From what I read Shiva used to be one of the cheapest servers, gil wise, I remeber reading on some of these boards where other servers were paying 5x at the AH what many of our items where going for. That was until recently. It seems that especially recently I have seen many items jumping up over 20k gil a week. This is a slightly sore topic for me since I origionally started saving for Ochido's kote when the prices where 500k and thought that won't take me to long and when I turn around they are 700k, brown belts have also risen from 300k to about 400k last I looked. Now many people will say farm/mine/garden/ect but some of these increases are starting to push what a person can do in set amount of time (no I don't mean I can't make 20k a week the 20k was an example don't jump on it).
No the conspericy theorist in me sees that it seems many of the servers prices are begining to look simular (which they shouldent considering that they are completely isolated economic systems). This could be due in part to the recent migrations of people used to higher prices on other servers to shiva, some global gil seller conspiricy, or the return of high level JP players with a lot of gil needing lower level equip for the new COP missions (I really don't know). Needless to say it worries me becouse reading these boards I see that there are still servers with much higher prices on some items than we have (so I wonder how high they will go). Personally it resulted in me giving up in my endeavor to buy Ochido's kote and brown belt for now.
I have also noticed a change in the atmosphere of my gil making enterprises. I have begun to notice more and more miners who often seem to be online at all times. One of them Quincy I believe (the spelling may be wrong) actually put autofollow on me when I was running from mining point to point in gusgan mining at every spot I came to. They are one of the two people I always see in either Bastok or Gusgan mines at all times I log on. This bothers me too, but mostly out of my own greed, as it makes it so that a mining run to Gusgan which used to net me 30-50k for maybe 2hrs work nets maybe 10k tops in 3hrs simply becouse of lack of mining points and point thieves.
I have no real solution to these probles, hence the term rant in the title, but rather wanted to get this off my chest and waste time writing it.