Will SE Add Economic Controls?

[Sabaron]

Market forces in FFXI have similar negative effects on the FFXI populace as they do in real life. Many nations employ systems of control to mitigate negative economic trends. I was wondering if S-E would be willing to consider adding such a system to FFXI so that they could make the economy of FFXI more stable and less harrowing overall for the entire population. I shall provide below an example system:

1. S-E is capable of calculating Economic Volume in the same way that www.FFXIAH.com is. That is, to find the volume of currency that flows through the AH in a single day.
2. Using this value, the server can set an "Inflation Coefficient" (IC) by comparing the servers' to each other.
3. The IC is then applied to all rewards, item sales, and prices.
4. The Guild Merchants are instrumental in controlling oversupply. While standard merchants base their prices on a fixed base price modified by the IC, the guild operates differently...

Guild Operation

The Guild Merchants will purchase and sell back any non-high-quality item for which their Guild Recipe NPC (e.g. Sieglinde) provides a recipe (This service may be restricted to Contracted Guild Members of appropriate rank). The Guild then stocks the items up to a certain amount until the end of the business day. At the end of the day, the Guild recalculates it's prices but will never, of course, let go of an item for less than they bought it for. If the demand for the item is high, the price of the item and, of course, the amount the guild pays for the item go up. At this time, the guild may also decide to increase its standing stock of the product. If the item does not sell, the price falls and the guild pay falls. The guild may also decide to decrease its standing stock.

When the guild decreases standing stock below it's current level, the items are (a) Desynthesized and sold as reagents if a desynthesis exists at an appropriate desynthesis rate and/or (b) liquidated and all guild prices rise to cover the cost of the guild's overstock.

The Guild Purchase Value (from PC) Floor is the same as the Inflation-Adjusted NPC Base Purchase Value (@ 0 fame) and the Guild Inventory Floor is 1 item--all items start out at this level. The Guild Sale Value (to PC) Floor is the same as the Inflation-Adjusted NPC
Base Sale Value Floor (@ 0 fame).

The Guild Inventory rises by a logarithmically determined percentage (with a minimum of 1 unit) only in the event of a full sell-out (the maximum level of cautiousness). The Guild inventory drops if the Sale Price (To PC) reaches the IC-Adjusted price floor and remains stocked.

This system is beneficial in that it allows SE to manipulate the economy by adjusting certain the price-setting numbers of the Guild NPCs allowing them to regulate currency inflow and outflow. The IC calculation can also be directly influenced by intervention (like the Fed does). This allows for controlled inflation/deflation rather than instantaneous random zapping of gil. For instance--if SE destroys 1bil gil on a server, that has a serious negative impact on the economy. To "swing" it back into alignment, SE can adjust the Guild and IC numbers to create a higher positive gil generation value. Server side equations can be used to regulate this by watching overall action on the Auction House (SE needn't be concerned with tracking each gil generated by NPC/mob transaction, but the system would be more accurate if this was already available). If there is too much volume, the NPCs drop payouts and increase costs and vice versa if there is too little.

Basically, the idea is that a "static" NPC economy is detrimental to a Free-market game like FFXI. If the NPCs respond to market forces, the economy becomes more stable and controllable.

[Legal Fish]

Re: Will SE Add Economic Controls?

How would I fix item inflation?

1) Add a secondary Guild Point system:

All crafted items made by a crafter and only that crafter can be traded in for points. These points can be spent to buy rare/ex crafting materials.

2) Double the amount of recipes involving a few materials. Especially the large amount of completely useless CoP materials.

3) Make sets like Wise/Chausable not suck ass so people will actually want to make and buy them.

[Jarre]

Re: Will SE Add Economic Controls?

The fact of the matter is that which ever way the economy goesd people will complain.

If consumabls i.e. cooking ingredients, ores etc. are cheap then people who farm and sell them will complain because they ain't getting enough money from them, on teh other hand teh crafters are welcoming this as its cheaper to synth to level. Now it may not sell for much at the moment, but to get the skill up so that it is easier to HQ lower items that may sell well, means you will earn a proffit. On the other hand. if the materials were very expensive, than crafters would complain as it costs them a fortuner to skill up.

There is no happy medium, crafters want items dirt cheap to help skillign without breakign the bank, farmers etc. want consumables more expensive so they earn more from their farming.

Its a win loose situation for different people no matter what SE may do to teh economy it will always disastisfy someone.

[Sabaron]

Re: Will SE Add Economic Controls?

I'm not trying to really "make people happy" so much as I am attempting to get a grip on the inflation/deflation aspects of the economy. Buyers maximal happiness is "free stuff" and Sellers are at maximal happiness when one item costs "all the money in the world". The disgruntledness of buyers/sellers is the basic economic force--I'm really trying to integrate the economy so that the NPC economy behaves similarly to the PC economy. This has a major effect that SE has desired. New players are unable to insert themselves into the PC economy because they are unable to make any signficant amount of money with which to participate in the economy. It also allows SE to regulate the currency volume which engenders "stability" in the economy, not "happiness".

I like those ideas. Rare/Ex ingredients sound nifty depending on how they're implemented and something useful definitely needs to be done with the abysmally useless CoP ingredients.

A Quote from an astounded CoP item buyer:
"WOW! A level 73 Scythe that casts the same spell that a 17th level BLACK MAGE or that I, myself, learned to cast at 29th level! That Roxxors! Imma buy 10 of 'em!"

Reference: Blizzard Scythe

Also:

"Ooo! A robe that gives me +1 Evasion on Earthsday, in the dark, during a full moon while I have SMN subbed and Fenrir out! YES!"

"Look at that! A belt that dispenses PEBBLES! What's that you say? They have WORM dispensing belts too? Where can I buy them? I need lots!"

[Vyuru]

Re: Will SE Add Economic Controls?

These points can be spent to buy rare/ex crafting materials.

Alot of synthes require multiples of a single item, like 2x wool cloth for instance. I would either have new recipes to use the rare/ex materials with so that you only need one, or else just do ex because then you can have multiples of that item, but you can't sell it to a npc or on the AH if that is what you are concerned about.

One idea I was kind of toying with is what if the guilds would let you pre order stuff?

Maybe make it so that you can pre order one inventory space per 10 levels of crafting experiance for that guild. So at level 10 cloth you can either get one crawler cocoon or other non stackable item, or between 1-12 moko grass or other stackable items. The catch is that you would have to wait 8 vana'diel days to recieve the items. You can only order items when the guild shop is open, and you cannot order them on guild holidays.

The price that you order them should be static, but it should be a bit higher than what the guild sells them for when the guild is at full stock. So if saruta cotton is 200/cotton at full stock, you should be able to pre order it for about 300/cotton.


I like Sabaron's idea. Are you thinking of this working so that the normal merchants multiply all items by the IC or are you thinking of having each item having it's own IC based on the AH?

For example, I can buy a Spear from a npc for between 16228 - 18345gil. I can buy that same spear from the AH for under 10,000gil. Now if the IC showed that there was inflation for all the items, then the npcs would sell the spears for more. But if the IC for spears showed that there was deflation, then the npcs would sell their spears for less. Another example would be wool slopes for instance can be bought at a NPC for 14756 gil, the AH sells them for under 3k, more often 1k.

It doesn't really matter I suppose, but it would be nice to be able to have NPC prices correlate more with AH prices.

[Sabaron]

Re: Will SE Add Economic Controls?

Well, the idea above is global IC which is basically similar to the real-life inflation rate. This IC is the "value of money". The higher it is, the less valuable a unit of currency is. The IC when any NPC works with money. Quest rewards, service fees, item prices, etc.
The IC is basically this

[Server AH Volume] - [Desirable Server AH Volume]
IC = ------------------------------------------------- * [Magic Coefficient]
[Desirable Server AH Volume]

*-CODE Tags appear to be "out" so I can't format my function and HTML compresses spaces... I'm not allowed to put in my own   so there's no way of making anything "laid out" any more... /sigh


The Desirable volume is a phantom point where the base values of the various standard merchant goods, at some level, are similar to the AH goods over all. Standard Merchants have a tendency to "over-inflate" items based on factors that player merchants do not, so the base prices are a little funky in that respect, but the idea is to get a certain set of items to synergize with the AH prices in some way.
Having individual demand determination would be akin to making all standard merchants behave like guild merchants. The only problem with this is that there is infinite supply. Where do you set the line for the product? Below AH? Above AH? At some Average? In order to implement this properly, you have to make each merchant a guild merchant who has an inventory so that supply can be regulated. What about items that are insanely ubiquitous like Distilled Water? Is it going to become profitable to go out and farm Tahrongi Cactus?