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Even if you don't have a 110 craft or can't merc, Gil making today is still a lot more diverse than it was say 8 years ago. The most prominent one is spamming VW and hoarding drops until campaigns are over. Even a 117 sparks NQ player can make a decent amount of Gil by repeatedly farming Alexandrites or Gobbie keys. Everytime you visit a sparks NPC, that's also a free mil right there. This also doesn't include the free gil made just participating in Ambuscade.

If anything Gil is more accessible today than its ever been, except it requires mule accounts to really notice how fast it adds up.

Exactly. Mercing has become a thing because it's a lot easier to make gil these days.

To be fair mercing has been a thing since Valkurm Emperor and Black Belt. BB items were a very common seller in my old JP HNMLS. I'm guessing the majority that are around today weren't around during the 2005/6 inflation.

{Teleport-Holla} {Can I have it?} {Reward:} 100k

A WHM tele-taxi was very profitable back then. Power-leveling was 1m per hour... etc.

25m for a scorp harness!

Yeah, I meant it has become so incredibly common now. It always existed.

It might be on a per server basis, mercing is pretty dead on Bismarck. It died more or less around the time when Vagary was introduced. Any start up group could make a killing right now, as I had received several tells asking for mercs but as an LS we just didn't do that anymore. I'm talking about very simple things like V.mail.

I've made over a billion gil mercing things in less than a year, and I don't even go as complex as V. mail, lol. Mostly Ru'aun t2's, Reisen t1's, etc.

That's not diverse tho. EVERYONE does some form of
-Merc
-Craft high tier HQs
-Farm currency
-Delve, vagary, ambuscade
-Sparks
-Wait for VW, HTB, WKR, skirmish etc. campaigns

That's pretty much it. As I said in my original post, making gil nowadays is easy, yes. But 8 years ago you probably could of had a 100+ page thread full of various ways people made gil, from crafting, to camping NMs, to farming materials.

People merc because they can and because it's one of the best gil making methods left.

Please make me this 100 page thread that I cannot break down into essentially the exact thing you just dismissed as not being diverse.

8 years ago the game's economy was in a state of deflation. Your options for making good gil were very limited, especially if you were just trying to get off the ground.

Idk I did pretty well for myself camping NMs, selling alchemy meds, fishing, farming higher level scrolls etc! One of the richest guys I knew made his fortune farming Tree Cuttings, another crafting Ram Leather, another from gardening + crafting ele staves.


If everyone's doing the same things, it's not diverse. There's not as many varied options to make gil as there used to be. All I'm saying is that even though gil is easy to make there's only really a handful of methods left to make it, mercing being one of them. Which is partly why so many people do it.... idk, not that deep yo.

I'm not asking for deep, I'm asking you to go into the details you claim you can make about how making gil was "diverse" back in the day that somehow isn't diverse now. All the same things exist now as then, except there's also sparks now. So I don't see your argument whatsoever.

We'll some gil methods did go extinct. To name a few:

NM drops. Leaping Lizzy, Emperor, Mee deggi, Argus, Lord of Ozonzo, archer ring slime, juggernaut axe, etc. One drop made you a ton of money but it was RNG and heavily camped, especially by RMT. Died with making most gear rare ex

Gardening. Every two weeks, farming elemental ores, gardeners made a ***ton of money.

Strange apparatus. Cermet chunks and arcane flowerpots were decent money but it was also RNG.

Crafting mat farm. This is still around but not nearly as much as it used to and no longer viable as a main source of income. By this I mean farming silk threads, tree cuttings, spider webs, etc etc.

Mining, Harvesting, etc. Used to make really good money but now most mats are obtained via drops/random treasure pools

Chocobo digging, same as elemental ores

Different AH systems = buy cheap in one area and sell for more in others.

Quest gil farming. Was never really that great but I remember them bubbly bernie lines lol...

Shihei tools crafting - died with curio moogle

Ammo crafting - used to be a really good money maker. Died with curio moogle/RMEA bullets/Delve bullets

Garrison

BCNM 20/40/60 / KSNM 99/ KSNM 30, in fact, most BCNMs are crap drops now(although utsu is making a comeback)...

Casinos - player ran but knew some people who made some good money with this.

You're reaching with quite a few of those. Different AH systems? With 7 slots on the AH and relisting fees I don't think too many people seriously did that. Reminds me of one of my early days of gilmaking of buying pickaxes with max fame and selling them for a mark up near the Zeruhn Mines. Sure, it was money, but it wasn't meaningful, lol.

Quest gil farming? What? This is still in the game and still just as silly an idea as before.

Ammo crafting died well before SoA, because ammo using jobs died. Silver bullets funded a significant portion of my Mandau, and that got crushed with the RNG nerf that hit alone. And that was over 8 years ago.

Garrison was never anyones significant source of income.

And in place of some of those other things we now have:

Everyday mercing, instead of limited to just those in the top HNMLS, people can merc much more easily.

Skirmish stone farming.

Vagary mat farming.

Sparks farming.

Unity farming.

Mog Garden.

Solo salvage/Dynamis.

WKR/Voidwatch campaigns

PL services.

I mean a chunk of what you said is "diverse" has died out because it's simply not that efficient, and never was, but we sure love to talk about how "awesome" tedious farming was back in the day.

Just naming them, not saying it's awesome lol. I personally used a lot of these methods back in the day, including quest farming, gardening, etc, since other means weren't accessible, especially if you had no 75s and were leveling your first job.

But times have changed and no one has the amount of time to just sit behind the computer to grind in game currency, especially while working a 9-5. I can't remember the last time I actually farmed for gil lol It just comes to me whether it's a campaign, drop, or login freebies. But it's nice to know that if I ever wanted to or go flat broke there are means to grind gil quickly

The diversity isn't in the variety of things a player can do to make gil, its in the way that any job can go out and spend time doing xxxx event solo and will still come out making profit.

Salvage at 75 wasn't done solo it was done with statics so that wasn't a source of income the way it is today. Same thing with Dynamis, only Linkshell banks had the real cash since that was an alliance event.

Solo farming would fit more into niche jobs like THF, either farming tree cuttings or gold orc masks to turn into ingots. When is the last time anyone "had" to go as THF to anything? If farming for treasure wasn't your thing, you fished for days on end. If you didn't like fishing you crafted or any one of the various things we all remember doing for cash. Last option was to just sit in mog whining that you didn't have anything to do much like players do today.

Literally any job can make money today just as well as the next. It's not like anyone has to go thru RDM/NIN 2-4HR+ style efforts soloing gods to make those millions. The time to effort ratio has definitely balanced out.

Farming tree cuttings in Zi'Tah competing with RMT for claiming Goobbuus isn't something I'd even wish on my own worst enemy. I remember leveling THF simply so I could farm beastmen blood and those tree cuttings for gil on my own.

And yeah now a days you can make/join a HTBF shout for gil on basically any job, or solo some of them on your own. So many easier, better ways to make gil these days compared to the old days in FFXI.

I think it's worth considering how much gil you actually made farming tree cuttings or whatever old method of farming you used to do. The prices of things are a bit different now, but getting 40k/hour or whatever while trying to save 100m+ for a relic weapon isn't my idea of a good time.

I used to sit and craft 100s of reraise hairpins all day long the profit was amazing lol very high demand item

Yes it's much easier and more accessible, and it shows.
Not many people willing to spend 300+ m on a single item those days ^^
It's a clear sign of how much gil is in circulation (granted that the easiness of farming it isn't the ONLY factor at play here, but it's clearly a very important one)

This is exactly what I was getting at. Gil/hr on most common methods was terrible relative to prices at the time, and intake from many of those methods were depreciated by intense competition from players and RMT alike. Other methods (fishing) only counted as a half-decent means of income because you could literally do them in your sleep. Many players still opted for the various things mentioned thus far because they couldn't or wouldn't get into any of the better options of the time, but that doesn't make it good gil. It was the equivalent of working a dead-end minimum wage job, while nowadays we have what basically equates to universal basic income (passive income through sparks etc). If one does wish to earn further gil now then there are a handful of reasonably viable and accessible options, even if your gear isn't very good and/or you lack other players/alt(s) to work with. Better equipped players can also make reasonable use of these same methods because they tend to scale to some degree, as opposed to the more constrained ceiling on gil/hr for past methods.

I remember starting out when the game was new, I'd farm wind elementals in Tahrongi Canyon, sub thf for steal on Mandies for Saruta Cotton, and kill bees and goblins for honey, beehive chips, insect wings, and goblin armors/helms and I forget if they dropped wild onions too. If I consulted the weatherman and planned it I could make 20k an hour. I remember I told a friend in college that was how much I made and he called me a liar. As much nostalgia as it brings back, the grindiness of repetitive tasks without much options for what to do, this artificial game length... I don't miss it and it's one reason I quit so long. Farming for 4 hours to afford 2 hours worth of arrows and shihei for leveling up ranger was not fun at all but what it ended up being once I got to the demon arrow stage which back then were about 100k a stack iirc. I even leveled woodworking to 69 but couldn't get those last few skill levels to make my own demon arrows, not to mention arrowhead supply was often privately traded rather than on the AH so you had to have good friends. I remembered making stacks and stacks and stacks of holy, acid and bloody bolts... if I could get the mats. Then take a week to sell them all. It was really hard to make gil back then unless you were in a LS where you could easily make gil. I remember I came back and you could sell things you bought with cruor and people were saying it broke the game etc. It did vs what it was before but it was the only time I'd seen that much gil.

Long story short, I don't really yearn for the gil farming of yesteryear it was tedious and grindtastic and if you were on a job that took money to level you'd spend 2x as long grinding gil as leveling after a point. I knew a few filthy rich crafters but. Ya. There wasn't much middle class in old FFXI. There were a few extremely rich and the rest of us were peasants farming mats neck and neck with RMT. Content poor games, like newer MMOs don't really have any choice but to make the content they have take forever. I'm glad FFXI is beyond that to a large degree.

I tried leveling Woodworking when I started in 2007 and at a certain point, the mats became too obscenely expensive.

I don't know if it was deliberate market control or farmers realizing "these crafters will pay anything for mats (and pass the buck on)" but there was a certain point where it just became absurd to go farm for an hour to afford a mat that might give you a chance at a skillup.

I was one of the peasants, the paydays came when quests came out with new scrolls.

That was the two other sources of income for the super rich, embezzling from the guild bank (lol) or flat out stealing it and really it was craptastic but you almost couldn't blame them.

Another source of income was people that would regularly roll mules and farm up the reputation for things like the first three Teleports, Recalls later, Sleepga II and even Ni. I would suppose that these people had a dualbox--something that was pretty uncommon.

Dev Post on the OF

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/51851-To-the-devs-Why-won-t-you-nerf-Geomancer?p=590414#post590414


Interesting...

What stuff do you guys think should be considered from the above? Atm I'm a little tired to think of anything to list for example

It probably means little for enhancing magics.
Only thing I can think of that's "in need" of a boost is Stoneskin... but I wouldn't actually call that a real need.
(Outside of Avatar buffs being..... <75....)

The real thing to look forward to would be the enfeebles. Actually make RDM more than just a shitty BLU.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if they just were looking at making skill more important and capping at a higher mark than the 600 that it is now or w/e it is.

Perhaps a pipe dream but scaling enhancing spells that aren't currently affected by skill would be nice.

As for enfeebling, they could do a number of things. Making enfeebling more potent through higher procs and more devastating effects would be really nice. Things like bumping dia III up to be more comparable to frailty + Dunna, adjusting the values on distract/frazzle/addle, or adjusting how often paralyze procs.

Maybe they are also thinking of making enfeebles a little easier to land.

It's good to see they are finally looking at enfeebling magic, though. It's interesting that they also gave a response in a thread titled "To the devs: Why won't you nerf Geomancer?".

My wish list for RDM enfeebling that will never happen:

Dia III and Bio III are 25% defense down and attack down, respectively.
Slow II now increases the amount of time that mobs need to spend readying TP moves.
Paralyze II now has a chance of interrupting TP moves like they do spells.
Blind II now has a flat raw hit rate subtraction part of the enfeeble in addition to the accuracy down (so, even if a mob has capped accuracy even with the accuracy down, they'll now have say, an 85% hit rate instead of 95%).
Addle stays like it is, but RDMs get Addle II, which in addition to MACC-/Cast time+, gives a low chance of the mob's magic accuracy being floored for that cast/TP move.
Add a new enfeeble that gives MDB-.

Finally, make it so that Saboteur is no longer nerfed against NMs.

On Enhancing and Haste

I see no reason why RDM should be able to spell-haste cap a player. Haste isn't the treat that it once was. Between GEO, SMN, BRD, and BLU, there are several ways to increase attack speed (or DPS rate from cor rolls). This wouldn't make RDM vital in setups but it would make them quite useful.

I would like this value to be flat or cap easily attainable. God it would suck trying to work with unreliable haste values.

To me, that's balance. When jobs have flavor, and sometimes great utility but not "we need this exact job every fight" utility as several of the core jobs are at.

I really like Geriond's Blind and Addle ideas. I would go so far as to say that the spells should cap at -25% acc (even mulplicative. If something has a 505 hit rate on me, Blind II could push it to 37.5%).

Frazzle / Distract III are already super powerful, Idris level powerful. Addle II is next in how awesome it is followed by Slow / Paralyze II. Dia III does need some improvement though. Magic Haste needs some scaling effect, probably through gear.

The real issue is NMs self erasing and thus making Sab debuffs useless. That and Frazzle III being dark based and too many things resisting dark magic.

Fix Monks weapon skills please. No use in giving us all this gear if the weaponskills are ***.