ffxiah.com

[murph]

I agree, that kind of gil explosion can only be caused by a gil creating exploit. Unfortunately, I'm sure that there were many legit players who found and used this exploit too. How come they weren't banned along with the gilsellers? Duping money is pretty much the biggest crime you can commit in an MMORPG.

[SephYuyX]

I agree, that kind of gil explosion can only be caused by a gil creating exploit. Unfortunately, I'm sure that there were many legit players who found and used this exploit too. How come they weren't banned along with the gilsellers? Duping money is pretty much the biggest crime you can commit in an MMORPG.

True, yes it's bad, but if it's in the game, it's fair game. Not like people were using any 'hacks', SE provided the tools nessisary to do so. And if you bring up exploits, you gotta bring up AV :wink:

[Navia]

I wonder if the people running the data collection tool realize they could also collect the price they post items on the AH as well.
The people running ffxiah could get alerts on heavy undercutters posting stuff for sale and buy+resell, maybe even setup a bot to snipe the kraken club some smartass thinks they can sell to themself for 1337 gil

/tinfoilhat off

[divisortheory]

I wonder if the people running the data collection tool realize they could also collect the price they post items on the AH as well.
The people running ffxiah could get alerts on heavy undercutters posting stuff for sale and buy+resell, maybe even setup a bot to snipe the kraken club some smartass thinks they can sell to themself for 1337 gil

/tinfoilhat off

You can't collect the prices that people post items for.

[murph]

I believe in the rule "if it's in the game, it's fair game" for absolutely everything EXCEPT gil creation exploits (including duping). That absolutely goes beyond the bounds of what is acceptable in an MMO. You cannot instantly undermine and threaten to completely destroy an MMORPG by warp claiming, speedhacking, teleporting, getting an NM stuck on a wall, or even stealing other people's accounts and items. In the big picture, all that stuff is insignificant chump change compared to a single act of gil creation or duping. I feel any offender should instantly be banned for it.

You can't collect the prices that people post items for.

As far as we know, yeah.

[TsingTao]

Selling an item to an NPC for more gil than an NPC charges for said item isn't a dupe or hack. It's someone being sloppy on SE's end, fair game.

Dupers should be castrated on sight, but this isn't a dupe/hack.

[murph]

It's not a dupe or a hack, but it's worse than most hacks, and absolutely just as bad as a dupe. There is no difference.

[solsovly]

I wonder if the people running the data collection tool realize they could also collect the price they post items on the AH as well.
The people running ffxiah could get alerts on heavy undercutters posting stuff for sale and buy+resell, maybe even setup a bot to snipe the kraken club some smartass thinks they can sell to themself for 1337 gil

/tinfoilhat off

Queue the savior YTMND.

[Cliff]

You guys should be happy. SE has done a rather good job of deflating the market. Just a month or so ago (prior to the visible chart) the numbers were much higher, especially so for Asura, which was insanely inflated.

Since we only started collecting data in the past couple months, and had a downtime during most of August, we're still missing a lot of long term data. It'll be interesting to see if the market starts inflating again after this correction.

I'd also like to do some analysis at some point to try to quantify the amount of gil RMT acquires through selling on the AH per day.

What I don't understand though is...just having RMT should not inflate the economy per se. Sure, it redistributes the wealth, but there's still a limited amount of gil, the increase of which being limited to the mechanisms in which FFXI generates it. The only way I can see that it could actually seriously inflate the market is if they were generating a serious amount of money in some way.

Maybe RMT isn't the bad guy, and SE is just blaming inflation on it as a scapegoat for a broken economy system?

I don't know enough about economics to say either way. Another possibility is that some gil generation exploits are still viable, though again that's not specific to RMT (I'm sure players would want to generate money for themselves even if RMT was completely controlled).

-Cliff

[Septimus]

You guys should be happy. SE has done a rather good job of deflating the market. Just a month or so ago (prior to the visible chart) the numbers were much higher, especially so for Asura, which was insanely inflated.

Since we only started collecting data in the past couple months, and had a downtime during most of August, we're still missing a lot of long term data. It'll be interesting to see if the market starts inflating again after this correction.

I'd also like to do some analysis at some point to try to quantify the amount of gil RMT acquires through selling on the AH per day.

What I don't understand though is...just having RMT should not inflate the economy per se. Sure, it redistributes the wealth, but there's still a limited amount of gil, the increase of which being limited to the mechanisms in which FFXI generates it. The only way I can see that it could actually seriously inflate the market is if they were generating a serious amount of money in some way.

Maybe RMT isn't the bad guy, and SE is just blaming inflation on it as a scapegoat for a broken economy system?

I don't know about economics to say either way. Another possibility is that some gil generation exploits are still viable, though again that's not specific to RMT (I'm sure players would want to generate money for themselves even if RMT was completely controlled).

-Cliff

Square liked to word their banning statements that they weren't banning RMT, but RMT who found a way to duplicate money in an unnatural fashion. The fashion probably wasn't specific to RMT, but they were probably the ones who discovered it and exploited it equally on all servers. (And didn't leak word of it for non-RMT players to exploit.)

PS. Have my babies.

[Chupunpupun]

You guys should be happy. SE has done a rather good job of deflating the market. Just a month or so ago (prior to the visible chart) the numbers were much higher, especially so for Asura, which was insanely inflated.

Since we only started collecting data in the past couple months, and had a downtime during most of August, we're still missing a lot of long term data. It'll be interesting to see if the market starts inflating again after this correction.

I'd also like to do some analysis at some point to try to quantify the amount of gil RMT acquires through selling on the AH per day.

What I don't understand though is...just having RMT should not inflate the economy per se. Sure, it redistributes the wealth, but there's still a limited amount of gil, the increase of which being limited to the mechanisms in which FFXI generates it. The only way I can see that it could actually seriously inflate the market is if they were generating a serious amount of money in some way.

Maybe RMT isn't the bad guy, and SE is just blaming inflation on it as a scapegoat for a broken economy system?

I don't know about economics to say either way. Another possibility is that some gil generation exploits are still viable, though again that's not specific to RMT (I'm sure players would want to generate money for themselves even if RMT was completely controlled).

-Cliff

If they used the gold beastcoin exploit and sold the coins to the NPC, that could be the reason why so much gil were introduced into the economy.

How much does a NPC pay for a gold beastcoin? If the gilseller have 5THF they can theoretically steal 60 coins an hour, 1440 coins a day. And depending on how much NPC buys a gold beastcoin, it could mean alot of money generated a day during the weeks, months before the exploit was patched.

[Kyreth]

What I don't understand though is...just having RMT should not inflate the economy per se. Sure, it redistributes the wealth, but there's still a limited amount of gil, the increase of which is limited to the mechanisms FFXI generates it. The only way I can see that it could actually seriously inflate the market is if they were generating a serious amount of money in some way.

Maybe RMT isn't the bad guy, and SE is just blaming inflation on it as a scapegoat for a broken economy system?

I don't know about economics to say either way. Another possibility is that some gil generation exploits are still viable, though again that's not specific to RMT (I'm sure players would want to generate money for themselves even if RMT was completely controlled).

-Cliff

Edit- Thank you Cliff, FFXIAH is pure awesome. Thank you very much.

Inflation spikes happen when large chunks of Gil get dumped into the system. Last few months, that hasn't been happening. Yes, some gil generation is still cheatable (craftbot/fishbots) so RMT's can have an influence. But as long as S-E keeps nuking the holder accounts, it's tougher to have the kind of effect they did around Christmas. Even so, lesser amounts of Gil are worth it to an RMT if they can engineer enough demand for higher prices. It's just that whatever methods are being used now to generate Gil, S-E is stepping on the results. That's all that matters, since you can generate all the Gil you like as long as none of it hits the outside economy...until it does, it's meaningless.

Mostly, it looks like what's "working" for RMT's right now is the resource denial side- Ulli/NM cockblocking, tradeskill undercuts and so on. There's always some kind of RMT profit to be made as long as they can manipulate people into wanting to buy at their prices- whether it's volume sales or price manipulations that make high price-per-million-Gil sales worth it to a player. They can't do what they did during Christmas, which was deliberately pump Gil through the AH to boost prices on various items until the entire system had an inflationary spike following along.

Somewhere, IGE has a couple of ur-nerd Economics grads rubbing their hands together plotting something evil for the next stab at dollars from Gil. Must look and sound like a cross between Urkel and Satan himself.

[aurik]

You guys should be happy. SE has done a rather good job of deflating the market. Just a month or so ago (prior to the visible chart) the numbers were much higher, especially so for Asura, which was insanely inflated.

Since we only started collecting data in the past couple months, and had a downtime during most of August, we're still missing a lot of long term data. It'll be interesting to see if the market starts inflating again after this correction.

I'd also like to do some analysis at some point to try to quantify the amount of gil RMT acquires through selling on the AH per day.

What I don't understand though is...just having RMT should not inflate the economy per se. Sure, it redistributes the wealth, but there's still a limited amount of gil, the increase of which being limited to the mechanisms in which FFXI generates it. The only way I can see that it could actually seriously inflate the market is if they were generating a serious amount of money in some way.

Maybe RMT isn't the bad guy, and SE is just blaming inflation on it as a scapegoat for a broken economy system?

I don't know about economics to say either way. Another possibility is that some gil generation exploits are still viable, though again that's not specific to RMT (I'm sure players would want to generate money for themselves even if RMT was completely controlled).

-Cliff

If they used the gold beastcoin exploit and sold the coins to the NPC, that could be the reason why so much gil were introduced into the economy.

How much does a NPC pay for a gold beastcoin? If the gilseller have 5THF they can theoretically steal 60 coins an hour, 1440 coins a day. And depending on how much NPC buys a gold beastcoin, it could mean alot of money generated a day during the weeks, months before the exploit was patched.

Recast on steal is 5 minutes, and you will fail to steal often. Probably only get 8~ coins an hour. That's still a lot of money, but why sell to NPC when you can make them into ingots and sell 48-coins-worth (6 hours of stealing) in a single AH slot, overnight?

[Kyreth]

Recast on steal is 5 minutes, and you will fail to steal often. Probably only get 8~ coins an hour. That's still a lot of money, but why sell to NPC when you can make them into ingots and sell 48-coins-worth (6 hours of stealing) in a single AH slot, overnight?

That's what they were doing with silver rings from fishbotting in Yughott, actually. Put a crafter in a safe spot, hand them stuff, crafter would desynth ring/synth caps/synth picks.

So I'd guess they'd do the same thing with coins. Gold ingots are nowhere near impossible levels of GS to easily build a crafterbot to, sell well and are quite anonymously sold in volume.

[murph]

What I don't understand though is...just having RMT should not inflate the economy per se. Sure, it redistributes the wealth, but there's still a limited amount of gil

Correct.

[Cliff]

Mostly, it looks like what's "working" for RMT's right now is the resource denial side- Ulli/NM cockblocking, tradeskill undercuts and so on.

Now, that is something I can understand. People have been doing that since Ultima Online. The only thing is, there's no reason why a player wouldn't do the same thing here to get more money.

I've been talking to some friends about this, and I thought I'd run it by you guys. The real problem with the game, from my eyes, is the lack of money sinks. When FFXI started, all AH prices were extremely low, and the economy "worked". Players weren't having to think about buying gil. But because there is no way to drain all this money being generated from players, the total wealth slowly increased, which is exactly what leads to inflation in a game.

It's not that hard to think of ways of doing this, though they would have to be well designed. For instance, paying for storage (think up to like 300 items or so). Careful tuning could equalize the inflow and outflow of gil from the system, and certain one time events could be used to drain out large amounts of money for unexpected changes. To me, that's much more preferable than mass banning of accounts in order to drain the economy.

Once that is accomplished, all that is left is to fix systems that allow hoarding and undercutting of this nature. That though, is a topic that is incredibly sensitive in a live game environment where any change is immediately hated by a certain percentage of the population.

-Cliff

[Raineer]

-Cliff

You know you have respect when you can sign your posts like this and not be ridiculed. Good work Cliff.

[murph]

I don't think lack of money sinks is the problem, or they wouldn't have lowered the jeuno AH tax.

Come to think of it, that would be a very nice tidbit to know, just a general figure of how much tax the AH absorbs each day. Just off the top of my head I'll bet it's by far the largest gil sink in the game.

[Minions]

I don't think lack of money sinks is the problem, or they wouldn't have lowered the jeuno AH tax.

Come to think of it, that would be a very nice tidbit to know, just a general figure of how much tax the AH absorbs each day. Just off the top of my head I'll bet it's by far the largest gil sink in the game.

who goes to jeuno anymore? They could put no tax in tavnasia and people still wouldnt be there lol

[Chupunpupun]

Recast on steal is 5 minutes, and you will fail to steal often. Probably only get 8~ coins an hour. That's still a lot of money, but why sell to NPC when you can make them into ingots and sell 48-coins-worth (6 hours of stealing) in a single AH slot, overnight?

Theoretically speaking of course.

If they sold it in the AH then they aren't introducing any new gil to the economy. It's just shifting ownership, if that was the case then the massive amount of gil was already there before the exploit was discovered.