Brand spanking new player arrives in Sandy. Mr. Warrior, becasue he wants to hack and slash stuff, has the grand total of 60 gil to his name. A semi-shiney set of armor and an sword to go and kill with.
Well Mr. War, for short, know from playing other games that his sword isn't all that great, low damage. So he goes to find a better one. He checks the AH and some bazzars and the NPC's, but sadly he can't afford them with his 60gil. So he goes out to hunt some rabbits to level his skill up and in the process aquire, well lets be generous here, 1 stack of rabbit hides and some earth crystals, maybe a stack of those as well. We will assume that someone mentioned to him the benefit of signet.
Let's also assume that Mr. War also knows that he can get more gil by selling his stuff at the AH, than he can by selling them to NPC's. He promptly goes to the AH and puts up his goods for sale and goes out to kill more rabbits. I do belive that 60 gil will cover the listing fees for these 2 items. Now while Mr. War is waiting for his crystals and hides to sell, along with ~70+ more people, depending on when he listed them. He levels up to level 7.
In the mean time, his stuff has not sold yet, he needs new armor and a new weapon. He could really use some food at this point to, but with his income rate food is a luxury. Now seeing that he has had some other online gaming experience, he knows that he can go someplace and just buy thegil he needs. Well he does so and he gets the new gear he needs and continues on leveling. Now that was soo easy for him to do, he spent a little bit of money to get what at his level is a huge amount of money in game. He is set for a while. So he goes out leveling his jobs, doesn't pay much attention to any other ways of making gil in game, why should he. He can just spend a few hours of his RL job pay to get rich quick.
Now the above I know about, I recently needed rabbit hides to work leather crafting. So I took a level 1 job and killed nothing but rabbits to level off. The drop rate on the hides was pathetic, this is in comparison to when I first started the game on my main.
Well SE doesn't like what he is doing, well not him specifically, but all those that do it. So they have a plan to put an end to it. They will make the drop rates worse on all the MOB's, so the gilsellers will get frustrated when they don't get the drops and move on. 100% WRONG... The gilsellers now work even harder to control mob's that spawn high level drops. They work harder, via botting, and other hacks that give them the advantage in claiming certain mobs' They camp normal mobs that have decent drop's and jack the prices up. This leads to Mr. War and others continuing to buy gil online to keep their gear current.
This jacks the prices up on items that are used in synthing. It takes much longer to farm lowend mobs for drops to make any type of decent earnings. The only way to get the economy back to normal, if it can be done at this point. Is for SE to realize what the problem is, and honestly I don't think they do.
Last night I had a converstaion with a GM about a minor problem, which led me to "ranting" to him regarding this. Basically his repsonse was "The players set the priceing". Yes I know this, but trying to explain to him what I have posted here I get the response. "This is not the forum for this, please submit it to comments and suggestions via POL".
So I did submit it to them, for the second time. If people want to see things change for the better in the economy I think that we all need to send SE messages like the above, pointing out that the economy and game is getting worse and worse because of the gilsellers.
If anything, it might just make you feel a bit less frustrated and less liekly to toss in the towel and quit. I was really pissed off at what had happend last night and the responses that I and 2 other's in my party got from the GM's.
/end rant