Azurymber wrote:
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.
Agreed. And if people are not willing to buy then Walmart won't sell a thing and will eventually lower their price.
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.
And my retainer - who also knows karate btw - will undercut your retainers, so yours will have to undercut in again etc. Not sure why you use a rather technical term like "non-optimized price" but how is this different from the real economy, where companies make huge profits and still make it look like they are involved in serious price competition? It all boils down to what a person is willing to pay for a certain item.
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.
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
That hyperinflation - the price of a scorpion harness rose from 2.5 million to almost 23 million in only a few days on Seraph, 12 acid bolts went up from 2,5k to 15k - was mostly due to a great holiday offer from our gil selling friends. It created a sudden influx of money stored on mules and did a pretty good number on the prices. SE should have paid attention to that earlier, when gilsellers were building up (sleeping) mules with maxed out amounts of gil and every now and then sent a random person a few millions. Later SE did take some measures: money was taken out of the game by banning suspicious accounts, they finally started to address the third party program problem that made botting possible and they made it more difficult to send large amounts of gil. Way too late for my taste, but they did exactly what an economist would do in this case given the economic system of a game: take money out of the system and put a stop to unfair competition.
(Ironically, during those days in December (2004, correct?) I met quite a few people who usually had regular, mediocre gear but all of a sudden started to run around in mighty expensive stuff... claiming they "played the market". Sure they did. Sure. ;) )
Could you elaborate on what economic sstem you would like to see in FFXIV?
Edited, Sep 3rd 2013 4:13am by Woofdram