Please stop calling wolf!Follow

I copied this post that I made on another forum... I'm really sick of hearing this.

Please do not jump on the bandwagon and blame gilselling as being the cause of inflation.

Gilselling is ... hold on, lemme break it down....

Selling of Gil. It isn't the creation of gil which is what causes inflation, it is simply passing gil that belonged to another person, to yet another person for payment of a different form.

Perhaps one of the main causes of inflation on this server is actually the Auction Hall. Most online games do not have auction halls, and therefore most crappy items that aren't worth the effort to sell will be dropped. The only ones kept will be the ones that return a decent amount at NPC's or those highly valued rares that can sell immediately through shouting in the largest city.

In the case of FFXI the Auction Hall makes it easy for you to sell those middle ground items and even those not worth **** items. Ever tried selling a stack of batwings to an NPC? Whats the difference between selling it to an NPC and selling it on the AH. I'll let you know, its about 50 times different. Now imagine there isn't an Auction hall, and you are standing in King Ranpere's tomb farming bat wings. You get a stack of them and then proceed to start shouting "Stack of Batwings for sale 2.4k!" while continuing to farm. Probably wont get any buyers. You also probably wont be farming them much longer unless you only need them for fame yourself as the 1.2k you get from the NPC for the quest, or the 48 gil you get from any merchant isn't really worth the time spent farming.

This process is repeated with armor. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say there was no more than 200 Lizard Armor body sets sold by NPC's per server since the creation of the game. Being able to recycle such quickly revolving items keeps you from having to purchase them from an NPC at over twice the price. When you buy items from an NPC that gil gets paid back into the game...

Crafting the items yourself however nets you pretty good profit too, especially if you farm the material yourself. So lets say you farm up everything you need and you synth a Lizard Mail. Where did that item come from? Was it gil sellers? Was it something you had to purchase? Or was it something that you yourself created from scratch. What did you have to pay to create this item? Absolutely nothing if you farmed the materials yourself... those were created when you killed the monsters who dropped them. So you took zilch and turned it into gil.

Wait... actually thats not 100% correct. You took zilch and turned it into gil for yourself. But that gil had to come from somewhere right? So where?

Monster drops... probably one of the main sources of gil creation. I'm not saying NM's who are camped by gil sellers and then their rare drops sold on AH. I'm talking about orcs who drop gil and also a worthless axe that you sell to an NPC. You can go out and farm monster drops for 2 hours and make quite a bit of gil. Probably not as much as if you camped lizzy for 2 hours, sold the boots and made your gil that way. But a decent amount nonetheless. Now think of how many beastmen there are out there. How many people kill them daily... hourly... by the minute? Everything they drop is created and adds to inflation. Basic economic knowledge will tell you that.

Then there are quests, and gil rewards from quests... I dont think I need to keep explaining this as its the same principle.

This is where it gets really good. Sometimes you can buy an item from an NPC, and turn around and synth it, then sell it for more than it cost you to buy. Or you can farm a simple item, synth it and sell it to NPC's for a buttload of gil (Padded caps anyone?). This process actually creates gil faster than gaining it from monster drops. That causes inflation at a far greater rate than I think anyone can imagine. But to put all this in perspective...

Imagine being the first person on the game. You then sign up 5 friends and start playing. The 6 of you have your basic jobs and form a party.... War, Thf, Mnk, Whm, Blm, Rdm.
Together you level up from scratch. You start with basic armor. About level 10 its getting nearly impossible to kill the monster before both the Whm, and Rdm run out of MP because you are taking obscene amounts of damage and not dishing it out. Time to buy some new gear right? Ok, whats a good way to make money? Sell the crystals? But no one else is playing this game... so you sell them to an NPC for 15gil each. After all of you pool your money together you are able to purchase not only a new sword for your warrior, but also a shield, and a new dagger for your theif, and two spells for your whm, blm and rdm each.

Not bad... but you are lvl 10, and now leveling in Valkurm Dunes and that still doesn't cut it. So you camp lizzy, the 6 of you, and you get the drop (obviously cause no one else is playing on the server) and you DONT sell it on AH for 600k, you simply put them on your theif and your warrior cause its better armor than your RSE you start with. You manage to get a third set and sell them to an NPC for 287 gil. Thats pretty nice for a lvl 7 item.

Thats how hard it would be to level up if you started the economy. Now for ***** and giggles... lets pretend this group of 6 players continued to camp lizzy, selling the leaping boots over and over again until they have 10million gil in their combined pool.

(its sad that I'm using leaping boots as an example here isn't it? Most of you are probably thinking that this item is worth WAAAAY more than that, but in truth, to economy leaping boots aren't worth ****. A Market Economy doesn't care how much Dex a DRK needs, it only cares about the raw currency)

Where did that gil come from? Its not a set amount in the game that someone just decided to sell them for $155. That gil had to be created. Now a 7th player joins the game and wants some help getting some armor (cause he's gotta play by himself cause he doesn't have a full party) so your party of 6 offers to sell him 200K gil for $20 bucks. He accepts and then goes to NPC and purchases his armor. This 20K he spent on armor and weapons to last him til level 10 is actually paid back into the game. Because when he's done with the armor he's not going to sell it to you guys (since you're already millionares and have for sure already bought your armor from NPCs) but he's going to turn around and sell it back to NPC's. Here he only gets 1/4th of his investment back. Which is no big deal because at least he gets something. The alternative at this point is to drop the armor and not get anything.

Do you see where this is going? The 7th player who joined also had an option. He could camp lizzy alongside you competing for the drop so he could take it back and sell it to an NPC himself. But you guys spent probably 2 months camping it nonstop to get that gil in the first place... so he'll just drop 20 bones and get what he needs from the people who have already done the farming and creating of gil and items.

In real life it doesn't work like this. There is a set number of dollars right now in the United States. I cannot go out and kill a pigeon, skin it, and sell the meat to a computer and have it print up $46 for me killing the pigeon and skinning it and bringing it to the computer.

Gil sellers are not the problem. As I hope I have explained clearly, the gil was created somehow, and the count on that total currency rises every second in this game. This will continue to happen until its gotten to the point that a new player will be able to make their first million gil within a week of playing, and it wont be any extraordinary at all because there will just be that much gil floating around. Raising auction hall charges is the best thing that SquarEnix could have done aside from doing away with the Auction Hall entirely. This game will be saturated with gil soon, and everyone out there farming is the cause of it... not the gil sellers, so please... stop laying the blame somewhere else.

It rests squarely on your shoulders.

To bring up yet another example that Shimmer brought up.

Raise III went from 500k to 2.5k in two weeks in December. This was NOT due to people buying gil... no way... no how...

without suppliers there are no buyers though. so it's a little of both.

sir eaglestrike understands... i love you man...

Kloe, what do you think? suppliers or buyers are the problem? Because the people supplying the gil are the ones who farm it from monster drops and selling that item to NPC's and synth items from NPC's to sell to NPC's for profit. They are the ones creating the gil, they are the suppliers. The gil sellers are simply the middle men.

I'm not saying that we should just stop all farming of monster drops (like training in davoi). What I'm saying is that there is nothing we can do about this. Nearly every online game has this problem and it hasn't been addressed properly yet.

I played Ultima Online years ago. The BEST armor in the game I could buy for 46k for the whole suit. BEST! I could sell that same suit to an NPC for about 700gold. To buy that suit for 46k I would spend about 5 hours in the lichlord room, killing liches over and over, then going back to town to sell everything they dropped, and deposit my gold in the bank, and back to the room. I could make about 10k per hour. But it also took me months to create a character that could kill lich lords by myself. No one else ventured in there unless it was some noob exploring, or a tamer who had two dragons with him.

My old roommate started playing ultima online about 6 months ago. He made a million gold in his first week. I couldn't believe it. There are single items that sell for like 25million gold now, and they've had to expand the game, make new monsters with higher value'd drops, add skills and jobs that make everyone stronger or else the game would have gone stagnant. Now lich lords aren't the toughest monster anymore... hell they are about a lvl 6 out of lvl 10 in difficulty compared to some monsters.

Someday this will happen here too. The cap will be raised and people will be killing Kirin by themselves... can you imagine that?

Everyone who has read about the fights against Kirin is looking forward to being able to try it once. Everyone who has fought Kirin, can you remember how awesome it felt? Now just think once the cap gets raised to 100 a WHM may be able to solo Kirin if he's got a THF around to take out the spawned gods for him.

But of course by then square will have come up with a new 'god' that you have to kill. Yea, of course I'll still be playing... but I'll still be kinda miff'd about it.