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They should raise the NPC price on stuff like Su3 gear. It would be far more attractive to attempt HQs if you knew that you didn't have to wait for NQs to sell to get back a good chunk of the costs.

It's absurd that something w/ a hardline minimum cost of 5mil+ worth of NPC-only mats sells for such a pittance. I think they should sell for at least half of the cost of the ~1.1mil/each guild mats involved in the synth.

Well yes and no. The Shank has no value, it was free to obtain. It relocates funds, not removes them.

It has an opportunity cost, you obtained it with the intention of selling, instead of another item etc.

If the Shank was sold by an NPC, instead of given away for logging in, then you'd be right.

The gil does not go away. It stays with the seller. The item however, is expended and is taken out of the game.

Not sure I agree :x
Besides the fact that I absolutely concur the game needs more gilsink (from NPCs!) badly, raising the price of the mats used to craft SU3 (and other stuff) wouldn't really be a solution, if anything it would make things worse for people with low resources, and will hardly land a dent for people who have way too much gil in their hands.

If you meant the gil you get from NPCing NQ Su3 gear, how would that be a solution either?
It's a "loss" for crafters that NQ gets sold undercut because of the large quantities but it's ultimately a "gain" for people with low gil who wants to buy it.

If anything they should lower the cost of those mats, raise the HQ chance from T0 to T1 at least, and offer instead additional alternative gil sink, link being able to buy a certain amount of mats (for RMEA? for whatever else?) from NPC, with the amount possible to buy resetting every month.

Just make a whole bunch of mats available for purchase from NPCs that are currently drop only.

Voidwalker, Vagery, Omen, etc. Whatever is hard to come by, add it to NPCs with a slightly less than current AH price tag.

Also add the 1M guild items to the next content's drop list so the deflated currency doesn't have an adverse effect on crafting items using those materials beyond what is desired.

The 300~500K is still in the economy so it's still in circulation. Money sinks are items / content / systems designed to delete currency from the economy, NPC purchasable materials and so forth. The gil must not be given to another player but must instead by returned to SE, aka deleted.

Yeah, and I would extend that to some mats for RMEAs as well.
The key aspect with that would be a monthly cap, i.e. can't buy more than a certain amount every month.

It wouldn't do miracles but it would be good if not to reduce gil in circulation, at least to stop the inflation generated by sparks and similar means.


There's a reason why they haven't done anything like that yet though, and I can acknowledge it's a tricky one.
Setting a gil value to pay to an NPC to buy item X, it's like setting the AH price for that same item.
In a way it's like "binding" players to sell that same item X for similar amounts on Bazaar/AH, i.e. a way to directly control what normally is a player-controlled economy.
They've always avoided to do that in these past 15 years, I don't see that changing. (with some exceptions for outdated and tipically marginally useful items, see Curio Moogles for instance)

Now if they could set the NPC price for Item X not as a static value but a dynamic one that changes by looking at the average AH sale price of the previous month... that would be the perfect solution but I'm not sure SE has the technical instruments to make such a scenario possible.


Regardless of this "tricky" issue, I agree offering part of the important mats available from an NPC with a monthly cap would be a pretty neat solution to contain the gil inflation.

I'd say *** it, allow all those rare materials to be purchased from a NPC. Would serve to massively suck gil out of the economy and enable crafters to turn them into HQ synths. Vagary and Voidwalker drops are the worst and supply needs to be corrected.

The game cannot run w/o inflation, since the launch people sold stuff to npc, for a while then SE would "fix", then another item would pop out followed by another fix until SE decide to make it legit with sparks. Sparks are bread and butter for gil sellers which are a decent sub part, those who buy cannot play w/o them so there's another small part of subscribers.

I mean.... inflation is one thing. Inflation doesn't even really cover what sparks is doing.

You can't even bazaar items anymore. 100m bazaar cap is half or less of what items go for these days. Things aren't even measured in thousands anymore, anything under a mil may as well be 1g.

That was an extremely rare occurrence to have an item (10,000 dyna) that was worth more than max bazaar, now it's standard.

Japanese devs explained some stuffs from update. Posting the original quote plus google tradutor translation, anyone feel free to correct it.

It's
That's called inflation. The amount of money in circulation is greater than the amount of goods & services offered, therefore, price of money falls -> everything costs more money -> inflation.

SE has been trying to get money out of circulation with the food items moogle and the crafting materials NPC. However, those are no longer enough or rather, they are not very effective.

SE is afraid of destroying whatever money making scheme poor crafters and players are trying to live off. I highly doubt any crafter would survive on most of these synths. Players, on the other hand, might use a ton of mules farming for ores, logs and such.

What SE can do is to offer certain NPC sold items that people will actually need in good numbers. For example Omen cards for 1mil gil each is reasonable enough. Fish or mats for certain obscure crafts items would be a nice also - since nobody craft them except for guild points.

What I would prefer is for SE to setup NPCs that are similar to guild NPC. They would sell all of FFXI tradable items at reasonable prices and buy items at reasonable prices depending on the amount of stocks they have left. Up to a 20% markup would be reasonable. They would restock or remove items everyday until the price return to neutral.

SE can put these NPC into a bazaar or market place and let people sell and buy whatever they need.

omen/su3 mats honestly seem to be causing deflation on leviathan, but i wouldn't object to more things being npc purchasable regardless

omen cards at 1m sounds too good to be true, i'd love to be able to drop 50m and instantly make a +3.. i don't see them weakening or removing that gate lightly

It might not look like a lot but from the inflation point of view, it's pretty decent for a quick way to take the gil out and let people catch up. A job needs about 250 cards so people can be expected to spend roughly 100-500mil for most of their jobs.

Of course, they will have to quickly add in new gear to reduce the importance of AF+3 - Relic+3 with Omen Card+1 (hahaha) maybe or some new Ambu gear.

Or they can make Omen Card -1 which can only be traded for AF+2 gear. You still need 40-50 cards for the +3 but the +2 will be a lot more accessible for lazy/solo people. Not too game breaking but definitely drain a fair bit of gil out of the economy.

FFXI economy is rough. Somebody at SE needs to learn some basic economics to create a simulate economy to keep the FFXI economy from going stale. They might not lack money, but a hefty increase in mats, foods, items people use will stimulate it a bit and decrease inflation.

It's not that I would mind, but I don't think it would be healthy for the game in the long run, would also be a problem in making their need to release new stuff even bigger than it already is.

I'm not sure what the right cap would be (be it daily, weekly, monthly, w/e) but there's gotta be an acceptable balnce somewhere.
The idea of having an NPC like the crafting ones used to work is cool as well and would probably be easier for them to implement I guess.


I think they don't want to deevaluate too much "old content". The reason why a wide range of old content still holds a certain degree of attractiveness for a large amount of the player base, is because you can obtain some mats from them.
So completely removing the necessity of doing that content wouldn't be too healthy imho.
Putting any sort of cap on this NPC would ensure that the attractiveness of such events doesn't completely disappear, as it probably would (over time) with no cap at all.


I mean I dunno, overall the cap on the amounts you can buy seems like a nice compromise for the game and its inherent health over time.

regarding omen cards- honestly, just change the exchange rate to 5:1, or even better, 3:1. No real need to make them buyable in my view.

regarding rare to find materials- I say add them to sources, but at legitimate droprates and permanently. None of this 2% from a crud BCNM for 3 weeks crap- I mean add them to things like iLvl avatar battles and other merit point battles- and something clean like 2 mats per BC with 1 guaranteed drop slot per run on D or VD.

I want them easily attainable, but not just purchasable. A small line, maybe. But an important one to me I guess.

I think it's fine how it is. The purpose of the crafting materials was to remove gil from the economy while providing good items. They seem to be doing that.

Personal opinion here of course but PERSONALLY I wouldn't be happy with that.
I mean it would surely be better than now, but I would keep ignoring the exchange rate if it were anything above 3:1, and even with 3:1 I would still be pretty dissatisfied and frustrated.
When you need 240 cards to "complete" a job's AFs (granted that you don't have to go 5/5 on all jobs of course) and when you can farm 3 cards a day on average, how would 3:1 exchange rate be considered acceptable by anyone?
Supposing you never fail too many objectives and supposing you do runs every day without ever wasting a KI, that's like ~2,5 months to get 240 cards.

Are you seriously telling me that taking OVER ONE YEAR (5:1) for a SINGLE job is acceptable? Really?
Or 7-8 months? (3:1 rate)
Sorry but I don't consider that acceptable.

And it all falls down to the fact that ~3 cards a day is not an acceptable rate anymore. It was fine when Omen was new, it's only right you try to slowdown players' progress so they don't milk out an event completely in 2 months and then they're left AFKing in town whining "omg there's nothing to do".
I'm fine with gating.
But Omen is gonna be 1 year old soon, bout time they do something for the card rate.

The campaigns they're holding up are good and I'm really happy bout em, but honestly they should just turn the campaign card rate into a permanent thing once the "new event" they've been working on is released.
At that point they could offer a 2:1 exchange rate or even 3:1 and in such a scenario MAYBE I would consider them on the threshold of acceptability.


I understand your point, but you're missing what other people's initial point was.
The original reason why people suggested to make "something" (whatever) buyable from an NPC is because FFXI atm needs a gilsink badly because the inflation is out of control and has been for a while. Things are only going to get worse unless SE offers a solid way to remove gil out of the market (players).
What better way could there be than offering players to buy some stuff from an NPC?
This is the real reason why this got suggested.
Better availability of rare to farm mats is just icing on the cake I think.

Following your suggestion wouldn't solve the initial, and real, problem. That is: removing gil from the economy.

How do you figure? The amount of sold Su3 is remarkably low. Half of them aren't even on Asura's AH. And that says something.

Just as an example, I'm 110 all craft, I will not -ever- make the crafting shields, so ZERO gil will get removed from me via Guild NPC. I know I'm not the only one. I also will not be making -any- AF+3.

The shields themselves are more of a gilsink than the 1.1m mats.

Anything that doesn't take a billion gil out minimum daily doesn't even scratch the surface of what needs to be removed from circulation.

Start selling Alex, HMP, pay-to-clear Assault, Eyepatch etc you'll drop my entire gil to zero daily.

Binding the new recipes behind Relic shield progression was such a bad game design choice... really.
I can understand they needed to offer players additional motivation to do the necessary steps in the Relic Shields progression, but using important recipes for that, really, was very very stupid.

Another error they did, at least for some pieces (and it's an error they did already in the past) is balancing very bad the difference between NQ and HQ.
This does apply only to some pieces of course, but for those pieces the NQ is basically worthless and the HQ is the only thing that matters. And when it's a T0 with annoying to get mats and bound behind shield progression... you get the idea.
Add to this that it only applies o a few jobs and things get even worse.

It's the case of of the BRD set. It's for a single job, it's very expensive, arguably just the body and hands are worth NQ.
Understand this and you get an idea why even on Asura it's hard to find those pieces on AH.

With better choices on the stats (and the difference between NQ and HQ) those pieces could've been so much more appealing than they currently are, and as such the demand would've been higher and consequentially even the amount of people bothering to craft them.

This was just an extreme example but I know it applies for several other pieces from the other sets as well.




As I said in the past the only problem I see with selling stuff that currently gets sold in AH/Bazaars (Alex, HPbayld, HMP, other currencies) is that if you set a fixed price on an NPC for those items, it's like indirectly setting a price for those items on AH as well.
I.e. it's a way for SE to (in)directly steer the prices in a very clear direction, something that in 15 years they practically always avoided to do because they wanted economy to be (almost) completely player driven.

I mean if you can buy Alex for 4k gil from an NPC, who would ever sell it for 8k on AH/Bazaar?
If you can buy HMPs for 40k from an NPC, who would ever buy it from AH/Bazaar? Players would be forced to lower their prices to something in line with the NPC price.

The opposite is also true. If the NPC price is too high, who would bother to buy those items from the NPC? i.e. defeating the original purpose why the NPC was even created, that is offering a chance for people to spend their gil on, eliminating gil from the economy.
I mean if HMPs were being sold for 300k each from the NPC, who the *** would buy them from the NPC?
It would only work for items that are hard to find, but in the post-ambuscade days that doesn't really apply to a lot of things alas.

I'm sure this is one of the reasons (the main?) why SE have been reluctant to put such an NPC in game so far.
To make things manageable you would have to set a cap on the amount of stuff you can buy from NPC, and/or make so the price isn't fixed but dynamic, connected to the average price on AH.
That would be good but as I said before I'm not sure they have the technology to do something like that, or the manpower to develop it.

And for the Cap/no Cap topic.
If everyone can buy an infinite amount of, say, Alexandrite from an NPC, who would bother to farm Salvage? And consequentially who would put Alex on AH/Bazaar?
Exactely, not many people if any at all.

That would be bad for the game in the long run because it would seriously reduce the amount of content that generate attractiveness for a certain part of the player base.
They don't want to do that, hence why I think they would rightfully be afraid to create such an NPC without putting some sort of limit/requirement to it.

That depends on the price point.
Bynes/o.bucks/t.shells @5k
Alex @10k
h-p bayld @20k
voidwalker crafting mats @500k
would you still just buy from NPC or from AH?
random #s.

The AH price is not the same on every server, and it's not always the same across time.
Prices do change. Sometimes just a bit, sometimes a lot, the point is that there's a lot of variable and they're all under players' control without direct influence from SE.

So would I buy from NPC?
Depends on:
1) can I find what I want aplenty on AH/bazaar? (clearly depends on server)
2) is the price from the NPC close enough to the AH one even if it's a bit higher?


Thing is that you'd need to find the right spot, and it's hard to balance.
Make the price too convenient and nobody will bother farming content for those mats and/or selling them on AH/Bazaar.
Make the price too high, nobody will bother with that NPC, defeating the purpose of even creating it to suck gil off the economy reducing inflation.

Not easy to find balance, and it's such a dynamic thing that changes from server to server, from time to time, that I don't think you'd be able to find such balance with a fixed price on the NPC, it would have to be dynamic.
And I still think there would have to be a limit of some sort on the quantity you can buy.

That way you could allow prices to be very convenient (making it very attractive for players to buy from NPC, hence sucking gil off the economy) but at the same time it wouldn't completely destroy the market for those mats (because you can only buy a limited quantity every certain window of time)

I think you're making it more complicated than needed.
All servers are the same, at least as far as NPCs need be concerned.
AH varies, yes therefore whether or not an item sold by an NPC will ever actually get purchased depends on the local market.

The only NPCs that are even remotely dynamic are guild NPCs. The rest have always been static with unlimited supply. Or do you want to change that whole system so every NPC acts like a guild NPC?

What is wrong with destroying the market?
Seriously, it happens every so often when new gear gets added that blows away current meta.
Crafters who haven't sold out take a one time loss on some items. New price points emerge, supply increases demand increases due to becoming affordable to a larger number of potential buyers. items move off the shelves more quickly.
Gil gets removed from market continuously.
Prices remain similar but become more expensive due to deflated market.
Materials added to NPC that were not worth farming anymore start to become worth farming again due to deflated market.
and balance is restored.

(items sold to NPC that affect inflation the most must also be made less appealing so actual farming does not just get replaced with sparks farming)

Just like you said further on in your post, Guild NPCs are not the same on all server. Their quantities, their prices and the stuff they sell changes from server to server dynamically adjsuting according to certain variables. I think this is a very fitting example.

I think a "gilsink NPC" would have to follow a somewhat similar model to be really effective without breaking too much the economy.


Now THAT would be complicated.
I wasn't envisioning SE adding different mats to a plethora of different NPCs.
I was imagining them adding a completely new NPC that holds all the new "gilsink" stuff, kinda like Curio Moogle, and make that specific NPC have different rules from the "normal" NPCs.
So limited quantities and dynamic prices.
I'm not saying the model has to be exactely the same as the guild NPC, it wouldn't work that way.
I'm just saying it would have to be a similar model, with different configuration parameters/variables of course.


I dunno, I can't say if it's wrong or right and I wasn't trying to imply either.
I was just talking about the chance of that to happen given the stance SE has always kept for these past 15 years concerning these matters.

Furthermore I was expressing concern for the consequences it would have on the "level of attractivity" some events still hold for us players.
A large number of events who are currently "attractive" because people do them to farm something.
That gives us players "something to do".
If all of this, or part of this, gets destroyed because you can just buy stuff from an NPC infinitely, wouldn't that help killing the game much faster?
Going back again to the point that you'd finish your goals faster and you'd be left afk in town whining about how you got nothing to do, eventually stopping playing the game.

I'm not saying the opposite either (keeping stuff too much gated/grindy to force people playing the game for long periods doing the same stuff over and over) because that too will eventually annoy the users.

If anything I'm saying there's some balance somewhere in between these two extremes.


How?
The only two ways I can think of where gil gets removed from the market are:
1) Stuff you buy from an NPC
2) Accounts with large amounts of gil that get banned by SE

All other possible interactions I can think of just "move" gil from one player to another, they do not remove that gil from the economy.

So yeah, seriously dropping the *** ball here;

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/campaign/login/login51.html

September log in uses salvage items AGAIN. Looks like 2 more months of this garbage for log ins.... also, no trusts.

They better have some grand scheme for salvage +2

It was a line of progression;
people buy gear that was made by purchasing large % of cost from NPC so a large % of the cost of that gear on AH will have been removed from play. Players just buying that gear gives the crafter the gil needed to repeat the process, hence continuous removal of gil from economy.

edit: as for event currency; the numbers I threw out should have been higher than every server's price tag but I did kind of eyeball it. So they would if given prices like that, could be relagated to a waste of even putting it on an NPC.

Craft shield from new freshly picked.



Cornelia and her sphere effects.