Wednesday, April 02, 2008

A reasonable offer.

What is a reasonable offer for high-end gear? 20 million? 30 million? I think part of the problem with the upper echelons of gear in FFXI is that it is not tiered well. Even if you exclude things like rare drops from HNM's and Salvage, there are other problems and it mostly has to do with crafting and ultra-rare drops. And the problem is not so much about the rareness of the items, but of the difficulty in pricing those rare items. I often hear the phrase "Pay what you think it is worth" but ultimately worth is a relative term. It is based upon the wealth of the consumer, the wealth of the provider, current supply, current worth of the currency, and a myriad of other factors. Ultimately for the most intelligent of consumers, the price of a rare item needs to be 1 more gil then the next highest bidder on an item. It will never work out exactly this way, but you can get close to it if you have the correct pricing queues. The problem is that those queues are often absent without a price history. Another problem is that the crafting rate for HQ Tier 0 items is something like 1%, which isn't bad in and of itself but it is when you consider that for Tier 1 items it is like 10%. That is a huge difference between HQ rates making Tier 0 items ultra-rare and Tier 1 items relatively common. And because of the rarity it makes pricing difficult again. It also probably puts some of this HQ gear out of the grips of those that didn't already build a huge gil reserve before the deflation that occurred last year.

Well, thats my excuse. LOL

Anyway, I want to level some more tonight. I got another merit last night and recapped SAM xp, but it wasn't that long and it was pretty much a late night thing. Tonight is more farming with Izman or more XP with Izman, or leveling BRD or BLM. Haven't completely decided but I know that it will be fun. I just wish Omoi was back, everything I do feels so disorganized without her, but it looks like she will be gone another 10 days. orz

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

D= You sure do talk about Izzy a lot...

And the price thing drives me crazy too...I had a crafter who had Dusk Gloves +1 for sale tell me..."You'll prolly save money just leveling Leathercrafting and making them yourself."

He wanted 20M. Bleh.

JESS said...

" A reasonable offer that I can not refuse on the day of my daughters wedding"

~GodFather



ok I'm off a bit ;P

Anonymous said...

Keep in mind, some of those T0 items are also 100K+ loss PER SYNTH. If you look at something like Cursed Mitts on Odin and see what that crafter is losing per synth, the pricing of some of those hqs is a freaking steal. 100 synths theoretically for 1 hq (and let's pretend that there aren't any breaks. For some of those other synths like your dusk gloves you need to realize that there are 2 synths there with a B. hide involved, which gives 2 opportunities to smash and lose the item). Anyway, 100 synths, 100k loss and you're looking at a 10m cost to the crafter. Factor in desirability of the item, rareness, and the time, effort, and money that crafter invested to do something you can't and you end up with expensive items.

Just as Ring is willing to pay 1g more than the last person, the crafter is looking for some schmuck who will pay 1g more than you.