What caused the Great Christmas Inflation

[Reggie_Asura]

the rusty cap thing was patch a good year or more before the christmas inflation happened.

[Ramzii]

Padded caps were about 3.3k, and Strong 3.8k, not 10k each lol.

Light Crystals were that much per stack, though.

[Keria]

the rusty cap thing was patch a good year or more before the christmas inflation happened.

No, it wasn't. It was patched sometime in 2006; I started playing around RMT Christmas (2005) and used to farm in Pashhow till like June 06- there were rusty cap bots there all that time.

[fantasticdan]

This was before they had changed anything regarding gil.
Virtually every NM in Sea Serpent Grotto dropped Siren's Hair, Mantas in Cape Terrigan dropped Angel Skin, and GMs didn't ban RMT like the STF does. There were bannings here and there, but there was a team of gil sellers at literally every zone of the game doing every activity they could to make money.

When they were banned, there were trains of RMT leveling in every zone to replace them. I think it was a mix of SE not being able to keep up, and trying to implement a good system to fix it, similar to what's happening with the account hackings.

A lot of you people don't seem to get this, but to reiterate; RMT camping/farming/synthing/etc. and selling anything to players, doesn't cause inflation. Gil moving between players and RMT doesn't create more gil, some of it is actually removed with the auction house and bazaar tax fees. Yes maybe RMT can increase prices a little on items they monopolize, but those prices will still be somewhat relative to the rest of the economy.

Gil is only introduced into the game by a few methods; mob drops/mug results, items sold to vendors, quest/mission rewards, etc. And I can't imagine RMT were making that much new gil legitimately to inflate the gil supply to what it was. There had to have been a lot of exploits/duping going on.

[Zhais]

A lot of you people don't seem to get this, but to reiterate; RMT camping/farming/synthing/etc. and selling anything to players, doesn't cause inflation. Gil moving between players and RMT doesn't create more gil, some of it is actually removed with the auction house and bazaar tax fees. Yes maybe RMT can increase prices a little on items they monopolize, but those prices will still be somewhat relative to the rest of the economy.

Gil is only introduced into the game by a few methods; mob drops/mug results, items sold to vendors, quest/mission rewards, etc. And I can't imagine RMT were making that much new gil legitimately to inflate the gil supply to what it was. There had to have been a lot of exploits/duping going on.

It can be artificially introduced all at one time if hordes of rmt banks were saving up a few billion gil. All of a sudden put that gil in a player that wants to spend it, and bam its back in circulation

[Asdrabael]

It was all rusty cap fishing. You don't realize how absolutely prevalent it was unless you were there to experience it.

Rabao was the most crowded zone in the game, with a good 200-400 bots there 24 hours a day just fishing caps, synthing them, npcing them at 200k+ created gil per hour. I was a newb and did it some (not the bots, just fishing them), and it was an amazing amount of gil that the game hasn't really ever seen since outside of blatant things like duping.

All those bots got all that many, and when it got fixed, you were left with hundreds of people, many of them rmt, with hundreds of millions of gil just sitting there that they'd been gradually stockpiling. Those people looked into buying all these luxury items, driving up costs, which drove down the value of gil, which caused more gil to come in through rmt controlled items (o kote, speed belt, striders, peacock charm, to name a few), and more to get sold. Rmt were trafficking easily 100 times the sheer amount of gil they can move now.

SE handled it with stuff like jacking up the cost of chocobos (whoo, 5000 gil chocobos at mea to goto bibiky bay anyone?) and mass banning, so they drained off most of that money.

In short, the massive inflation was caused by a year of a gil producing method that put the bat farming they just nerfed to utter laughable shame, and has since caused them to monitor gil introduction with the iron fist they now use. They saw the initial cause, which was massive npcing, and just plain won't allow it now.

[Tubbers]

There's a lot wrong with the above post, to name one the chocobo costs were never "jacked up". That was the original chocobo system. Every time someone rented a chocobo, the price for the price of the next one went up 200~500 gil or something like that. The highest chocobo price was much, much higher then, at least 10k. The reason that Mea chocobos cost so damn much was the constant flow of players going to Bibiki/Sky/Onzozo. The most popular EXP camps were in those areas, almost everyone went through Mea.

You're partially correct on the fishing. That played a large role, but as I said earlier, the real big gun was the gil duping. It probably wouldn't have been as common or easy for RMT to get enough gil required to do the duping exploit if not for the fishing though.

[Lordwafik]

Who remembers making a bibiki party, only for your WHM to say "The choco prices are too annoying >.< I'm walking ^.~" and then you'd have to wait at least 30 mins or so before the skank found her way to camp?

Thank god that will never happen again.

[Cloudius]

Rusty caps, fishing beds, DB and npc duping gil, and that CoP npc. Good times good times.

[Ashira]

Padded caps were about 3.3k, and Strong 3.8k, not 10k each lol.

Light Crystals were that much per stack, though.

Farming Light Elementals in sky for BLM EXP with a friend was quite lucrative at the time, running for 4-6k a stack/cluster.

[yayaok]

Who remembers making a bibiki party, only for your WHM to say "The choco prices are too annoying >.< I'm walking ^.~" and then you'd have to wait at least 30 mins or so before the skank found her way to camp?

Thank god that will never happen again.

fuck fuck FUCK

wish i had kept all my gil before i quit, shouldn't have bought those stupid luxury items..... 7mil royal cloak wut

[Valyana]

The Tavnazia NPC resale exploit introduced a lot of gil, too.

[Sephiroth_Owa 13]

Who remembers making a bibiki party, only for your WHM to say "The choco prices are too annoying >.< I'm walking ^.~" and then you'd have to wait at least 30 mins or so before the skank found her way to camp?

Thank god that will never happen again.

Believe it or not but had more then one pt where the whole pt'ed walked to the exp zone. Bibiki Bay on Choco 9k.....nah I'm walking....going to the tree? 10k for the whole pt >.<
I'm so happy those days are gone, but anyone remember when ToAU came out? Holla chocos went up to 5k cause of ppl running to Sandy to get that c/s done.

[Pergo]

weskits were never 30k before the inflation. dragon talons were still rare back because isnms didn't exist

[Weeks]

Rusty Cap fishing was not the huge exploit that people are claiming it to be. I did it for a solid week while studying flash cards for finals, and the most caps I ever caught in an hour was 17. For the entire week, I made roughly a million gil. On average, it was something like 30k per hour per fisher. It was only broken because the only requirement was to be able to get to Rabao. That said, it probably was the source of most of the inflation. Unlike the dbox duping trick and the NPC exploit in Safehold, it lasted for a very long time.

[Kerberoz]

What pissed me off the most was this.

Before the inflation the NQ of this item was 30 fucking K, I could have bought 100 of them, sold them for 10mil each and got 2 relics :/

Ummm... no. Weskits were 500k-1 mil when they were first added to the game and the price rose steadily. The only reason they're 30k now is because SE nerfed dragon talons and made them drop off of everything.

[Vodou]

To put some raw numbers on this:

SE reported deleting 184 billion gil in Feb-March 2007. The rusty cap exploit was locked away on 2/2/07. Since that time, very few months have come close to that level of gil deletion and as we all know per FFXIAH, deflation has been almost constant.

On the other hand, the massive inflation of 11/2005 - 12/2005 occurred almost overnight. SE reported that they deleted 550 billion gil in the period of 2/06 - 3/06. This was almost certainly some dupe or npc exploit. The fact that SE did not lock down rusty caps at the time was either due to it not being used as much or simply not known to SE.

It could have been that the rusty cap exploit was conicidentally removed in 2/07 and that another exploit was closed at the same time since if the 184 billion was from rusty caps alone, it would have LIKELY required more light crystals than the game could have produced. I recall again almost overnight seeing light crystal prices skyrocket. Its hard to think this exploit was "widely abused" while light crystals remained at low prices. Caps could have been a long term much smaller scale exploit however.

[Weeks]

Rusty Cap fishing was first nerfed in early 2004. Before that, the Rusty Caps sold to NPCs for roughly the same price as the Padded Caps. There weren't dozens of 24/7 fishing bots doing this yet, but for at least a few months people had been steadily doing it. Right when that really started to take off around March of '04, Square nerfed the price on the Rusty Cap, requiring people to level smithing and synth them into Padded Caps. This didn't slow down the exploit, all it really did was open up an avenue for light crystal/cluster farmers to join in. About 6 months later, they lowered the NPC price of Padded Caps enough to slow the whole thing down. They didn't really kill it until last year, but they crippled it in late 2004.

Looking at the actual figures, I'm starting to change my tone a bit. That 550 billion figure basically would basically require 140 fishers per server going after Rusty Caps 24/7 for six months straight, and of course that wasn't all of the inflation amount. I think it played a significant role in creating the gil surplus that the RMTs would eventually unload, but the duping and NPC sellback exploits had to play a pretty significant role too. Rusty Caps and Delkfutt gigas alone couldn't bring that much gil into circulation.

[Asdrabael]

I remember light crystals being 20k a stack in rabao during the height of rusty cap fishing, and the AH was always running low.

The tavnazia gil duping thing lasted only a few days as far as I remember it, and SE banned a bunch of the people involved. It didn't go on for the sheer amount of time that the cap fishing did (this went on from the introduction of roz until the first nerf towards the middle 2004, so over a year, and it existed in a smaller form before that because you could fish them up in places like la theine but the travel time involved was heavier).

It annoyed me when it got nerfed at the time, because I had just moved up from moat carp as a brand new ps2 generation player, and was making decent gil doing it and able to barely keep afloat as prices rose.

Then it got nerfed, prices kept steadily rising, and boom, christmas hit and the inflation spiraled away.

[Absolutely Virtue]

Thanks to the people who got what I was trying to say while I was drunk last night. >< Doing business with RMT does not inherently create inflation. In most cases, inflation stems from a dramatic increase in money supply.

I remember a time on Fairy in early '04 when it seemed like every person in the early NA HNM LS scene was botting in Rabao. Almost everyone seemed to know about it (surely SE did), and people didn't even try to hide it. Most people I know who did it used their own character to do it! It was definitely a nice supplemental income, but I don't know anyone who got rich (as in max-gil rich) doing it. Not even close. You just couldn't catch enough caps to do it.

I'm convinced that there was some specific exploit taking place at the exact same time of the hyperinflation. And since it happened on every server and average players didn't know about it, I suspect RMT. Because:

The recent Salvage dupe is pretty good proof that a secret can be kept under wraps for a decent amount of time. But when the lid was blown on that, plenty of people confessed to knowing about it (and the amount of gear you see suggests they're telling the truth). This hyperinflation exploit seems, in my estimation, to have been a bigger secret than the Salvage thing. Only way that could have gone FFXI-wide (ie, all servers) is if RMT specifically did it on every server. Just a theory.