ffxiah.com

[Talis]

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.

There are already a fair number of gil sinks in game. Dynamis and limbus entry fees spring immediately to mind, as well gambling with the gobby NPC for the solo ENM. More gil -> rare/ex conversion is whats needed to keep the economic balance, otherwise there is a constant inflow of gil, with nowhere for it to go. Hopefuly similar fee per event type instances will be introduced in the new expansion, and give an additional release valve for the inflow of gil.

[TsingTao]

Honestly, I'd be worried about adding more gil sinks. The ones in place now were added when the economy had much more gil. Time to see what happens with the ones already in place.

Between AH taxes, AF storage, the Sis Kebab vendor (this guy must make serious bank), and assorted misc. sinks I bet the game is good as it is. It just took a long time to ban enough RMT banks for it to be noticable.

Now all they need to do is look around for the dozens of 24x7 rmt crafters. I bet Cliff's data would be an eye opener there too. People can only craft, camp, or farm for so long. If the RMT weren't there in force I wouldn't worry about the economy one bit.

BTW, thanks for everything you continue to do for the FFXI community Cliff.

[layoneil]

Subligar desynth was a nice quick gil sink.

[divisortheory]

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.

A lower bound, upper bound, and "guesstimate" on this could be computed. Take the lowest possible tax rate (Al Zahbi), and the highest possible tax rate (Whitegate). Since he's already collecting AH data and knows how much stock is up and what items sold, he should be able to get a total count of how many items have been listed. To get an initial value you scan the current stock of the AH. For items that have sold in the past 7 days use the last AH sale price as the listing price, for items that haven't sold in the past 7 days calculate the price trend for that item as a function f(t) and predict the next sale price, using f(now) as the listing price when calculating tax.

Once you get your initial trend, every time you fetch new data compare new price history vs. old price history.

CurrentStockCount - (OldStockCount-NumberOfNewItemsOnPriceHistory) should give you a lower bound on the number of items listed since the last check. Then use the trending algorithm above to determine how much taxes were absorbed by those listings.

[Cliff]

I guess we'll just have to see if the market stabilizes or gets screwed up again, that's the only way to know.

We could probably set something up to see the approximate gil drain from taxes.

-Cliff

[Ashira]

Hmm, add'l money sinks...

Pay a goodly price to be able to have our Moogle retrieve from Storage anywhere, and maybe a price to have Nomad Moogles access Storage and Locker as well...

Pay an exorbitant amount of money (well, maybe not exorbitant) to be able to send more than 8 items via delivery at a time. That would make me soooo happy.. no longer would NIN to BRD to BLM be quite so horrific.

Responses to such would probably be something like "we don't have the memory available to do such things..."

[aurik]

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.

Right. I don't think the massive gil quantity was introduced from stealing coins.

I personally think that the massive gil quantity dumped into system last christmas was a large amount of gil obtained from sustained RMT efforts, both "legit" (ie, fishbotting), and "illegit" (ie, duping). A huge amount was cycled through the system in a short amount of time, and since RMTs control a lot of the luxury materials, a lot of that money ended back in their coffers, where it was stomped in January. We had further stompage in June and July and August now, and probably ongoing.

The thing is, the RMTs control extremely lucrative earning methods through their complete dominance in sky. Which means if SE stomps only the banks, they are stomping away gil, but failing to stop the constant siphoning of gil into these banks. So the money base is continuing to dwindle, because gil is being sucked out by RMT into these shelters, and then these shelters are being destroyed instead of eventually feeding the money circulation.

[murph]

SELECT * FROM AHdatabase WHERE sellingdate LIKE '2006-09-18 ';

output to excel spreadsheet and look at the bottom of the second column, then multiply by .01

Doesn't need a permanent feature, I just want a ballpark figure out there so we can avoid comments about the ENM gobbie and sis kebab vendors... seriously, gtfo

[Minions]

Hmm, add'l money sinks...

Pay a goodly price to be able to have our Moogle retrieve from Storage anywhere, and maybe a price to have Nomad Moogles access Storage and Locker as well...

Pay an exorbitant amount of money (well, maybe not exorbitant) to be able to send more than 8 items via delivery at a time. That would make me soooo happy.. no longer would NIN to BRD to BLM be quite so horrific.

Responses to such would probably be something like "we don't have the memory available to do such things..."

Pay 1m to send 5m. IGE at its best

[divisortheory]

SELECT * FROM AHdatabase WHERE sellingdate LIKE '2006-09-18 ';

output to excel spreadsheet and look at the bottom of the second column, then multiply by .01

What are you talking about?

[Shyla]

With RMT filling every zone so you can hardly even exp anymore, I cant see how there will be room for real players to make an economic living, besides maybe BCNM's and such.

[murph]

How to get a rough idea of how much AH taxes are, of course.

[divisortheory]

But taxes aren't 10% ANYWHERE, and there is a fixed cost as well, which eats up a ton of money when listing cheap items like crystals which sell very frequently.

[layoneil]

that's why he said "rough idea". it's the simplest way to guess at it, it's not suppose to be accurate.

[Cliff]

With RMT filling every zone so you can hardly even exp anymore, I cant see how there will be room for real players to make an economic living, besides maybe BCNM's and such.

Am I the only who finds it odd that the game was designed with such a small maximum capacity?

-Cliff

[Brennon]

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.

Right. I don't think the massive gil quantity was introduced from stealing coins.

I personally think that the massive gil quantity dumped into system last christmas was a large amount of gil obtained from sustained RMT efforts, both "legit" (ie, fishbotting), and "illegit" (ie, duping). A huge amount was cycled through the system in a short amount of time, and since RMTs control a lot of the luxury materials, a lot of that money ended back in their coffers, where it was stomped in January. We had further stompage in June and July and August now, and probably ongoing.

The thing is, the RMTs control extremely lucrative earning methods through their complete dominance in sky. Which means if SE stomps only the banks, they are stomping away gil, but failing to stop the constant siphoning of gil into these banks. So the money base is continuing to dwindle, because gil is being sucked out by RMT into these shelters, and then these shelters are being destroyed instead of eventually feeding the money circulation.

Perhaps this is intentional on SE's part. They let the gilsellers around long enough and keep "stomping" the gil-mules, and when the level of gil on the servers reaches the level they want, then they get rid of the rest of the gilsellers to?

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but if that was designed and intentional, it's not a half-bad idea actually.

[divisortheory]

that's why he said "rough idea". it's the simplest way to guess at it, it's not suppose to be accurate.

I don't even think that's a good rough idea tbh. More than 50% of the time my items get returned, even when I undercut. So more than 50% of the time that method would completely ignore the tax absorbed by the AH. I suppose you could take that number and double it, that might be close.

[Sykes]

Lack of gil sinks is definitely the problem. Or at least it was the problem for a long time. That, and taking way too much time to fix problems like rusty cap botting, etc.

Decent gil sinks exist now, such as AH fees, femina subligar, limbus, dynamis, etc.; however, I think that they took so long to get here that a lot of the damage was already done. Perhaps those adjustments, combined with patches which have taken steps to mitigate the things like rusty cap botting, plus the removal of large sums of gil via the banning of RMT bank mules, etc. are responsible from the gradual deflation that we've been seeing.

That said, while SE's RMT-removal strategy has helped the economy, it really hasn't done much to improve the enjoyability of the game in general. Sure, it is nice to actually be able to afford stuff on AH, but as long as RMT are still pwning lesser HNMs, sky, and starting to do sea and Tiamat, I have nothing to do with any of that cool stuff from AH. And until SE stops ignoring that aspect (and for that matter all of the other major issues that exist in the game), I think that the next big economic issue that is going to plague the game is wealth consolidation ... people quitting the game are either going to be giving all of their stuff to friends, or RMTing it all. Either way, there will probably be fewer players, but the same (or similar) amount of gil and items in the game. I'm not sure what the effects of this will be, but it is probably too late to prevent this from happening.

[layoneil]

Am I the only who finds it odd that the game was designed with such a small maximum capacity?

-Cliff

the obvious answer to that of course is PS2 Limitations.

[aurik]

By the way, those of you that think BCNMs are a haven from RMT, think again. We have a RMT manaburn group on asura that manaburns at Jody's spawn spot often, and basically operates 24/7. Tracking them on FFXIAH reveals that they also sell a lot of phil.stones, etc, which all basically all come from KSNMs that they manaburn.

They also pop the cheviot cloth NM every time its window is open, and do Totentanz and assaults as the reentry timers let them.