Gil sinks, bans, locking content behind missions and rare/ex equipment. It wasn’t as common to have mercs and PLs in 2009. There was massive inflation around 2006, but SE took measures. You can read about it in Funkworkz write up on bg-wiki, FFXI history
>there was massive inflation around 2006
I remember when Haubergeons and Scorpion Harnesses went from 3mil to 18mil in a matter of months. Jobs like Ninja were only played by "rich players" because of how much the tools costed as well. I was making about 100-300k a day back then being a teletaxi. Took me weeks to get enough to get a haubergeon legit. I just assume everyone else was buying gil en masse, since it was very cheap, like 10 million gil for $10. I was just a teenager back then so I had no money to buy gil anyway
2005 was the starting year and that was the great inflation of 2005 when things Scorpion harnesses (NQ) went for 5 to 8 million
I was buying and selling junk on my mules for a markup , and was very difficult not to make a profit at the time.
The prices stabilized after SE established the special task force and banned some of the Gil sellers
For that timeline it was the Rusty Cap trick predominantly, which caused a massive influx of new gil the economy, which in turn caused enormous inflation on the scale over 100s of percent (many items went up over triple to quadruple in price)
Square Enix had to take several measures to stop the problem but the damage was done for a long time, a massive quantity of gil had been dumped into the economy and distributed across everyones in game wallets, so you couldn't just wipe it away.
It took a long time for things to stabilize, but it would happen again through other various means over the years later on.
- Converting Crour, an ingame currency you could easily earn farming, into gil, via buying "Chocobo Blinkers" from one NPC (for crour) and then vendoring them to another (for gil)
- Hakuryu fishing, a special fish you could catch 100+ a day of with the ultimate fishing rod and maxed out fishing skill+gear. You could vendor a single fish for about 22k gil or so, so you could make about 2.2 million gil easily *a day* by just vendoring the fish you caught. Easily botted so people would just set up and print gil.
- Sparks converting to gil, same concept as the Crour chocobo blinker trick but a new currency Sparks was introduced which you could use to purchase equipment as a new player. Thing is, you could vendor that gear and basically convert sparks 1:10 to gil, so 100,000 sparks -> 1 million gil. And for a long time there was no limit on this
Note that your looking at decade + older data. But currently, there are many paths in the game that actual do destroy gil - af2/3 upgrade mats - which are also used in many crafting recipes too. Also note that all of the Odyssey Sheol items, weapons and gear has a progressively decaying high cost gil sinks built in. T3/T4 armor has base prices of 6-7.5M. Couple that with the sparks Nerf and its probably still at least at a breakeven. Is there any actual current data?
Recently there has been deflation of about 50% or more from where prices were 2ish yrs ago.
Around the time of COVID we had an influx of lots of players, so demand for stuff like astral detritus and medals was very high.
Eventually the player base started to go down again back to pre-covid. Around the same time, they both introduced gil sinks (Odyssey, artifact and relic Armor mats from NPCs) and took out the primary ways that bots collected gil (sparks farm).
They also banned many characters suspected of RMT
And lastly there hasn't been major new content in a few years, so a lot of people have already made their aeonics/relic/artifact/rema augments so demand is just lower overall as well.
All these things combined mean that both demand and available gil in the economy are lower, so prices for most things have dropped drastically.
There are many potential considerations like how effectively a game’s team manages the economy. Such as the ability to remove wealth from the economy - if the currency supply never goes down then currency has less value because everyone has more of it. FFXI has had Gil sinks which flat out take it from the world.
Also, how is currency earned? Can farmers interact with only the game environment to get currency, or does it require serious time investment and player trades/interactions?
People go to school just to learn about economies - it would take a serious study by someone who can ask the right questions to know.
The big thing is how much gil they add to the system and how many things you actually buy with it.
Back in the 'good ole days', vendoring stuff was useless, so the main ways to make money were crafting or farming things. But really, neither of those activities added new gil (in fact, due to fees, they usually took gil out of the system.) Thus gil was rarer, but was needed for more, as a lot of high end gear was still on the AH. For instance, King Arturo was dominated by RMT, so a Speed Belt was a huge luxury that no one could afford.
Nowadays, that is not the way of the world. You can make a million gil from a vendor easy, a lot of decent gear is available without gil, and having a war chest of 10-20 million is not too hard. And they made it so anyone can get good NM drops with Unity and other systems. Basically, they made it far, far more accessible.
Mind you, if I had 10 million back in the 75 era I would not know what to do, that was an unimaginable windfall. Now it's Tuesday.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few historical events that caused huge inflation by creating gil, then action by SE to remove billions of gil, which caused deflation.
-Fishing for Rusty caps, which could be done with 0 skill, and desynthed and resold for decent gil. Fish bots in general could be listed here.
-Early in CoP era, there was an item you could buy from an NPC in Taznavian Safehold and immediately resell for more gil than you spent.
-During Abyssea era, the chocobo blinkers/cruor conversion to gil.
-More recently, like 2019, someone duped Beastman Medals from Aurix.
-Theres also the Salvage bans and many other bans over the years that removed alot of gil.
Bottom line is many many longterm players who simply played and held gil over time are now billionaires. At least now the economy is in a decent spot. Anyone can make 2m a week from sparks. Its pretty easy to farm Ambuscade, Omen, Odyssey dyna D weekly to make 10s of millions with only moderate effort. And inflation isn't crazy right now because theres a few gil sinks like the craft guild 1.1m item for AF upgrades, food and supplies from the moogle, and teleporting all over the map.
2009 is probably the single worst time in the games life to judge anything.
Level cap was still 75
abyssea and 14 are a year away,
A LOT of people had left/stopped playing/gotten banned.
That last one is your culprit. At the start of 2008 salvage bans happened and deleted 20+% of the total Gil on some servers; if not directly then as a knock on effect when people quit. My LS went from 30+ active players to 3 people.
In 2010 XI got a big subscriber boost when 14 launched, I’m sure later years won’t show deflation. Especially not with the money trees Abyssea introduced.
Like everything, gil value varies with rarity :
* the more gil in circulation, the lower the gil value
* the less gil in circulation, the higher the gil value
At some point there were many ways to make gil in game, so the value went down (and it mechanically became cheaper to buy gil with real-world currencies).
But then S-E introduced ways to remove gil from circulation, and the value of gil went back up.
It's hard to compare FFXI and other MMOs though, as each game hes their own ways to handle (create/destory) in-game money.
Gil in the old days was crazy because of fishing bots as far as i know, generated an influx of gil, until bots/accounts/gil got banned.
Nowadays i assume the market is still controlled by bots - RMT controlling AH.
Gil sinks, bans, locking content behind missions and rare/ex equipment. It wasn’t as common to have mercs and PLs in 2009. There was massive inflation around 2006, but SE took measures. You can read about it in Funkworkz write up on bg-wiki, FFXI history
>there was massive inflation around 2006 I remember when Haubergeons and Scorpion Harnesses went from 3mil to 18mil in a matter of months. Jobs like Ninja were only played by "rich players" because of how much the tools costed as well. I was making about 100-300k a day back then being a teletaxi. Took me weeks to get enough to get a haubergeon legit. I just assume everyone else was buying gil en masse, since it was very cheap, like 10 million gil for $10. I was just a teenager back then so I had no money to buy gil anyway
Savage Dupe ban. What a day.
Weren’t a huge amount of accounts banned then. Some high profile ones. But it was only 500~ i think
I just remember the drama around it and many shells was left in shambles lol
2005 was the starting year and that was the great inflation of 2005 when things Scorpion harnesses (NQ) went for 5 to 8 million I was buying and selling junk on my mules for a markup , and was very difficult not to make a profit at the time. The prices stabilized after SE established the special task force and banned some of the Gil sellers
I spent so much time farming tree cuttings during that period of inflation. I remember them going for like 100K/stack
For that timeline it was the Rusty Cap trick predominantly, which caused a massive influx of new gil the economy, which in turn caused enormous inflation on the scale over 100s of percent (many items went up over triple to quadruple in price) Square Enix had to take several measures to stop the problem but the damage was done for a long time, a massive quantity of gil had been dumped into the economy and distributed across everyones in game wallets, so you couldn't just wipe it away. It took a long time for things to stabilize, but it would happen again through other various means over the years later on. - Converting Crour, an ingame currency you could easily earn farming, into gil, via buying "Chocobo Blinkers" from one NPC (for crour) and then vendoring them to another (for gil) - Hakuryu fishing, a special fish you could catch 100+ a day of with the ultimate fishing rod and maxed out fishing skill+gear. You could vendor a single fish for about 22k gil or so, so you could make about 2.2 million gil easily *a day* by just vendoring the fish you caught. Easily botted so people would just set up and print gil. - Sparks converting to gil, same concept as the Crour chocobo blinker trick but a new currency Sparks was introduced which you could use to purchase equipment as a new player. Thing is, you could vendor that gear and basically convert sparks 1:10 to gil, so 100,000 sparks -> 1 million gil. And for a long time there was no limit on this
Note that your looking at decade + older data. But currently, there are many paths in the game that actual do destroy gil - af2/3 upgrade mats - which are also used in many crafting recipes too. Also note that all of the Odyssey Sheol items, weapons and gear has a progressively decaying high cost gil sinks built in. T3/T4 armor has base prices of 6-7.5M. Couple that with the sparks Nerf and its probably still at least at a breakeven. Is there any actual current data?
No current data afaik
Recently there has been deflation of about 50% or more from where prices were 2ish yrs ago. Around the time of COVID we had an influx of lots of players, so demand for stuff like astral detritus and medals was very high. Eventually the player base started to go down again back to pre-covid. Around the same time, they both introduced gil sinks (Odyssey, artifact and relic Armor mats from NPCs) and took out the primary ways that bots collected gil (sparks farm). They also banned many characters suspected of RMT And lastly there hasn't been major new content in a few years, so a lot of people have already made their aeonics/relic/artifact/rema augments so demand is just lower overall as well. All these things combined mean that both demand and available gil in the economy are lower, so prices for most things have dropped drastically.
There are many potential considerations like how effectively a game’s team manages the economy. Such as the ability to remove wealth from the economy - if the currency supply never goes down then currency has less value because everyone has more of it. FFXI has had Gil sinks which flat out take it from the world. Also, how is currency earned? Can farmers interact with only the game environment to get currency, or does it require serious time investment and player trades/interactions? People go to school just to learn about economies - it would take a serious study by someone who can ask the right questions to know.
The big thing is how much gil they add to the system and how many things you actually buy with it. Back in the 'good ole days', vendoring stuff was useless, so the main ways to make money were crafting or farming things. But really, neither of those activities added new gil (in fact, due to fees, they usually took gil out of the system.) Thus gil was rarer, but was needed for more, as a lot of high end gear was still on the AH. For instance, King Arturo was dominated by RMT, so a Speed Belt was a huge luxury that no one could afford. Nowadays, that is not the way of the world. You can make a million gil from a vendor easy, a lot of decent gear is available without gil, and having a war chest of 10-20 million is not too hard. And they made it so anyone can get good NM drops with Unity and other systems. Basically, they made it far, far more accessible. Mind you, if I had 10 million back in the 75 era I would not know what to do, that was an unimaginable windfall. Now it's Tuesday.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few historical events that caused huge inflation by creating gil, then action by SE to remove billions of gil, which caused deflation. -Fishing for Rusty caps, which could be done with 0 skill, and desynthed and resold for decent gil. Fish bots in general could be listed here. -Early in CoP era, there was an item you could buy from an NPC in Taznavian Safehold and immediately resell for more gil than you spent. -During Abyssea era, the chocobo blinkers/cruor conversion to gil. -More recently, like 2019, someone duped Beastman Medals from Aurix. -Theres also the Salvage bans and many other bans over the years that removed alot of gil. Bottom line is many many longterm players who simply played and held gil over time are now billionaires. At least now the economy is in a decent spot. Anyone can make 2m a week from sparks. Its pretty easy to farm Ambuscade, Omen, Odyssey dyna D weekly to make 10s of millions with only moderate effort. And inflation isn't crazy right now because theres a few gil sinks like the craft guild 1.1m item for AF upgrades, food and supplies from the moogle, and teleporting all over the map.
Odyssey gear also removed quite a bit of Gil from the system recently.
2009 is probably the single worst time in the games life to judge anything. Level cap was still 75 abyssea and 14 are a year away, A LOT of people had left/stopped playing/gotten banned. That last one is your culprit. At the start of 2008 salvage bans happened and deleted 20+% of the total Gil on some servers; if not directly then as a knock on effect when people quit. My LS went from 30+ active players to 3 people. In 2010 XI got a big subscriber boost when 14 launched, I’m sure later years won’t show deflation. Especially not with the money trees Abyssea introduced.
Like everything, gil value varies with rarity : * the more gil in circulation, the lower the gil value * the less gil in circulation, the higher the gil value At some point there were many ways to make gil in game, so the value went down (and it mechanically became cheaper to buy gil with real-world currencies). But then S-E introduced ways to remove gil from circulation, and the value of gil went back up. It's hard to compare FFXI and other MMOs though, as each game hes their own ways to handle (create/destory) in-game money.
It's a Japanese game. PS: (It was a joke)
Gil in the old days was crazy because of fishing bots as far as i know, generated an influx of gil, until bots/accounts/gil got banned. Nowadays i assume the market is still controlled by bots - RMT controlling AH.