RIP SPARKS!!!

You mean somehow keep infinite onion swords and cardian cards on the ah for 1g. forever. lol?

First... that's just silly. There are a million items, you could never do it for all of them.

And that's not how gil is sold, that's how gil is stored.

why could you not? i don't mean creat accounts with 7 slots item limit. simply restock server sided when ever a items stock drops to 0 so RMT always risk to lose their gil trying the transaction. would also help with inflation as it would whipe gil from the server if RMT are stupid enough to keep trying their luck.

What item do you do it with? Any that you don't, will be used. You can't do them all.

Put up infinite onion swords, they'll use iron swords. Put up infinite iron swords, they'll use steel swords. Put up infinite steel swords they'll use cermet swords.

they can’t stop RMT as long as a demand exists.

Could SE be a limit on a single account? not just a character

The only way they could kill RMT entirely is by selling gil and popular items themselves at prices so low that sub costs exceed farming potential. Anything else is just an arms race and a constant drain on the dev team's time. So long as it's profitable, RMT will always find a way.

A weekly sparks cap really doesn't seem like an anti-RMT measure. As others have pointed out, there are better ways to impact RMT without hindering players. This seems more like they're trying to balance weekly income disparity between recent returnees and the BiS crowd by nerfing gain xp cleaves.

all of the low priced items, maybe even every item. everything thats attractive to distribute gil. make the server calculate a average of each item (filtering the odd XXX mil sells first) and set the item the server provides significantly higher than the average so it doesn't compete with regular players trying to sell their stuff but low enough it becomes unattractive or at least very tedious for RMT to distribute gil and obvious to detect.

POL isnt part of the equation once you've logged on.

This isn't about stopping RMT in general, it's about stopping the rapid and uncontrollable gil inflation that is caused by spark and accolade conversion.

People have been commenting on this since spark and accolade conversions first came into existence but I don't have an indexed forum history saved so Ill just provide an example post from last month which explains the issue and predicts the fix that is now being implemented: https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/54830/what-will-be-ffxis-stone-of-jordan#3512635

I'll also repeat what multiple other people have already said in this thread: botting alexandrite, HMP, etc. is not the same as botting sparks, blinkers, and Hakuryu.

When you bot the latter, you're basically introducing gil out of thin air, which in turn causes currency inflation. Currency inflation typically causes every sellable item to increase in price as the availability of the currency increases while the availability of the sellable items stays the same.

When you bot the former (alexandrite, HMP, etc), then you are still generating resources out of thin air, but that effect does not extend to *every* sellable item in existence. Instead, it typically only dictates a price wall that non-botters will have to compete with in order to continue investing their time into farming that resource manually. Botting these resources will also typically increase overall availability which can be viewed as a positive or negative depending upon your viewpoint, in any case it's definitely not as globally damaging as sparks and blinkers were.

Kudos to SE for "getting it" for once.

Thats cool and all but


No, they didnt "get it". In fact, they've contributed to this multiple times since its inception.
BGWiki's sparks page was updated on January 25/26 2015 to add Acheron shields, and similarly on FFXIclopedia on January 24. So over a year after Sparks have existed, SE made it easier to convert Sparks into gil by replacing the 1625 spark Bahadur with a 2755 spark Acheron Shield.

Additionally, there were the recent prize powder changes. Maybe that was inadvertent with the other changing of stacks to 99, but they had to have been aware of people using Sparks/Accolades in this way over the last 6 years.

They even raised the caps and the gain rates, they knew full well what was going on. Typical SE fashion though they let it grow wildly out of control.

They even stopped every mob created around that time in the game from dropping gil when killed, possibly because of sparks.

Fair enough, when I said kudos for "getting it", I meant in terms of the eventual implemented fix, rather than doing something like trying to ban all of the botters or other ridiculous *** that doesn't solve the root cause of the issue.

At every point throughout the decision making process on their end, they're also considering subscription income against player sentiment. Just because it was obvious to us that the situation was bad doesn't mean that it was a bad business decision for them to ignore it. I think that what we're seeing now is that inflation and player sentiment has reached a point where its more profitable to ban the multitude of subscriptions that they receive from spark botters than it is to risk alienating their core consumer base.

Anyone who agrees with this what do you gain by losing the ability to make less money?

State your claim again, but this time use your words.

There's no other way to reasonably create gil in the game.

I forgot they raised the caps from 50k to 99999 lol

Thing is, after 6 1/2 years, after some players have acquired capped gil on their mules from this...its a bit too late to just up and remove it.

Inflation isn't necessarily bad in FFXI. It devalues existing hoards (the Gil rmt are sitting on) and encourages people to spend because their Gil is worth the most it will ever be worth at every point in time. This is particularly true in ffxi where there is no potentially disastrous consequence of going broke (like not having enough money to survive after you can no longer work.)

That said, farming sparks wasn't fun. SE should be trying to make the events we do in game fun. Let me NPC Lustreless scales for 100k each and I am happy because we have some inflation and Odyssey is pretty fun.

The economic impact of this should be that people hold back on purchases a bit. Ironically, given SE's stated logic, this will actually increase the value of RMT capped gil characters.

The difficult in generating an in-game currency is exactly what determines its inherent value. If the only way that you (personally) could generate gil is by running through the rank 1-10 missions then it would be totally unreasonable to do so in the face of other people generating 20 million a day while botting 500 damage spark goals. But if everyone has the same barrier to entry in terms of creating gil, and it's not something that you can bot efficiently, then it ends up being worth the amount of manual time and effort that you put in, which is exactly what you want it to be.

Inflation is health to a degree, see the Zimbabwe trillion dollar bill as an example of inflation that you wouldn't want to experience.

Inflation really sucks for those who save up their gil. A little inflation is expected, though.

Right, and this is probably what Byrth was getting at, a lack of any type of inflation will generally cause people to horde their currency/wealth and slow an economy down as there's less reason to purchase goods now when they can purchase more goods down the line for the same amount of money that they have now.

Preventing that scenario is why *some* inflation is good. But what we have now isn't *some* inflation, it's a *** insane amount of inflation that prevents people from ever wanting to store gil for even the shortest periods of time because it becomes devalued so quickly.

Really glad that you posted this because it's a perfect example of why rapid inflation is bad for an economy. If you would hoard a necessary resource because you predict that it will significantly increase in value compared to the amount of currency that you would receive for it now then you're going to *** everything up in the same way that you would by hoarding the currency.

Well, you shouldnt save, you should invest actually. When i say invest, im not saying to try high risk investments but every country should have pretty safe investment options that at minimum cover any inflation.

Just tossing cash under the bed is worst option despite having inflation or no, because youre wasting your money potential.

Also, hyper inflation thats the abnormal inflation, is mostly an assuran thing, either by holding loads of players, either by holding the most players that buy gil, either by sucking other servers resources by people jumping servers to buy Su5 and orher expensive junk.

The other servers slowly follow assuran, but the reality is the we just end having an empty market and not inflated AH.

This does spark a very intriguing conversation, at least in my mind its intriguing :)

MMO environments are by design a toy version of our real world, but experience over time has shown that they have to base some of it on things that have worked in the real world. They can't just pull a universe out of their ***.

Real economies, as Bryth stated indirectly, have to give some concrete value to their currencies. That's why originally we had things like the Gold Standard, Pounds Sterling, and other commodities directly tied to different currencies to establish their base value.

Over time, some governments have moved away from attaching a concrete good to their currency, falling back on terms like "Full Faith and Credit". While risky, there still is something behind that currency.

In an MMO, the only thing I can see that gives value to currency ARE the RMT. They indirectly attach a real-world dollar value to in-game currency, and that through a 3rd step results in a gil:hour ratio because gilbuyers compare the gil they can buy with real money to their wages/salary...all of a sudden if gil is $20/million and someone made $10/hour, they look at gil as valued at 500k/hour. If they can farm gil faster than 500k/hour, they can make gil faster in game than they could buy it with real-world work. That gives it value, albeit in a twisted sense.

Over time, big-ticket items in game are actually more valued in terms of USD than Vana'diellian gil- that's why the gil price in game changes of an item when the dollar per million value changes on their website. In a way, the gilbuyers are looking at that Crocea Mors as work hours at their job not farming in game- the prices they pay for that gil might change, but the things they buy in game change in proportion to that gil:dollar amount.

So again, this is why I'm so curious to know what the game Devs would actually consider a "healthy" economy in game. Because if an MMO were truly isolated from RMT, how game currency would develop value would be so easy- established NPC prices for meds and base armor would lead to a scaling system over time that forced crafters to comply with established price points.

Since we can never experience such an environment, its better to just know how to play within existing variables. But as a thought experiment, boy does it make me curious.

There were bots on Asura for sure but the majority of the spark/accolade bots operate outside of Asura due to the lack of competition and attempted retaliation on the less 'aware' servers. The number of bots on Asura is probably miniscule compared to the global scale of spark botting. Asura just happens to be the server where everyone brings their gil back to sell.

hehe its the Nike factories in China selling back in the USA.