Inflation observations/strategies

[Mojo]

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

25M Dusk Gloves +1 would like a word with you

[Cantih]

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.

I don't know the MOST optimal targets, but...
A few jobs have some very strong AoE attacks, especially with atma, and if you build up lights you can literally farm gold boxes and time extensions until you become the next "guy plays to death" news item. Many do this for KI sets to pop mobs for empyrean weapons. (motherfucking glavoid sonofabith)

You can also happen do it for a pair of augmented Dark Rings in Konschtat (unless you have a D.Ring), aiming to find that 6% Mag/Phys Damage Reduction ring. All those 2-3% rejects though, npc for 30k a pop.

[urat]

Solo Id say you can make a notable sum of money in abyssea via gold box farming on dnc. It's a versatile job fully capable of going on nonstop killing one mob at a time in abyssea. Just stick to kill shots with Aeolian edge and you'll be getting top tier gold boxes soon enough.

What zone you want to do can vary a lot. If you want a particular AF3 feet for a job Id suggest the zone for that since you'll be opening shit tonnes of gold boxes. Alternatively you can do konshtat for the dark rings and npc those while keeping the best 2 for personal use. Should be able to farm a decent sum of money this way but I think doing dom ops is higher profit by selling the augmented weapons. Capping gold light will get you tonnes of weapons that npc for a lot, while using dom points to get more of them. Finally you're getting tonnes of crour to by Aurore legs and npc those as well.

Though hands down the biggest money maker is mercing out your brew for 200K crour. I think you could probably find someone willing to drop 1 mil+ on you brewing some NM for him.

[Lyall]

What zone you want to do can vary a lot. If you want a particular AF3 feet for a job Id suggest the zone for that since you'll be opening shit tonnes of gold boxes. Alternatively you can do konshtat for the dark rings and npc those while keeping the best 2 for personal use. Should be able to farm a decent sum of money this way but I think doing dom ops is higher profit by selling the augmented weapons. Capping gold light will get you tonnes of weapons that npc for a lot, while using dom points to get more of them. Finally you're getting tonnes of crour to by Aurore legs and npc those as well.
.

I'm not so sure about comparing Ops to farming gold chests. Even if you're only making 6k~ per item from, say, Vunk, that's still going to beat the time required to make a single augmented item. Level 90 Ops get you what, 300 credits? You'd need to kill forty-five mobs before making the credit required to make a single 7-8k augmented weapon.

I'd be willing to bet most people will see more yield from outright farming gold boxes. I know I have, I've made a couple hundred thousand gil in just loot while trying, solo and without even Aeolian cleaving, for Iga feet.

Edit: DURRRRRRRRRRRP I misread and thought you were saying that just going for dom-ops would trump item farming.
Further edit: Yeah, farming weapons while farming weapons would probably be the most effective way of doing things without looking for pure profit. I think that nod goes to dark rings, still.

[Celebrindor]

I've always taken to crafting as 90% of my playtime (3 or so hours/night 5-7 nights a week) at events. Which is the way I like it, I'd rather be busy playing the game than sitting on my ass in a $12.95/month chatroom. That being said, I took up crafting as I didn't have the time to farm back in the day. And while its not as wide-open now as it used to be, I still find a way to cover my bases in a relatively short amount of time compared to others. And since I may only get 5 hours or so a week for leveling other jobs (or trying to) and making gil outside of events, 20 minutes of crafting before I log out every night is more effective for me than 20 minutes of swapping jobs, getting to abyssea, getting buffs, going to a camp and start pulling.

I would like to see SE try and give the original crafts some quality recipes rather than just shitting on the durable goods crafter and putting them all in synergy.

[Absolutely Virtue]

For those that asked, there generally two theories about what caused big inflation spikes in the past. We've discussed them here before. They fall into two camps:

1) Outright duping exploits. Someone always knows someone who did this, but I've actually never seen it done. The story I hear most often is lagging out during trades, something SE patched years ago. I know people were banned for messing with that mechanic (I specifically knew players banned for it). But I'm not sure if that use was widespread enough to cause inflation.

2) Mistakes by SE. There have been cases where items could be purchased from an NPC and then NPC'd for more money. The most famous example was probably the piece of gear (maybe it was a subligar, iirc?) you could buy in the Safehold.

RMT have exploited other things in the past. They used to POS hack to the avatar battlefields and spam those for 10k gil or whatever the reward is, which led SE to introduce a daily limit on the fight. And they have always fished en masse, although I think this has probably declined. A lot of people blamed the inflation on rusty caps, but we did the math here once and figured that was probably impossible. Fishing for rusty caps, even with a great bot and ideal conditions, still never produced the enormous amounts of gil people think it did. Just trust me on that one, if you know what I mean.

Spells from BCNMs is a very interesting issue. You'd assume that one of the reasons the price is going up is scarcity. People are getting far fewer seals these days if they're burning through jobs in a day or two in Abyssea. And you'd assume that soon people are going to use what seals they have fighting kings. Unless SE introduces another way to get those scrolls, the prices are likely going to continue to rise. Hrm...

[Fievel]

Vir Subligar is the subligar you're thinking of, yeah, that shit added a lot of gil into the game.

[Kidnoftle]

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.

Avg for me off mat sales is about 1.5m/hr for a decent set of buyers. Other stuff I sell avgs me about 2-4m/hr

[Haborym]

Avg for me off mat sales is about 1.5m/hr for a decent set of buyers. Other stuff I sell avgs me about 2-4m/hr

I don't know how selling drops translates into exp from abyssea. C'mon now kid.

[Aemora]

A hell of a lot of the economy is supply and demand. The OP started off by stating that Aud Hides are selling for 100k on Sylph, and that it's a relatively highish drop rate. You then have to see what drops these hides and why people fight that mob. Three reasons people can fight that NM:

1. They want Hands Seals, Hides are just a by-product worthy to sell.
2. They want Body Seals, so people fight that NM to bypass bying the Rare Hide.
3. They want gil, so farm that NM for the Hides.

So that's where your supply is coming from. What about demand? The only reason to buy Aud Hides (and infact any rare item in Abyssea) is to pop something else. People have a limited time in Abyssea, some groups can't farm chests effectively, nor find that they have the timeframe to do a T1 NM to do a T2 NM. This is where the demand arises. This is why there's such a huge difference between H.Q. Buffalo Horns (3k) and Hides (100k), people don't have the time but do have the gil to reap the effort from other people.

Here, you are talking about a popped NM, when it comes to timed NMs (which I have an absolutely abhorant drop rate on all those NMs, shit should be 100%; we can proc grellow/blue/red for KI 100% of the time, but we can't get a rare drop irrespective of the procs available to us? That's another story BUT...) the supply is further hindered and greater demanded. Look at Sisyphus Fragment... When Abyssea first came out, Apademak was one (and still is) one of the harder top tier NMs. And the Dhorme version doesn't really drop that good of a seal. But then the update doesn't come around, people complete their objectives and look for something more to do, so they start doing Empyrean weapons, and find out that with 1 Brew you can destroy 7-8 Apademaks, compound that with the fact that he drops Jewels which make BLM/RDM+2 Bodies... Compound all these together, and the reason Sisyphus Fragments go from 40k to 200k is because people now are doing Kannagi's, Almace's, BLM+2, RDM+2 with relative ease.

People view the Empyrean weapons as the new Mythic or Relic weapon, and with it comes the mentality that Mythic/Relics actually cost gil. You HAD to spend money to get a Relic, you didn't have to spend money geting a Mythic but 30k Alexandrites with a piss poor drop rate and hardly any on the market meant that you kinda had to... With this mentality, people associate that you HAVE to spend money to get an Empyrean, it's a top weapon, it's worth the gil, so then when you look at it like that, people don't mind dropping 250k to pop Dhorme Khimaira to pop Apademak to get 1-2% closer to a Lv90 Empyrean, people think that spending the money is good, shit I want it now, I don't want it later, I want it now. So you see people willing to spend nearly 10million (at least) just on one stage alone (because hey, the previous 11 stages were free).

I don't think Abyssea has ruined the economy, just changed the focus of the economy. P.Charms are 600k, Hagun's are 30k, a Salvage body is now 150k... These are all HUGE differences to what the economy was like a year ago, and that's because the game has evolved to a point where you get rewarded more for the time you put in as opposed to the amount of money you have. Money still helps, but it isn't the be-all and end-all anymore, which allows a lot of players more scope to get the best and to achieve their goals.

However, you look at expenables, such as Shihei, and the price has gone through the roof whilst keeping the cost to make them the same. Food is another thing that hasn't dropped in price, eventhough inside Abyssea you can get away with not eating food because it's such a minor contributor compared to Abyssites and Atmas.

tl;dr version - Economy is fine, people with no patience/time/lots of money make prices sky-rocket.

(Prices based on Sylph also)

[Gwynplaine]

Comparing MMO economies to real world economics is a tricky thing to do. There are some principal similarities but there's also many important differences.

To start with, what do you consider "inflation"? Because I get the feeling you're using it to just imply "rises in price levels". But price increases aren't necessarily inflation, its a symptom not the thing itself. I consider inflation to be an unnatural increase of money into the system in a way that doesn't reflect any real production or activity.

In real world economics that would be your Federal Reserve, arbitrarily printing more money out of thin air. As well as counterfeiting (same thing but illegal).

In an MMO economy obviously you don't have that, but the closest thing would be flat out money or item duping where the goods are created at will. Or something like the subligar selling scheme. But I haven't seen any evidence there's massive amounts of gil being accumulated by duping or glitches involved in making tons of money at will lately.

So most likely the price increase for something like sheihei is just the reflection of the players change in values. Price increases are not inherently bad, evil, scapegoats even if you feel like you don't like it. If you personally think the prices shouldn't be so high then go craft it up and sell for less. If you don't, chances are because you evaluated your time as being more valuable than the gil you'd make cranking out sheihei bags and you implicitly agree to their higher prices.

Like most of you have mentioned I think that Square's focus to shift away from gil is the biggest reason for players shift in how they value goods.

My thought is that there is nothing wrong with the economy and Square shouldn't try to futz around Tzar style to fix stuff only to mess it up. Unless they want to shift toward using more gil again I guess that's their judgement to make. If the prices of shihei eventually climb too high then players will swoop in to profit. They will increase in the short-term but even out in the long-term.

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 just wanted to address this before I finish because it's interesting. One vitally important thing to keep in mind about an MMO economy is that ultimately it winds up founded in the same values of a real one. The most basic value to everyone - time. Playing an MMO uses up precious time of your life you won't ever get back. And so when you consider the value of something there's always weighing the opportunity cost of what you could have done otherwise. And in this way you can see even things that are nominally "free" still "cost" you by your time and alternative actions.

For you you've considered it and decided 100k is too high for that Hide and you would only buy it for less. But apparently other people agree with the price. Maybe they don't have buddies to duo with, or who knows. Consider that Abyssea time is limited as well so that makes things doubly time consuming. Maybe someone would rather solo an easier NM and sell a 2nd party the drop for 100k than duo this NM. How much shihei did you use tanking the NM and how much does the cost factor in? Did you use food and how much did it cost? etc. etc.

[Damane]

Solo Id say you can make a notable sum of money in abyssea via gold box farming on dnc. It's a versatile job fully capable of going on nonstop killing one mob at a time in abyssea. Just stick to kill shots with Aeolian edge and you'll be getting top tier gold boxes soon enough.

What zone you want to do can vary a lot. If you want a particular AF3 feet for a job Id suggest the zone for that since you'll be opening shit tonnes of gold boxes. Alternatively you can do konshtat for the dark rings and npc those while keeping the best 2 for personal use. Should be able to farm a decent sum of money this way but I think doing dom ops is higher profit by selling the augmented weapons. Capping gold light will get you tonnes of weapons that npc for a lot, while using dom points to get more of them. Finally you're getting tonnes of crour to by Aurore legs and npc those as well.

Though hands down the biggest money maker is mercing out your brew for 200K crour. I think you could probably find someone willing to drop 1 mil+ on you brewing some NM for him.

I am in the process of farmign myself a refresh hairpin in konschtat highlands (fucking rare augment). I have farmed allready 20+ hours there solo. I get each hour like 150k-200k NPCable shit depending on luck, and thats not counting all the scrolls and synth mats, because I leave them out (inventory is limited). tough my intention is actually not farming money (but that damn fuckign refresh hairpin), its a nice sideffect.

[Cymmina]

A hell of a lot of the economy is supply and demand. The OP started off by stating that Aud Hides are selling for 100k on Sylph, and that it's a relatively highish drop rate. You then have to see what drops these hides and why people fight that mob. Three reasons people can fight that NM:

1. They want Hands Seals, Hides are just a by-product worthy to sell.
2. They want Body Seals, so people fight that NM to bypass bying the Rare Hide.
3. They want gil, so farm that NM for the Hides.

So that's where your supply is coming from. What about demand? The only reason to buy Aud Hides (and infact any rare item in Abyssea) is to pop something else. People have a limited time in Abyssea, some groups can't farm chests effectively, nor find that they have the timeframe to do a T1 NM to do a T2 NM. This is where the demand arises. This is why there's such a huge difference between H.Q. Buffalo Horns (3k) and Hides (100k), people don't have the time but do have the gil to reap the effort from other people.

Oasis Water is in the same boat as Aud. Hides. Look at the seal drops: RDM Body. They don't come from a "good" NM that's worth farming like Ironclads or the lesser Cerb/Khim/Hydra, where they lead up to something better. The 3rd NM is the goblin in Grauberg, and the other 3 seals he drops aren't very popular or have better NMs to get them from.

Pop items for Abyssea NMs are a very lucrative way to make money right now. Water/hides are good, but so are pop items for NMs in Scars zones. We did our wind staff trial in La Theine on the flies there. After we were done, I looked up the price of the pop item and told the LS that they were 20k. One guy says, "I already dropped mine because I thought it was worthless." The tier2 pops in Tahrongi are particularly expensive, despite being 100% drop rate.

Also, the Phalanx price spike happened when they announced PLD was getting it natively. I paid 30k for mine years ago. Less people are doing BCNMs now but demand is higher than ever.

[Vlint]

In an MMO economy obviously you don't have that, but the closest thing would be flat out money or item duping where the goods are created at will. Or something like the subligar selling scheme. But I haven't seen any evidence there's massive amounts of gil being accumulated by duping or glitches involved in making tons of money at will lately.

There was someone boasting in the relic/mythic completion thread about his gil-duping prowess. I think he is keeping the method pretty close to the vest though (which is a good thing), because I do agree that there isn't the sort of inflation going on that we saw in 2005.

[Myriads]

I encountered an interesting bit of inflation a week back.

I had a new player join my shell, she was is a great person, enthusiastic, and had been playing for about a month, solo, and had leveled all the starter jobs to 30+ and had opened BST and taken it to 55, and was stuck at G2.

Not a problem, I told her I would do it for her, and lets hike off to the glacier and then Xcab to do it, "Could you sub WHM to s/i yourself and make my life simpler?" I asked.

She replied with. "Sneak sure, but I don't have invisible. I have not been able to get it to drop, and whenever I see it on the AH it's too expensive."

"WTF???" was my silent response. "Too expensive??? Okay perhaps it's 5 or 6K which for a new player could be steep. I'll buy it as a welcome to the shell gift." So I hit the AH, and not only are there none up in Jeuno (and I checked all the starter cities later, and none were there for some time either) its average cost was 50K O.o !!!!!!!!

50K for a scroll of invisible.

Later on she pounded one out of some gobs, but it took a bit of time. It's not a super common drop. But it's clear that some items are simply not about in any great numbers as the population has shifted to 90's in {A} I wonder how many other 'easy' scrolls are eye popping expensive now.

[Kaisha]

Spells from BCNMs is a very interesting issue. You'd assume that one of the reasons the price is going up is scarcity. People are getting far fewer seals these days if they're burning through jobs in a day or two in Abyssea. And you'd assume that soon people are going to use what seals they have fighting kings. Unless SE introduces another way to get those scrolls, the prices are likely going to continue to rise. Hrm...

Only easy fix I can see for that is having the grade of seals work like imperial currency does, where you can take a higher-grade seal, and break it down into X amount of a lower quality one.

For instance, KS could be worth 3 bst seal, KC could be 3 KS, and HKC could be 3 KC. Just an example.


That would also give HKC a purpose as I don't believe the new BCs being introduced even use them? I guess removing lvl caps would work also for the short term. ;/

[Gwynplaine]

I don't know about that. I have lots of Beastseals, and you know what? I'd love to use them up on some BCs for some money drops since they're doing nothing for me. But getting people to do it sucks. No one wants to. Obviously because it's fucking annoying to do them. You have to haul out some mishmash of low level gear for some random job. Then go all the damn way out to the BC. Ugh. No one wants to do it. They don't need most the drops and gil isn't really as useful now.

[Zoelef]

I encountered an interesting bit of inflation a week back.

I had a new player join my shell, she was is a great person, enthusiastic, and had been playing for about a month, solo, and had leveled all the starter jobs to 30+ and had opened BST and taken it to 55, and was stuck at G2.

Not a problem, I told her I would do it for her, and lets hike off to the glacier and then Xcab to do it, "Could you sub WHM to s/i yourself and make my life simpler?" I asked.

She replied with. "Sneak sure, but I don't have invisible. I have not been able to get it to drop, and whenever I see it on the AH it's too expensive."

"WTF???" was my silent response. "Too expensive??? Okay perhaps it's 5 or 6K which for a new player could be steep. I'll buy it as a welcome to the shell gift." So I hit the AH, and not only are there none up in Jeuno (and I checked all the starter cities later, and none were there for some time either) its average cost was 50K O.o !!!!!!!!

50K for a scroll of invisible.

Later on she pounded one out of some gobs, but it took a bit of time. It's not a super common drop. But it's clear that some items are simply not about in any great numbers as the population has shifted to 90's in {A} I wonder how many other 'easy' scrolls are eye popping expensive now.

Yeah, I rerolled as RDM recently and I've been lucky so far, getting Invisible (25-30k) to drop in Rolanberry Fields, but I'm currently dreading saving up for Refresh (70-75k, I swear this used to be ~10k), let alone Phalanx (370-380k). Ironically, the faster leveling up has left me with relatively few Beastmen's Seals; I'll be lucky to have 80 of them before I reach 40 on RDM. Then again, people aren't clamoring to do BCNM40's when there's Abyssea instead.

One item of note: Stacks of Boyhada Moss cost (25k-30k) and went for 7-8k several years ago. Looks like I'll be making several trips to Selbina with Millioncorn instead.

[Theraven]

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

Because that's synergy, not traditional crafting. I do have synergy levelled to 70 but I really hate it and try to do it as little as possible. Also, those rings aren't super easy to make or anything, I tried for over an hour one night to make a MND ring and got fed up, mats still in my delivery box. The VIT ring on the other hand was much easier.

and in reply to this

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

Those BCNM (Ni, Phalanx, Erase) scrolls used to be that price a long time ago, so you could say they have been insanely cheap for a long time and have just recently returned to their original value. Also people complain about BLM scrolls being way overpriced but those also used to be very expensive (100-200k) with the exception of a few spells (Freeze/Blizz 4) and nowadays it is MUCH easier to make money than it used to be so I really don't know why people complain. Things just seem to be shifting back to 2004/5 prices (scrolls, anyways. Gear is MUCH cheaper in general) while gil is easier to make.

[Agrona]

Mage's Ballad is another scroll that is very easy to get yet is high priced. 300k+ for a scroll that literally takes no effort other than forming a party of 6 people. I remember getting this scroll back in like '06 on my original character and don't remember it being even near 300k. The problem with this scroll is that this quest is literally the only way to get it and the quest isn't repeatable. By now I'd think most people who would be interested in this scroll would have done the quest already. This makes it especially obnoxious to get since you can't even solo the quest, it requires 6 people.