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Why the FFXIV Economy will FailFollow

#1 Sep 02 2013 at 9:13 AM Rating: Decent
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Recently a mod posted on the official forums:

Quote:
"Greetings,
The current features of the market wards were created based on discussions held between the market planning team and Yoshida. The market wards were set up in this way so that it would be possible to create differences between players who check the market and those that do not, by allowing the person placing items onto the market to research the current demand and sell an amount of items that are easy to buy. "
- 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.
#2 Sep 02 2013 at 9:16 AM Rating: Good
That's a very good point, and you're right, a lot of MMO's do have economists on staff to plan these things out. That video is a good watch explaining it, too.
#3 Sep 02 2013 at 9:17 AM Rating: Excellent
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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.
#4 Sep 02 2013 at 9:18 AM Rating: Decent
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This could probably be made a little better by not displaying the name of your Retainer... but of the actual player.

That way you know that not "flufflymcfluffypants" was ripping you off, but that the retainer was linked to "Sephirothx Pizzahuts" for instance.

That way you can atleast send them a "what the hell man?" in tell and work out a reasonable price.
#5 Sep 02 2013 at 9:23 AM Rating: Good
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Quote:
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.


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.
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#6 Sep 02 2013 at 9:33 AM Rating: Excellent
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Azurymber wrote:
This is nothing new. FFXI didn't bother using economists either, and ended up with hyper-inflation one year as a result...


And as we all know, that game never stayed around. :P

In all seriousness, though, I think it's important thing to understand that any micro-economy is subject to both hyper-inflation and deflation. There's really no perfect system because the people using it -- greedy players, apathetic players, RMT -- are themselves not perfect. Let's not forget that FFXI also had many items whose worth was persistently undercut to the point of them not even being worth the cost of putting them up for sale. Furthermore, already on FFXIV's auction house, I've seen (and bought as upgrades) tons of gear listed for around 7 gil.

As in any economy, physical or digital, some things will be monopolized (perhaps -- this seems very hard to do in XIV, actually), some widely available, some hard to acquire, and still others nonsensically cheap. There will always be problems, though, is what I mean to say, no matter how much intervention we have at the system level.

The type of obfuscation you speak of, while annoying, is hardly economy-shattering. It really is just that: a small bit of weak trickery. (Afterall, who worries about 200 gil when they're spending 140,000 for 2 consumables?) In the end people will pay what they can afford; if they can't afford it, then there will be some lonely retainers hocking wares at terrible prices.
#7 Sep 02 2013 at 9:40 AM Rating: Good
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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
#8 Sep 02 2013 at 10:09 AM Rating: Good
Azurymber wrote:
Recently a mod posted on the official forums:

[quote]"Greetings,

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


They show you what's sold and for what price over the last 7 days as well as what people are selling it for now. Not everyone knows where to look for that, and so you see people attempting to do the sort of manipulation you talk of. But it's hard. Because who knows when someone else is going to make another X Y Z item, and to keep your inflated price you have to keep buying the lesser ones and then all the sudden you have all of these X Y Z items and you're inflated price is the real price and you can't keep buying people out.

I sell items that don't get created often way over their value. I don't think it's because people don't know any better, I think it's because it's convenient. Some people don't want/need to wait for a deal.

Also, I've found a lot of people put stuff up for the recommended sell price, and I often wonder if that's just because they don't have room in there inventory or because they aren't looking at the data. I have a couple of things I watch for that and always pick up.
#9 Sep 02 2013 at 10:20 AM Rating: Excellent
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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.
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#10 Sep 02 2013 at 10:24 AM Rating: Excellent
XI's hyper-inflation woes had more to do with massive gilselling problems and unchecked exploits than the issues on the AH. Some of the checks put in place to handle it (besides a major RMT crack down) included charging an exorbitant fee for some of the most important dungeons, Dynamis. Each run cost a group half a million gil. That money went to an NPC. So a group that went twice a week (the limit for entry) would pull out a million gil from end game. There were 12-15 such groups running every week. So every week, at least ten to fifteen million gil was sucked right out of the economy, keeping prices fairly stable for many years.
#11 Sep 02 2013 at 10:27 AM Rating: Decent
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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
#12 Sep 02 2013 at 10:42 AM Rating: Excellent
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I don't see a big problem with this economy and how it works from this standpoint. Right now there is a lot of stuff real cheap at the low levels and really expensive at the high levels because we mostly have low level crafters selling stuff right now.

SE has smartened up with the economy in XIV.

Gear is bound to you so once you wear it it is removed from the economy.
But you can convert it to materia so used up gear still is useful.
And if you convert gear with mateia on it the materia is eventually lost.

This will cause a constant sink on the game that will help battle hyper-inflation and create a need for constant crafting (farming) of new mats and gear.
#13 Sep 02 2013 at 11:22 AM Rating: Excellent
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darexius2010, Goblin in Disguise wrote:
That's a very good point, and you're right, a lot of MMO's do have economists on staff to plan these things out. That video is a good watch explaining it, too.

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.
#14 Sep 02 2013 at 11:41 AM Rating: Default
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Arnulf wrote:
darexius2010, Goblin in Disguise wrote:
That's a very good point, and you're right, a lot of MMO's do have economists on staff to plan these things out. That video is a good watch explaining it, too.

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.


Gw2 SWTOR WoW and EVE all have economists working for them.
I believe ESO also has one

I can make this argument a lot simpler
You need 4 years of undergrad for a BA in economics, 2 years for a masters, and many more for a PhD

Lets say your friend's car breaks down
And they clearly don't know how to fix the car
They tell you the problem is that the confamagulator is incandescent to the insoscrupulator and all you have to do is replace the comboble and it will work..
Would you bet money that they could fix the car?

Well that's basically what SE said about the economy
And economics is a lot more complicated than a car
So why would you ever think a team that is actually taking action based on made up things, will manage to run an economy.
When other major games have economists with very good degrees handling things, and still sometimes run into problems.

Edited, Sep 2nd 2013 1:42pm by Azurymber

Edited, Sep 2nd 2013 1:45pm by Azurymber
#15 Sep 02 2013 at 12:00 PM Rating: Default
Azurymber wrote:

.... why would you ever think a team that is actually taking action based on made up things...


What did they make up?
#16 Sep 02 2013 at 12:15 PM Rating: Good
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I played almost 2 hours last night and the timestamp on my chat showed me i was getting tells every 3 to 5 min from gill sellers "even in the inn" 3 of the 4 was keyboard mash names,I can't fight that. I started my playing my Carby and checked the market for low level gear, when you see dozens of normal things sell for 50 gil then spaces of 150k and 200k you doubt normal players move that much gil. I'm giving SE time to deal with rampant gil selling because of the servers.
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#17 Sep 02 2013 at 12:16 PM Rating: Excellent
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.
#18 Sep 02 2013 at 12:22 PM Rating: Good
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If something you want to buy is too expensive, then don't buy it. The seller will have to come down on the price if they are going to sell it. If other people are buying the thing you want at an "inflated price", isn't that price then the actual value of the item?
#19 Sep 02 2013 at 12:28 PM Rating: Default
JyIscariot wrote:
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.
#20 Sep 02 2013 at 12:47 PM Rating: Default
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Squander wrote:
Azurymber wrote:

.... why would you ever think a team that is actually taking action based on made up things...


What did they make up?


This:
""Greetings,
The current features of the market wards were created based on discussions held between the market planning team and Yoshida. The market wards were set up in this way so that it would be possible to create differences between players who check the market and those that do not, by allowing the person placing items onto the market to research the current demand and sell an amount of items that are easy to buy. "

That is literally saying:
Market wards meant to differentiate between people who check it and don't
By forcing people to sell items either alone or in fixed stacks
So they can research demand

that is meaningless.
They basically said "we decided you can sell things and see if they sell" and then somehow tried to tie fixed-number-sales (ex. can't stick up 99 and sell one at a time) into the equation. That enitre quote makes no economic sense.

It's like if i said "I attempted to fix the wheels on my car by dismantling the glove compartment so that it would be easy for you to eat lunch"

I've never seen a coherent economic plan from SE at any point in time.
And if you look at this forum's history you will find people with PhDs in economics explaining what all the different issues have been.
SE does not understand how economies work, and it's clear. Their economy flopped in 1.0 for nearly the same problems it will flop now.
#21 Sep 02 2013 at 1:06 PM Rating: Excellent
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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.
#22 Sep 02 2013 at 1:17 PM Rating: Default
Eliminex wrote:
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.


You're the third person to tell him that.

@azurymber

Why are you writing in poem format? Are you texting from a phone or something? It makes it hard to follow your train of thought.

Also, you're not parsing their sentence correctly. All he's saying is that people can sit around and play the market boards. You can sit all day and watch items go in, buy them up and sell them for a profit. Just like a stock market. He also says, look, you can buy in bulk and then sell them piecemeal for a profit.

You can do both these things.

The quote is translated so I can see why you might have read it the way you did, and why that would be upsetting to you, but your interpretation isn't correct.

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

Edited, Sep 2nd 2013 3:17pm by Squander
#23 Sep 02 2013 at 2:06 PM Rating: Decent
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494 posts
Squander wrote:
Eliminex wrote:
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.


You're the third person to tell him that.

@azurymber

Why are you writing in poem format? Are you texting from a phone or something? It makes it hard to follow your train of thought.

Also, you're not parsing their sentence correctly. All he's saying is that people can sit around and play the market boards. You can sit all day and watch items go in, buy them up and sell them for a profit. Just like a stock market. He also says, look, you can buy in bulk and then sell them piecemeal for a profit.

You can do both these things.

The quote is translated so I can see why you might have read it the way you did, and why that would be upsetting to you, but your interpretation isn't correct.

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

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


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
#24 Sep 02 2013 at 2:15 PM Rating: Good
Azurymber wrote:
If you understood highschool economics you would realize how ridiculous it sounds.



Or maybe you are reading it incorrectly. The world may never know.

The reason they are selling in stacks of 99 is to allow people to buy the 99 stack and then sell smaller stacks for a profit.

If you look at the board you see a deep discount on stacks of 99, if you want to take the time to buy that stack and sell it 2 at a time you can make some money.
#25 Sep 02 2013 at 2:16 PM Rating: Good
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Quote:
the quote is responding to a topic on not being able to sell a 99-stack 1-at-a-time on the boards.


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
#26 Sep 02 2013 at 2:21 PM Rating: Good
Eliminex wrote:
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.


Sellers have to make a decision on what they want to do with their 20 to 40 slots. This system creates an interesting variance in the price of items. It allows for bulk discounts.
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