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[Column] Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn: The FFXIV Economy Issue
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has some economic issues that need addressing and we're breaking it all down for you in our latest column.
If you want to earn Gil in FFXIV, you’re going to have to interact with the economy in a meaningful player-to-player way. In theory, this is awesome. Most modern MMOs eschew the interdependency we found in classic MMOs for a much more solo, selfish approach. Square Enix’s emphasis on interdependency is refreshing, but there are some issues with the implementation.
Read more of Michael Bitton's The FFXIV Economy Issue: Gil Sinks & Gil Fountains.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
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Free to play = content updates for the cash shop. Buy to play = content updates for the cash shop.
Subscription = Actual content updates!
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Like you already said in Your last part. They did it on purpose. A very smart move.
It's much easier to repair (read boost) a deflated economy, then trying to repair a completely inflated economy, which is impossible. As has been seen in so many existing MMO's like WoW and EQ2 which both have totally inflated economies.
And they already made the first adjustments With today's patch, by significantly lowering the repair costs and costs of Dark Matter!
Next step will be the addition of Daily Quests that should come With the 2.1 patch.
In a future patch, when necessary they can and will adjust leve gil rewards.
This is a much better approach, to be careful and keep the reign on the Gil fountain at launch, which will also significantly reduce the negative effect With exploits that always tend to pop up shortly after launch!
Right now, the economy is all wonky because EVERYBODY is leveling up EVERYTHING. Mats cost ten times the amount of a finished product, dungeon grinders cant afford their repair bills, its pretty tumultuous.
That said, i think once the majority of players settle into their preferred meta game, things will start to smooth out. Perhaps a more end game oriented gil fountain will help. I know that when the spirit bond/materia/meld system hits its stride, a lot of the crazy price fluctuations will even out.
Id give it about 3-4 months and we will start to see the economy humming. Then wouldbe a good time to do some tweaking. But tweaking it now would be a bad decision since most players are still leveling up and finding out what they want to do.
Not a fan of dailies myself. I figured leves basically took care of that and occupied the same design space, so I'm kind of wondering if they really are working on dailies. You get 6 leves every 24 hours, so it pretty much works the same way. I like that you can pick the ones you want to do and adjust their difficulty. I'd rather see them improve on this system than add traditional dailies.
they already have dailies, "leves" which by the lack of quests gives you something to do, to grind seals when you are tired of the fates. (doesn't take long).
The economy... urgh i hate crafting. "what do you mean to continue carpentry and leatherworking i have to take ANOTHER TWO professions AND grind certain animals constantly" (albgoat leather - it's so much fun to get) just a shame you need another thing to make the leather, then to actually make some of the stuff... i won't go there.
if i wanted another 4 jobs.... yeah.... no.
Of course, just now i'm playing "visit a city, be bombarded with SPAM with no real way to report it, and manually putting it into a blacklist which actually has a LIMIT of the number of people".
coupled with bad mob placement (one of the class level 25 quests in a level 28-29 area). Poor mandatory story line dungeons (i really couldn't say story with a straight face, it feels forced to put a dungeon in there). Hell half of the dungeon mobs feel forced to be there without any real lore or anything behind them.
i could go on... already made my mind up not to resubscribe, for a reborn they've not really done very much. Solo mixed with forced grouping is amusing. I'm not even going to mention the duty thing... 50 mins for an Ifrit group. Fantastic, i'll do some leves to pas... oh wait i can't.
I'll just slit my wrists and do crafting... you know what i'll play another GAME.
The quest zones, we play whack a mole to what point of the map you end up with in.. nothing seems thought out or well placed. I use teleport more times than my chocobo.
looks pretty in some parts of the game though (most of the classes just feel the same). Puglist and lancer .. no real difference even with the "forms" and "combo" difference. All you're doing is bashing the buttons in a certain order in both ways.
sigh. give me a call when they add PvP... i doubt it'd be good, the "morale" system sounds very much like a mixture of LOTOR and WoW's resilience.
"nothing actually matters, we're just slightly evolved monkeys clinging to a dying piece of rock hurtling through space waiting for our eventual death." - Frankie Boyle, Mock The Week
Currently playing SWTOR and it's MUCH better than it was at launch.
awesome article. The economy being run by transfers of wealth, buy making/obtaining something someone wants to buy is awesome, it reminds me of Wushu. The only "fountain" in Wushu is from kidnapping. These are not one time quests though, you can do it 10 times a day everyday, but is still heavily dependent on population.
I understand your concern with FFARR's economy completely. There are two options. First add dailies or some other type of event to continually inject cash. Second, create a cash to gill conversion system. The second is why I said, "atm" in the first paragraph.
All that being said, this makes me want to give ffarr a shot. The need to produce, gather, or get something someone wants to buy to make cash is awesome. I just hope they introduce some decent pvp quick.
Your Forgetting Leves they bring gil into the economy, Im currently doing Leves at 30 that award 1k per completion. While not a massive amount of gil its likely the economy will shrink to fit the scale, so there will be that at least.
I agree completely. I hated that feeling of "Have to log in and do my 6 dailies to make sure I get the [insert currency here] to trade in for that [insert specific items/pets/mounts/gear here].
I prefer the Leves which let me run however many I want to run at anytime provided I have them available.
I prefer to have Gil be worth something instead of having eleventy billion Gil.
As was stated earlier, some of the Gill sinks, such as repairs, are being addressed already.
I think this team is smarter than us forum dwellers and they probably have a plan in place.
2 words:
Anarchy
Online
Anyone who has played that game will understand that a poor economy to start with and slowly tweaked and adjusted carefully so proper balance is achieved is much better than a flood of money coming in and you end up with an economy where players have to create 2 and 3 accounts worth of characters (not individual character, but actual accounts full of mules) to hold the billions and billions and billions of credits a player can amass. Then new players come in and see that nice low level shiny worth millions and they are lucky to have 100K to their name.
When individual items in a game are price capped by the individual character limit (the max amount of money the game will allow a character to hold) , You have a broken economy.
I don't believe that this wasn't intentional. It has to one of the smartest moves made by an MMO team. This allows them to slowly get a groove of just how many players they need to support and then get into a position where they can easily scale gil fountains up and down depending on player count.
Can't wait to see how they help us level 50s earn gil. If its in the form of dailies, I hope theres a twist to it. something like a hunting log daily would be nice. but they have to make up for teleport costs if they go that route.
Monster Hunter since '04!
Currently playing: MHW & MHGU
I don't believe that this wasn't intentional. It has to one of the smartest moves made by an MMO team. This allows them to slowly get a groove of just how many players they need to support and then get into a position where they can easily scale gil fountains up and down depending on player count.
Can't wait to see how they help us level 50s earn gil. If its in the form of dailies, I hope theres a twist to it. something like a hunting log daily would be nice. but they have to make up for teleport costs if they go that route.
Monster Hunter since '04!
Currently playing: MHW & MHGU
I don't see what the issue is?
It may become an issue in the future if SE sits on their hands and does nothing. Which, at the time of posting this article is not even true anymore as the dev team lowered the cost of repairs and dark matters.
In other words there is no issue at all in the FFXIV:ARR of today. There are simply economic forces at play and SE's hand to stabilize said forces through whatever means necessary at any given point in time.
At this moment SE is keeping the influx of gil entering the economy at level cap low because the amount of money coming into the economy through players leveling their classes would cause massive inflation otherwise.. When this is no longer true in some other point in time SE will implement other measures to counter whatever economic shifts there may be.
Pointless article, just like the forum topics about the """"issue""""
Just wanted to point out that there is a huge gaping hole in your article. There is no set amount of Gil shared between all players that is being eaten up. The only way that would be true was if the ONLY method of earning gil was quests and leves. But that isnt the case. People are constantly bringing in money from fates and dungeons as well. No, theyre not huge chunks for each individual fate or dungeon, but it quickly adds up over the course of doing several fates or dungeons.
Manage your Gil wisely and theres no reason to not always have the Gil you need for whatever you want. Take the couple of minutes it will take to ride your chocobo somewhere rather than teleporting if you're hurting for money. Dont blow your Gil on buying items from the market which are 5-10x what they should realistically be priced at based on the materials required and difficulty to make. If you're dying so much that you need to constantly repair your gear so often that you're broke from it... stop sucking.
The only time I've been hurting for gil was when I spent several days doing pretty much nothing but crafting, leveling all of the crafting skills, and buying the mats rather than just gathering them myself. If you're actively going out and doing quests, fates, dungeons, and leves you'll be fine.
I will read this article again in about 3 to 6 months from now. Reason is I can never judge an ingame economy this short after release of the game. I do understand the concerns but it's to early to tell if they really matter at this time.
All die, so die well.