Changes to Items and Money for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

[Raistlin]

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Today, Square-Enix published an announcement on The Lodestone detailing some changes to items and money in A Realm Reborn. Here are some highlights:

As we covered previously, FFXIV 2.0 will reduce all players’ gil and all NPC item costs to 1/10 of its current value. This is being done because some cheap consumable items, such as arrows, will be removed. The new announcement clarifies that this is only a general guideline, and rebalancing issues may result in some deviations in this formula for specific items and services. Additionally, we reported in the last Letter from the Producer III, total inventory slots will be reduced to the original 100. However, any items a player has in excess of the new 100 slot limit will not be lost. Instead, the items will be given to a special NPC, and the player can speak to it in order to regain the items at his convenience.

Player-operated bazaars will also be closing, and all items and gil will be put in the player’s inventory. Because the current cap for crystals in the inventory, 9,999, will not be changed, any crystals a player will have in excess of that cap will be automatically converted into gil. Players can still transfer any excess crystals to a retainer in order to keep them.

The following items will be removed from the game: Guild Marks, Guild Treatises, and Key Items. Players should exchange all Guild Marks before November 1, 2012. And while key items will be removed, a player’s special ability or content as a result of the key item will not be removed. The announcement gives the example that chocobo whistles will be removed, but players currently in possession of them will still be able to summon their chocobos. Key items that will be removed and their abilities rendered obsolete (such as aetherpasses) will result in an eminent-domain-style just compensation to the player in the form of a payment of gil.

The following items will be converted into gil:
• Ammunition
• Throwing weapons (consumable, I assume)
• Fisher’s secondary tools
• Fishing Tackle
• Lures
• Other obsolete items
Additionally, consumable throwing weapons will be replaced by non-consumable versions.

Other items will be become unobtainable, such as dated/weathered gear, items gained through seasonal events, and rewards for achievements that will be defunct in ARR. Additionally, dated and weathered gear will be untradeable.

People have been praising the removal of arrows/ammunition from Final Fantasy XIV, even while decrying the lowered gil. Overall it seems like a good move and will allow newer players to more easily choose ranged classes. Allowing veteran players to keep the special abilities and content from removed items seems like an attempt to appease older players, but it seems like it could create an imbalance in the future. What do you think? Discuss this and any other parts of the new announcement in the comments.

[Jiro]

The economy will be a little bit confusing for everyone at first, but I think they'll figure it out soon enough! Interesting that they would drop the prices by so much though, I wouldn't have thought consumables like that would have caused that sort of a dramatic change on the market. Guess we can learn plenty about economics from FF!

[Ouch!]

The explanation for why everything was so expensive was that they wanted to maintain a 1,000:1 price ratio between a standard sword at any given level and an arrow of the same level. Consequently, this meant if they wanted a low level sword to cost 200 gil, arrows of the same level would need to cost 0.2 gil. So instead they multiplied everything's value by ten so that the sword cost 2,000 so that individual arrows could cost 2. Perhaps the smarter solution would have been to have NPCs sell quivers of arrows at a cost of 20 gil each, and then each quiver had 99 arrows in it. But no, that would have made too much sense.

Not that I'm complaining about no longer needing to buy arrows. Just like pointing out obvious design flaws.