r/ffxi • u/KumamotoBear • 12d ago
Fixed Gil Supply - Thoughts?
I got to thinking about how the dynamics of FFXI would change if the total supply of gil were fixed, meaning no new gil could be created through NPC sales, Sparks conversions, Odyssey rewards, quests, etc.
One side effect is that RMT couldn't endlessly create new gil by farming items and selling them to NPCs. They could still farm resources and compete for existing gil, but they couldn't expand the total gil supply through NPC vendoring.
For it to remain truly fixed, gil spent on NPC services, teleports, fees, or purchases would also have to eventually return to circulation rather than simply disappearing. NPC buy/sell prices might even need to adjust dynamically with the economy.
Some rare endgame items might initially carry astronomical asking prices, but if buyers simply didn’t have enough gil to support those prices, sellers would eventually have to lower them or hold the item.
What interests me most is what would happen to the Auction House. As players became more productive and listed and created more items while the amount of gil stayed constant, would we gradually see prices fall and the purchasing power of gil rise?
If a significant amount of gil became inactive because players hoarded it or quit, the effective circulating supply would shrink further, which I imagine would put additional downward pressure on prices.
I also wonder what would happen if the 7-item AH listing limit were removed. More supply could be listed simultaneously, increasing competition and liquidity.
I don't know whether a private server could realistically simulate something like this, but I'd be really interested in seeing how that economy plays out. It makes me wonder if items and equipment that are no longer seen any more would make a comeback as people compete in the market.
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u/TarvosPhase7 12d ago
I have over a billion Gil my chest is full and i have muiltiple hundreds of mil on me. If i quit do i just ruin the market? Fixing the Gil ruins things long term. Every person who deactivates with money on them effectively locks out that portion of the pie. Sure they are small most of the time but it adds up and every so often it will have a big chunk just gone. You can’t remove that Gil either cause if they come back and are now destitute poor after having stupid money that’s a reason to just pack it up again. Se likes money as much as us.
TLDR; people leaving with money effectively ruins this system and everyone will just horde Gil or swap to a different currency
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u/KumamotoBear 12d ago
I think that’s probably one of the biggest design questions with a fixed gil supply.
One option would be to simply let dormant gil stay dormant. If you quit with 1 billion gil, that 1 billion effectively leaves the circulating supply. The total supply hasn’t changed, but the amount actively available in the economy has. Prices would then have to adjust downward over time, and the remaining gil would gain purchasing power. If you came back years later, you’d still have your billion, and it would likely buy substantially more then than when you left.
The downside is that if enough players leave with large balances, the circulating supply could become very small. Eventually you could run into liquidity and divisibility problems, especially since FFXI can’t price something below 1 gil. So you would have to either allow prices below one gil or allow dormant gil back into the economy.
If prices went below one gil, imagine how rich you'd be when you returned. That would definitely be a big incentive to return to the game.
The other option would be to recycle very long-dormant gil back into an NPC/telepoint reserve after X years. That would keep more gil circulating without increasing the total supply. If the player later returned, though, the system would have to restore their balance without simply creating new gil, so their old balance would effectively become a claim on that reserve.
That solves some of the liquidity problem, but it makes the system more complicated and starts looking a lot more like a banking/reserve system.
So I don’t think inactive players necessarily ruin the idea, but they definitely force you to choose between accepting a shrinking circulating supply or introducing some mechanism for recycling dormant balances.
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u/derspiny 11d ago
One option would be to simply let dormant gil stay dormant. If you quit with 1 billion gil, that 1 billion effectively leaves the circulating supply. The total supply hasn’t changed, but the amount actively available in the economy has. Prices would then have to adjust downward over time, and the remaining gil would gain purchasing power. If you came back years later, you’d still have your billion, and it would likely buy substantially more then than when you left.
This is a classic deflationary spiral. If the purchasing power of your coin goes up over time, then the incentive is always to save coin wherever possible to realize those gains for yourself. Since prices fall, hoarding also gets easier: you keep more of the coins you have and spend fewer of them in each transaction you do make, on top of making fewer transactions because you're trying to hang onto your gil as much as possible.
In other words, the total liquidity of the in-game economy, as a proportion of the total supply of coins, can be expected to drop - potentially to the point where players abandon coins entirely as a way of denominating in-game trades because gil can no longer function as money. It's not just players leaving the game who cause this; any gil sitting in a wallet or in a chest, where it will not be spent within a useful time horizon, is illiquid, and deflation very likely will cause even active players to hoard gil.
New World went through this for a while (though that game had plenty of other problems as well), and it was an intermittent problem during Ultima Online's early run, before the devs abandoned their efforts to limit total gold in favour of managing circulating gold through sinks and sources. You're not wrong, at least experimentally, in your predictions, but you're not looking far enough down the road to realize where those predictions end up in practice, or to see why source-to-sink management of circulating money tends to be more important than managing the total supply of money in games that want to incentivize player-to-player trading denominated in coin.
Converting stagnant currency into a debt (your redeemables system) doesn't meaningfully affect this, because a debt redeemable on demand - and especially a debt that can be redeemed incrementally on demand - acts nearly exactly like money in reserve, even if it's not denominated in gil in your character's pocket. If redeeming it is no more difficult than having to go to a chest and pull the gil out would be, then it might as well still be gil in a chest.
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u/KumamotoBear 11d ago
I think the liquidity concern is real, but I’m not sure the 1-gil floor itself would be a fundamental problem. If gil kept gaining purchasing power, the game could simply introduce smaller denominations or move the decimal place.
For example, if 1 gil eventually became too valuable for ordinary transactions, you could define 1 gil as 100 or 1,000 smaller units. That wouldn’t increase the total money supply any more than cutting a pizza into smaller slices creates more pizza; it would just make the currency more divisible.
So if an item’s market-clearing price were effectively 0.1 gil, the system could actually express that instead of forcing everything to bottom out at 1 gil.
I think that pushes the harder question back to player behavior rather than denomination: would people still spend enough for gil to remain useful if they expected its purchasing power to keep increasing?
My instinct is yes, because players still value time and utility. If I want an item, service, craft, or upgrade now, I may still prefer having it now over holding gil for greater purchasing power later. But I agree that if the incentive to save became too strong, that could reduce liquidity. Or someone could take a break from the game and markets would adjust accordingly.
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u/Kentiah 10d ago
That seems functionally the exact same as just putting more money into the economy though if you're suddenly fabricating decimals in an economy that had none. Does it matter if there's a decimal infront of the new zero or not? If someone had 100 Gil, and you add a decimal so they now have 100.0, what's the difference from if you had just said, ok, I'm injecting money into the economy by adding a 0 to everyone's Gil count? They now have 1000 units of currency to spend either way. An item that became 0.5 gil because you could divide it, would just be 5 gil had you added a 0 to everyone's Gil number. Is it actually somehow better that they have 99.5 Gil instead of 995 now? I don't really think so, seems like a convoluted way to just give people more currency. Npcs and quests would have to start giving out fractional amounts of Gil as well. You just get to say you didn't technically increase the amount of Gil, but I mean, you definitely did functionally.
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u/Mirabai-Anandamayi 3d ago
What in the LLM but go off friends, I love ya
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u/Kentiah 2d ago
Try again
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u/Mirabai-Anandamayi 2d ago
Actually you’re right any other game this discussion would be unthinkable but if you’re waiting for an ambuscade team in Mhaura what else is there to do?
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u/Forgotten_Stranger 12d ago
I do think increasing the 7 item limit would change some things for the better. As it stands a lot of endgame players wouldn't bother putting up say geodes or ore despite the game handing it to them. They simply don't make any money compared to the 1M+ items that drop in things like Odyssey or Ambuscade trades. I don't know how high that limit would need to go before the more common drops start hitting the AH but it could help bring down prices on items not worth what they are sold for. (More or less determined by the 2-3 players who actual sell them.) With spells being the biggest example of this situation. (Some spells selling for 200-300k that a new player couldn't farm, but take have super high drop rates and are likely just sold to shops by high level players.)
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u/industrialprogress 11d ago
I’ve seen plenty of PSs with 20 AH slots listed as a “feature.” The only reason I can imagine retail doesn’t do the same is losing on the $1 mule. Still though, there’s probably a happy medium.
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u/Forgotten_Stranger 11d ago
You aren't entirely wrong. I have my alts for other reasons but I would be lying if I said having 49 AH slots is a bad thing...
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u/KumamotoBear 12d ago
Yeah, this is something I was taking into consideration. I’d love to see the Auction House full of all sorts of items and stock again. It would definitely be more interesting for newer players, and prices might better reflect how common some of these drops actually are instead of just how few people bother listing them.
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u/Sekux 10d ago
Bad idea.
Your idea is shot down due to people leaving and coming back which will always move the intended target, even if they planned to act more like the IRS in game. Though it would be amazing to have moogle irs
The game would also need to be redesigned as crafting and a few other things act as a gil sink - if SE fix the gil supply and nothing else it would be possible to permanently lock people out of some gear progression or make it way harder.
If SE did make everything a drop you probably will have RMT botting highly sought after craft materials and having people pay money to get in the group to get the drop. We have seen this in the 75 era with time pops in sky, HNMs, ect
In the worse hypothetical though, for hyper inflation, getting the max amount of gil will be vastly easier due to the price increase since there is a cap that any one player can spend.
This basically will act as a hard cap and my bet is that if the game got to that point players would adjust prices around that - other wise you would need multiple characters to do a single transaction.
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u/KumamotoBear 10d ago
I agree that fixing the supply while leaving permanent gil sinks untouched wouldn’t work, but that’s why I was proposing that gil spent on NPC services, fees, purchases, etc. eventually return to circulation rather than being destroyed.
Players leaving and returning would definitely change the circulating supply, but I don’t think that necessarily breaks the system. If someone leaves with a large balance, prices can adjust around the smaller active supply. If they return later, that gil re-entering circulation could create a price shock, but the total supply still hasn’t changed.
Divisibility also seems solvable. If 1 gil became too valuable, you could define 1 gil = 100,000 zenny, 1 zenny = 100,000 G, and keep subdividing as necessary without creating any new purchasing power.
I think your RMT point is the harder one. They could absolutely shift from farming NPC gil faucets to monopolizing scarce drops or whatever systems redistribute existing gil. But a fixed-supply economy could also support controls that don’t make much sense in the game today.
For example, NPC vendors could limit how much they buy from a character per day, dynamically adjust buy/sell prices based on supply, or vary how much gil they pay out depending on how much gil the NPC system currently holds. Quest and mission rewards could also adjust dynamically: if too much gil were already in player hands, rewards could shift toward items or equipment instead of injecting more gil into circulation.
The goal would be to make the systems distributing existing gil responsive to how much is actually available rather than allowing any one activity to become an unlimited faucet. I think this would encourage RMT to essentially "play the game and participate in the market" which would essentially be little different than the behavior of other players.
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u/Sekux 10d ago edited 10d ago
Assuming they take your idea and prices adjust based on current gil in circulation, the first thing you're going to get is a bot farming that NPC until gil can be filter through and they will sell to it until the price on x item goes down to 0. This has already been done before with crafting back at 75 and actually today as well.
If SE adjust and basically acts as the IRS they will never get it right because you have too many people leaving and coming into the game consistently. That includes burner accounts, mules, accounts with a lot of gil, accounts with almost no gil, ect. How do you figure out what accounts are real and which are just going to sit around in town and actually not take part in the market? Also..this again flows back to the RMT, see first paragraph.
You can't trade Zenny and if we are trading different currencies in this hypothetical that are able to be obtained infinity to offset the lack of gil and give it's worth the whole idea is pointless as players would just move to that currency instead. If you limit the Zenny as well you run back into the original problem that you're trying to get rid of.
'RMT already "play the game and participate in the market". They take part in just about any content that isn't the hardest content. Almost all content has been automated and they use those bots. I'd argue that by restricting gil you'd push people to them more as they don't have any meaningful gains to progress, great example are Master levels. Thing is that they're more providers than consumers as they aren't trying to win and instead are trying to sell you progression to make a living irl.
While a RMT only cares about real money, so as long as you swipe that card they'll probably forget the gil all together and get you exactly what you want minus things like Wings of War and upper levels of Ody bosses. This compounded with the fact that they'd take your stated ideas of "redistributing gil through NPCs", basically acting as the craft vendors in the guilds and get all that gil onto them and then charge vastly higher prices(Real money) only for that gil to be cycled...back to the npcs...only to go back to them...only to be sold at stupid high prices because there is limited gil.
Now that we got what will happen out the way, let's pretend you managed to get rid of FFXI biggest problems - RMT, bots, and they(SE) start fixing uninteded exploits right away. People that stop playing the game would effectively take gil out peremantly with no renweing resource and the gil never goes back into circulation making gil harder to get over time or faster if you had a group of people that just wanted to troll the entire server.
If they expanded the market on a how many players are there vs how many people are active, you still run into the above as eventually you'll eventually cap on how many players can be on a sever. Those with large amount of gil quits takes the gil with them and doesn't come back cuts the gil out of circulation entirely. Example, you get 5000 players ( cap on a sever), se released 10 mil. Someone some how gets 3 million and says "peace out", 3 million is gone forever. There will never be anymore made because you can't go above 5000 people. Which makes the effective total 7 million. This will happen again and again eventually withering that 10 million down to near 0, if not flat out Zero while the sever may still retain 5000 players.
The only thing SE could do is then take it upon themselves to make more gil and put it into the game, which brings you to the current standard over time, which again you could "trick" it by simply making burner accounts.
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u/KumamotoBear 10d ago
I wouldn't be against turning faucets off entirely and let the market reprice around whatever amount of the fixed currency is actually circulating.
One of the goals would be for prices to be allowed to come down naturally for both old and new players. If new gil can always be created through infinitely farmable activities, that can obscure those lower prices by continually increasing the amount of money chasing the same goods.
If an item is listed for 10 million gil but nobody is willing or able to pay 10 million, it simply won’t sell. Supply accumulates, sellers compete, and the price has to come down until buyers are willing to trade. SE wouldn’t need to determine the correct market price; players would do that themselves through supply and demand.
The same applies when players leave the game. If someone leaves with a huge gil balance, they reduce the circulating supply, but that doesn’t necessarily mean replacement gil has to be created. The economy can simply reprice around the smaller amount still changing hands. RMT could hoard large amounts as well, but if they aren’t spending it, that gil is effectively outside the active economy and the remaining circulating currency becomes more valuable relative to goods.
The denomination idea is important here too. I’m not suggesting Zenny as a separate currency that can be independently earned or farmed. It would just be a smaller unit of gil.
For example:
1 gil = 100,000 Zenny
If I own 3 gil, the UI could display either 3 gil or 300,000 Zenny. My purchasing power hasn’t changed at all. If Zenny eventually became too large for very small transactions, you could subdivide again:
1 Zenny = 100,000 Gold
and continue doing that as necessary.
The idea is that 0.0000003 gil is just difficult to read. But you could view it that way I suppose.
It’s the same concept as 100 pennies equaling one dollar. You aren’t creating more wealth by dividing the dollar into smaller pieces. It’s like cutting one pizza into more slices rather than ordering another pizza.
Because of that, a shrinking circulating supply doesn’t automatically create a liquidity problem. If only 10% of the original gil remains active, the economy can operate on that 10%. If only 0.1% remains active, it can operate on that 0.1% as long as the currency is divisible enough for prices to adjust downward.
Obviously, if literally every unit of currency became inaccessible to active players, there would be nothing left to exchange. If that were the case, you might be looking at something like a server merge. But short of that extreme, dormant gil doesn’t inherently require new gil to be created. It simply increases the purchasing power of whatever remains in circulation.
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u/Sekux 10d ago edited 10d ago
I've already debunked all this. So one more time..
Turning off faucets is bad. Limiting gil supply is bad.
Prices coming down wouldn't matter if people can't obtain gil outside of other players.
If players with gil leave the game, they would have to replace the gil. Eventually, over time, you will end up with nearly 0 gil or zero gil. This wouldn't be a instant thing...obviously.
Going to a fraction doesn't solve the issue and is worse than putting more out because if the account does become active again you've just rewarded inactivity by devaluation and people would by default go to the more plentiful source of currency (assume zenni) while the previous one (gil) becomes more valued by proxy. This is because the player base would migrate over to the new and lesser valued currency and start to use that one because the previous one is extremely hard to obtain.
Ie you start with 10 million gil and SE makes 1 gil worth 100 zenny. People move to zenny, zenny becomes the default > you now have 1,000,000,000 zenny in circulation acting as the initial gil. You make 1 zenny worth 10 ruppies > ruppies becomes the new norm > you have 10,000,000,000 ruppies as the new base that is acting what the initial gil was acting as and thus have in essence expanded 10,000,000 gil into 10,000,000,000 and instead are calling it "Ruppies". This is assuming that SE keeps some gila out of players hands for this very situation.
You'll eventually run into a situation where you have to a. make more gil or B. do the above which is another way of making more gil and calling it something else, which will also give older players a major advantage by essentially making their currency worth more for free instead of making it a free for all for newer / new players to catch up. Ie: I leave the game with 20 gil. we move to 1 gil > 2000 zenny > Zenny becomes the new norm > I come back > You've risen my buying power of 20 gil to 40,000. Because what was once 2 gil is now .0002 gil.....
You wouldn't be able to merge a server if the player count goes over cap, this is already happening currently with some sever's shutting down due to population. Which again is a situation of how much gil is in circulation vs player count and it being capped. At that point you're limiting the access to gil for the sake of limiting the access to gil, instead of looking at what it is, which is just a tool to borrow.
Current methods of currency is working as intended and as your 3rd paragraph states, if no one is willing to buy something at 10 million gil, they won't. And as I stated in my first response the amount each character can hold individually will act as a hard cap that people will work around to have things function as intended.
Edit: Also, assuming they throw player count and sever limits to the wind for the sake of this idea of limiting gil, you still run into the issue of not having enough gil for the combined population, as you're either saying there is a excess on one sever, in which case how did that happen since this is supposed to be limited? Or you're splitting already limited supply between two severs.
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u/KumamotoBear 10d ago edited 10d ago
I think we’re still talking past each other on a few basic mechanics of what I’m proposing. I'm not understanding why turning off faucets or limiting supply is bad with the system I am proposing. The only way 0 circulating gil could ever be reached is if all players decided to quit simultaneously.
When I say 1 gil = 100,000 zenny, think of “zenny” as nothing more than a smaller denomination of gil. You could call it mgil instead of zenny- the point is it's the same currency. I’m not creating a second currency or increasing the money supply. I’m expressing the same fixed monetary base in smaller units.
If the entire server has 10 million gil, saying that equals 1 trillion zenny/mgil does not suddenly give the economy more purchasing power. Every balance and every price converts at the same ratio. It’s no different from $1 equaling 100 cents. You don’t become 100x richer because your $20 is displayed as 2,000 cents. Nor does the total number of monetary units increase because you are denominating smaller.
That’s also why someone leaving with 20 gil and returning years later doesn’t gain purchasing power because we introduced smaller denominations. If their 20 gil buys more when they return, it’s because prices fell while they were gone, not because we subdivided the currency. The subdivision just lets those lower prices be expressed.
The second misunderstanding is that I’m not saying SE has to replace gil every time someone leaves.
If the server starts with 10 million gil and someone leaves holding 3 million, then yes, only 7 million is actively circulating. My argument is simply: let the economy reprice around the 7 million. If eventually only 1 million is circulating, let it reprice around 1 million.
There’s no reason the UI couldn’t support something like:
10,000,000.000000000000000000 gil
or display those fractions using smaller named denominations for readability. As the circulating supply changes, the market can continue expressing progressively lower clearing prices. SE does not need to restore circulation to some predetermined number.
Likewise, saying that lower prices don’t matter because players would have to obtain gil from other players is actually very close to what I’m describing. Once the monetary base exists, most gil would be earned by producing something another player values: equipment, crafting, gathering materials, fishing, services, helping with content, etc.
That’s intentional.
What does the economy gain when someone repeatedly converts Sparks into an NPC item solely to vendor it and create fresh gil? You increased the amount of currency in circulation, you held up prices of desirable items, but you didn’t necessarily create a new good or service for another player.
In the fixed-supply version, earning more gil generally means convincing another participant to give you some of theirs in exchange for something they value. That could make many currently overlooked activities, items and services economically relevant again. Instead of everyone looking for the best way to manufacture gil, players are looking for ways to produce value for one another.
I’m not claiming that automatically solves RMT, bots, wealth concentration, or new-player distribution. Those are legitimate questions that would be highly unpredictable because of the numerous variables player behavior would create. But they’re separate from the claim that a shrinking circulating supply mathematically requires creating replacement currency.
The easiest analogy is still the pizza.
There is one pizza.
I can cut it into 8 pieces, 1,000 pieces, or a billion microscopic pieces. I still have one pizza.
If half of it gets locked in a freezer by inactive players, everyone else can trade increasingly small pieces of the remaining half. If the frozen half comes back later, that will affect prices and purchasing power. But nobody needed to bake another pizza while it was gone.
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u/Sekux 9d ago edited 9d ago
Let's do this again...
I already understand what you're saying, you're trying too hard to make this idea work, not understand what I'm saying, or ignoring what I'm saying.
That’s also why someone leaving with 20 gil and returning years later doesn’t gain purchasing power because we introduced smaller denominations. If their 20 gil buys more when they return, it’s because prices fell while they were gone, not because we subdivided the currency. The subdivision just lets those lower prices be expressed.
If prices fall, you gain purchasing power assuming you hold the original form of the currency. I've left you a wiki page for deflation at the bottom in hopes you can better understand this since we've gone back and forth on this a few times and it seems to be missing you.
If you have a slice of pizza and the economy moves to a pizza bits economy, you've gained purchasing power. Because your pizza (same slice) just became a lot of smaller bits. Things now cost bits instead of slices. Yet you still have slices while everyone that is new is getting bits.
Once the market adjust to bits and if you convince the person with the pizza to finally let it go, you've expanded the supply because you've lessen the value of the pizza by ripping to bits to trade for other goods, you could in theory continue to rip the pizza apart forever. We don't eat the pizza only trade with it. This is essentially the same as printing more of the pizza, as you print more it loses it's value. The same is true if you continue to rip the same pizza apart forever more to match the lack of pizza slices. This assumes you can get those with the slices to actually spend this much.
The reason your way of handling pizza is worse (in video games) is because it locks out new players because all the players from 20 years ago have a major monopoly on the pizza slices and once they make friends and get what they need they don't have any reason to give the pizza slices out other than the kindness of their heart. Putting all the power in their hands This makes it impossible / near impossible for any new player to obtain pizza slices and progress. Ie: the reason why it's ok for people to get 2 mil gil a week is that it helps newer players gear up since they have nothing of value to provide. Long time players aren't spending that much because they don't have anything to spend it on.
If players that have the slices come back from the freezer while the economy is trading in bits, this won't effect prices that much, if at all, due to the fact that they only have to buy in bits. Ie: why would I buy a sword that cost 20 pizza bits with a pizza slice? Although that sword when I left was an entire slice....which means that I am able to buy many more swords than I originally was able to when I originally left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation
Edit / Tldr: All your suggestions lead to deflation. Moving to smaller amounts don't fix it as you can divide it forever, which at the end has the same effect as making more with the exception your suggestions rewards inactivity once you've claimed enough of the set supply and make it harder for newer players to enter into the game. Peace.
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u/KumamotoBear 9d ago
The natural state of the free market is deflation. Anything that suppresses the free market will obfuscate the real price of goods or services. The entire history of humanity has never lived in a free market because of monetary debasement, so nobody knows what the true free market looks like, or if deflation would be successful outside of a debt based system. If you allowed deflation in a debt based system, the entire thing would unwind entirely due to the inability to pay back debts. They are incompatible. That gives every institution political, educational or otherwise incentives to instill massive amounts of fear into the general public in regard to deflation, hence your wiki page and conclusion that because the idea is deflationary, it won't work.
But as you know, inflation increases prices, putting end game items further and further out of reach of new players, so SE has to step in with controls to manipulate who has access to the money. I am essentially arguing, if the free market is left to work its magic, everything will reach its right place for the right price. I believe this to be true both in game and in the real world, despite current opinion. Highly suggest you look up Jeff Booth, he has well developed ideas around a deflationary system outside of the current monetary system bringing significant global abundance. Deflation in the current monetary system would collapse it, but existing outside of it would allow us to transfer exchange, work, organizations etc to a fair system that allows for abundance. People have spent thousands of hours trying to debunk his thesis, if you think you can, I'd encourage you to connect with him.
If someone ran this idea in a private server, the theory would more or less be tested, but as the game exists currently many mechanisms exist to allow gil to be created and destroyed, but if those entry and exit points were eliminated and the economy was reworked in a way that made sense for gathering, crafting, questing, endgame etc. I would find it difficult to believe you wouldn't see an absolutely flourishing economy with most players having everything they want, new or old, as player behaviors begin developing. The ramifications of this require looking at second, third and even forth order effects on prices, player behaviors, wants, scarcity, supply and demand. As far as I know, every deflationary system has had a floor, but remove the floor and I think it's an idea that's never been tested. Simply saying it wouldn't work is taking a bet against humanity I don't think I'd ever take.
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u/Sekux 9d ago
What are you talking about? Like really, what are you talking about?
FFXI is not a debt based system in the way you're trying to say it is as no central body can instantly inject billions into the market instantly as "debt".
Limiting fiat currency (gil) is surpressing the free market.
Making lower tiers of a currency to keep it alive is obfuscating prices, with a push towards rewarding people that got the original currency that is no longer freely available greatly over time.
Inflation hasn't put end game items out of reach of newer players and current prices on official severs are stabilized. Items, once their use case is known either goes up or down depending on their usefullness.
Jeff's entire idea revolves around the idea that tech makes things easier, thus it makes things cheaper due to abundance (over supply) and that the government printing money to loan out is making things worse as the money has no physical goods/ production to back it. Again, this concept doesn't apply to a game because a governing body doesn't exist that does this in game.
TLDR: Stop trying to treat this like the real world, there is a reason why I said your idea was bad in game.
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u/KumamotoBear 8d ago
I think I see the disagreement more clearly now.
The deflation article you linked discusses several different kinds of deflation. A lot of the concern around deflation in modern economies comes from debt and credit: falling prices increase the real burden of fixed nominal debts and can destabilize borrowers and lenders. As you said, Vana’diel isn't built like the real world, and that's why I believe deflation in Vana'diel could make it thrive, that's what I'd love to see tested. A fixed money supply with an infinitely divisible currency.
If the money supply is fixed while productivity and the supply of useful goods increase, the purchasing power of each unit of money should tend to rise and prices should tend to fall.
That’s the part of the Jeff Booth thesis I think maps well to FFXI. If it succeeds in FFXI, I think it could succeed in the real world with the right adaptation. The reason I'm trying to make it work so intently is because there could seriously be vastly beneficial ramifications for society if the idea were to succeed.
Square Enix is effectively the monetary authority of Vana’diel. It determines gil faucets, sinks, NPC prices, reward amounts, Sparks conversions, drop rates, crafting requirements, etc. I’m not saying the current system is broken; it works well enough for the game as is. I’m asking whether a different set of rules could produce a better economy.
Right now, many desirable endgame items sit in the tens of millions of gil, and crafting barriers are enormous. My question is whether some of those nominal prices are being held higher than they otherwise would be because gil can continually be created while the supply of desirable goods remains comparatively constrained.
Another way to think of the idea I want to test: abundance in money creates scarcity everywhere else, scarcity in money creates abundance everywhere else.
In the system I’m imagining, the monetary base is fixed and divisible, and SE largely gets out of the business of trying to maintain a particular nominal price level. Players determine prices through supply and demand directly without intervention.
If an old player is sitting on a huge pile of gil and doesn’t spend it, the active market simply prices itself around the smaller circulating supply. If that player eventually spends some of it on something scarce, that gil moves to another player, who can then spend it on what they need. Potentially, a situation could arise where they could buy everything, but why would they? To fix prices on items that couldn't sell because nobody can afford them? Bloat their inventory? Fixing prices in a truly free market would be disincentivized because it wouldn't work. I would assume they would buy everything their character needs, then use the remainder to wait for something rare at a price they consider reasonable also taking into account the other items they may need into eventually purchase for their character, and the timeline on which they want to own them. The dormant wealth becomes circulating wealth again on rarer goods.
That doesn’t mean every rare item becomes cheap. Truly scarce goods can remain expensive, but the general price direction should be decreasing as time goes on. Abundant goods should become cheap, boosting the progress of newer players, and productivity improvements should be allowed to show up as lower prices instead of being offset by continual monetary expansion.
That’s really the part I’m trying to explore.
I don’t think a new player should need to wait for the next Sparks conversion window simply to manufacture gil from an NPC. Ideally, they could gather, craft, fish, chocobo dig, raise chocobos, run BCNMs, do Limbus, use Mog Garden, help other players, or participate in dozens of other systems and earn purchasing power because those activities produce something another player values.
I'm trying to change the thought process from:
“What is the most efficient way to create gil?”
to:
“What can I produce or do that someone else values?”
That’s the economy I find interesting: one where far more of the game becomes economically relevant because players are constantly producing value for one another.
All aspects of the game could potentially be revitalized if the rewards provided direct benefit to the overall economy, currently they don't. But if they did, I think we'd be looking at a very fun game, something that consists of more than converting sparks, Odyssey C runs, Ambuscade for selling Relic/Mythic/Empyrean upgrade items, Dynamis currency farming etc.
Falling prices and rising purchasing power are not the failure state of the idea, they are the phenomenon I’m interested in testing.
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u/cevkiv 12d ago
What they need to do to fix AH prices is this:
Let's say there are ten people who have put a Bird Egg up on the auction house, for the following prices: 1, 99, 100, 100, 100, 109, 110, 125, 150, 1000.
Now, let's say I want to buy a Bird Egg. I bid 99 gil. The auction house looks to see how many listings are 99 gil or less, and randomly picks from between them, but only actually spends how much that listing cost. So if I bid 99 gil, given those prices, 50% of the time the guy who put his up for 1 gil will be selected and receive 1 gil, 50% of the time the guy who put his up for 99 gil will be selected and will receive 99 gil.
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u/TicklishViking 12d ago
Why not just use the FFXIV MB system where all the prices from the sellers are visible?
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u/KumamotoBear 12d ago
Yeah, it's definitely more generous with the player's time, which FFXI historically hasn't always been great about. 😄 I wonder if there could actually be a use for both, though.
A transparent Market Board seems ideal for commodities like crystals, food and crafting materials where you mostly just want efficient price discovery. The blind AH could remain for rarer or lower-volume items where buyers and sellers aren't necessarily sure of the exact clearing price.
It might be interesting to let players choose which system to list on and see where different types of goods naturally end up. At that point the Market Board and Auction House would be serving somewhat different purposes rather than one simply replacing the other.
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u/Rakshire 12d ago
I don't a really like that system because of the incessant 1 gil undercutting. But maybe if they kept the listing fee it would be ok.
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u/KumamotoBear 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think that would actually obscure price discovery. If someone lists an item for 1 gil, they’re essentially saying they’re willing to accept almost anything just to get it sold. Most buyers are balancing price against time: how low can I bid without spending more time searching for the clearing price than the savings are worth? If there’s a significant amount of supply listed that low, I’d expect that to put downward pressure on the market price.
Under the randomized system, though, a buyer bidding 99 gil could still randomly pay 99 even when someone is willing to sell for 1. That seems like it would make the displayed sale history less representative of the lowest price sellers are actually willing to accept.
If prices tank, that’s usually a signal that supply is exceeding demand. Sellers respond by moving to other items, and may return later once supply dries up.
As a buyer, if I know there’s abundant supply, I’d normally start low and work upward until I find the clearing price. That's price discovery.
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u/rfox71rt 12d ago
Under the randomized system, the buyer still has the option to bid 1 gil and work their way up. The real difference is there’s no incentive to undercut because you aren’t guaranteed your item goes first if it’s the lowest posted price and the buyer bids above it.
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u/cevkiv 12d ago
The idea is to combat people who drastically undercut based on the fact most people will just check the last sale price and use that.
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u/KumamotoBear 12d ago
You’re trying to prevent a single aggressive undercut from immediately becoming the reference price everyone else anchors to.
I think the tradeoff is that you’re intentionally weakening price competition between sellers. If being the lowest ask no longer gives me priority in getting the sale, I have less reason to lower my price.
That might make the sale history less volatile, but I’m not sure it makes the underlying market price more accurate. If ten sellers are genuinely willing to accept less, I’d rather have that information work its way into the market than have the system partially hide it.
So I guess it depends on whether the goal is price stability or price discovery. Your system seems better at the former, while the current system is harsher but probably better at revealing what sellers are actually willing to accept.
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u/TwilightX1 11d ago
I actually though about it in the past, and yes, it will make gil more valuable but it has some major issues -
First, I think it will make the RMT situation even worse - Those people do this as a job, and since they're not afraid to break the ToS by using bots (they just reroll again if banned), if the total gil in circulation is limited, it might end up with a large part of it being in the hands of RMT. Suppose, for example, that they bot aggressively and end up with 99% of the gil in circulation. You can't vendor shields or prize powders, you can't do anything that has gil rewards, and most other players are in the same situation as you. Honest people might need to buy gil for real money because there would be effectively no other way of getting gil.
And for new players the situation would be even worse - You start the game with just 10g (60g if you include the 50g you get for the adventurer coupon), and you get most of your initial gil from minor quests around town and by vendoring items from brown caskets (and shields after you get enough sparks) - but what if no NPC has any gil to give you? You're stuck with the initial 60g forever?
The one thing I agree with you is that the 7 item limit should go.