Why the FFXIV Economy will FailFollow

Recently a mod posted on the official forums:

- Camate
(http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/63494-Not-being-able-to-buy-single-items-from-a-stack-on-the-marketward.?p=1104587#post1104587)

Now here's the thing
This statement makes 0 sense
You can't "research demand" by looking at supply and magically guessing
Without knowing what has sold and what hasn't, there really isn't any way at all to gauge demand
And even if you could, limiting how you sell items has -NOTHING- to do with it

Imagine you went shopping at wal-mart and everything there cost 2-million dollars. Does that mean that people are willing to pay 2-million for a roll of toilet paper? Of course not.

What this system really does is let people "manipulate the market"
For example I can buy up the 2 or 3 bloody bardiche heads on the AH for 30k each. Then sell 2 on one retainer for 140k, and then 1 or 2 on the other retainer for 139,800. This makes it look like one person is undercutting the other, and creates a non-optimized price.

Now the problem here isn't that the markets are bad (even though they are).
It's that SE has a silly nonsensical reason for creating the markets the way they are
What that shows, is that the people handling the economy have no real experience in economics
And in an age of gaming where MMOs hire economists to make sure their game's economy runs smooth, that is probably going to be a problem

This is nothing new. FFXI didn't bother using economists either, and ended up with hyper-inflation one year as a result

But in a game already having economic problems, it seems like things will go further downhill.

So it sounds to me kind of like in regards to the market wards... nothing really changed from the old game.

At least, from this post that's how it reads.

Well, is it sad that I never would have thought of that? That being said, this would only really work early on or for rare items. Before long so many people will be selling them that the price will stabilize fairly quickly I would think... but I know nothing of economics so I could be completely wrong.

The market seems rather good imo the onyl difference is being able to check the tax of each city other than that its the same as a AH in other games.. Its a player driven economy and will lvl out soon enough. Also they need to get rid of the hackers farming like mad I have seen speed hackers and thats not kool lol

Player to player doesn't effect the economy. If you've got two people, each with a dollar, and one gives their dollar to the other, you've still got two dollars in the economy. No amount of trading between the two is going to change that. Nor does increasing the pool of people or money, statically speaking. x money traded between y people z amount of times, you still have x dollars. Undercutting or overpricing items doesn't effect an economy, though depending who you ask one is a **** move. In the end it's just circulating with zero economic effect.

What caused the hyper inflation in XI was that the money fountains, money you would receive from quests and (especially) from selling items to NPCs, wasn't being removed from the system at nearly an adequate pace as it should have. Going back to the two friends and two dollars, what happened was another dollar was introduced. Then another. Then another. And this kept going, and never removing the dollars. Or rather something like 1¢ per hundred dollars; An insignificant amount was removed from taxes and the occasional item bought from NPCs. So what you end up with is two people with millions of dollars. This in turn devalues the currency to a point where paying two million for toilet paper becomes the norm.

Many of the posts are true.
ffxi is still around > but they shifted from gil-based items to rare/ex items after the whole hyperinflation christmas fiasco (around the time when they introduced aquariums for houses)

I don't even know what recommended price is.... where does the auctionboard have that? That seems rediculous as new servers have much less gil than legacy ones. Recommended prices should be substantially different cross-server.

And the point of this post isn't that there are issues with the economy
It was that SE's argument for the economy makes no economic sense

By saying something that makes no sense they demonstrate they don't know how to handle an economy

It's an interesting point, but in no way indicative for "The FFXIV Economy will Fail"

Also, there is only one MMO with an economist on board: EVE Online.

The reason that inflation hit in FFXI was not because you could have mules in FFXI. It was rather there were some really prolific gil sources versus very few gil sinks. Money volume increased, prices soared. If a goverment prints money and pumps it into the system that's going to happen sooner or later.

I'm not defending FFXIV here, but Azurymber postulates two dubious "facts" here and concludes an "economy fail". Hardly plausible.

What did they make up?

Hmmm...

Actually I think everyone is overlooking the fact that XIVs economy is being cushioned by vendors. The thing saving us from inflation is what is crushing/going to crush the player based economy. Gil is being introduced into the system at a crazy enormous rate. I don't have to farm items or craft to make money, I can harvest it all from the system. The developers recognized this as a problem and included quite a few gil sinks, the biggest of which is the ability to buy practically everything you need from NPC vendors. In order to compete with vendors you need to undercut and take a loss. The only reason people are doing this is because they are pumping through crafting levels or have extra gear and want to make some of their money back. In the long run this cripples incentive to even play the market though. This is suppressing incentive to craft, to farm, to gather. Why bother joining the economy when you can quest/fate/leve to multitask for gil/exp/seals and run straight to the vendors.

There are few items that sell for less than the cost of mats. Most items on the board are priced above the NPC vendor because the board gets a convience price. Yes you can get X item from an npc vendor for 50 but you have to run all the way over there, or remember which one it was and it's a real hassle. People rather spend 200 on the board, also they know their money is going to a real person.

NPC prices seem to keep things at a reasonable level, because at a certain point the convenience isn't worth the cost but I don't see npc items undercutting my products.

One thing I got a good eal on was making sunstone gear. I was surprised to find a npc seller in the game going for a lot cheaper than what he boards have. I've been playing since beta and hadn't found the seller of sunset chokers. I thought about buying a bunch rather than crafting but again it tends to be easier to craft, and it was still cheaper.

Azurymber, did you know that you can look at the history of items that have sold? It has price, date, and time of sale listed. This is how you estimate demand.

1. the quote is responding to a topic on not being able to sell a 99-stack 1-at-a-time on the boards. And that is what it's referring to. And that is why it's silly. It's SE trying to justify why you have to sell in fixed numbers, using a nonsensical economic argument. If you understood highschool economics you would realize how ridiculous it sounds.

2. It is not translated, it's a quote from a dev on the official boards.

3. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING ABLE TO SEE HISTORY

I just went back and read the OP to the thread you posted and it's not even about that. The thread is about not being able to buy 1 off of a stack of 99. Basically, it's the seller's discretion on how they want to sell their items. Nowhere in your OP did you even set that up. You just went into the middle of a rant.

Secondly, why are you so angry about this anyways? I'd love to know why you think this is such a big deal. Seems like you want to rant just to rant.

Edited, Sep 2nd 2013 3:17pm by Eliminex