Q: What is the Economic Index on the front page?

A: Real-life stock exchanges, which track the value of individual corporations, have index numbers which represent the overall trends in the market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite, and the Nikkei Average (in Japan) are all examples of this.

The Economic Index on the front page is computed daily by taking a cross-section of approximately 30 reliable, stable, price-sensitive items that reflect overall trends in the economy, and then running a calculation to arrive at a number representing market trends. In general, if the Economic Index on a server is falling, that means the gil value of material items server-wide is also falling. Correspondingly, a rise in the economic index would indicate that the prices of items on a server are rising overall. It is interesting to note that since SquareEnix has begun mass-banning of RMT, the economic index has never posted a sustained period of positive growth.

In order to discourage artificial manipulation of the index number, we do not publish the list of which items are used in the calculation.

Q: How do you get your data?

A: While the actual data collection routine is proprietary and not public, we will state that we do not violate the Terms of Service via bots or automated in-game 3rd party utilities to collect our data.

Q: Why do some transactions not get recorded?

A: Our site can only record data so quickly. At the moment, it takes about 15-20 minutes for the site to fully process the AH records across every server. On items that have very high sale rates, it's possible that your transaction fell off the bottom of the sales history before our site got back around to record it.

Q: So is using your site a violation of the Terms of Service?

A: As we do not use 3rd party utilities to do the data collection itself, nor use automated in-game systems to harvest the data, we do not feel that we are in violation of the ToS nearly as directly as other 3rd-party FF-related utilities and sites, if at all.

The data that we harvest is publicly available to FF subscribers. Other FF-related sites which reverse-engineer game data files to harvest item information continue to enjoy close business relations and official sanction from SquareEnix, and our data collection is no more invasive or harmful.

We are always open to some sort of official communication from SquareEnix regarding this matter, but so far they have not contacted us.

Q: Can FFXIAH.com be considered a violation of user privacy? Can I opt-out of the data collection?

A: We do not view the information we collect as a violation of privacy. Every transaction that we record is listed publicly on an in-game auction house already. We are not capable of recording any data that doesn’t already appear in-game in some form.

We take the opinion of our users very seriously. After many months of careful deliberation, it was determined that many more of our users approved of the system than viewed it as a violation of their privacy.

However, for those that were uncomfortable with their characters’ transaction histories being searchable, we created a way for registered and verified users to set their displayed transaction count to zero in their ffxiah.com character settings.

Q: Do you support RMT? (Real Money Trade)

A: Absolutely not. We have no ties to RMT companies whatsoever, nor do we condone their activities.

The high volume of traffic and database load required to host ffxiah.com can be quite expensive. Originally, much of the data that is now publicly accessible on the site (including the entire crafting section) was slated to only be available via a subscription service, similar to other FF-related fan sites. Instead, we decided to ask Google AdSense to target and place ads on our site, which covers our hosting and management fees.

While we have been making efforts to move the site to other advertising networks that will allow us to avoid RMT ads, we do not have complete, direct control over which ads are placed on our site. Unfortunately, it appears that a significant portion of them are still from RMT companies. While we could ask that all RMT-related ads be blocked, our revenue would no longer be sufficient to support the site, and we would have to move to a subscription-based membership model. Our users have made it abundantly clear that they would rather have ads, even RMT ones, than have to pay a monthly fee to access parts of the site.

A more lengthy forum thread on this topic can be found here.

Q: How are the profit/loss calculations on synths done? The math doesn’t seem to make sense.

A: There has been an ongoing debate among our users for the better part of a year regarding how the profit/loss calculations on synth recipes should be calculated. There exist a number of potential figures that could be used for the price of ingredients: average, median, last sale, as well as the price difference between buying items individually versus taking the stack price and dividing by 12. We could also consider sale rate or NPC prices.

The current formula is defined as thus:

For every item in a particular synth recipe, the median price (not the average) is taken from the last 10 transactions. As computing the median on the fly is a very intensive database operation, these medians are pre-computed once per real-life day. For items that stack, the median price of an individual item is compared to the median price of a stack divided by 12, and the lower of the two is used. Each price is then multiplied by the number of items in the recipe.

Because of this cached pricing system, the profit/loss numbers for a particular synth on the crafting page may not precisely match up if compared to the prices you get by clicking on each item separately and doing the math yourself.

Q: Could you have the crafting section report ________ too? What about ________ type of feature? It would be really convenient.

A: The original goal of the synth section was to provide a rough estimate of which synths are most profitable at any given time – not to provide a one-click, “this is what you should craft” solution to making gil. The ffxiah.com development team is extremely sensitive to game balance and health, and we will not implement any feature request that we feel gives our users a significant and unfair advantage within the game itself.

We have sufficient data on characters, recipes, and prices to completely trivialize the crafting process if we so desired, by reporting precisely which synths are most profitable for a given character’s skill levels and market trends at any moment in time with a single button click. We have elected not to report the majority of this data. While this decision requires our users to go through a bit more effort to make a buck, we feel the current framework provides decent rough estimates without severely unbalancing the game’s economy.

Q: How do your relic lists get updated? How can I report a relic? Can I request that a relic record be deleted?

A: Originally, the relic section of the site was more for our own curiosity than anything. The records were automatically gathered from various FF-related fan sites, with no guarantee made for accuracy.

After awhile, ffxiah.com became one of the largest repositories of relic-owner information on the internet, and people began to ask how they could report new relics to us. We still have no system for allowing users to automatically submit relic records. Instead, relic owners can be reported through the official relic reporting thread in the forums, and we will manually add them to the database, until we can figure out a way to allow user submission of relics without the potential for abuse. A screenshot would be helpful if you can provide one. Also keep in mind that this is done on the honor system -- if we find out a relic report is fake, we will take steps to prevent you from using the site in the future.

We have recently also received a few requests from relic owners who do not wish to be listed on the site. Although we are unsure why someone would not want to be listed as a relic owner, we will honor these requests if we receive them. Again, please send such requests to any Site Admin via private message, or email ffxiah@gmail.com, and we will remove the record from our database.