Inflation observations/strategies

[Fievel]

Nope.

lmfao

[Bling]

I see people say that crafting is dead frequently. It's not dead. It's actually a hell of a good time to craft. People are so busy trying to get all of the massive amounts of gear they added in abyssea that they do very little else. I think that is one reason for the huge price jump in consumables; people aren't wasting time crafting anymore (and there don't seem to be a million RMT bots crafting consumables now either).

The reason to craft before was that you wanted to make gil to buy a relic weapon, new armor, w/e. Now everything that is amazing is pretty much free; all you have to do is grind out hours in abyssea to get it. Same reason for farming; nobody is out farming AM scrolls to sell on the AH to fund their bravura. There is very little reason to need gil right now and people don't want to slave away for hours to make a buck so they can buy a grim +1 just to have SE shit on it next update.

[Theraven]

I see people say that crafting is dead frequently. It's not dead. It's actually a hell of a good time to craft.

Maybe if you have a consumables craft ie: cooking/alchemy/woodworking, for the other crafts it's pretty dead. I have goldsmithing, cloth and bone and while there is SOME profit to be made, it's not worth the time investment for the most part. I used to spend hours a day crafting stuff between my 3 craft characters and didn't get rich. That was ok, because I wasn't looking to make a relic or anything, but I was making a profit. The demand for crafted goods (and armor specifically) is WAY down, so even if it looks like there is profit to be made it might take you really long to sell the hq, not to mention all the nq's you also made. Everyone values their time differently, but for a lot of people it's just not worth the time anymore.

[Yugl]

I think the biggest contributors are:
* NPCing Abyssea gear has become the new source of income for noobs + Noobs make up 85% of the population => OMG SPIKE IN GIL
* Most gil gear is replaced by Abyssea gear that is relatively cheap

I hope the latter doesn't get crushed since I'm a casual player though.

[Vlint]

Tangentially related, but what do people agree was the cause of that Christmas hyperinflation? I always thought it was related to some combination of a gil-duping exploit and rusty fishing (or other popular pre-patch npc-scheme), but I just could be dumb.

[Mojo]

Maybe if you have a consumables craft ie: cooking/alchemy/woodworking, for the other crafts it's pretty dead. I have goldsmithing, cloth and bone and while there is SOME profit to be made, it's not worth the time investment for the most part. I used to spend hours a day crafting stuff between my 3 craft characters and didn't get rich. That was ok, because I wasn't looking to make a relic or anything, but I was making a profit. The demand for crafted goods (and armor specifically) is WAY down, so even if it looks like there is profit to be made it might take you really long to sell the hq, not to mention all the nq's you also made. Everyone values their time differently, but for a lot of people it's just not worth the time anymore.

8x Phyrgian Ore + some kind of gem gem = up to 500k or more profit per synth, dunno how this doesn't seem profitable to you

[Vlint]

I also agree with Bling above. With a crappy 60 wood skill, I can make a stack of bags of shihei for 30-50k (depending on luck), while they retail for ~100k. You don't see me jumping into the shihei market though because I can't be assed to sit down and pump it out when I can be doing "better things with my time." Related also to what Byrth notes in 1A-C above.

[Syntex]

On Sylph, H.Q Buffalo Horns sell for 3k. They're used to pop Audumbla, who drops an Audumbla hide 100% of the time. The hide sells for 100k. The fight is trivially easy for a tank and a healer, and takes just a few minutes. If people have enough money to drop 100k rather than spend ten minutes farming something that would essentially be free, it leads me to believe the economy is out of whack.

I want to correct you here and say the hide is not 100%.

[Weeks]

Cruor and traverser stones are the only currencies that count these days. Maybe when relics become useful again this will change, but for now gil is about as important as conquest points.

[Fievel]

I want to correct you here and say the hide is not 100%.

If only this had been brought up sooner!

wait..

[shaddix]

How much gil/hour can individuals make via exp in abyssea? Some rough range would be enough. I want to know if I am wasting my time fishing.

[urat]

I think a ;large chunk of the inflation does come from the gil entering the system through NPCing as well, fisher's one my server are cumulating at least 5 million gil from NPCing hakuryus a day, thats a pretty notable sum of money entering the system, but nonetheless I think it's a bit more than that.

It's not just the quantity of the gil, but who now holds it. Before, sure there were plenty of ways for a player to get money into the system, chocobo racing is a pretty good example. In one batch I could profit about 200K over races, all from npcing carrots. Fishing had a few ways as well, though not nearly to the extant today, and trumpet shells / rings are another good example.

Yet, all of these people getting surplus gil into the system had something in common. They all had to be experienced players in order to get access to such funds. You needed to be pretty good at fishing and your job in order to get to vunkerl and fish the shells. You needed to spend months capping your chocobo in order to profit well at races. You needed to be a veteran bonecrafter in order to have solid profit on rings, etc etc etc.

Today however, any fool who can get into an abyssea shout run can make tonnes of gil without any thought required. All these 90 gimps who abyssead there way from 30 to 90 in 2-3 days have little to no game skill, and yet they've made shit tonnes of money already in their crour. So now that they're level 90 the first thing they dump it into is new armor. However because of how wet behind the ears they are chances are they don't think twice about the amount of money they dump in, A because they're new and B They have so damn much money they don't care.

The economy's state is the end result. To give you an example that shows how its not just a surplus a money but a surplus of morons in the economy, I have managed to list up over 50 items on my server's AH that all NPC for 1~3K more than I buy them on AH. Sitting at port jueno AH I can buy it out and npc everything and make about 50K, for doing practically nothing. I've always been able to do this since the days of dynamis, but never to this extreme extent.

[Syntex]

Yea I posted before reading all of the first page.

I did want to ask though since it was specifically mentioned. What did cause the Christmas inflation that year? I know a bit about economics and always chalked that up to Gil buying with record lows(was something like 1mil for 3 bucks) and the holidays helping. If that isn't what caused it then what did?

[Vlint]

I don't think gilbuying ever causes inflation. It's just recirculating the gil that's already in the system. The reason the price of gil was so low was because a large supply had been created somehow. Large supply -> same demand or not enough increased demand -> less value

[Bling]

8x Phyrgian Ore + some kind of gem gem = up to 500k or more profit per synth, dunno how this doesn't seem profitable to you

Synergy is especially not dead. There are quite a few synths that are very useful, and since synergy is so stupid and cumbersome to learn/utilize not many people have leveled it or bother to use it if they have. Just making NQ junk in the furnace can make 5x+ profit for materials on quite a few synths. It just comes down to time spent vs reward, and there's nothing worth spending that time making gil for since they shit on relic weapons, salvage gear, anything that used to cost gil.

[Mizunos]

I think it's harder to predict the FFXI economy because we don't know values like total gil in game. Also, not sure how it relates, but Mog Bonanza is happening twice a year now. Last time it took about 3 billion gil out of the economy.

[Byrthnoth]

I don't think gilbuying ever causes inflation. It's just recirculating the gil that's already in the system. The reason the price of gil was so low was because a large supply had been created somehow. Large supply -> same demand or not enough increased demand -> less value

This is mostly but not entirely correct. Gil that is out of circulation (say, for instance, it's stuck on a gilseller's mule account) is effectively not in the system and doesn't influence prices. If, in theory, you hoarded half the gil on your server and then simply gave it away one day, market prices would approximately double.

Individual saving/spending habits certainly does influence the economy, which is why it was cited as a major reason for the recession post-9/11. It's more complicated in the real world though, because there are other currencies and commodities.

[Pringles]

I also agree with Bling above. With a crappy 60 wood skill, I can make a stack of bags of shihei for 30-50k (depending on luck), while they retail for ~100k. You don't see me jumping into the shihei market though because I can't be assed to sit down and pump it out when I can be doing "better things with my time." Related also to what Byrth notes in 1A-C above.

This exactly. I have a 100 ww on a mule and I still just purchase a 12 stack shihei off AH rather than make it just because it takes forever to churn out shihei. Odds are I'll make that 100k back and more while farming zones and popping nms before I run out of shihei. I even take the beads off NM's that drop and turn them into staves before going to bed and npc the NQ for ~7k and AH the HQ for ~20-80k depending on the staff. Since December, I haven't dropped below 4mil and the only thing I spend gil on is ninja tools and some foods. If gil ever really became a commodity again, all a person would have to do is farm kon for a few hours and npc dark rings unless SE decides to nerf their npc price.

[Nishida]

and there don't seem to be any absurdly overpriced items around anymore.

Because nearly 600k for a scroll of phalanx isn't absurdly overpriced at all..

[Ticktick]

Do some BCNM40s, get phalanx + refresh + utsu: ni, make about 1.5M