Inflation And AH Bot Price Fixing....

I think your own words should be sufficient enough proof for you. Jesus.

I never said it wasn't happening, I said:



It isn't a widespread problem, it's effecting a very small subsection of the market, and it generally resolves itself pretty quickly because the only items where supply is lacking are crafting mats.

When less than 1% of the playerbase can even use crafting mats because you need a S4 shield to profit, it's not exactly a game shattering issue. You're just blowing it out of proportion.

Sparks and S4 shields themselves are far larger issues than RMT or price fixing, if you really want to get up in arms about the virtual economy.

Ok bud, way to hand pick 1 out of a few examples I posted to try and fit your argument.

lets assume thats the truth for a moment and bots/rmt always cause prices to drop. thats awesome for someone who already has a lot of gil but for someone who saved up currency those bots/rmt devalue that persons work of the past months or even years.

you'll respond to just farm sparks instead but its not very profitable outside of gain exp without bots. gain exp dictates specific times and places for optimal conditions so you'll inevitably run into competition. not to mention as a real player you get tired of doing the same thing over and over again.


a good example for obvious price fixing is hepatizon ore, always jumps between 100.000 and 1.000.000.

Hep ore/ingots aren't price fixing. They're annoying to get, and anyone who starts a new account with goldsmithing buys them to level with.

No one is buying them to hold and resell, it's just a high demand item that gets bought in cycles. And they're too cheap to bother manipulating. Price fixing is vagary mats.

Don't spent your valuable game time slaving for gil. You'll be much happier. If you're desperate for gil do ambuscade and farm alex. The price never changes and that ***sells instantly. Or, and this is crazy right, buy it. You slaving for gil might make (let's be generous) 5m in an hour. That means your time is only worth $1.50 an hour. I think you're worth more than that. Skip a coffee and buy 50m! Treat yourself.

hepatizon ore definitely is getting price fixed, not just recently but for years.

if i'll get to the point where i feel the need to pay someone else to play a game for me i'll quit for good or at least take a very long break.

if you view play time the same as work hours then you're either a RMT or you're doing it wrong.

Not defending RMT. The presence of RMT crafters means there is more supply of otherwise hard-to-find HQ products. So Thorny is correct that almost everything crafted is cheaper because of RMT/bots. However, gil buyers are complicit in creating demand for HQ products and MERC services.

Bear in mind, the tenure of FFXI and the major age range of the people who play this game. If the majority of the player-base has been around for 10-18 years, including the JP population, this places the majority of the player-base within the 30-40+ year age range. Most of us started this game in our mid-to-late teens.

What this means is many players should have graduated on to careers. Some players likely have children near the age when they started playing this game.

When we were teens, money was tight. Now that we are adults, money may still be tight but we have more resources and access to buy "feel good products."

Buying gil and playing this game casually is part of the current "convenience culture" where you can get anything delivered to you next day. Convenience culture thrives on instant feel good products. Buying gil and playing FFXI is cheaper than night clubbing and other social entertainment venues.

In FFXI, convenience culture equates to gil buyers wanting HQ items to boost their status in game. This is the equivalent of purchasing designer brand name status goods like Gucci, Prada, Cadillac or Humvee.

FFXI convenience culture also creates a market for MERC services. The purchase of shiny new HQ items does not give anyone instant skill or teamwork required to conquer the hardest endgame content to gain every other piece of sexy gear.

Time is needed to cultivate the skill, friendship and teamwork required to conquer endgame content like Tumult Curator, Wave3 Dynamis [D], and Master Trials. If you are fortunate to belong to a great team, you don't need to buy gil, bot or dupe. You can even play vanilla!

This mostly sounds like some guy that is broke/gimp as hell and mad that he isn't shiny.


Glow envy is serious business.

this comparison is imho flawed, just because gucci or prada clothes were sewed by child hands doesn't make it a game.

buying gil might be convenient but there won't be any sense of achievment. even for those that sense some sort of instant gratification when they buy gil its probably a very short-lived satisfaction and ultimately just self-deception.

What RMT is going out of their way to level a craft into levels that will be able to make popular in-demand gear, when they can just manipulate the sellable gear and mats on a level 1 character instead? Buying an account that is already leveled maybe. Either way, the first law of economics: human want is insatiable, (as in they are too greedy to lower prices because they will always want more) so they are never going to lower prices from a price point that has already proven to sell. Never. If there are RMT in direct competition with each other they may try and undercut pricing for a short period of time, but that is only if the market is oversaturated with supply, in which case they would be more likely to focus their efforts on a different mat/item anyway, leading to that surplus drying up very quickly.

But then again they weren't smart enough to keep scarcity in regards to the supply of gil in order to keep the gil/dollar price point into a more profitable region. So who knows, maybe you are right, in the interim though while they are attempting to stabilize prices to whatever desired level they want, not based on demand either (because this is not a real economy, where demand is dictated in part by the finite availability of money and resources. There isn't a mountain of any one supply that will run out eventually all resources in XI are infinite, except time, which is also quasi infinite not because of the game structure, but because of the bypass created by RMT, thus the rapid inflation), so there is no downside (such as shelf life, very low chance of obsoletion if you pick the right items, no warehouse costs etc. etc.) to hoarding up supplies to keep the prices high, (the diamond industry is about the only real world commodity that has been able to pull this off) no real player can reliably depend on this so called mass and constantly renewed supply being consistent on price or availability. The only reliability you can control on this is to gather that resource yourself for yourself. But then you are further sacrificing the one resource this game doesn't have an infinite supply of, which is time. Which continues to be further devalued across the board due to RMT, and spending more of that resource due to inflation.

Here is the deal with price fixing as it reflects to crafters. Mats creep up in price further, what ever product is made from the mats will also increase in price. So, crafters aren't the only ones hit by this, if anything they are the least affected, because all they have to do is increase prices on product to compensate. All players are impacted.

Guess what happens when the AH bots successfuly change the 'demand' price to whatever level they want, when they learn that no one is even trying to sell for less, they will knock the price up even further and start all over again. Look at the bigger picture, they will never lower prices, they will however keep bumping up the price further though as often as they can get away with it. They benefit two fold in this way, 1st being more gil per AH slot, also they will sell more gil per transaction, because the players who buy it will have no choice to need more gil to afford the new market prices (in other words they are able to manipulate an increase in the real world demand for gil, to compensate for their over saturated supply of gil).... It's pretty self evident. Not hard to predict this, unless you are an ostrich.

As far as I have gathered the price fixing has been ramping up hardcore over the last couple of months. We will see what people's tune is like in 6 months when they aren't being banned and even more of them are operating on more and more items. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Stupid? Why the need to be a douche? Oh that's right, nerds on the internet....I get it.

If you were on this server and watched the mules log in and out literally precisely in exact sequence, you'd know it wasn't possible to do that manually over and over and over. He has to be at bare minimum using some kind of script for that. If you saw the AH history and seen what others on this server have witnessed for so long, you'd know it wasn't done manually. Is it that hard to believe someone is using a script to buy/sell/monitor the AH? I know for a fact they exist, old dude in my old LS use to use an AH bot (he admitted this and explained it) that would bid on anything that sold for 1,000 gil and NPC for more.

These are just a handful of the names of his mules. Used to be able to look each name up on FFXIAH and you'd see their history was nothing but these names buying and selling from one another, but it seems he/she/it got smart and removed the purchase history viewing option on his mules from FFXIAH at some point. .

Bemberg
Leautaud
Bernald
Arbos
Delplanque
Floreange
Margarethe
Chrystallea
Clothilda
Algerina
Farelle
Ernoldus
Bambang
Claudene
Elphegine

Though nothing you said is technically wrong, the issue people who craft have with the first statement you made is, people who do not craft (especially those without a Stage 4 shield) have literally no clue how much gil we have to spend to make those +2 necks, that HQ Su3, and worst of them all, the Su5 weapons. Making one of those shields was and is the absolute most daunting task in an MMO I've ever seen. Even worse than making a relic in 2004. Making a mythic is like, killing a T2 Escha NM in comparison. And that is EVEN if you purchase every sphere, so I don't want to hear the RMTers chime in about, "well there are no vanilla made shields." That focuser process alone was excruciating and most do it manually.

MMOs shouldn't be so that everyone can easily or cheaply attain everything, that's the whole point of them. Some people try harder, become better at the game and they earn things based on this. Some people can't get into the best linkshells or groups or guilds and that's by design. Not every slag in the game should have BiS. That's the, "everyone gets a trophy" mentality.

Anyone who puts "lol' several times per every comment clearly is a douche, I don't need to really point that out. He's at the AH almost all day, though disappears from time to time, is that better? Never anywhere else, never in the field, never leaves Bastok. Are you seriously stupid enough to not think there are AH bots, or do you have one and trying to deflect the attention?

Scroll up, I'm not the only one on this server to notice this, why would you even try and act like we are making it up in our minds? That's what I mean by being a douche, and for no good reason.

Not at all just wondering why some people, such as yourself, on these forums just always have to be an a~hole for no reason. You get some kind of enjoyment out of it?

Not taking anyone's side but to answer your question, the 2 main reasons people do it are 1) they're sad and just like to get others going to fill that void in their life. Or 2) they suffer from internet tough-guy syndrome. It supplements what they lack in their life.

Many years ago, I knew a guy in real life who fit this description. He was a sad, skinny guy who lived with his parents until he was almost in his mid 30s when they kicked him out. He used to stick his upper torso out the passenger window of his friend's car and shout obscenities to people while they drove away telling the guy "come on!". He'd troll people on messenger, calling them names, telling them he'll kick their *** yet locks himself in his room.

My advice is not to be upset with these people. Show them some compassion as they lead such a sad life.

Have you met Yojimmbo? Sadly, they find it far too easy to attempt to compensate their inability to contribute with meaningful logic, rationale, or discourse by trolling/attempting to distract people. Treat them like everybody else on Asura and ignore them; they will go away.

I'm just trying to figure out what's wrong with AH prices. Few years ago you couldn't touch HQ abj pieces for under 100m. Now you can get just about every piece for under 20m

Crafting shields happened. Making -1s costs millions less because of them. Making the Voodoo/Jinxed takes way less materials because you never NQ also. This is also why Eschite Ores have doubled in price.

Cause shields make HQing less of a loss/gamble (most times).

Oh, my bad. I myself understand, I'm trying to figure out why he doesn't like AH prices.

It's just absolute stupidity. Working himself up over a problem that in no way effects him.

Have you even played this game? There is no shortage of RMT crafters, and if you believe otherwise you're beyond deluded.

Wrong. S4 shields are the only people crafting, because anyone else cannot make a profit with or without price fixing. If a mat goes high too long, they will just transfer it in from another server where it hasn't been fixed or do a different synth.

If a mat goes up in price on all servers, and the craft result goes up in price(as is the case with Ethereal Squama/Amalric atm), I'm sorry to inform you but that is simply supply and demand. It doesn't matter if the first person to start listing squamas at 2-3m was trying to price fix or not, there isn't enough supply of squamas to satiate the demand for amalric, so the price went up.

If you look at major crafted items, most have dropped, not risen, over the last month. The exceptions make logical sense(again see Amalric, Ethereal squama is incredibly slow to target farm and hasn't been in login campaign in a while). This makes theoretical sense, but it isn't actually happening because there are too many servers and transfers are too frequent.

But.. AH botting is the one thing they've been consistantly banning for since 2018 or earlier, even during the period when people considered 24/7 botting to be safe. It's never been ignored, and this Gadfather guy is likely not botting for long periods or he would've been hit.

Look, I'm not happy price fixing happens. It's annoying to go to pick up some moonbow cloths that were 300k a week ago and are now 2m despite 12 stacks being up. Dark matter should never have gotten up near 3m. But, these are items anyone can go farm at any time, and if they were not worth something near the new price they would've been rapidly farmed and the price would've crashed again when people got upset they weren't selling. This is what happened with Dark Matter, there are dozens and dozens of stacks up on most servers now and the price has dropped significantly and will likely continue to do so.

In a perfect world, SE would be able to immediately detect and identify RMT to ban them, but they don't seem able to. Something like price fixing is very subtle, you need to report these people to get them acted on. If someone spins up a mule, sets a bot to bid nonstop, and leaves it for a week.. it'll be banned. But, if they just spend a half hour a day buying and relisting their target items, it's white noise to a database. Without reports, SE cannot easily identify whether this is market forces or price fixing, especially if it's spread across multiple characters.

However, the reality of the situation is that price fixing is not funding RMT empires. It isn't destroying the average user experience. It's a blip on the radar, a tiny annoyance when a crafter goes to buy something and sees their mats are no longer available at the previously going rate. Sparks are the real problem.

RMT are making absurd amounts of gil with them, sure, but so are plain players. You have people playing 2, 3, 6, or even more characters and getting 15m per char out of NPC 3 times a week like it's their job. A dualboxer doing every gain for a year adds 4,680,000,000g to the economy from just that. Never mind that they're also getting sparks whenever they play outside gain days. A six boxer would be over 14bil. Price fixing may have some extremely minimal impact on small markets for small periods, but inflation is being caused by sparks, plain and simple.

I can see you have perfected your excuses over the years to help you sleep better at night.

That's a funny way of saying I have a valid argument. I neither farm sparks, nor price fix, btw.

It's the Russians they were sent to FFXI to destroy the economy and cause chaos.