Escutcheons Final Stage

I think the problem is exactely like Eiryl said, almost.
When you have people who can play only 3 hours a day with a single account and people who can play 6+hrs a day with 4+ toons, of course the latter will make an insanely higher amount of gil than the former, and as such he'll be more keen to spend larger amounts of gil (driving the price of stuff up).

But this is a basic mechanism of how things work in the virtual economy of MMO game, I don't see anything special with it. Love it or Hate it, can't do much about it.


What made things even worse, much worse than this scenario I just described, are two separate factors.
1) Large amounts of gil that were generated through hacks and that never got completely (not even remotely) pruned from the economy
2) Large amounts of gil (in the grand scale) that get constantly generated with legit ways through NPC selling stuff (sparks being the main but not the only culprit here)

When you're an average player with a single account that might not seem like a big deal, because let's face it, it's not.
But when you have multiple accounts, lots of accounts, and that's all you do all day long, then it becomes a much serious problem for the community.

This creates an insane amount of inflation and the result is that price get driven up. People selling (legitemately) make more money, which will make them more keen to spend more money on stuff they have to buy, and then sell, and blah blah it's an endless circle.

Prices of HQ items, as rare as they are, should've never touched the >400 mils it's come to these days.
It happens so often we got used to it. This is not a good sign, it's a sign of what I described so far.



If you ask me I don't think SE can do anything to solve this problem. Is way beyond solution, way too late.
They can try to somehow slow it down or contain it maybe, and it's what they've been trying to do with "gilsink" (stuff you buy from NPC for relatively high price, i.e. removing gil from the market flow). One example being the new mats added from guild NPC.
Imho that's nowhere good enough, people in the past over these boards have come up with plenty of interesting gilsink options that would be really helpful to the end of removing gil from the market, but we all know it won't happen, alas.

The point of this all is that every possible solution they could come up with today in terms of gilsink will have pros and will have cons. Finding a right balance between them is not easy (check for instance the guild mats recently added)

AH system is also to blame. It shoulda been open, see who's selling at what price and endless purchase history. A handful of people ruined crafting for everyone long before this shield was on the table.

I love the blind bid system of the AH. One of my favorite things about the FFXI economy.

I agree with your point about endless purchase history, or at least more than the last 10 transactions.

so with the crazy hq rate where can we expect HQ su3 prices to fall?

If you want to be realistic about things, the amount of gil generated by 1 is at least several hundred times the total gil generated by 2 for the lifespan of the game. As for what % got banned, who knows.

Some of the really high prices isn't necessarily really directly related to inflation of chase items. SE keeps making these T0/1 crafts that use ingredients that either straight up cost millions from npc or come from content that takes enough time that you could have made millions doing basically any form of farming in that time keeping their price up.

So the base price per synth is pretty much set by SE to be really high and then with the gambling that is crafting T0/1 and the fact a lot of the nqs are kind of meh and come at losses HQs are bound to be crazy high. New HQ rates might help alleviate that but no small portion of this is due to what I assume is SEs attempt to take gil out of the economy thru crafting sinks

Nobody forced crafters to sell NQ at huge loss tho, sell them to break even and hq price should be way lower.

I needed a second vexed bonnet, 200k on ah - 1.5mil to make not counting the hexed. Everyone chased HQ because
1: mats were available
2: too much gil laying around.

This is pretty much what's happening with Su3, because the mats were so obscenely expensive.

That said, it's not always viable. There isn't enough of a playerbase to keep a continual demand for NQ pieces, especially ones that aren't removed from circulation. Once market is saturated, you're tossing NQs.

This is exactly what happened when I was crafting my hq Kenda set. The body took me approx. 75-80 to finally make hq. It was difficult to unload all those bodies, so over time I just had to either floor the price, sell for nearly nothing to ls members or npc to free up space.

Thats most of the Su3s. Too many NQs already on the AH, slow moving. Making the HQs not worth making or too expensive to make sense.

Honestly, wouldn't say the HQ patch is that big of a problem. The ratio of people who will acquire the gil one way or another to get HQ to people who will stick with NQ is much higher than the 1:45 or w.e current T0 is.

The lack of fresh players to suck up NQs makes for stupid ratios. In a healthy game, there would be a way to keep steady demand for NQ.. nobody was throwing out scorpion harnesses or haubergeons at 75.

The real problem is shields(kupo and escutcheon) creating an environment where anyone who doesn't have them can't compete. Kupo still kept it's spot on a handful of synths. Escutcheon is too high of an upfront cost to be viable for many crafters, and it is just an insult to the people who took the time to level all crafts. You're clearly not finishing 8 of them before the game dies, so they just invalidated most of your work.

Nobody did, but when there are more items on the market than the request from players you don't have many options. Selling for a portion of its mats cosy is typically still less of a loss than NPCing it.

Yea, crafting is not this huge wheel who needs to spin constatly, no demands for nq? stop crafting. Crafter choose to chase that hq, putting an absurd amount of nq on the market hurting himself and others.

We've been playing with nq gear since 2002 and clear everything, today it seems like you either full hq or you suck and don't get to do stuff.

No one is forcing players to buy nqs at price either though... and they wont when nqs are pretty mediocre. That's probably one of the best parts of the new su3 a lot of the nqs are pretty decent. That said it's difficult moving the amount you'd end up making in order to get HQ regardless of price. Forget Ah prices can't tell you how many nq abjs I've ended up either npcing or putting on the ah over the course of years trying to just get hq sets just for myself

I think for the majority of crafters it's more of a situation that they're chasing the HQ for themselves, more than to sell them on the market. Not sure if this makes any difference for you though.


I agree but... what is your point exactely?
Since when have players in this game ever chased after gear because it was "necessary" to clear content?
I could (and I did) tank all Omen and Reisen T4s with my Vagary-geared Aettir RUN if I wanted, so what? Does that mean I should ignore new and better gear because I don't need it to clear content?

Also I kinda blame it on SE and their wicked sense of balance when they made HQ so much better than NQ, and most NQ completely useless compared to other, often cheaper/easier to obtain, gear.
And I also blame it on them to make the required mats so difficult to obtain (in a failed attempt to keep old content somewhat relevant so that people can't simply ignore it exists) and I also blame it on them when they made the HQ rate so damned low.

When you think about it that feels so 2005-style FFXI in terms of punishment/frustration rate. Wonder why they've been so keen over the past 5+ years into trivialize everything in this game except professions.
(they kinda did to be fair, but nowhere cloee to the same extent)

Sechs you dont even have a craft that matters! Get outta here Galka man!

Hey I have a 110 Cloth/Fishing mule! Yo! Matters so much! (lol)

Akaitorepan is the guy with goldsmithing shield. and as you can see he is already bazaring 8 hq bodies and 11 mache earrings +1 LOL so it seens he is doing what it is suposed to do and trying to recover the gil from the money sink that stage 4 can be before someone else catches up with him hahaha (and as interwebz demands pics or did not happen here is one, sorry for lower quality but i was kinda in a hurry) also the hq rates on this seens insanely high since he buyed 8 cursed bodies and made 8 voodos

It's highly unlikely he turned 8 cursed bodies into 8 voodoo. Given it's still T0 even with full +hq rate would only expect maybe 3.5% hq rate so figure about 228 synths to make those 8 and with capped reduce break rate 45 still break something chances are at least one Cuirass bit the dust.

Also he's bought 20 Cursed Cuirass over the last couple of days according to this site. As well as several stacks of eschite ore, douma's shards and plat ingots probably to make more cursed cuirass

That said without the shield he might not have made a single voodoo out of all those

Has anyone actually got a screenshot of a string of these people's synths? The numbers being thrown around and price crashes are completely ridiculous compared to what one would expect it to do. Maybe the shield is broken and is giving more of a HQ rate than expected, or some other benefit.

Also curious where everyone is getting the 'mat reduction caps at 80%' thing, since the text from SE could just as easily have been read at 20% cap(ie: nothing stacks with shield.. you can't get anywhere near that without shield).

TLDR& Shield sucks, everyone stop making one, not worth it.

im sure dropping those bodies from 80m+ to 20m- and mache from 65m to sub 20m was because HQ rates are not high ...

Even with the sarcasm, it's not wrong lol. By the time the second one is completed market is already completely gone.

it sunk from 100m to 20m essentially over-night.... by the time you finish you're looking at 10m or 5m like it's alchemy.

If it (really) cost 4 billion to make buying the spheres, it'll take a long *** time to break even and get ahead with profits that low.

I take it you read that as trait cap's at -20%.
That could very well be the case. I understood it as 20% chance of losing items when I read it.
Will scrub that from earlier post, as the way I wrote it made it sound like I knew it as a fact.

It's not that mat reduction caps at 80% so much as "The likelihood of synthesis material loss can now be reduced to a maximum of 20% based on the type of item while factoring in bonuses from equipment, food, and other effects."

The way I read it is the most you can reduce loss rate to is 20%. Which doesn't mean you have 80% reduction rate but that you can take the approximately 50% base loss rate down to 20%. As far as getting their without shield we have no idea how much HQ crystals offer and don't think we know about moglification or ionis

Looking at his purchases, he's doing the normal synth and not the -1 one but if you think about it, if he uses the enchantment the hq rate should be:

+5 from shield enchantment, +3 from rusk, +2 from orvail and craftsman ring and +1 from the hq crystal.

This alone turns a T0 into a 1/9 synth if all these, here in ragna he'll be burning 5mill per voodoo cuirass so yea, no need to do -1s anymore with the shield but why drop the price so much when you can just drop the price from 100 or 80m to 60 or 50, maybe he wants all sells or w/e lol.

But again, if im mistaken with the calculation i did and the +chance of HQ isnt % based then i agree with the comment that maybe the shield is broken or has some hidden effect, any1 talk to this guy yet to know his input? maybe he can throw some light and numbers.

Don't think the special crystals affect HQ rate.

You can't get 1/9 from T0. There was testing on BG indicating that +1 to HQ rate != +1%.

https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/130586-CraftyMath-v2-Post-September-2017-Update

+4 to HQ rate only yielded a final rate of about 2.5% for T0. Orvail also only gives +1.

Wait did I miss something? I thought HQ crystals only gave -loss rate not +hq rate.

Regardless while we don't have numbers on full +hq rate +4 only increased HQ rate by ~.6% total unless it scales really really weird even full +10/11 is unlikely to break 4%. That's still comparatively great and the no nqs really pushes it on those but yeah no T1 rates on T0 lol