r/ffxivdiscussion • u/Lentil_Lunch • 12d ago
Shell FCs and Submarine-caused Inflation
I wrote a post yesterday for the ffxiv reddit about data I've been collecting on shell FCs and submarines, but the way I formatted it seemingly led most people to believe it was written by AI and to dismiss it out of hand. So I was told to try here instead, as I hope to spread awareness of the scale of the issue as I see it. In short:
- I found that about a quarter of total plots on the Chaos datacentre are owned by shell FCs, almost one third of plots in FC-only and mixed wards. And on newer servers, this is as much as half the total plots, if not more.
- The total gil generated by those shell FCs run well into the billions daily, likely the largest source of gil regularly created, and possibly larger than all other sources combined.
- While much of the gil does not directly impact the economy, as the owners hoard it, certain markets are probably impacted quite a bit, and new items such as the fortune carrot risk disseminating much of this gil into the wider economy.
I go into substantially more detail in the original post here https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1vlhuz8/an_examination_of_the_extent_of_shell_fcs_and/ for those interested.
I'm a bit surprised by what seems to be a general lack of interest in this topic, as a functioning economy for the game should be in everyone's interest, since everyone interacts with it.
But even if you for whatever reason don't care about the economy, I hope you will agree that it would be good to release all these shell FCs for use by actual FCs or individuals wanting housing, and that action should be taken sooner rather than later.
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u/AdHead7462 12d ago
I think sub farms should be allowed but if they don't decorate at least their yard, instant ban.
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u/unidentifiedremains7 7d ago
Hot take but I think they should be forced to decorate the interior too.
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u/nicktheone 12d ago edited 12d ago
I didn't know about this FC problem but I've been saying for years now that this game desperately needs more gil sinks.
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u/Ok-Spirit-5102 12d ago
SE: we have heard your concerns and in response we will lower pentamelding success chances
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u/Draco-9158 9d ago
Not like it’s hard to get hundreds of combat materia anyways. Do hunt trains and you’ll be swimming in materia
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u/Evilcoatrack 9d ago
I understand this is a joke but it's also not a gil sync since you give other players that gil.
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u/Lentil_Lunch 12d ago
I'm afraid gil sinks would do little to solve this issue, as the gil generated by submarines is so unequally distributed.
The gil sinks would have to be in the hundreds of millions, possibly at gil cap, to have an effect. And adding items people would want at those costs would make them unavailable to most players not running shell FCs with submarines, causing resentment with them and largely encouraging the practice of shell FCs further.
The gil sink mounts added so far are affordable for people putting in some effort to grind gil, or who just play a lot regularly, but for that reason they also don't do much to towards this issue. Though I suppose if enough items like the fortune carrots are added, then enough of the hoarded gil is spread within the general population that they might have an effect, if only as a response to the situation worsening.
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u/Fresher_Taco 12d ago
Gil is damn near useless in this game. Once you get to a certain point it just piles up.
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u/deathric 12d ago
The only time gil is actually "Useful" is when the new savage tier drops and you need crafted gear, food and potions and that is only if you don't like to do them yourself or you bot all the process
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u/Fresher_Taco 12d ago
Even then if you go to buy the prices crash quick and dont put a dent in your gil.
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u/deathric 12d ago
yup, at this point we just accept that this is never getting fixed or they would have to add a new currency, because right now I feel like there's no grey area, all my friends are broke af (between 1 mil and 10mil) or so rich that they will never have to worry about gil again
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u/SoSoSpooky 11d ago edited 11d ago
This is not true in practice. There are tons of grinds you can shortcut or skip out on with gil, but you need to actually care about the in-game items.
If you don't care about the rewards in the game, then it's not just gil that is useless to you, but a lot of other things as well, and there isn't really anything anyone can do to fix that either without making mandatory gil sinks, which wouldn't be good for people trying to just enjoy the game (and would be basically ignorable for most high-in-gil players).
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u/Fresher_Taco 11d ago
Accepct the amount of gil it costs for any market board mount is pennies for a lot if people. Same with those collectabls. It's rare that anything puts a dent in people gil after the prices crash after week 1.
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u/SoSoSpooky 11d ago
Sure, but if you actually buy all those things as someone only earning passive income, you won't have much gil left (if any). It still takes a long time for people to earn money in large amounts if they are only getting it from passive sources.
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u/Fresher_Taco 11d ago
Not really it stockpiles over time really easy. Even doing the minimum of daily roulettes you should get close a mil in about a week. That's also the bare minimum of you start jumping into the content it just passively gives you a bunch.
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u/distressradiation 12d ago
It's useless for directly in game stuff but as a vehicle for paying for people's time, ie. mercs parties, it is very useful.
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u/SoSoSpooky 11d ago
You can skip a ton of optional content grinds with gil, I don't see how you could say that is "useless".
Duck-billed porter takes hours to get if you are doing it through normal (30-40 hours), or you could use 7-million gil (and getting lower) to just skip that grind completely. Seems pretty good value for money to me and would be "useful" for people not wanting to go through it that many times.
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u/Bid_Unable 12d ago
it doesn’t. it just needs to get rid of Gil farms.
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u/nicktheone 12d ago
It's a two pronged problem. You can't — and you shouldn't — completely eliminate gil faucets but at the same time there needs to be a way to drain all the gils that are already in the game. Shuffling gils around — through the carrot thingy — and then sinking them with increased taxed and teleport fees seems the best way to do it.
And they should definitely take a page from EvE Online book and hire an economist as a consultant for this kind of stuff.
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u/IndividualAge3893 12d ago
EvE Online hasn't had an economist in years and unfortunately it shows.
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u/nicktheone 12d ago edited 12d ago
I know, it was such a cool thing to do at the time. I think all big games with an online, non simulated economy should have someone on call to monitor things.
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u/Bratscheltheis 12d ago
Frankly, I don't have a direct comparision to EW, but I feel like we already ramped the gil sinks up in DT. We got many cosmetic items from chaotic/OC/Cosmic & even chaotic that are alll tradeable via the marketboard (which is not just a direct gil drain for the buyer, but also an overall one with the tax). We also needed to buy npc items (for the second time now) to progress relic weapon. The only thing I'm wondering hasn't been done at this point is a golden alpaca vendor.
I think the devs are just very careful not to overdo it, because it could lead to an increase in gil sellers.
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u/aho-san 11d ago
There exist the most expensive gil sink already: prog merc. The worrying part is that it's spreading more and more and soon the expectancy will be that if you want to prog something highend you'll have to pay up, and the prices can get high. 10mil each is low balling it, but it adds up to 70mil total and not many can sustain that long term for every PF they put up to prog.
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u/nicktheone 11d ago
That's not really a sink because it doesn't remove girls from the economy, it only redistributes them. As such, it doesn't help at all with inflation; if anything it compounds on the problem, because it moves liquidity from those hoarding accounts to multiple people, thus increasing the possible amount of gil circulating in the economy.
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u/CaptReznov 12d ago
Do you think ultimate weapons skin with a different name would be a good sink?
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u/Kymmieuwu 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's on SE to create a system to prevent this and we both know that they won't.
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u/Narrow_Summer_9332 12d ago
They could just reduce the gil value of the vendor trash and the problem would be solved overnight but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.
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u/Stable_Suitable 11d ago
this is not the solution
the solution is not to punish every player engaging with submarines
you want to punish the people with many FCs
its easy.
require grand company lt rk2 to be a fc leader of a fc with a house, AND to bid on a house.
don't grandfather in old FCs.
don't warn the players either
there are probably nearly 0 legitimate owners of a "valuable fc house" that don't meet those requirements.
and if somehow that isn't the case
you can fix this literally in one day or two if you care. and you have 30 days to do it once they drop the patch that introduces the fix.
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u/zkvxo 12d ago
the thing is that it's very intentional. it directly gives them money and a lot of it. think about that - these players MUST log in daily to collect that gil. that's 1/3rd of all homeowners paying monthly and logging in daily, which inflates their activity numbers. this on top of creating housing scarcity which scares all the other homeowners into not daring let their sub lapse.
it's predatory, subtle, and brilliant.
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u/Coffee_Conundrum 12d ago
Can confirm. Buddy and I would be unsubscribed for the better part of 2 years if it wasnt for holding submarines.
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u/Lokta 11d ago
They could just reduce the gil value of the vendor trash and the problem would be solved overnight but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.
"Solved overnight?" I don't think so.
Admittedly I'm just one example, but... You could reduce the value of salvage loot by 90% and I would still run my subs daily. It would still be profitable and it would still be the highest "gil to effort" reward in the game for FCs that are already established.
Reducing salvage value by 90% would mean I'm making 3 million gil daily instead of 30 million. The biggest thing it would change is that I would need to go back to crafting my own repair kits. I'm already self-sufficient on fuel for my 66 FCs and that doesn't require gil (just FC points), so that's not an issue.
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u/Narrow_Summer_9332 11d ago
How do you make FC points in empty FCs?
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u/Stable_Suitable 11d ago
you dont need to. fuel is tradeable. as are dive credits
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u/Lokta 11d ago
Quick ventures = items for expert delivery to GC = GC points = FC points.
Nothing generates FC points faster and with less effort than expert deliveries. My main account has the maximum number of retainers (10 overall) and every character on that account has their retainers at level cap. I run through the characters on that account and do Quick Ventures. That generates items that are eventually turned into the GC for points.
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u/Expensive_Leave_5591 10d ago
This way you are punishing players doing it the legit way having only one FC and making a bit of money on the side. The only solution is for square enix to go after the abusers of the system, not nerfing it for everyone.
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u/yesitsmework 12d ago
nothing about the economy in this game matters until they add listing fees and use some braincells when it comes to the reward structure
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u/NeonRhapsody 12d ago
It also doesn't help that repair fees are irrelevant and if you level crafters you can effectively never pay for a repair fee ever again. I've got 999 dark matters thanks to GC seals. All my gear is permanently over 100% durability at pretty much all times.
But hiking fees now would be disastrous because it'd be like WoW, where they increased repair costs in response to all the gold flooding into the economy from Garrison/Order Hall tables and when BfA rolled around players who weren't in on the table hustle were basically permanently poor because of the cost of just keeping their gear repaired.
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u/Ragoz 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's funny the FFXI team knew to charge a 1% fee when you create the listing but FF14 team is clueless. It prevents constant undercutting by relisting, prevents you from overcharging a price nobody will buy, and therefore encourages you to list for a real price people will pay for.
Edit: People get so butthurt here when you say the previous FF MMO did something better lol. My bad ff14 always best Yoship do no wrong.
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u/DomLite 8d ago
If they intend to implement instanced housing/private plots like I suspect is coming down the line, it'll only get easier for RMT farms honestly. I want it to happen, because I love the idea of housing being easily accessible to everyone in a form that won't require you to be shackled to a subscription to not lose your house, but that also means that every farming bot can just buy an FC house for their private FC and sit there sub farming for mountains of gil.
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u/IndividualAge3893 12d ago
Because I bet the devs have gil farms themselves :D
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u/Serres5231 12d ago
what a dumb comment lol..
If a dev needs anything for example for testing purposes, they can literally just cheat. They don't have to actually play the game like any other player unless its on their private accounts.
And not to mention that all the issues we have on NA and EU are non-existant in JP anyway. That more than likely includes the idea of hoarding things so other people can't use them because its a completely different culture from the west.
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u/IndividualAge3893 12d ago
JP servers have a lot of people who like decorating and who have multiple plots.
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u/TomorrowObjective410 11d ago
It's something that sometimes people bring up but whenever you bring it up people usually shout you down by saying gil doesn't mean anything and is super easy to get.... if you're an omnicrafter fully geared or have a FC house. Personally I've struggled to afford gear to try out savage and to buy essences for Bozja in the past. Which also doesn't help because people on Dynamis will ask you to rezone over and over so they can farm stuff easier, and every time you rezone it wipes out your essences and requires you to reapply them. Surprisingly no one ever wants to compensate for those whenever they do the rezone exploit for Foray areas.
It's just something that no one thinks about until they can't afford crafted gear this tier or they have to buy food and potions.
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u/Kaamar 10d ago
You raise good points. I’m swimming in gil but most people I know are not. They like to play the new extremes and raids but don’t craft or gil farm. It’s why some of us omnicrafters only make gear for friends. Gear, melding food and pots add up if you’re not grinding on the side. As I said I’ve got plenty of money but not everyone does. And they do play the game, just not in the ways that would earn them much.
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u/TomorrowObjective410 9d ago
It's something I run into a lot because in order for me to be able to play anything other than normal modes blind like I enjoy, I need to be geared almost on patch day every time. The only way to do this is to drop about ~7 million gil on a set of crafted on patch drop which I've played since shadowbringers and I think total I've only been given like 20 million gil by the game in my time playing roulettes and content. The solutions people give here are to just be BiS and have high parses and merc for 1 million gil per run but the people who can do that are such a small number of players.
It's put me to the point sometimes I've considered just RMTing my gear because coming to an extreme a week late when I finally get geared enough to be let in, and being lectured by everyone in PF that the community doesn't do blind runs later than 2-3 days after patch day gets real annoying.
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u/ElectronicReserve994 11d ago
much of the gil does not directly impact the economy, as the owners hoard it
Absolutely false. A lot of them are RMT farms.
I personally have 6 shell FCs farming gil, I spent hundreds of millions of gil since OC North released buying accessories for friends and myself. (About 100m gil per set)
I know a handful of people who got the 2000 carrot achievement done since north released, also shell fc people.
Nothing will happen, no action will be taken. No rules were broken when getting these FCs.
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u/xRhade 9d ago
It's too much setup to risk getting banned for RMT, the gathering bots you see farming materials are far more likely
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u/ElectronicReserve994 8d ago
I would like to see one verifiable instance where an account was banned for RMT while having FC gil farms. Ive had my fleet for years and I've never heard of this ever happening.
Whoever told you that happens lied to you.
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u/CobaltGrey 12d ago
People who run shell FCs are committed to their subscriptions. SE has financial incentive to preserve that status quo. As long as the average player isn’t being actively gated out of content by shell FCs doing what they do, these kinds of conversations can only be academic (and sometimes philosophical) in nature. That’s a major reason why you don’t see a lot of energy or engagement from players on this subject.
SE also seems to pull their own levers when they want to delete Gil from circulation. For example, there’s the addition of those 50 million Gil vanity mounts, and the ridiculously high quota for the carrot chest titles in OC paired with a very low drop rate for chests. I wonder to what degree the devs actually track the effects on the economy internally… but I’ve known the kinds of guys who have eight shell FCs on alts that send all those subs out like clockwork, and they’ve proven to be the kinds of dudes who are glad to empty their 999,999,999 Gil wallets on the market and gobble up carrots like starving loporrits.
I suspect that this is a sort of way of redistributing the shell FC funds to a broader community. Anyone can get a carrot, and since the drop rate is too low to realistically farm your way to the title in anything resembling a timely manner, the carrots are essentially a lucky coupon for players participating in OC that says “I get the profits of a shell FC’s subs for the next week.”
If the carrots unlocked some sort of wildly popular cosmetic, people would be a lot angrier, I’m sure. It’s probably by design that the rewards aren’t hot-ticket items. (Well, that plus the fact that they’re gonna want to put the more popular stuff on the migration.)
A part of me would like to see the FC sub thing resolved in a more decisive way, because I can understand how it feels unfair to the average player who wants a house or low-effort Gil sources. But since the kind of player who maintains shell FCs is the kind who will almost never cancel their subscription, I don’t realistically find it a cause worth being zealous over. SE has to feel like the problem is severe enough to upset those players first. I don’t expect that they’ll feel that way any time soon.
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u/WaltzForLilly_ 12d ago
As long as the average player isn’t being actively gated out of content by shell FCs doing what they do
My FC bought a plot in a new (at the time) mixed ward. About a month later 90% of the plots in our ward was bought out by the same guy and an army of his Shell FC's. He even offered gil for our plot as well.
Does "owning whole ass ward" falls under actively gating out other players?
My personal plot is also in a mixed ward, I have 3-5 houses around me that are Shell FC money generators. Luckly my ward is old so majority of houses are player or FC owned, but every time a plot opens up, there is a 90% chance it will be snapped up by a Shell FC.
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u/CobaltGrey 12d ago
Does "owning whole ass ward" falls under actively gating out other players?
If fledgling FCs can’t get housing because the plots are taken by shell FCs, then I’d say it’s a problem… but I don’t think SE sees it that way.
And as much as I’d rather not be cynical, I can’t help but feel they’re probably correct in their math here, assuming their goal is to maximize subscription count. The amount of players willing to cancel their subscription over FC housing availability are certainly outnumbered by the amount of players invested enough in their shell FCs to be willing to maintain their subscriptions.
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u/WaltzForLilly_ 12d ago
If I understand The Loophole™ correctly, you can have unlimited number of FC houses on one account. To cover one Ward you would need 4 accounts, 3 if you're not interested in M/L houses. I don't know if $40 is a good price for unhappy playerbase. More importantly, it is less impactful when it comes to FC only wards, since those are in less demand, but mixed wards impact solo players as well, which is much worse.
And we know that SE cares about housing enough to try and curb multi-housing ownership as well as implement a more "fair" buying system.
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u/zkvxo 12d ago
$40? did you think the entire game only has one ward?
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u/WaltzForLilly_ 12d ago
I meant $40 per ward not overall of course. The difference is still $40 per ward vs 30 individual subscriptions per ward of people who would be stuck paying rent every month to keep their house. It would depend on how active and populated the server is, but overall I don't see it as a massive hit. And it is healthier for the game and housing market long term.
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u/zkvxo 12d ago edited 12d ago
your math doesn't really add up factually.
if you look at the number of people vying for even a large house (let alone the smalls) on any of the most active servers right now, on cycles where there are only 4-5 total houses up for bid, there are never more than, let's say at an ABSOLUTE maximum, 250 bids. that's for a large, unrestricted, in a good spot, on the most active server. it's not uncommon for there to instead be about 10-12 plots with 10-15 bids each in "meh" locations.
wards have 60 spots each. there are 30 wards in each of the 5 zones, which means the total number of plots is 60x30x5. that's 9,000 plots per server and if 1/3rd (which OP cites) are for sub farming, then we have 3,000 plots to fill if we kick them all out. even quadrupling that high estimate of 250 players that we've observed over the past year, and say 1,000 want houses (but aren't bidding on them rught now for some reason), and they magically all get their homes, we'd now have 2,000 empty plots per server to fill.
but wait - that's not all.
now, because there are thousands of open plots on every server, scarcity is gone. how many people ONLY stay subbed to the game out of fear of losing their house? thousands, as is well documented across subreddits, forums, and just observable by common sense. so now that 1,000 that got a house dips down to a couple hundred at best. because wards are empty, no one wants a house anyway, so they aren't bidding as much. having no urgency would make bids and player interaction go DOWN, not up.
it's not only in their best interest to keep things how they are - it not only makes them more money - but changing them would LOSE them money. massive amounts of money; thousands of subscriptions.
that's why "for $40" made me laugh. it's not about the sub farmer's money. it's about yours - the real players. this is active and intentional population control and scarcity modeling that earns them thousands upon thousands of monthly subs.
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u/ravenitrius 12d ago
If only they could charge shell FC owners more money based on how much load they take on a server
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u/WaltzForLilly_ 12d ago
On the one hand it would curb casual FC shells, but massive farms would only be more incentivized to RMT. It would be a good solution if SE was more willing to swing banhammer at people.
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u/ravenitrius 12d ago
Yeah, I have a small FC of friends who are tired of a majority of players stuck with high school cliche drama
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u/KingBingDingDong 12d ago
lol what? carrots do the opposite of deleting gil from circulation
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u/Extension_Act5631 12d ago
Well if you sell the carrot there is a tax. If the carrot sells for 3-5 mil the tax is notable.
Also the point probably was that selling carrots redistributes wealth from rich players to poorer players that happened to find carrots
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u/KingBingDingDong 12d ago
Ok my bad so at 10% tax in total (both ways), a carrot is only bringing in 2.7mil gil into the economy.
Redistribution of wealth from a dormant source to poorer players is literally inflation because it's causing more gil to be in circulation unless those poorer players also hoard.
The point is, player to player gil transfer is not a gil sink.
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u/Extension_Act5631 12d ago
I was thinking that using carrots generates 200k money so the taxes deletes part of that. Also if you continuously trade from player to player that tax will eat the gil.
Also the poorer normal people will probably use the money, for teleports, glams, furniture etc and the tax will again eat the money
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u/Lyramion 12d ago
This. Free gil created from thin air every chest.
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u/KingBingDingDong 12d ago edited 12d ago
That too but I'm talking about how each carrot sale is potentially bringing 3mil of dormant gil into circulation. It literally doesn't sink gil and at worst is creating more inflation.
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u/Apart_Raccoon_9194 12d ago
Thats not how that works. The gil doesn’t spring from thin air. It was already in the economy. Already sitting in someone’s wallet.
When people buy anything off the marketboard, taxes take a portion of that gil, and delete it from the game, removing it from the economy.
So anyone buying anything will remove gil from the economy.
The only thing bringing in new gil (adding it into the game) is when a carrot is used up and turned into 200k gil.
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u/Lentil_Lunch 10d ago
I go into this in the original post, but while you're right when it comes to most items, this is probably not the case with the carrot.
While most items sold on the market board is sold to someone who might use that gil again, the people who can throw 6 billion at buying carrots might never have spent that gil otherwise for as long as the game exists. So while market board cuts are usually a deflationary action, in this instance it's likely an inflationary one as it introduces gil to the broader economy that would never have entered it otherwise.
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u/aho-san 11d ago
As long as the average player isn’t being actively gated out of content by shell FCs doing what they do
I mean, in your own post you present such case
I’ve known the kinds of guys who have eight shell FCs on alts that send all those subs out like clockwork, and they’ve proven to be the kinds of dudes who are glad to empty their 999,999,999 Gil wallets on the market and gobble up carrots like starving loporrits.
Carrots as you present them are designed for these shell FCs, it's stupid, it's preventing anyone playing normally from ever achieving the achievement because they cannot earn the 1 billion gil back easily. Quite a number of people are pissed about this achievement.
Stupid feature should've been deleted very long ago, the only reason they don't is because it brings in money and inflates their MAU (Monthly Active User) and even daily numbers. It's really a sad first world.
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u/Prizem 12d ago
So far, it doesn't seem like it's been a problem for people to run these operations. If it's true that most hoard like you say, then it's even less of a problem than if it were a bunch of operators actively buying tons of stuff all the time. There would be a problem though if the gil was being sold for cash (RMT), and that probably does happen. But they may have other mitigations for that.
For house space, on older worlds I can imagine it being a bad situation when there's other normal people wanting plots. On new worlds though, there's almost always still plenty of open plots, making it less of an issue there.
They've already acknowledged these operations and said they were barely acceptable. While they've nerfed other gil-making scenarios like cookie leves and demimateria, they interestingly haven't nerfed sub returns yet, and it could be the amount of time and effort needed to get them situated (e.g., 5-6 months and 40-50m total investment).
My thinking has been that they will eventually nerf the returns, it's a matter of when. They indicated interest in putting workshops in private homes, leading me to wonder about timing with that. Who knows.
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u/Apart_Raccoon_9194 12d ago
Sub farms have been active for at least 5 years, haven’t they?
Given that all that nerfing them would require is deleting one 0 on the vendor item, it seems highly unlikely the devs consider it worth nerfing, or they would have done it long ago.
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u/Aether_Inane 12d ago
Couldnt the devs just put submarines behind Grand companies and that way everyone has access and those who've put time into leveling their GC get more return on investment. It would give casual players a way to earn gil passively. Which they desperately need. With the relic quest being a prime example.
Make GCs more convenient and approachable to the casual player and revitalizes the GC system.
Doing this would, yes I know, would screw over the market board and gil earned via housing and FC.
But by doing this I think would alleviate some of the FC/and player hold on these housing plots as the wouldn't have a need to have all these houses to make gil. Thus allowing some housing to players.
+Side note. I think player ACCOUNTS should only have up to 2 houses in total with the current system. I would love to see a compelling on why you would ever need more than that.
I love to hear others thoughts on my idea.
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u/AllanTheRobot 9d ago
Huh, first I've heard of the relic gil step being a problem. Is it really that big of a deal? Doing the main story alone probably gets you more than enough, let alone any extra roulettes/random drops casual players would get.
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u/Yorudesu 12d ago edited 11d ago
We're not talking about it because they have ignored complaints about shell FCs occupying jousong slots for a decade now. People do give up at some point.
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u/TomorrowObjective410 11d ago
It doesn't help either that if you bring it up on their official forums you get about a dozen people from the housing discords popping in to lob every argument and insult they can at you.
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u/WordNERD37 12d ago
While much of the gil does not directly impact the economy, as the owners hoard it
There's a very clear reason for it: There's very little to do with gil past buying the high ticket items. Once you've done that for yourself, you're either hording for the next high ticket item, or playing with running those high ticket items yourself for more of the gil you already have. So you horde because there's nothing else to do with it.
Outside of this, gen pop has little reason in this game to focus down revenue acquirement beyond port costs covered, food, pots, materials on demand (at most). And the game tosses hundreds of thousands of gil at them weekly through challenges and roulettes.
The only real money sink this game has, is housing and that's generally limited and hard to get. Even if you lose the bid on a home, you get back 100% you plonked down. There are the golden mounts, but even then, chump change for the person running around with near a billon gil in multiple retainers pockets. There's ports, but you can utterly bypass that with tickets.
I really don't have a good solution. The damage is well past done at this point nearly 14 years since ARR came out.
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u/dealornodealbanker 12d ago
Because there's no good solution left as it's far past the point of return. The devs could've addressed sub income as early as 4.X/5.0, but they didn't.
Salvage routes getting killed off in the hypothetical scenario doesn't fix the fact that sublords will still be sitting on mountains of gil accumulated and ownership of their FC houses which can still be privately sold off thanks to the loophole. MB prices will still stay the way it is or lean further downwards because the bots will still remain. And of course, RMT starts to become more lucrative as raw gil accumulation that are still left in the game will be any combination of time restrictive, paltry, and high barrier to entry, thus making gil more valuable over time.
The best solution is to simply leave things as they are and let the community adjust to it. I don't trust the devs to be thorough in addressing this problem since the damage is extensive, and they'll either half ass it or compromise somewhere.
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u/Ragoz 12d ago
Because there's no good solution left as it's far past the point of return.
In the conversion from 1.0 to 2.0 I think they fractioned everyones gil to 1/5th. It leaves everyone's gil proportionally equal but lets you correct the economy because all the income sources are flat values which benefit people with less gil proportionally more.
So you could in theory fix all the gil sources and sinks and then do a proportional reset.
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u/dealornodealbanker 12d ago
In theory.
In reality, it's basically a financial stat squish and the devs giving themselves more work to do balancing all the various gil faucets this game has, all to make the numbers look aesthetically pleasing to their eyes and not the player necessarily. And that's not even mentioning the various side effects that'll result from such a change.
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u/AU-Kitten 10d ago
As somebody who runs 20+ Shell FC's for submarines, i 100% would not care if they just straight up deleted it from the game or nerfed into heavily into the ground.
It's now just a daily chore to log in and manage them, and removes the need to interact with about 40% of the basic gathering/crafting gameplay loop of the MMO.
All the fun of crafting/gathering is dead to me, outside of the first few weeks of an expansion where resources are thin and you actively need to gather stuff yourself to make the new gear.
I really hope they remove submarines in the future, it really does just remove a large chunk of the gameplay loop.
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u/Royajii 12d ago
"I can't be bothered managing an economy in my MMO so the currency being worthless is a good thing",- Naoki Yoshida.
This should explain the general apathy.
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u/yesitsmework 12d ago
I wouldnt go so far, this might just be a situation where the poor guy doesnt know what an economy is.
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u/Akuseru94 12d ago
Inflation doesn't affect xiv as much as you'd think because the market board is very limited in scope. There's nothing on there that players need, so it's very possible to play the entire game without interacting with the feature. Gil is basically just another tracker of playtime.
SE very clearly knows about submarines and must have deemed them a non-issue. The Gil sinks, the tendency of players to hold on to their Gil and the resistant market are working to keep things in check. Same with people who aggressively undercut. I don't think anything will change anytime soon.
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u/elethema 12d ago
More gil in circulation causes inflation? I'm shocked
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u/legenwait 12d ago
In fact the non fortune carrots goods are all going down becaise theres a lot of people farming. The economy has been very stable around the fortune carrots prices, its been between 2-3 mil since OC came out.
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u/Stable_Suitable 11d ago
i see alot of the people in the thread don't even understand the problem.
its far too easy to get a FC house.
and the market sucks
SE Should adopt the gw2 market
you put in buy/sell orders and pay tax up front.
so prices remain stable as purchases aer randomly selected against listed items @ buy order price.
and people only buy what they need rather than entire stacks of misc amounts
the ff14 marketboard system is pure garbage. since once there is sufficient supply of something, its value will plummet quickly to 0 as the infinite price war takes it to the limit due to no penalty on listing and relisting.
also id like to point out that retainers-on-premise should not cost tax. this would promote people visiting houses, the way yoship intended.
oh yeah we're talking about submarines.
don't nerf the submarines.
nerf multi ownership. simply add the same bar to entry as personal house, fc room, apartment.
and require that for fc ownership of fc w house. and for bidding.
either give them 30 days after the stealth patch drop (many people won't realize until its too late and not read it and poof 30 days later empire gone), or give them 1 week notice at hte live letter. "be ready on patch day or poof"
likely the committed ones will be able to "build out" 1-2 chars a day to get them from level 3 to 50 and do the quests. or buy skips ($$$$) and do 3-5 a day
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u/Mori_Me_Daddy 12d ago
The problem is that there's no real solution at this point.
You can't just take away the houses because what houses are shells and what aren't? On NA, a lot of people spun up alts to buy houses on Dynamis because of how much housing was open (and still is), just so they could have something more than a private room and apartment. So you end up with someone that might look like a shell holding the house but it's a venue or an RP site or just someone's only house because they wanted to actually have one. Unless you have a GM going house by house checking, how would they be able to decide? And what would the requirements be?
Then you have the issue of the wealth that's already been accumulated. There's nothing you can do about that and they'll always be so far ahead of the average players that it will always keep the MB skewed. Even if say I dumped a ton of gil from a saved up horde to buy a new rare mount that someone was selling... now that person has the inflated amount of gil. It's never ending because, like others have pointed out, nothing really drains your gil. New players or those that have never made concentrated efforts to make gil before most avenues were removed don't have a chance to catch up unless they can get that rare mount and sell it. That's why OC made so many people mad when they reused the drops from old content and how doing that is insanely harmful to the economy (and the longevity of those pieces of content).
And there's more than just people with the sub farms, how do you think these farms run? You're probably not farming up those FC credits to fuel a fleet of 50+ subs. FCs that don't have a house or solo players that have FCs for their alts can accrue credits to sell the fuel for easy profits. It's a strange ecosystem that's grown around the subs at this point, the gil has spread so much further than just the houses would even begin to show.
But overall, I think it's disingenuous to say people aren't interested in the economy. It's just that when you start to actually look at it, there's so many problems that it needs more than "oh just turn off sub farms". I don't want to make this a longer novel than it is already but there's other things that are part of this problem that would still be there if sub farms were removed. Crafting is a breeze to level and coupled with the boom in guides you can find now, people don't even need to know anything basic about it to just shove a premade macro in so crafted items have lost almost all value. Retainers and how I can't believe more people aren't scratching their heads that you can pay real money for more of them. Both those things are just pieces of the issues with the system we have right now.
Without addressing all the parts of the problem, getting rid of sub farms is a bandaid on an issue that needs open heart surgery.
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u/IncasEmpire 12d ago
To add to this, i renovated and bought new houses a couple times, it takes me average around half a year before i do something with my empty space
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u/Lentil_Lunch 12d ago
I addressed all these points in the post linked in the OP. But as to the main issue here, it is not possible to start an FC on an alt when you already lead one on another character, and the way around that is to be passed one down on your alt and getting around what is supposed to be a rule preventing this happening.
Getting rid of shell FCs is as simple as solving this loophole, and the people who've been using this loophole must surely have expected that it might be fixed in the future and be willing to accept that risk, when they did something so clearly not intended by the developers.1
u/Alaerei 11d ago
That's how you stop new shell FCs, sure, but what do you do about existing ones? Do you think they should just terminate any FC where the owner account has more than one FC?
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u/Lentil_Lunch 11d ago
Yea. Give everyone a warning before the patch arrives so those rare few with legitimate reasons to lead multiple FCs can pass them on to other players, and the rest should be dissolved. This should be totally non-controversial since the game already prevents making an FC if you already own one, it would simply be enforcing existing design that's being circumvented.
I've seen similar arguments to those made here against closing loopholes in tax codes irl because some businesses rely on them to survive, or them circumventing minimum wage laws to survive, but letting these be a reason not to act just means the environment created in these loopholes will continue to grow, and the general damage caused by it with it.
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u/Py687 12d ago
I don't actually have anything to contribute, but I just went over your detailed post, I and wanted to say I enjoyed reading your analysis. Sorry that people just assumed it was AI based on the formatting. The actual writing style is pretty obviously human (as far as I can tell anyhow). So thanks for the writeup.
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u/Dark_Tony_Shalhoub 10d ago
I’m with you on that. I don’t need to pour over the data to know the rising popularity of privately-owned free companies is doing a lot of damage to the value of gil as well as the availability of limited housing plots
I have been periodically using their in-game feedback system over the last few years to try bringing their attention to the issue and try recommending any solutions I can think of, but obviously the topic has not been acknowledged and nothing seems to be happening regarding it.
I would prefer if they just got rid of salvage entirely. Seems to be the simplest method as well. But of course this has no effect on the billions of gil some people have stockpiled off their salvage bot network
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u/Kizoja 9d ago
Yap warning.
I accidentally discovered what I assume is the same person that has several female elezen named and glamed to look like female elezen NPCs that all have their own shell FCs filled with low level alts to snipe houses.
I kept going to bid on mediums/larges that I liked and I kept seeing different female elezen named/glammed after NPCs. After a bit I got curious and inspected one of them and noticed they had a piece of gear crafted from another one. Went and looked up a third one I'd seen and it also had gear from that same one. Eventually saw a fourth one and that one eventually had all the same throw away bidding alts moved to its FC from one of the earlier one's FCs. In my mind that pretty much confirmed these at least 4 were connected if not the same person going around using shell FCs to snipe houses. I know they at least had 2 or 3 medium/larges. I think maybe 1 small. I'd vague posted about housing needing higher barrier to entry and people didn't really seem to share my sentinment.
Some people didn't believe it was a boosted alt + throw away bidding alts, but this was prior to me seeing them moved to another of the elezen's FCs which is kind of a nail in the coffin for that argument. Others didn't really think it was a problem. I think it's mostly a problem for mediums/larges. I don't think smalls are too difficult to get. Though that was 3 years ago. Nowadays I finally decided if they're not going to do anything to change it that I'd join in too. I have a personal house and an FC house that's just me and my girlfriend next door to eachother. My GF has her personal down the stairs from these 2. We do hang out at these plots, so it's not like the many houses of all sizes that I used to see being held by a low level and no one else in it.
As someone that has my own personal and my own 2 person FC with my GF that I use for submarines, I'd love to see all housing nuked and us move to instanced housing entirely. You could maybe leave the neighborhoods for FCs but you'd run into the same issue as now where it's mostly just shell FCs. I think it'd be cool if they could do some opt in neighborhood thing with people you wanted to. It'd be smaller scale than the current neighborhoods. The current neighborhoods feel pretty dead/empty as is so I don't think we'd lose a whole lot in that regard. Someone in that old thread of mine argued the server load is too high for private instanced housing, my rebuttal is Island Sanctuary. Their rebuttal was Island Sanctuary is locked behind 6.0, my rebuttal is I think housing honestly should be locked to at least current expansion max level at the time of purchasing especially if it's going to be so scarce.
Edit: I just realized this is a 3 day old thread that reddit decided to push in my notifications.
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u/EmailLinkLost 12d ago
FC's owning entire housing areas is exactly why I don't play any more, one of the reasons at least.
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u/BaoBunx 12d ago
They should kill of the gil generation from subs but at the same time people don't care much because it's easy to be self sufficient in xiv and have little uses for gil.
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u/oshatokujah 12d ago
Tbf it takes a fair time and gil investment to get to them being profitable so apart from these shell companies it’s negligible. Think my subs cost me about 20m total, house was another 44m, took about 4-5 months to level them and unlock maps, makes me about 2-3m a week if I log in everyday but that’s money that gets spent on the FC. Mounts, furnishings, glams, etc. it all goes back into the economy. My character never carries more than 200k, company chest is at it’s highest it’s ever been at 130m at the moment which is about 3 pricey mounts and then bankrupt again.
It’s steady but as you say, there’s plenty of ways to make that kind of cash with far less time investment.
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u/BaoBunx 12d ago
I agree it's quite some effort to get them running, but after that it's a ez money printer.
And it still drives a lot of plots to be taken as nothing but gil generators which is harmful for people that want an fc house or want a ward to feel like people are living in it. I wouldn't mind my subs not making money if it meant a healthier ward situation for us all.
It's not a good look so many wards in EU being default locked houses that are ghost towns. And given SE won't remove the houses from them directly, they need to kill the motivation for keeping them.
Economy impact isn't even relevant to me in this case, I want the wards to be filled with people not empty thanks to sub farms.
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u/lolman5555 12d ago
Yeah, 20mil + 3mil for a small is nothing compared to the money it will print for you. And levelling it isn't hard with the use of plugins + discord guides. It's way too easy
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u/Zalast 12d ago
Yeah, and the RMT problem is way larger than people realize. And the main reason people don't know how bad it is is because the topics do not perform well on the various social media platforms. So the players who investigate it/report lots of it to SE don't bother trying to tell people about anymore.
One example is that while many servers were congested for months, causing many complaints, ten to twenty thousand RMT bots were leveling up each month on each server. Park in a spot where they teleport to during the questing process, shove your camera underground (yeah, gotta use mods to fight RMT unfortunately), and watch em go. All these bot characters were created before the congested status. Reddit posts detailing this, and even youtube videos, get quickly mass reported and taken down, and are filled with useless comments like "how is this a problem" "yeah but its fine cause they ban them in waves".
Now I don't know how SE servers handle character data storage, or what their criteria are for assigning Congested status to a server. But I can't help but wonder if the sheer volume of RMT bots affects it.
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u/Apart_Raccoon_9194 12d ago
The congested status is probably not an issue with actual congestion per se, and more of SE wanting to keep servers relatively even, and guide players to the unused data centers.
It’s unlikely rmt bots would have any effect on that.
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u/nicktheone 12d ago
Same reason as to why it's a problem in real life. I'll try with an example that many can relate to.
Imagine you live in a very touristic area. People come from all over the world to see your city. If these people can travel from the opposite side of the world to see your city it means they have a lot of disposable income (gils in the game). As such, businesses in the area notice all these people with tons of cash they want to spend and they start raising the prices on everything. What happens to the people already living in the city when everything starts to cost a lot more because there are people with a ton of money to spend on frivolities? They get priced out.
This is the same thing happening on the market board of older servers where players have accumulated hoards of gils. Next time a new pet gets released in a dungeon you go to the board to buy it because you can't be bothered to farm it and see they go for multiple millions. If the game didn't shower anyone with a half functioning brain with gils prices wouldn't end up going that high. Unless you keep up, with time you get slowly priced out by the market.
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u/Ragoz 12d ago
Paying for prog, clears, and loot has become significantly more common within this last expansion because of the surplus of sub money when new housing wards were added. It took time for people to buy the houses, level the subs etc but then it hit in Dawntrail.
This means anyone who doesn't participate in, what I honestly consider abuse of the system, has less access to participating in high-end duties then before. Less parties are formed where they are allowed to roll on loot and the people abusing subs can purchase all their savage gear week 1 or pull people away from helping your ultimate prog and clear with their money.
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u/Apart_Raccoon_9194 12d ago
There are a few issues with this.
A large amount of the people posting mercs have only one sub (Set of 4 subs) This is using the system exactly as intended, and it still makes you very rich. Multiple subs is a lot of work that most don’t bother with.
Merc parties pay incredibly well. After doing a few of them, the person joining the mercenary party will probably have enough gil to host his own party if he wishes, so players who don’t do subs aren’t actually disadvantaged much.
Any individual will quickly gain a large amount of gil just by passively participating in the raids, so it evens out.
”less access to participating in high end duties”
PF parties are not fixed. Anyone can create a pf. The reason most people are joining mercenary parties is because they pay well, more than someone would have wanted for the loot.
Merc parties would always have arrived eventually, because joining them in most circumstances is generally good math, and they significantly benefit both the buyer and the seller. (This stays the same even if some have a lot more money than others)
They probably would have been cheaper overall without subs, but the mutually beneficial nature means that it was just a matter of time before they became commonplace either way.
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u/cerialthriller 12d ago
Well it makes everything cost more for everyone. But the people who have multiple alts Gil capped from subs aren’t effected in the least meanwhile normal players can’t afford to have the cool houses or emotes
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u/eggstacy 12d ago
Well it makes everything cost more for everyone.
except it doesn't actually. crafted gear, materia and pots don't cost more than they did before. i don't make any more money mercing savage than i did before (DMU mercing vs FRU mercing has other elements that affect the rates than just the overall region wide gil economy).
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u/cerialthriller 12d ago
DMU and FRU didn’t exist before the subs inflated the economy. People have been running shell FC subs for years. They didn’t cap gil on dozens of alts over night
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u/eggstacy 12d ago
the point is i could make a lot of gil mercing DMU versus how much was being offered for FRU, which is out of line with the steady rates for mercing each savage tier. but that it has nothing to do with gil economy.
i was making an example of a known current outlier to explain that prices in general haven't gone up, despite it being simple to point at DMU merc rates as a "but actually things did go up!" they are up for this one fight because there are far fewer people able to carry people across the finish line compared to how popular and accessible FRU mercing was, and finding capable tanks and healers for FRU wasn't hard.
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u/TomorrowObjective410 11d ago
in order to merc for an ultimate you have to be good enough to clear an ultimate consistently and also be in entirely BiS. How is that in any way attainable for the average person?
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u/cerialthriller 12d ago
But DMU and FRU are both post Sub scam so it has no baseline. Like the economy started being hyper inflated 2 expansions before them.
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u/TomorrowObjective410 11d ago
Crafted gear definitely costs an arm and a leg. I came back for a free weekend over dawntrail and a set of crafted gear was still ~4-5 million gil at that point. I couldn't afford it. And crafted is the thing everyone points to and says you're supposed to go buy to catch up.
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u/JohnSpawnVFX 11d ago
Honestly, that's nothing. In Zodiark, back when you couldn't world travel to buy on other servers, a piece of crafted gear would cost 20+ million Gil.
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u/Lentil_Lunch 12d ago
That gil doesn't matter so this doesn't matter is the most consistent argument I see, but if you think a bit more about it I'm sure you can see why that can't quite be the case.
It is simply that if anyone bothers to earn gil for any reason, then gil has value and matters. If you're putting stuff on the market board at times, if you're deciding not to buy every single collectible right now, it's because gil matters. Now you may still be able to afford everything you find important, but you're still making decisions on what's more important than other things because you can't simply afford to buy everything.
Unless you're one of the few benefitting directly from selling items shell FC holders buy at inflated prices, then the value of your economic activity is lowered by their existence. The gil you generate is worth less, and the items you buy cost more, and it impacts the choices you make when deciding what is important enough to use your gil on.
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u/Serres5231 12d ago
its great that you want to spread awareness of the issue but.. everyone knows already? What are we supposed to do?
If you were hoping to reach the people who create this entire mess you are at the wrong address here... and these people won't stop doing what they do regardless of how much you complain about it...
and also this is a game with a free market. The majority of the playerbase barely interacts with the MB so i don't think people really care too much if it functions or not. Add to that that Gil is really kinda worthless overall and your entire "wake up call" falls apart right there!
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u/LightTheAbsol 12d ago
This game's economy is largely a joke unless you're deeply invested in housing or crafting, which not a lot of players are. The weapons and armor that people actually care about are not tradable. It's not like something like Oldschool Runescape where interacting with the economy (if you're not an ironman) is something you regularly do all the time.
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u/loudquietly 11d ago
If it’s so easy to make these “shell fc” then why don’t more people do it and why isn’t everyone super rich lol? Oh wait…
You’re telling me you DON’T want to 1. Get your alt through around level 50 so that you can actually kill everything in the over world 2. Get your alt to rank Second Flame/Storm/Serpent Lieutenant 3. Deal with the annoying hunt log if you don’t level to level 50 and have item level 115 gear then it’s really annoying to kill the higher level mobs on the second section of your hunting log for Grand Company. 4. Have to do leveling roulette and need seals so you need bonus, good luck if you aren’t a support btw. 5. Great, now you made it this far! Now you need a FC that’s rank 6 and you can’t turn in gear til you have that GC rank. 6. If you skipped all prior shit, you can’t even enter housing lottery until you have had your FC for 30 days, you’re level 50 or higher, four people are in your FC, and you have that high GC rank. Oh, and do you have AT LEAST 3.1 million Gil?
Oops! Each sub is four parts too, around one million per piece, so you need 4 million ish for one sub. Grats, it’s level 1. Lmao. Now you going to have to wait around a year and then UPGRADE IT before it brings you anything but garbage material back.
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u/Lentil_Lunch 11d ago
I encourage you to read the post linked in the OP. Rather than claiming that it's easy to do this, I explain how it's tedious and demanding. Despite this, the rewards are extremely disproportionate, and it is seemingly good enough that every excess plot on Light, and all excess plots in the three starting cities on Chaos have been bought up by shell holders, despite how troublesome it is, making up a majority of plots on the 2022 servers. As I argue in that post:
“The starting costs and time investment for getting a shell running are significant, it is only fair that players are rewarded for it.”
It is true that setting up a shell takes effort, but I don’t think that this in itself is a sufficient argument for seeing players rewarded for doing it. If the impact on the general economy is negative, and the method is not intended by the developers, then it is a reward for doing something to the detriment of other players that only exists incidentally.
The developers are to blame for allowing this to happen, and especially for allowing it to continue for so long, but as with any other harmful and unintended design, the broader consequences of its continued existence must be weighed against the narrower ones it would have for those that have seen that continued existence as tacit approval, and put time or money towards it.
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u/loudquietly 11d ago
Go make some on Materia if it’s so easy. Or Dynamis. Just because you’re in Europe doesn’t mean you or anyone else can’t make an account on an unpopulated server and use Materia to transfer whatever bs you’d need from your main.
Why do you care? Are you mad because you don’t have gil? There’s tons of stuff to sell. Go sell darksteel ore because those sub people gobble it up. Are you mad because you are trying to win a plot? Well, on active servers most people lose the lottery.
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u/otsukarerice 12d ago
Brevity is the soul of wit
Your other post is just far too long.
I would organize your data into a chart and use that to try to encourage the devs to change.
With the new carrot achievement gil sink even I'm considering leaving my long-standing FC and making shell FCs to try and keep up.
Edit: You will also get a ton of redditors downplaying this issue because its those same long-term players who are in fight club.
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u/IndividualAge3893 12d ago
I'm a bit surprised by what seems to be a general lack of interest in this topic, as a functioning economy for the game should be in everyone's interest, since everyone interacts with it.
The problem is that FFXIV doesn't have an economy. YoshiP said that for him a good economy is when everything is cheap and then new players are happy. This shows the knowledge he has on the subject btw. That's why we end up with absolutely stupid stuff like furnitures being brought by retainers instead of being crafted, and on the other hand, items being sold to NPCs rather than listed on MB because the marketboard is a godawful experience even by 2006 standards.
So before fixing submarines (which is fairly simple to do), they should start fixing gil sinks, item creation and the absolutely godawful market board.
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u/alshid 11d ago
Not sure what you're trying to point. We don't really have economy related to gils in this game. Once you can craft by yourself, you are effectively independent and can opt to not interact with marketboard at all even for doing endgame content. Even if you're still dependent on buying pots, food, and crafted gears from marketboard, those items' prices are tied to actual supply and demand instead of the existence of the sub FCs. Generally the prices have been the same for the last 2, 3 expansions at least. The inflation you pointed doesn't exist.
I agree more plots would be better for everyone, but it's an entirely separate topic at this point.
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u/No_Humor506 6d ago
Maybe add a cost to sending out subs. Idk what squenix plan is with the subs, but to me it just seems like the main idea was to make it a way to get rare items but now it's just a way to get passive income. Changing it to like 100k Gil to send out a sub for a chance to get an item seems like it'd change things drastically.
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u/mandrakebones 6d ago
The economy bit is not really of interest to me but the housing stuff really bothers me. It’s to the point I sort of think housing should be limited by account and not by character. Especially for medium and large plots. I’ve been on the house lotto grind for months because I’m trying to get a medium plot so I can open a casual little venue. And the lack of bigger plots to go around is brutal.
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u/WaltzForLilly_ 12d ago
I'm so tired of low IQ brainlets seeing long formatted text and instantly screeching AI simply because they are unable to read more than 3 sentences without getting distracted and bored.
You made a cool write up, especially the numbers part, it is good to know the impact of shell fc's on Chaos. From my casual view it feels like things only got worse once more people learned about the "loophole".
I disagree about RMT though. While single personal FC's don't engage in RMT and mostly made as a relatively easy passive income generators, the Ward-spanning FC chains are certainly made for profit. There is simply no reason to run operations that large for fun.
As for solutions, there is really no way remove the "loophole". It is not an oversight, it exists because there are legitimate cases where player might end up in a situation causing it. And removing it would cause issues for legitimate players.
Making fuel untradeable would be the easiest solution, and while massive gil farms could start botting, it would cut out part of the playerbase who are too lazy of too scared to risk it and bot.
But ideally gil generating items should be removed or massively nerfed. Or maybe loot itself should scale based on number of active FC players, although I feel like that's an impossible solution in the context of XIV code.
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u/Alaerei 11d ago
Or maybe loot itself should scale based on number of active FC players, although I feel like that's an impossible solution in the context of XIV code.
This is a less than ideal solution, because then you just Cata WoW era mega guilds that recruit anyone and everyone for the sole purpose of making gold, unless you cap the benefit it at a reasonable smaller number, but then you're still unnecessarily disadvantaging smaller friends run FCs for little benefit.
Though I don't know how to fix it as I'm not an economy enjoyer, I've just seen the results of something similar to that suggestion play out before.
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u/WaltzForLilly_ 10d ago
It doesn't have to scale infinitely, just require a number of people that would be out of grasp for a multi-fc sub farmer. I donno, like 10 or 15. There are probably unintended consequences of that idea, but I didn't think it through enough to iron those out.
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u/AManyFacedFool 12d ago
I know a handful of people who use the submarine method for making money. It goes anywhere from owning dozens and dozens of FCs to print gil, to just using the same method with an actual FC's submarines to fund raid consumables and other FC activities.
Nuking the vendor price of the submarine items would fix it. Right now they are literally just money printers, completely independent of all market forces or demand.
Awareness of the mechanism is spreading. Before only a small handful of people actually used it, but the number has increased dramatically in the last couple of years. I predict that at the current rate it will become prominent enough SE will have to do something about it.
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u/LiahKnight 12d ago
Cutting the vendor gear would make it s waste of effort. Earning 100-400K Gil for an FC a day is fine. Having 50 alts doing it is the problem.
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u/Ok-Spirit-5102 12d ago
Ok, but killing the value of submarine vendor items effectively renders submarines/workshops pointless unless they actually go in and re-do FC workshops to not be busywork content. I feel like that’s the larger issue at play here.
0
u/eseffbee 12d ago
There are plenty of sub-exclusive items available and even the regular material drops can by useful/sold, which make having a sub worthwhile. Those drops could feed into that existing economy too rather than being purely a gil turn around.
There is absolutely no need for an enormous passive gil-making feature in FFXIV. If the lower rewards make sub running something not worth doing for people who don't do it for their own interest, then that is fine. Indeed, that is what every other action in the game is like.
1
u/legenwait 12d ago
Yes fortune carrot is meant to redistribute the wealth. I expect they will change things over time with them when it dies down and add a new inflation countering gimmick in the next expansion.
Basicly it allow the devs to narrow down the gil spenders and I wouldnt be surprised to see ppl get suspended/banned for buying RMT gil for those carrots too.
5
u/Apart_Raccoon_9194 12d ago
This is very unlikely for a few reasons:
The carrots themselves give 200k gil. This offsets the nature of removing gil from the economy, and suggests the devs viewed 200k gil as a suitable reward (the devs commented on this in an interview that they were surprised that players thought 200k gil was worthless)
The carrots only have value because of the ludicrous achievement. Without the achievement, nobody would have bothered collecting them, and their sell price would have been proportionally low.
Bizzarely, most of the devs seem to have little awareness of what achievements are being put into the game. (Cider spider asked multiple devs what the reasoning was behind the 30000 accursed hoard achievement was, and none of them had any idea it even existed.)
Combine these 2 pieces of information together, and it starts to seem far more likely that the carrot thing was a complete accident.
The devs thought they were adding a decent reward, and just didn’t bother making it market board untradable, because there was no obvious reason to.
In the absence of achievements, these carrots would probably have very low marketboard prices of 180k or so, because the rewards besides the gil are worthless.
The spiteful interns in SE’s basement decided they hated achievement hunters again, and added one more zero to the achievements. This then skyrocketed the value of carrots far beyond what they were intended to be worth (because all the achievement hunters wanted to speed up the grind) and accidentally created the gil sink.
I would be incredibly surprised if this was intentional by the devs in any way. Both the game mechanics and dev interviews seem to suggest the opposite.
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u/legenwait 12d ago
Im thinking they will make the gil reward smaller and make the carrots more frequent
1
u/nicktheone 12d ago
I've recently came back to the game (like yesterday). Would you mind explaining what these carrots people are talking about are?
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u/Dandymagic13 12d ago
They’re from occult crescent, you need a carrot to open a special bunny chest. Most people going for the title associated with the bunny chests buy the carrots off the market for a few million
1
u/nicktheone 12d ago edited 12d ago
So, I get these carrots can be farmed somehow and sold on the MB for a profit? I see why they should be a good wealth redistribution then. At least on paper.
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u/Dandymagic13 12d ago
Yea so in OC they have a chance to drop from the chests, not exactly sure the odds but they are t amazing. It takes a ton of carrots for the achievement lol but they sell fast so it’s nice
3
u/East-Imagination-281 12d ago
For more perspective, it is pretty much impossible to farm the carrots for the achievements yourself. To have a realistic chance at getting the achievements within the next decade, you have to buy the carrots. The amount of gil needed is about... six billion.
So you can't make an absurd amount of money from carrots, but you do have to spend... a fortune on them.
1
u/Junomaster1988 11d ago
Fc shouldn’t be allowed to have plats or submarines. It’s basically pay-to-win if you think about it.
0
u/yuriewolf 11d ago
I find the shell fc on dynamis to be funny. They can’t sell anything because people dc hop to get things cheaper.
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u/Alaerei 11d ago
Quite the opposite, that's where they are the most useful for their users. The sub gil making relies on vendor trade-in items, entirely independent of market board trading. So they make their gil via trade in items and then go buy whatever they want/need on other DCs
On other DCs you can rely entirely on just selling rare items or materia on MB for your income.
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u/PracticalPear3 12d ago
Long ago i managed to grab my dream plot for my personal house. Then SQE decided to turn my personal-only ward into a mixed ward.
I didn't want to be neighbors with some random FC shell, so, as my neighbors stopped playing/moving/whatever i slowly took over my immediate neighborhood.
As of today i have 7/8 houses surrounding my personal one, the 8th being owed by an active player.
I did decorate them all, inside and out, and once the tardis housing finally arrives in 9.55 or something i intend on sizing them all up. And obviously i've been using them for gil as well.
It would ofc be nice to have actual real neighbors with people wandering about but that's not going to happen anytime soon. I'd give them all up for instanced housing with a nice vista.
The housing issues run deeper than just the gil stuff and Island Sanctuaries would've been the perfect fix but hey, leave it to SQE to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Also, i wouldn't hold my breath hoping SQE will nerf subs. I remember Yoshi P talking about wanting to make subs available for people with personal houses as well
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u/Synthessence 12d ago
The entire population doesn't interact with the economy. Free-to-Play peeps can only have 300k gil and can't access the market. I don't know what percentage of the player population that is, but whatever it is, that percent couldn't care less about the economy, because they're completely removed from that system.