The Cancer Thats Killing The FFXI Economy?

the gill sellers aren't what *** up the economy.
its all those people too stupid to understand supply and demand, so they undercut every item they sell even if 20 of that item sells per day.

having your stuff sell first is nice, but when it is going to sell anyway no point undercutting, it hurts you as well in the long run.

good example is a kc, on asura its not that hard to sell for 40million, sometimes more.
yet people go and sell for 20mill sometimes, because they have no idea what the *** they are doing.
the kind of person to buy a drop like that has so much regular income they would still of bought for higher price.

also seen a few people selling sky pops for half price, when 1 look @ rolanmart and they would know they are HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE.
all the time and usually are sold within a day.

Well everyone has the same mentallity - "If I don't undercut, someone else will." Which sadly, is true from all of my encounters ._.

I sell Imperial Gold Coins often, and the usual going price is 8k. I was the only person with them up at the time, so I did 8k. A few days later, I see them returned in my DB. Everyone undercut to like 7k-7.5k. =/

yeh but that mentality is fine to some extent, its when people do it to an extreme that rly screws the economy over.

like i once tried to sell a snow ring a while back, 0 was on AH so i put it up a bit over the going price which was 450k then

i checked the next day, some guy had sold his for 200k, sure it could of just been he made a mistake, but with how stupid some people are i'm guessing it wasn't.

undercutting to some extent is natural tho and we see it all the time in places like supermarkets irl.

Yeah, ridiculous undercutting grinds my ge- er, cancers the economy.

I agree with the undercutters ruining the economy...

Take the humble tavnazian taco for instance:
This usually sold at a steady 20k/stack, would even go to 25 some days depending on supply and demand.
On asura there's like 7+ people powercrafting these, one of these people is Babyangell.
She deserves an 'honorable' mention for being the only person on asura stupid enough to consistantly undercut the price by 2-6k with little to no competition. It's a wonder she makes any profit on the tacos since she buys all of her materials -_-;... this making the 4~hrs gathering materials for this item worthless since it's no longer a good sale -_-;

I know it's a silly wish, but I do wish that people were more... educated (I think that is the right word?) when it comes to undercutting. I really think some people don't understand fully how things like the economy work in this game, and as delicate as it is, I think silly people are more detrimental to the economy than gilsellers.

Sorry for the wall of text D:.... needed to rant XD ._.;

Personally i think the deflation was fixed by price-fixers......... by that i mean take a gil-mule for the old inflation RMTs. they had chars with max gil. now if you had max gil during inflation.... 1mil wasnt worth much..... but take it nowadays....... and you get my drift? RMTS who have old money never have to do anything ever again as long as they dont get caught and deflation stays. one theory. im probably wrong.

like Alyria said :
"I believe everyone is a factor for the economy."

They're always one winner and one loser. In that case, if someone undercut you, the buyer will be happy while you'll be QQ'ing. You gotta look at this from a different angle.

Let's say I have 400K on me. I wanna buy 1 khroma ore. "Average" price is 300K.

Case 1 : Undercut : Some random dude sells his for 150K. Well I buy it. I have 250K left, which can be used to buy something else.
Case 2 : Normal : I buy my ore 300K. 100K left on me, not enough to buy anything else.

Case 1 = I'll please the seller of that undercuted ore (well he got his 150K) and i'll please another seller because I could spend my 250K on something else (w/e it is).
Case 2 = One seller will get 300K, period.

You see where this is going ?

Economy act just like a balance, someone undercutting price cannot "kills" the economy since at some point all money invested through AH will return back into the economy. People have a hard time understanding that.

What's kill the economy is removing or adding currency (or items) into the market. Stop looking at the problem only from your seller point of view.

Yes, listen to this man. He speaks the words of a true economic. :o

Case Closed

true i guess but isn't the economy more how much people spend than how much money people have? Bigger gap between the rich and poor means harder for poorer people to buy stuff.

before the low prices people could make a profit from pretty much anything, everyone was spending a lot of gil, now a lot of people just buy cheap ***and don't farm/craft as much if at all because its not worth it now.

i could be wrong tho, never paid too much attention in business class.

That's because RMT activity was high, so everything was constantly farmed and lot of money was injected into the economy. One thing never change and is the same for all player : NPC price. During inflation, NPC price were low compared to millions we had. Add to this that every single "needed" material was farmed/mined/dug/harvested by RMTs, meaning constant supply, which leads to lower price.

hehe your my hero QFT^
The AH is working as intended your just got boned on a sell but the buyers are happy

Thunderz's face is killing the economy.

O.O I keel you!

See? There he goes again.

While you are right to some extent if you continue on with that chain of events, you will notice that some of the items that are already getting overwhelmed by better rare/ex gear will have relatevely hard mats to farm sell for high while the item itself is selling for low. Ultimately no crafter is going to buy the overpriced items to make the product which is selling for low. Go on with the chain, and you will find that the mats are now selling for low ----> and there you have it, a mat that is not being farmed anymore because it is not worth ppls time and a product that isnt made anymore cuz there is better rare/ex equipment (death of a revenue).

An example of this is really not hard to see, you brows trough the recipies area and notice how the majority of things are selling dead slow.

Now about the NPC prices never change thing. You cant be serious as the vast majority of items have been gimped to sell ridiculously low to NPC in an effort that SE admits was to repel the gill sellers. SE by all means doesnt want you to make a good amount of gil by NPCing. and they will continue killing prices of every NPCed item that is being spammed.

I will point out that during the time of mass inflation, we had an equal number of forum posts whining that people were "too lazy to undercut correctly," and claiming that people not taking the time to undercut (again, out of "greed") was responsible for killing the FFXI economy.

Hahah it's funny isn't it? The thing is, the longer this game goes on the more quantity of every item there is, a flooded market increases deflation.

Also, the less gil people produce through npcing stuff (either crafts or farming) the less gil floating around the economy to stimulate high demand and in turn clear stocks and incur price rises by sellers.

Seriously learn to read between lines or don't even bother answering. NPC price remains static and the same for all players until SE adjust them like they did for Dynamis, Limbus, Remedy etc... Still they're static price and not everchanging like these on AH which can fluctuate from a 1 to 3 ratio in a couple of hours.



lolwut ? The price of the mats will automatically go down if the final item price is lowered. Then people will stop to farm it... up to a point, until supply becomes so low that price start to go up again. There's NO death of a revenue. If you're not farming X, you'll farm Y. If you're not making money by selling X, then customer buying X is saving money. No matter what you do, when someone "lose" somewhere, on the other hand you have someone who save money.

What *** up this mechanism is server transfer, people removing gils from the economy, etc... Otherwise gils<>items intra server exchange themselves cannot "kill" the economy, that statement makes no sense at all.

Wow, finally a thread for people who "get it". I'm really glad to see I'm not the only one who's sick of morons who don't understand a damn thing about elasticity of demand lecture the rest of us about supply and demand. I do agree with the argument that individual players can't "kill the economy" since the money keeps floating around. There is a point to be made however, about killing off [profitability of] certain areas of the economy. Players who undercut like mad to get rid of items with relatively inelastic demand may "kill off" an item from the game.

Case in point, Kodoku (Ninja Tool) all but stopped selling on Unicorn because a certain crafter decided to undercut the price down to 1/3rd of it's original price (with no competition no less) making it a loss even with HQs. Even at this new low price it sold at the exact same speed it sold at before with him being the only person who sold any. After a month of this, crafters refused to craft the item for Ninjas (or at least good Ninjas) who actually need it. The tools all but stopped selling for a week or two til I revived it by bringing it closer to it's original price.

In a sense, this example was supply and demand at work, except with the FFXI twist of people who don't have to feed their family with gil. In the real world just like in FFXI, there will be people who don't have all the information (on both the side of Supply and Demand) leaving the entire system highly imperfect. However, since gil is more easily earned than dollars (and since it's not vital to survival) people are more willing to throw it away.

Ultimately, SE's paranoia about inflation has led to their strategy of waiting for known gil sellers to accumulate billions before banning them to remove the money from the servers entirely. If ever there were a way to "kill the economy" that would probably be it.

The facts of the current deflation are simple. SE is banning people, period.
People has undercut and will undercut always. It's the nature of the AH, and that's explained by the marginal benefit from earnings. Let's say you have 100 million, winning another 100 million is worth more to you when you have that amount of money than when you have let's say 500 million. So earning money to people becomes less attractive. Another factor is the value of money in time, if you recieve the gil earlier it has more value for you than recieving it in a month from now.

Anyhow the complexity of the supply and demand of money makes it really hard for SE to really control it. irl the Central Banks have a tough nut to crack with many more tools than SE has.
What are the tools for making gil appear? NPCs vendors, gil drops from mobs, from BCNM/ISNM/etc., quests and that's about it, I might be missing some but it doesn't matter. All these are not controlable by SE, they have a fixed price/rate, apart from a few mods like Gil Finder or Mogenhancement. but all in all they can't modify it quickly.
Unlike a central bank that can lower the interest rates for the short term

Now what are the tools for making gil disappear. AH fees, dynamis, limbus, taxes, storage, teleports, chocobos, shops, etc. Again all these are at fixed price/rate. And again they can't modify this quickly.
The problem is that the main factor to make money appear/disappear depend on what the ppl do in Vana´diel and that is ever changing and hard to predict. Plus the big distortion that banning generate. Which makes it even harder to predict. In the end the lack of a stability, in terms of monetary use and the lack of responsiveness of SE make the economy so frail.

Yeah... reading in between the lines... just as your refferal to NPC prices wasnt related to the quote you were relating it to, my reply was simply to point out that the NPC prices are gimped out for the purpose of making FFXI less appealing for gil sellers, and not because of the money ratio between now and when servers were flooded by millions of gil by the gil sellers.

and "lolwut ? The price of the mats will automatically go down if the final item price is lowered" is simply not true. i wont do the research for you but its fairly easy to see tons of examples if you visit the recipies portion of the site.

Lets see what SE says about making recipes for cooking above lvl 100. I think its time and trying to farm Royal Jelly has just got to me so bad Id almost rather buy dragon meat. Ambrosia made from Cursed soup and it adds +7 to every stat and only sells for I think 3k a bowl. It sucks the linoleum off the floor.

I don't really care about items that are hardly sold, just taking in consideration things behind sold at a large scale. Eventually the price will drop, unless the mats can be used for another thing which is valuable. (add exception also like gobbie bag items etc...). And then again, because one single item is "killed" doesn't mean the whole economy is killed.

Sure they will, same goes IRL... until they're out of stock. But something like that won't affect the economy as a whole anyway.

Not to mention that people have lot of sources of income. When you make millions a month with your endgame LS, you don't really care about selling something cheap, undercutting everyone.

Another factor to take in consideration are the 7 AH slots available. People needs to sell things fast, not everyone have 5-6 mules, lot of player only have 1-2 at best (some don't even have one), in a such case, you'd rather sell and undercut people (even if losing money) than sell at normal price, waste 1 day or 2. This could cost you more money in the end.

On FF XI when I don't make gil by doing [X], I can just switch to [Y]. IRL you can't do that also, because you invested money before making profit. Farming doesn't require that. Lot of activities can get you money on FF XI without any long term investment.



This + lot of player stopping also. Millions just disappear from the economy.

That's exactly one of the points I was getting at except I wasn't sure if I was hitting my character limit.

In what I was quoted on, I was primarily referring to crafted items (as per my example) and other things where people don't accidentally come upon fifty stacks of an item while leveling. I know if I ever find random crafting stuff while leveling I just throw it up for whatever I think is appropriate to make it sell first. But when you're making something for profit on an item with nearly perfect static price elasticity there's no gain in cutting by an item from 9k to 3k instead of from 9k to 8k, especially when there's only 0 or 1 at the AH.

The problem is that most people on FFXI don't understand some basic concepts in economics and assume Unit PED, this leads them to believe that the cheaper they sell it at, the faster it will sell. For example, an item selling once a day at 9k a stack, will sell three times as fast if it's priced at 3k a stack, which simply isn't the case. But that's something everyone has to come to terms with if they're going to sell anything on the auction house while retaining their sanity.



This is a really great reply to most generic complaints about undercutting (especially true for items that can be found while not particularly looking for it, which includes anything from items found while leveling to items found while killing gods). I get this argument entirely except I never made an argument against that. I know many times I've been one of the people that price items at whatever it takes to be the next one to sell.

My point was simply that some people undercut on items (or over price items) to the extent that either supply or demand go out of existence at a given price range. Again I am referring to items that are crafted for profit (especially consumables where you don't have the excuse of people reselling). This leads to some items not being traded at all or just very rarely (even when they're still trading regularly on other servers). Looking through the AH, I've seen a number of items that have stopped selling because they never readjusted after massive inflation or certain crafters undercut so much that nobody else wants to make it for the price it's being sold at.

Of course a complete stop in trade is an extreme for this example. In less extreme cases, it's simply the case of more and more items becoming unprofitable in crafting and dwindles supply. Antipika and some others here made a really good point that you can't kill an economy simply by favoring consumers over suppliers. It just looks like the economy is getting killed for suppliers, but at the same time things look great for consumers. The way you DO kill an economy (or at least certain areas of it) is to get capital and/or trade to stop flowing. What I am describing is the latter phenomenon.

What's killing the economy? People charging 3,000,000 gil for an item in game and people actually paying for it. That's a lot of gil going to one person for an item that adds some petty latent effect. Nothing in the game should be worth that much.

Yep. She lost me after that, too. I'd read on, but I'm pretty certain that the horse is dead and can't hurt us anymore, so what's the point in watching someone else beat on it?