This topic contains 133 replies, has 15 voices, and was last updated by 
Gray 4 years, 9 months ago.
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Well, if Carl hasn’t answered your questions, I don’t know, who else could.
Actually, you guys have answered LOTS of my questions (and I’m certainly grateful to you); just… you know the way it goes: answers produce more questions. The most important question, IMHO, is related to gathering-crafting balance. Let me bring an example from EVE Online…
Say, there is demand for 1000 guns on market, which cost a billion isk (EVE currency) together. Production requires 4 stages:
1) Raw materials (minerals) are needed. Mining is an extremely boring and low profit activity (which is why people often mine with bots), but minerals cost is about 70% of total final product cost. I.e. miner is one who receives 700 mil profit by selling his haul to manufacturers; though, it takes him some 20 hours of playtime to produce that much.
2) Newbie crafter buys minerals and crafts basic components (say, some screws, plates and alike simple details). It requires next to no skills (Industry I is enough); it takes some half a hour to buy minerals, transfer them to manufacturing plant, install production, go offline and wait (wait time not included), then bring products back to trade station and sell them for, say, 750mil, having 50 mil of profit.
3) Average crafter comes and does almost the same, just he buys basic components and crafts more complicated parts like circuitry and mechanic blocks. This activity requires more skill training (say, Industry V) and lets him sell him product at 850 mil, having 100 mil of profit per half a hour.
4) Finally, professional manufacturer buys it and produces actual guns. It requires crapload of skills (say, Industry V + Science V + Electronics V + Engineering V), but then again he receices 150 mil of profit per the same time.Now take into account that average profit of an experienced pilot (mission runner, pirate hunter, anomaly scanner and so forth) usually stays at 100 mil/hour level (well, real numbers might be outdated as I haven’t played for about 3.5 years, but you get the point). So, basically, almost ANY crafting brings more profit per given time than any grinding, but… you just can’t do it 24/7! Not enough demand, not enough manufacturing plants, not enough everything… oh, and undercuts, too. This is why it goes the way it goes: real players “craft” for some 1-2 hours a day, having great profit per hour (but not that great total income per RL day, because they mostly wait offline / participate in other activities); bots grind, having rather low per-hour profit, but then again they can do it 24/7 (rotating accounts). It is logical and it is even fair, IMHO.
Of course, there are greedy (/stupid) players who follow [newbie] rule: “I should do the whole chain all by myself, to never buy anything!” They think they maximize their profits this way, lol. In reality, though, they just waste playtime doing things far below their potential level. I mean, for real, why would sane experienced crafter mine for 35 mil/hour if he can craft for 300 mil/hour?? The “minerals did not cost me anything because I’ve mined them myself” argument is but utter bulls**t, because they goddamn had cost measured in RL HOURS!
Soo… now I want to ask: can somebody tell me why shouldn’t this logic be applied to any game which has free market and [more or less] low market transaction tax?
First, there is a limit to how much you can sell. In this game, you sell via retainers. Each retainer can have 20 listings for sale. I believe you can have up to 8-9 retainers, but any after the first two cost real money.
Yea, sounds logical. Still, is it possible to perform bulk sales here in FFXIV? Say, can I gather some 100,000 fire shards and put them on market as a single listing?
On a high demand day, a single fire shard might sell for 300 gil. On a low demand day with people aggressively undercutting, it might drop to 30 gil each. Once it drops that low, it would take at least a week to recover assuming people simply stopped listing.
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In the example I gave with the shards, once I enter the market, it only takes a day or two for the value to tank so much that it is no longer worth my time.Then this is just a wrong target item in terms of professional grind 🙂 I mean, heck, there is about million (?) of players in this game. How can single player (you) enter the market and corner price of some item? It has to be a really really low-demand item, I’d say.
In order to make good gil – you’ll need to reliably identify items of high demand and low supply – and hope another botter does not start an undercutting war.
I’d say “high demand” is enough… in case of populated server, I mean. Heck, I was farming the same single item in EVE with 16 accounts, 12 hours a day each (basically, 8 windows 24/7), for weeks if not months… until finally its original price dropped by 20% or so. Then usually banwave comes, I lose my farm, it takes me some 3-4 weeks to restore it; during that time prices jump back to original state, and cycle repeats from begin. That’s what I call “an item of high demand, a REAL grinder’s target item” 🙂
Third – kind of trivial, but worthy of note. You need to progress through the game to certain points in order to have full access to items you can gather.
It was noted above already, IIRC… what’s the problem with it? I mean, if this game holds an absolute record of 24 hours to complete main plotline, then probably I’ll manage it in some 36 hours with every new account once I learn the game. That’s some… 3 days rl? Per account? Can’t say I’m scared 🙂 And yes, I do not have any rl job (since 2006th or so).
So, I take it as there ARE some places/materials to grind for a decent profit, actually?
Rather less than more. Just to give you a better overview, here’s some data:
Evergleam ore is currently listed at 3300 gil per item on my server. It is one of the highest level items you can gather with a max level gatherer. You can only gather about 12 per hour, because it is only collectable from a timed gathering node that can only be gathered once, before it disappears.
Evergleam ingots however are listed at 84.000 gil per item. You only need 4 evergleam ore, 1 palladium nugget (easy to get) and 2 Gyr Abanian Carbon rods (buyable via a farmable content-currency).Another example is Grade 3 Infusions of intelligence and its only non-stop farmable material Chickweed:
Chickweed can be gathered non-stop. You can gather a few hundred of them per hour. However, the price is as low as 400 gil a piece.
Grade 3 Infusions of intelligence are crafted from 2 Chickweed and a few other mats, that are all on timed-nodes. They sell at about 7000 gil per item on my server.However, from only one stack of 99 Chickweed a player can craft 150 grade 3 infusions, which will most likely last until the end of the expansion for him, so the demand for that is rather little.
This is to show, how ridiculously underpriced gathering materials – even the ones you can only sparsely farm – are, compared to the crafted item. It’s a 5-10x difference in profit you can make with crafted items.
In the end it boils down to the same thing: money received per hour, this way or that…
Yes. But the problem, we’re talking about is, that it is highly inconsistent. Of course, if you’re going by the logic “any money per hour” you don’t have a problem. But depending on several factors it can be anywhere between 0.05-0.7$ per hour.
about million gil per hour
That’s highly overambitious. If you just farm without actually playing the market board actively, you’re looking into maybe 50.000-200.000 gil per hour. Only if you actively play the market board you can get up to something like a million per hour and that is really, really hard to achieve.
Just to give you a brief overview again: From time to time I actually play the market board. I plan ahead, which mats to farm, which objects to craft from them and after a whole day of gathering and crafting I might have items for sale worth up to 8 million gil. However, these items can take like a week or so, until they’re all sold. Also, as it was mentioned before a few times, there is a limit, how much you can sell at once.
If you go by your farming mindset, after a month you will sit on a mountain of items, worth like 250 million gil, but you can only put so many on the market board and it would take about a year or so until you can sell all of them – and then there is the other problem, that after 3 months all your items become almost worthless, because SE releases a big content patch every 3 months that releases new recipes, etc. which extremely devalues all your items.MSQ?
Main Scenario Questline
which come from gatherers, right?
Partially from gatherers, partially from crafted collectables currency, partially from instanced content currency.
It takes almost no time (or?)
It’s slower than you think. Gathering in Final Fantasy XIV is not like gathering in all other MMO’s, where you simply walk up to a node and collect the item. In FFXIV even the fucking gatherers have skill rotations to gather materials effectively.
Both crafters and gatherers in FFXIV are actually full classes with gear, skills, etc. and I’d say, they’re even much, much more complex than most combat classes.
Just to show you, what I mean: There is an over 300 pages long dissertation on gathering and crafting made by the FFXIV community on google docs:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L1aDMxZOjhdmzsilToDvsrwqfcUOs6NKxhsCBa1IwVQ/preview#Though, gathering is just… running in circles and, well, gathering basic materials. It is NO FUN
Incorrect. At least partially. It is running in circles and gathering materials. But you also have a resource you have to manage for using gathering skills that influence the amount and quality of gathered items and there are also different random buffs on gathering nodes, that influence gathering as well.
Some people actually find that fun and I know some people on my server, that do nothing but gathering in FFXIV (like my gf for example), since they hate combat content and crafting is too complicated for them.There should not be much undercut in prices of simple mats, just because there should be not that many players who spend their time doing something that is not fun.
This is also false. Price undercutting apparently has no limits and players don’t give a damn, if they are making less profit. Even if they gathered for 3 hours straight, they will undercut you all the time, if it’s an item that is on high demand and sells very often.
People usually undercut you by only 1 gil, but sometimes there are a few morons who give even less crap about it and undercut you by 30% of the full price. And then there are still more players who keep undercutting that person.Another data-example:
Grade 3 Infusions of strength are one of the most highly demanded items in the game. They’re consumables for a short strength buff, which is highly demanded by the raiding community.
On release of the patch where these infusions became craftable, some of them sold for up to 300.000 gil per piece.
2 weeks ago the price was at 22.000 gil per infusion. Last week it was at 18.000 gil per infusion.
Right now it sank down to a measily 10.000 gil per infusion and the price is still falling. People absolutely do not care. And I predict, that by the end of the expansion, the price fell down to about 3.000 gil per infusion.How high it is? Some 5%? That would be acceptable.
I think it is 10%.
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This reply was modified 5 years ago by
Arc.
Market tax is 5-10% depending on if the discount is active or not at the time (server dependent I believe).
More data —
Three weeks ago I was selling Stormsap (A material gained by doing daily gatherer/crafter quests) for 50-60k. Two weeks ago they got undercut all the way to 20k. Right now they are 9-10k.
Three weeks ago I was selling various end game gathering mats for ~3000-3500. Now most are at best 1k or less.Shit goes up and down much more wildly than I have seen in other MMO’s
Yea, sounds logical. Still, is it possible to perform bulk sales here in FFXIV? Say, can I gather some 100,000 fire shards and put them on market as a single listing?
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Then this is just a wrong target item in terms of professional grind 🙂 I mean, heck, there is about million (?) of players in this game. How can single player (you) enter the market and corner price of some item? It has to be a really really low-demand item, I’d say.
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I’d say “high demand” is enough… in case of populated server, I mean. Heck, I was farming the same single item in EVE with 16 accounts, 12 hours a day each (basically, 8 windows 24/7), for weeks if not months… until finally its original price dropped by 20% or so. Then usually banwave comes, I lose my farm, it takes me some 3-4 weeks to restore it; during that time prices jump back to original state, and cycle repeats from begin. That’s what I call “an item of high demand, a REAL grinder’s target item” 🙂
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It was noted above already, IIRC… what’s the problem with it? I mean, if this game holds an absolute record of 24 hours to complete main plotline, then probably I’ll manage it in some 36 hours with every new account once I learn the game. That’s some… 3 days rl? Per account? Can’t say I’m scared 🙂 And yes, I do not have any rl job (since 2006th or so).
First off – there is no need to defend yourself. I provided you with insight that I feel is important in this equation. Do your own research and make your own judgement on the worth of paying for jump potions and playing through the Stormblood storyline.
I think you’re making some very poor assumptions, which we’ve all tried to correct, but it seems we might have boiled down to a specific point. There are not about a million players. The market is actually quite small.
Refer to: https://ffxivcensus.com/
There are 3 regions. Each region have their own datacenters. Each datacenters have their own worlds. Each world has their own market place. Lets do some really naive math but it might help illustrate the point.
According that that site, there are 583,966 active characters. It appears that the number of active characters is dependent on how far they’ve progressed through the MSQ – so this number might be a bit higher. By my hand count, there are 65 worlds across the three regions and 6 data centers. Lets pretend that there are an equal amount of active characters across all.
That is about 9000 characters per world. 9000. Lets be generous and assume that there are 11,000 active characters who simply haven’t completed the MSQ upto the required point to be tracked. I made this number up, but it is more than double of the base number. Thats 20,000 active players.
I don’t have stat of how many people are active crafters, but once again, it is a fair assumption to believe that pool of people is generally pretty low. I would wager that it is closer to 5-10% of the active population, but realistically, there are only a handful of ‘master crafters’ and most people simply refer to them for their crafting needs.
Your success will be mostly determined by how active these crafters are on the world that you chose.
My final example. You can crap on shards with “Then this is just a wrong target item in terms of professional grind” – but if you knew anything about this game (which is obvious you do not), shards are practically the most moved item in this game on the market in terms of quantity. ALL crafters need shards. It is a universal ingredient needed to start a craft. Shards/crystals are also the only item I know that is not limited to the 99 stack. You can list up to 9,999, which makes it a highly attractive item to see as a botter. But I’ll attach a mostly redacted screen shot of sales as an example. On the 28th, stacks sold for 200 gil a piece. On the 29th, there is no activity. On the 30th, there is very little market activity. Value drops below 100 gil a piece. On the 31st, activity explodes. No sales made as of today. There are periods in time when very very little sell – because in reality, there are not that many active players – and certainly not those who craft.
Each market listing is limited to a max of 99 at a time unfortunately. Really downs the mass mat market.
Geeeez… that’s 8 retainers x 20 listings x 99 per listing = about 16,000 items to sell daily MAX? So if one aims for at least 16 mil gil daily, (s)he should just dump any item of value less than 1000 gil into trash can / sell to NPC vendor? Now that’s really fun news… GMs are really killing free market in their game. Thanks bunch for info, too!
Evergleam ore is currently listed at 3300 gil per item on my server. It is one of the highest level items you can gather with a max level gatherer. You can only gather about 12 per hour, because it is only collectable from a timed gathering node that can only be gathered once, before it disappears.
Evergleam ingots however are listed at 84.000 gil per item. You only need 4 evergleam ore, 1 palladium nugget (easy to get) and 2 Gyr Abanian Carbon rods (buyable via a farmable content-currency).So basically any crafter who is able to smelt ingots should come to marker, buy ALL ore, turn it into ingots, put ingots back to market and soon have 84000*0.9 (tax) – 4*3300 = 62400 gil of profit per ingot. So THE question pops up insta: why does nobody do that?? Is it that hard to smelt? Does it require lots of time? Maybe the rest components are not really that easy to get? I mean, heck, there has to be some logical reason 🙂 Otherwise in any sane game either ingot price should drop down to 18-20k or so, or ore price should grow up to 15-18k per item!
Grade 3 Infusions of intelligence are crafted from 2 Chickweed and a few other mats, that are all on timed-nodes. They sell at about 7000 gil per item on my server.
However, from only one stack of 99 Chickweed a player can craft 150 grade 3 infusions, which will most likely last until the end of the expansion for him, so the demand for that is rather little.
This part is quite logical, actually. Low demand for an item = everyone has as much as they need (or can craft it themselves + they have as much mats as they need for craft) = real price of these infusions are about 1000 gil per item. Note: “real price” = “you can sell lots and lots of items at this price, and people will keep buying anyway”.
So, I think 7000 per infusion is not about crafting being important 🙂 it’s about seeking for a stupido who actually pays that high price… Maybe the previous example of 84k gil per ingot falls into this category as well?
It’s a 5-10x difference in profit you can make with crafted items.
Can you sell these ingots at this price in bulk? Say, 100 ingots per day? 200? 300? Or, as soon as you put 300 ingots on market, people start undercutting until price drops down to the logical level of 20k per ingot? hehe
Yes. But the problem, we’re talking about is, that it is highly inconsistent. Of course, if you’re going by the logic “any money per hour” you don’t have a problem. But depending on several factors it can be anywhere between 0.05-0.7$ per hour.
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If you go by your farming mindset, after a month you will sit on a mountain of items, worth like 250 million gil, but you can only put so many on the market board and it would take about a year or so until you can sell all of them – and then there is the other problem, that after 3 months all your items become almost worthless, because SE releases a big content patch every 3 months that releases new recipes, etc. which extremely devalues all your items.From what I see, this is the only factor that matters… Basically, this means you can sell items of new content right after release at very high price, and then prices go down. I.e. you do not “sit on a mountain of items, worth like 250 million gil” – this mountain of items actually worth 10x less or so. I mean, if you can’t sell items at this value, then these items just aren’t worth it…
So, does it mean you can earn some 1 mil/hour right after content patch comes out, but just some 50k/hour right before the next patch?
It’s slower than you think. Gathering in Final Fantasy XIV is not like gathering in all other MMO’s, where you simply walk up to a node and collect the item. In FFXIV even the fucking gatherers have skill rotations to gather materials effectively.
Both crafters and gatherers in FFXIV are actually full classes with gear, skills, etc. and I’d say, they’re even much, much more complex than most combat classes.
Just to show you, what I mean: There is an over 300 pages long dissertation on gathering and crafting made by the FFXIV community on google docs:What’s way more important than dissertation: does Miqobot support all this stuff (skill rotations, random buff checking/reacting accordingly, etc)?
People usually undercut you by only 1 gil, but sometimes there are a few morons who give even less crap about it and undercut you by 30% of the full price. And then there are still more players who keep undercutting that person.
Ooh, they are NOT morons 🙂 they are way more clever than you think!
Look, what’s the point of undercutting by 1 gil? You have to sit at the market and check, and undercut, and check, and undercut, and check, and undercut again – until you sell everything or until you go dizzy. What’s the point to spend 3 hours gathering AND then 3 more hours at the market, undercutting? I’d rather undercut by 30%, then go to farm for 3 more hours, and put it at 70% again: this way I earn 70% * 6 = 420% compared to your 100% * 3 = 300%. Someone undercuts me? Fine: I let him sell his stuff at 70% minus 1 gil, then sell mine at 70%. He sells his loot, but I fail to sell mine? Then next day I undercut by 40% and sell at 60%… as simple as that. See, it’s the only viable option in a world full of inflation (such as FFXIV or WoW). If you fail to sell today at 70% of high price, tomorrow you might be selling at 100% of low price… which is lower than 70% of high.
Another data-example:
Grade 3 Infusions of strength are one of the most highly demanded items in the game. They’re consumables for a short strength buff, which is highly demanded by the raiding community.
On release of the patch where these infusions became craftable, some of them sold for up to 300.000 gil per piece.
2 weeks ago the price was at 22.000 gil per infusion. Last week it was at 18.000 gil per infusion.
Right now it sank down to a measily 10.000 gil per infusion and the price is still falling. People absolutely do not care. And I predict, that by the end of the expansion, the price fell down to about 3.000 gil per infusion.Now I wonder if component prices (needed to craft these infusions) were going the same way or no? Maybe it wasn’t about low “supply” of crafters, but rather low supply of ingridients?
I think it is 10%.
Tad worse, but not as bad as in BDO, hehe… You should play EVE some day 🙂 and enjoy BASE tax of 1%, which is reduced with skill down to 0.5%!
That is about 9000 characters per world. 9000. Lets be generous and assume that there are 11,000 active characters who simply haven’t completed the MSQ upto the required point to be tracked. I made this number up, but it is more than double of the base number. Thats 20,000 active players.
Geez… I should have started with this question. I wonder why your worlds are that small? Heck, WoW servers easily hold 150-350k players per server; EVE Online just does not have any realms – all players (some 400k, 40k of them active at the same time) are in the same realm. Now I’m not surprised anymore that your market is sooo volatile 🙁
Now probably one of the most important questions pops up: is there a way to check official info – number of players per world (to choose really populated one)?
Shards/crystals are also the only item I know that is not limited to the 99 stack. You can list up to 9,999, which makes it a highly attractive item to see as a botter.
Heh, well – I didn’t know that, indeed; so no wonders my assumptions were incorrect %)
But I’ll attach a mostly redacted screen shot of sales as an example. On the 28th, stacks sold for 200 gil a piece. On the 29th, there is no activity. On the 30th, there is very little market activity. Value drops below 100 gil a piece. On the 31st, activity explodes. No sales made as of today. There are periods in time when very very little sell – because in reality, there are not that many active players – and certainly not those who craft.
Too bad you edited away quantity of sales 🙁 Was that hundreds per day? thousands?
Oh, and there is also a related question: how much time have passed since the last addon / left until the next one? Maybe such poor market activity and volatile market has something to do with game world being in dormant state while waiting for the next addon?
First; you need to buy the game and do your own research. I understand that you are asking questions to gauge your possible interest, but the logic you are applying to analyse the responses is futile as you don’t have the base knowledge to understand the answers.
Second; and it’s funny that no one has actually said it, Gil is rather unnecessary in this game. I know it may seem absurd, but the average player can get everything they want or a similar substitute by waiting.
Third; the FFXIV Marketplace cannot be explained. All the answers provided to you and even some of the scenarios you proposed based on those answers are accurate. Unfortunately you can only get a clear picture from selling and buying items on the MB (Market-board). Additionally to effectively sell items and make Gil, you will need to spend at least an hour or 2 per day deciding what to sell. Granted this will get easier over time, but you will still need to do research and recheck your prices hourly to be effective.
Forth; there’s actually a lot more to say, but I’ll end with just a few tips.
(i) Crafters and Gatherers are usually the only people that reliably purchase Ingots, Cloths, Reagents, and Leather (items made from raw materials and used for final crafts). This usually happens because the price of the Raw Materials is usually higher than the materials they make.
(ii) The big money is in Glamour, Special Dyes and Minions. Their sale is unreliable, requires various specialists (Minions), can only be obtained with retainers with unpredictable success (Special Dyes) and almost always requires materials that cannot be obtained from gathering (Glamour).
(iii) Good Luck and I hope your venture (lol “Retainer Ventures”, FFXIV JOKE) is successful.Geez… I should have started with this question. I wonder why your worlds are that small? Heck, WoW servers easily hold 150-350k players per server; EVE Online just does not have any realms – all players (some 400k, 40k of them active at the same time) are in the same realm. Now I’m not surprised anymore that your market is sooo volatile 🙁
Now probably one of the most important questions pops up: is there a way to check official info – number of players per world (to choose really populated one)?
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Heh, well – I didn’t know that, indeed; so no wonders my assumptions were incorrect %)
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Too bad you edited away quantity of sales 🙁 Was that hundreds per day? thousands?
Oh, and there is also a related question: how much time have passed since the last addon / left until the next one? Maybe such poor market activity and volatile market has something to do with game world being in dormant state while waiting for the next addon?
I don’t know of any exact numbers, but you can have a guesstimate of which ones are most popular based on how SE classifies them:
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/80cd4583bf743600105b947d6906d0909189e479The numbers I edited out ranged from hundreds to thousands. It would be kind of trivial to identify my server with that info, which is why I redacted most of it. At this time, since you’ve seen it, I’ve detached it completely.
The next expansion is due in a couple months.
First; you need to buy the game and do your own research. I understand that you are asking questions to gauge your possible interest, but the logic you are applying to analyse the responses is futile as you don’t have the base knowledge to understand the answers.
You are right; but still, I understood enough to at least give this game a shot, hehe. I guess now I try it myself and continue learning from my own experiences…
Second; and it’s funny that no one has actually said it, Gil is rather unnecessary in this game. I know it may seem absurd, but the average player can get everything they want or a similar substitute by waiting.
This is true for nearly every game; though, my targeted audience is far from an average player 😉 It’s more about rich arrogant pricks who do not want to learn the game, do not want to create something by themselves (let alone to wait) – they just want PayToWin button, hehehe… which I can gladly offer!
to effectively sell items and make Gil, you will need to spend at least an hour or 2 per day deciding what to sell. Granted this will get easier over time, but you will still need to do research and recheck your prices hourly to be effective.
Are you sure? In most cases there are things which are always needed – like infusions of strength mentioned above. So basically the only thing I need is to find such areas, corner prices there (i.e. make it low enough so nobody would undercut me) and then farm materials and craft these items until next addon comes, no?
Besides, I’d still want to hear some answer to one of the most important questions: can Miqobot effectively farm materials like this (i.e. using gathering prof, rotating skills etc)?
(i) Crafters and Gatherers are usually the only people that reliably purchase Ingots, Cloths, Reagents, and Leather (items made from raw materials and used for final crafts). This usually happens because the price of the Raw Materials is usually higher than the materials they make.
Hmmmm… how so? Look above (the “evergleam ore at 3300 gil per item / evergleam ingots at 84.000 gil per item” example)!
Or maybe I miss some point again %) oh well
(iii) Good Luck and I hope your venture (lol “Retainer Ventures”, FFXIV JOKE) is successful.
Thanks! I’ll certainly need it, hehe…
I don’t know of any exact numbers, but you can have a guesstimate of which ones are most popular based on how SE classifies them:
No congested EU servers 🙁 life is pain… but thanks anyway!
The numbers I edited out ranged from hundreds to thousands.
So that’s about 100k gil per day? Not that much… but maybe that’s because of low population of your server, dunno.
The next expansion is due in a couple months.
So right now it is neither best time to farm/sell, nor worst, it seems… while “10-50 mil/day” scenario was probably assuming the best days (i.e. right after new addon was released).
What’s way more important than dissertation: does Miqobot support all this stuff (skill rotations, random buff checking/reacting accordingly, etc)?
Yep. Miqo team also collected data and wrote several parts of that dissertation.
I think at the end of the day, you’re taking what you want and discarding the bits of info that doesn’t conform with your ideal situation. A lot of our information is based off of years of experience in this game. You reference the items mentioned by other users without understanding its implications. Most data points presented does not have a reference of time. “(the “evergleam ore at 3300 gil per item / evergleam ingots at 84.000 gil per item” example)!” does not have a time reference. You do not know how many are sold at that price and over what period of time. I included my screenshot for this purpose.
And here is a bit you also missed – just to emphasize: “However, from only one stack of 99 Chickweed a player can craft 150 grade 3 infusions, which will most likely last until the end of the expansion for him, so the demand for that is rather little.”
This means if a player buys a stack of your infusions, they are practically out of the market for months. These items do not move fast the majority of the time. They are high-end crafted materials – demand for them drop sharply after most active players upgraded their gear.
This will be my last post/contribution, but just to point out another poor assumption:
“So that’s about 100k gil per day? Not that much… but maybe that’s because of low population of your server, dunno.”A. That is for one item type. If you’re as savvy as you presume you are, you would be selling all variety of crystals and shards.
B. You have absolutely no idea what server I am on and I hope for it to remain this way. If you disregard what have been said based on the idea that some of us might be on low-population server, you’re going to be disappointed.Regardless, good luck. I personally don’t think this is the game you’re looking for.
Edit: Your best bet – start a trial account. Start a subscription to Miqo. Play with the bot – how crafting and gathering works. If you’re happy with what you see, upgrade your account to a standard account. Look at the marketboard (you can’t see it as a trial user I believe). Poke around with your own eyes. Each item has a history as I have posted in my screenshot. Do your own research and decide for yourself. Probably a $30 investment just to see if this works out for you ($20 for the starter version of the game, $10 for miqo)
So, I take it as there ARE some places/materials to grind for a decent profit, actually?
This might be where so far we failed to explain how exactly FFXIV works.
In this game, every content and features are gated, locked behind something. And every interesting loot/materials/items are locked behind weekly lock out, reset, cool down, timers, etc.
This is how the game controls carefully the injection of what is interesting.
For example, when a Savage Raid patch comes out, like I explained previously, what will be on demand during a small window are raiding crafted gears.
The materials required will ALWAYS include several items gated behind 2/3 external currencies, and those currencies all have a maximum you can stock per characters, and only a specific quantity per week and per players of those currencies are easy to get, beyond that it’s quite long, even for a bot, and lots come from playing Discipline of War and Magic.
It makes it difficult for one person to actually get enough to mass produce the items on demand, whether they’re the final items, or pre-crafted ones (because like you pointed out already, quite often the highest profit/hour is not on the final item).
This is made so that the wealth get divided more fairly between players, rather than one botter owning the market.
This doesn’t mean a well prepared botter can’t win a lot, it just makes it harder and less profitable than it could be without those protections, and there’s plenty of little subtleties like that, like plenty, for real.Though, gathering is just… running in circles and, well, gathering basic materials. It is NO FUN; I bet there are not that many players who would do it for hours on daily basis. So, why would I need to craft at all?
In FFXIV, gathering is fun and super popular, because just like crafting, it has its entire game in a game, lore, prices, etc.
What you are describing, Gathering as in running in circle, this does exist, but every materials from there worth barely nothing, and are available in large quantity for cheap in the market, can be bought for cheap at NPCs, can be farmed by legal in-game bots (your retainers that you also need to level up and gear up for that purpose, they are also the reason why farming mobs for loot materials worth nothing, it’s because those legal in-game bots will do it for you), are also brought up by Airships, Submarines, gardens, etc.
So yes, regular players don’t do that “gathering in circle” for days, not fun, barely worth something most of the time.But lots of them do the other part of gathering, which is more fun, and consist of farming Unspoiled, Legendaries and Ephemerals. Those nodes spawn one or 2 times per 74min, are available only for a couple of min, require some specific rotations, super good gear well melded, and are less mind-numbing, because you go somewhere, spend a minute there, then you teleport somewhere else for the same thing, and so and so on.
So there’s competition there, lots of competition from regular players, and prices of mats are kept low because of that.
Again, it doesn’t mean you can’t make profit out of that, we’re just trying to warn it could be less than you would imagine.And Miqobot is the perfect bot for this, with its scenario feature, if played smartly, you can blend with other players, act like a real players and only do it for an hour, take a break, have the bot go somewhere else do a different activity, and go back to gathering later, so that you just look like a casual and doesn’t raise suspicion among people seeing you there all the time.
It was noted above already, IIRC… what’s the problem with it? I mean, if this game holds an absolute record of 24 hours to complete main plotline, then probably I’ll manage it in some 36 hours with every new account once I learn the game. That’s some… 3 days rl? Per account? Can’t say I’m scared 🙂
Be careful, like I said everything in the game is gated behind something, so not only you would have to do what you described, but way more, tons of stuff to unlock again, leveling every jobs all over gain, farming again all your specialist recipe books, gearing up again and melding, the melding cost quite a lot when you went down to 0.
No one explained it I think already, but à la FFVII, you need to meld materia into each piece of gear you have in order to reach the stats thresholds allowing you to craft end-game recipes, and allowing you (well, allowing Miqobot) to craft High Quality items, and to gather end-game mats.
Those materia are a huge part of the market itself, especially for Gatherers and Crafters, their price sky rocket often, and you need tons of them because of one thing that rules in FFXIV: RNG.You need to meld 4 to 5 materia per piece of gear, the 1st and sometimes second one have 100% rate of success, then it falls from ~17% to ~7% rate of success.
This means you’ll blow hundreds of pricey materia, millions of gils if you didn’t stock enough or start with nothing.
You need to redo all this 3 times per expansions, when a new set gets available in a new patch. It cost a lot.
Not saying it to discourage you, no, just so you know what to expect, there’s plenty of things cutting down profits, this is a big one to consider regarding a ban.Now probably one of the most important questions pops up: is there a way to check official info – number of players per world (to choose really populated one)?
FFXIV is a very popular game, full of players, healthy, very greedy, well alive, and bringing a mountain of cash to Square Enix, FFXI used to be the game that brought them the most money, FFXIV exploded those records.
It always been hard to guess numbers, especially because players come and go between patches, because of the monthly fee, lots of players wait to have 2 full patches to do before paying for a month, it’s not because of the lack of content, they’re just trying to save a few box.
So when you see those unofficial census trying to figure out how many active players there is by just looking at how many cleared the current final main story quest, it’s quite inaccurate. Especially because for that, they rely on people having their achievements public, and they’re not by default.
And sometimes, they rely on mount/minion (those are always public), but only rare few ending quest of the main story quest reward you with one. And there’s always at all time, so many new players slowly doing the Main Story Quest, and far away from reaching the end, considering the amount of stuff to go through before getting there.That being said, here is a relevant official information, in 2015 before Heavensward Expansion, Square Enix claimed 4 Millions registered players (not playing at the same time, and this is not the number of characters, this one is over a billion).
In 2018, 3 years later, they announced reaching 14 millions of registered players (+250%), and that the current expansion, Stormblood, was their biggest growth launch.
To me, those officials numbers reflect better what I see myself in the game.Now what you need to know, picking a low populated server, directly pointed by the game, would usually result in higher prices for everything.
But, this come to an end in a couple of month, where they’ll introduce the World Visit feature, where one can visit any world of their Datacenter (by then there will be 8 Datacenters, as they are creating 2 new one right now, for the next expansion), and will be able to buy stuff from the market board of the World they visit (no trading of course, no selling), which will quick equalize the prices, and act as an even bigger undercutting machine.Lots of people here tried hard to explain to you how the market board works, there’s really no buy orders, it really fluctuates a lot (there’s many notorious Reddit trolls who enjoy crashing markets for weeks just to make a post out of it), it fluctuates all the time, it really takes a good knowledge of the game (meaning actually playing all content of the game, every little and obscure ones like submarines loot, workshop housing) to figure out what will sell and when, and it really takes a lot of market board playing to get significant profit out of it, and this means lots of real human hours, not bot hours.
It’s no mistake if pretty much everyone here tried to say it with one way or another.
You can still think that we might then just not be good at it, it’s fair, maybe we’re not, most of us get out of the bot more gils than we need, so we’re not trying very hard I suppose, Lyfox like to watch his billions grows, myself, I stopped to care when I reached one billion because you can not display more and it gives a nice touch to my vid and streams, any extra beyond that is to buy minions, mounts and orchestrion rolls from lucky players (the cost for this is high, from 15M to 50M per patches, exactly what I get from both Miqobot and the game without trying (meaning crafting surplus of what I wanted for myself and selling it), 8M/week average, can be 3M/week for month, and 50M/week for specific content).
Oh, and there is also a related question: how much time have passed since the last addon / left until the next one?
FFXIV 1.0: 2010
FFXIV 2.0: 2013
FFXIV 3.0: 2015
FFXIV 4.0 : July 2017 [launches of expansions are always in July every 2 years] [1st part of Savage raid]
[every even patch is a savage raid patch, patch are release every 3 month, new savage raid is then every 6 month]4.1 October 2017
4.2 January 2018 [Second part of raid Savage]
4.3 May 2018
4.4 September 2018 [Third and final part of raid Savage]
4.5 January 20196 month hole with still mini patches (where we are now)
FFXIV 5.0: July 2019
FFXIV 6.0: July 2021The pattern is always the same, it never misses, it’s the part entirely predictable.
Okay, I’m also gonna make a last post, since the amount of text is getting tedious and I want to provide a reasonable insight about the game, so I’ll try to answer all questions I see and think might be unanswered yet:
Raw materials (minerals) are needed. Mining is an extremely boring and low profit activity
Mining, Gathering and Fishing in FFXIV is a matter of taste. Some enjoy it a lot, others hate it. It is a low- to medium profit business ranging from somewhere between 50k up to 1.5 million per day of gathering, from my experience.
minerals cost is about 70% of total final product cost
Yeah, depending on the item you are crafting material costs range from 30-200% of the price of the final product, because nobody can monitor all the items on the marketboard, since in FFXIV there are currently 2.651 different crafting materials in the game and all their prices fluctuate a lot.
Newbie crafter buys minerals and crafts basic components (say, some screws, plates and alike simple details).
In FFXIV it is quite the opposite. Newbie crafters mostly cannot even afford even the cheapest stuff, so they gather everything themselves. It is actually the high-end crafters, who are sitting on a ton of gil, who just burn their gil for crafting mats out of laziness, when they need something, since Gil is pretty unimportant in the game.
it takes some half a hour to buy minerals, transfer them to manufacturing plant
In FFXIV you simply go to a market board and simply buy the listing instantly, as if the vendor would be standing right in front of you.
Average crafter comes and does almost the same, just he buys basic components and crafts more complicated parts like circuitry and mechanic blocks. This activity requires more skill training (say, Industry V) and lets him sell him product at 850 mil, having 100 mil of profit per half a hour.
Yes, that’s how most of the crafters do it in FFXIV. I can tell you a tale from my casual days of crafting:
When I didn’t have that much gil (only in the 500k range), I only bought items, where I would spend no more than 50k in total. Nowadays, where I’m sitting on about 1-5 million on average, I occasionally buy stuff in the 50-200k range, but I’m still somewhat stingy, even though I could make several millions over a few weeks, but why would I, since it’s unnecessary?Finally, professional manufacturer buys it and produces actual guns. It requires crapload of skills (say, Industry V + Science V + Electronics V + Engineering V), but then again he receices 150 mil of profit per the same time.8
In FFXIV it requires both a lot of skill / a great bot like Miqobot and a crapton of RNG luck to get your gear to the point, where it can consistently craft what you want.
Now take into account that average profit of an experienced pilot (mission runner, pirate hunter, anomaly scanner and so forth) usually stays at 100 mil/hour level
The majority of FFXIV players only have about 300k-2million gil on average. There are only so many people who have 10+ million, up to several billion gil, because maybe only 5% of the playerbase does absolute high end crafting and the products of those high-end crafts are mostly just bought in bulk by the same rich players, who want a shortcut at the beginning of each even patch, where the gear level increases and a new raid is released. Those players however are, as I already said, not many and once they bought their stuff, the market drops a lot.
This part is quite logical, actually. Low demand for an item = everyone has as much as they need
You mentioned a key point there: There is basically low demand on every item in this game, because you can get almost everything without ever spending a single gil. With “high demand”, like on the buff pots I mentioned before, I mean that the players, who don’t have crafters leveled themselves, don’t have friends who can craft and go into high-end raiding. Only about 20-30% of the whole FFXIV community actually raids and only about 10-20% of those actually tryhard in raiding, so they need pots. And only about 30% of those have no other means of obtaining buff pots, than the marketboard.
So all in all, we’re talking about only 1-2% of the whole game community actually needs those pots from the marketboard and this is already considered something, that it on high demand.Of course, there are greedy (/stupid) players who follow [newbie] rule: “I should do the whole chain all by myself, to never buy anything!” They think they maximize their profits this way, lol. In reality, though, they just waste playtime doing things far below their potential level. I mean, for real, why would sane experienced crafter mine for 35 mil/hour if he can craft for 300 mil/hour?? The “minerals did not cost me anything because I’ve mined them myself” argument is but utter bulls**t, because they goddamn had cost measured in RL HOURS!
The thing is, that to work that way in FFXIV you need a huge gil base to begin with. Only maybe 1% of all players has the means to do so. So by this logic the only way you could apply your system to FFXIV would be to get a max level, fully geared, all unlocked high-end crafter, which takes months to do, amass several hundreds of millions of gil in the first place, which would also take a few months at first and then you can start your system.
And if anything happens, that gets you banned, all that work until then is wasted.I mean, if this game holds an absolute record of 24 hours to complete main plotline, then probably I’ll manage it in some 36 hours with every new account once I learn the game.
This is just the main scenario quest. To summarize, what you need to unlock, to reach that peak crafter/gatherer level, here’s a list:
1. Finish the Main Quest – as you said, 36 hours. That’s reasonable, but it’s mind-wrecking, since Miqo cannot do that and I have no clue, which dirty code-injecting bots can do so
2. Level all the crafters and gatherers to max-level. When you already have 1 character with all of them maxed, you can boost one crafter on the next character up to max level in 2 hours. All the others take several hours, if not days. With Miqobot I’d estimate, it takes about 40-60 hours to purely grind one crafter to max level, if you have written the necessary scenarios. So all in all, it’s about 440-660 hours for each character, where you wanna level everything. 3 weeks, just for the grind on one character.
3. Get a set of high-end gear. Again, if you already have one fully equipped character, it takes about 6-10 hours to gather all the materials to craft a high-end gearset for the crafting/gathering jobs (gear is shared across all crafters and across all gatherers, so you just need 2 sets per character). You can also simply buy the gear for about 4-8 million gil.
4. Meld materia into it. This is the most costy and since it’s purely based on RNG it can (realistically) cost you somewhere between 10-500 million gil. Most players do this via weeklies, where you get 3-9 materia over a period of a few months, so they don’t have to spend gil (you need somewhere between 60-2000 materias for this).
5. Buy all the folklore/mastercraft tomes to unlock the gathering nodes/recipes (bought via an untradable collectable currency). This can take about 2-3 days, if you’re grinding it all via Miqobot, non stop.Geeeez… that’s 8 retainers x 20 listings x 99 per listing = about 16,000 items to sell daily MAX?
Nope. It is 2 retainers (+ about 1-2$/month per extra retainer up to 8 per user account) x 20 listings x 99 per listing at any time. Once someone buys something from you at the marketboard you can instantly go to your retainer and list a new item.
However the frequency on how fast items sell fluctuates a lot. I have a broad variety of “high-demand” items on sale at my 3 retainers and I play the marketboard a lot (checking my prices, undercutting, etc.) and on some days I sell 4-6 items per hour, while on other days I sell like 0-2 items every 4 or so hours.So if one aims for at least 16 mil gil daily, (s)he should just dump any item of value less than 1000 gil into trash can / sell to NPC vendor? Now that’s really fun news…
Yes. That’s pretty much how things roll in FFXIV. I’d say, if you wanted to make 16 mil gil daily you’d need to sell items, where the bulk you are selling ranges from somewhere between 50k-300k gil and those have to be really high-demand or extremely rare items. Achieving 16 mil per day on average would be crazy. Even good market board players might only earn like 5 million daily, from my estimation.
GMs are really killing free market in their game. Thanks bunch for info, too!
More like the devs and less the GMs. They implemented a ton of gil sinks and kept the worth of gil at a very low bar, so no one is really reliant on making a lot of it. Even the most expensive things that exist in this game, which are large player housing plots cost “only” somewhere between 30-50 million gil, plus it’s a one-time buy and they are extremely limited (I think only 300-400ish big plots per server).
And before you ask: Reselling those doesn’t work anymore in FFXIV. Until about a year ago you could buy a plot and sell it to other players for a fortune, by giving up your plot, while they were standing there to buy it instantly, once it is freed. Now, when you give up your plot it gets a random, invisible timer ranging from a few minutes up to several days, where it randomly becomes buyable again, so nobody buys houses from other players anymore.So THE question pops up insta: why does nobody do that?? Is it that hard to smelt? Does it require lots of time? Maybe the rest components are not really that easy to get? I mean, heck, there has to be some logical reason
Yes, yes and yes.
First of all, it is hard to craft them. Here is a video of someone crafting an evergleam ingot in High Quality. Miqobot is a bit faster, but you’re still looking at about 2-3 minutes to craft a single evergleam ingot in HQ.
Secondly, as I mentioned, one of the 3 components of that ingot is Gyr Abanian Carbon Rods. You can only buy them for ridiculous prices on the MB (which almost no one does) or via an untradable currency, that you obtain for doing any max-level instanced content. Grinding that currency is extremely slow, but it’s something everyone does automatically by simply playing the game normally.Can you sell these ingots at this price in bulk? Say, 100 ingots per day? 200? 300?
No. You need those ingot to craft for entry-level raiding gear (which is an alternative to grinding equal gear from casual content over a few weeks) and for a full set you need about 6-12 of them. No one would buy more than 10 at once. Those ingots sell about 5-20 listings in total per day, per server and most people list single ingots up to 3’ish ingots per listing, so even if everyone bought all of them from you (which is highly unlikely due to undercutting), you’d be making about 300k-1.3m per day on those. More realistic would be 90-180k per day.
So, does it mean you can earn some 1 mil/hour right after content patch comes out, but just some 50k/hour right before the next patch?
As mentioned several times before, you can’t make estimations of per hour profit in FFXIV, as the demand is unbelievably volatile. Daily profit is a better option. If you know what to do, what to sell and you’re fast in providing the necessary items, you can make somewhere between 10-40 million per day the first few days after an even patch launches. When a new expansion releases, you can even make 20-2200 million gil per day via crafted, glowing boss-weapons for the newly released jobs and the materials needed to craft those.
But be aware, that during these days, the undercutting is extreme. Such an item might start out at 30 million gil per item, but within a few hours its price drops to about 6 million per piece and 2 days later it’s at 1 million per item. And this is mainly, because everyone sees those ridiculous prices and everyone crafts the items, trying to get a piece of the cake, while almost no one buys them. Maybe 2-5 of those get sold for those horrendous prices within the first few days.Look, what’s the point of undercutting by 1 gil?
Simple: If you undercut an item by 1 gil, you move up in the list on the marketboard. Items on the MB are sorted by price per piece. Not by price per bulk. And players always buy the cheapest one.
I’d rather undercut by 30%
And the instant you do that, one of those players, who only undercut by 1 gil undercut you instantly and instead of your item being sold, their item is sold first. And everyone else’s items that undercut you by 1 gil. The only thing that happens, when you undercut by 30% is, that you annoy other players and they still undercut you.
this way I earn 70% * 6 = 420% compared to your 100% * 3 = 300%. Someone undercuts me? Fine: I let him sell his stuff at 70% minus 1 gil, then sell mine at 70%. He sells his loot, but I fail to sell mine?
No. You simply don’t sell your items at all, because several players play the market board like that and you get undercut within a few minutes by 10 different players, who are playing the market board. The problem here is, that there is more supply than demand, for anything.
it’s the only viable option in a world full of inflation
The point you are missing is, that FFXIV is not a world full of inflation, like other MMOs. Quite the opposite: It’s a world with a massive deflation. Items get cheaper every few minutes, because gil is almost meaningless. Maybe there is a connection between Japan’s deflation and FFXIV’s deflation 😛
Back to the topic though: As I said before, the majority of players only has somewhere between 500k-3 million gil, while only a small percentage has somewhere between 3-15 million and only less than 0.1% of the playerbase has a huge amount of gil, since it is rather pointless to have much gil in this game.Tad worse, but not as bad as in BDO, hehe… You should play EVE some day 🙂 and enjoy BASE tax of 1%, which is reduced with skill down to 0.5%!
I don’t actually care about the tax in FFXIV and I doubt anyone really does.
Now probably one of the most important questions pops up: is there a way to check official info – number of players per world (to choose really populated one)?
No, there is no official info. The most accurate census however is the census made by a Japanese player called LuckyBancho. While ffxivcensus bases its numbers on the completion of a certain recent main scenario quest (which is pretty inaccurate), LuckyBancho bases his quest on 3 factors:
– the character’s levels and experience values have changed since the previous survey, or
– the character’s number of minions or mounts possessed must have changed since the previous survey, or
– the character is newly created since the previous surveyAccording to his census in January there were about 608,000 active players worldwide, across all servers (there are 66 different servers in the game). Here is a link to a translation of his data. There you will also find things like active player count per server, etc.
Oh, and there is also a related question: how much time have passed since the last addon / left until the next one? Maybe such poor market activity and volatile market has something to do with game world being in dormant state while waiting for the next addon?
A bit simpler to read, than how Carl explained it: FFXIV follows a strict patch schedule:
1. Expansion gets released.
2. 1 month later the first raid tier gets released (equipment level is increased and raiding starts)
3. 3 months later the first odd patch is released (catch-up patch with only new untradable gear so casuals can catch up to hardcore raiders)
4. 3 months later the next even patch is released (equipment level is increased and new craftable gear for raid-entry is released)
5. 3 months later the next odd patch is released (same as above)And as Carl explained, there are 3 even major patches (X.0, X.2 and X.4), where you can make quite some profit from crafted gear and pots/buff food and 3 odd major patches (X.1, X.3, X.5), which only serve as catch-up period for casual players. The next even patch comes with the new expansion in early July, as others have already mentioned, so if you start now, you might get to an endgame level, to already make some profit, when the xpac launches.
You are right; but still, I understood enough to at least give this game a shot, hehe. I guess now I try it myself and continue learning from my own experiences…
This is actually the best thing you can do. Only this way you can make a realistic evaluation on the game, if it’s worthwile for you.
Also, feel free to share information you gather with us. We also share valuable information here and provide pretty useful community-made tools for efficient botting. Also, if you ever need a specific scenario for something, also feel free to ask nicely for it. Surely one (most likely Lyfox, as he is pretty much our biggest contributor here) might help you out.This is true for nearly every game; though, my targeted audience is far from an average player 😉 It’s more about rich arrogant pricks who do not want to learn the game, do not want to create something by themselves (let alone to wait) – they just want PayToWin button, hehehe… which I can gladly offer!
Yeah. The only problem is, that FFXIV has no real ways of pay2win. It’s more like a pay2GetASlightShortcut, but winning is only accomplishable through effort.
So basically the only thing I need is to find such areas, corner prices there (i.e. make it low enough so nobody would undercut me) and then farm materials and craft these items until next addon comes, no?
Someone will always undercut you, unless you lower your price so extremely, that you are making only 5% profit, which is not worthwhile.
And no, not until the next expansion, but until the next patch with increased gear tier, which is every 6 months.If you really want the best way to make gil consistently, in my opinion it would be:
Gather the materials and craft a truckload of infusions (about 1000 of each (strength, intelligence, dexterity, mind – no one uses vitality) and keep about 75% of all your retainers selling those in packs of 3-9. That way you sell them pretty quickly and consistently. Check your retainers every 30-60 minutes and undercut people by 1-100 gil. 20% of your retainers should be selling crafted raiding gear, which is hard to sell, but when it sells, it makes a pretty big profit. 5% of your retainers should be selling rare niche items with low supply and high prices.
If you can keep that variety of high-demand items, raid-entry items and rare items supplied at all times, you’ll be consistently making gil. I’d estimate around 2-15 million gil per day, per character over the course of a full patch cycle. Calculate what kind of profit you’d be making that way.No congested EU servers 🙁 life is pain… but thanks anyway!
The most active EU servers are most likely Ragnarok and Shiva.
So that’s about 100k gil per day? Not that much… but maybe that’s because of low population of your server, dunno.
Yes. The only profitable way of making gil with shards is, as was mentioned before, by creating armies of accounts with stolen credit cards, fraud, etc. and mass-farming them with about 100 characters simultaneously.
This is only possible, because you can farm shards from level 1 on, without getting anywhere into the game. However, with only a handful of accounts you’re definitely better off getting them all to endgame and making the more complex, but bigger profit.So right now it is neither best time to farm/sell, nor worst, it seems… while “10-50 mil/day” scenario was probably assuming the best days (i.e. right after new addon was released).
It is one of the rather worse times to make a profit, but the best time for someone with your mindset to get into the game, learn how it works and prepare your characters for the next big profit boom, which is July this year.
Phew… Took me about 2 and a half hours to write this post, gathering all the data, making up my mind about individual topic, etc.
I hope I gave you some more useful insight now and answered most of your questions.
With that said, I wish you good luck and effort to get into the game. Keep us updated about your thoughts and experiences, since you’re the first one to voice that mindset here and it would certainly give us some new insights.-
This reply was modified 5 years ago by Arc.
Yep. Miqo team also collected data and wrote several parts of that dissertation.
Great! Thanks bunch 🙂
I think at the end of the day, you’re taking what you want and discarding the bits of info that doesn’t conform with your ideal situation.
There is just too much info which is not “anchored” to any personal experiences or memories… so I simply fail to keep all of it in my head at the same time.
A. That is for one item type. If you’re as savvy as you presume you are, you would be selling all variety of crystals and shards.
Actually, in the ideal game world I would farm the same place using the same script for days and months (assuming that market consumes everything I bring, and asks for more). This means I need next to no attention to my farm: no need to move my toons from one place to another, no need to switch bot profiles, etc. Less time spent on manual micromanagement = more time for rl, you know.
Though, most probably ideal games (WoW and EVE) are closed for me (too low profit, too many bans), and looks like there are no other games as ideal… So oh well – guess I’ll HAVE to go for “variety” and “blending into majority”, as you say.
Regardless, good luck. I personally don’t think this is the game you’re looking for.
Me neither. The problem is, though, that other games are even worse… I.e. either there is low risk of bans, but botting nets too damn small profit per hour (WoW brings about $0.06 – i.e. 6 cent – per hour, you know? just because everyone and their grandma have their own bots), or there are decent profits (EVE still brings about half a dollar hourly), but GMs ban botters like hell 🙁
Edit: Your best bet – start a trial account. Start a subscription to Miqo. … Poke around with your own eyes.
Will do. Thanks again!
This might be where so far we failed to explain how exactly FFXIV works.
Maybe… as Luluna says, maybe I just need to poke myself to understand it, hehe. Right now the common sense tells me that generally there are 3 kinds of stuff in any game:
1) stuff which is useful for newbies/lowbies only: no sane player or bot farms it, indeed;
2) stuff which is useful in the endgame, and comes from fun activities (questing, raiding, crafting and so forth): lots of legit players do it just because it’s actually fun, so market is flooded with this kind of stuff, and there is [next to] no point (or even impossible) to farm it using bot;
3) stuff which is useful in the endgame, and comes from boring grinding: [next to] no sane legit players want to do it for more than a hour, so that’s where bot literally shines – people pay to botters just to obtain this stuff so they do not have to grind themselves.Now you tell me that everything is actually fun in FFXIV, gathering included + simple grinding brings no useful stuff at all! This makes me sit down and ponder: why the heck would you need bot, then? %) Players should probably cover all demand with their legit supply, just gathering for fun!
No one explained it I think already, but à la FFVII, you need to meld materia into each piece of gear you have in order to reach the stats thresholds allowing you to craft end-game recipes, and allowing you (well, allowing Miqobot) to craft High Quality items, and to gather end-game mats.
Those materia are a huge part of the market itself, especially for Gatherers and Crafters, their price sky rocket often, and you need tons of them because of one thing that rules in FFXIV: RNG.You need to meld 4 to 5 materia per piece of gear, the 1st and sometimes second one have 100% rate of success, then it falls from ~17% to ~7% rate of success.
This means you’ll blow hundreds of pricey materia, millions of gils if you didn’t stock enough or start with nothing.Well… it’s not like I’ve never heard about something alike before. Take Lineage 2 or Black Desert Online: enchants work much like this. Though, why would a botting toon in L2 need, say, weapon +16? Heck, +5 is more than enough (or even +4)! There is just no much point to invest in your RMT toon, because sooner or later it gets banned anyway – even if bot is not discoverable, finally they ban you just for RMT. And I sincerely hope it works like this in FFXIV, too… as I don’t feel like investing months into account doomed to ban.
FFXIV is a very popular game, full of players, healthy, very greedy, well alive, and bringing a mountain of cash to Square Enix, FFXI used to be the game that brought them the most money, FFXIV exploded those records.
Just too bad these players are split into THAT small realms 🙁 I’d find a way to cover demand of thousands of players with a single bot, but what can I do if most of these players are in other worlds?…
and this means lots of real human hours, not bot hours.
Too bad 🙁 If I wanted to do something manually (as opposed to automating it with bots), I’d accept a RL job, hehe…
8M/week average, can be 3M/week for month, and 50M/week for specific content).
Now that’s really not much. I mean, in terms of RMT! so no offense to you personally. Even if we assume that 1mil = $1 (for simplicity), $32 per month is nothing – even crap WoW bot brings some $43 monthly (per window). I really really hope that a professional botter should make way more – otherwise this is really not the game I’m looking for.
6 month hole with still mini patches (where we are now)
FFXIV 5.0: July 2019
Did I get that right: so right now prices are in the deep @$$ because of this “hole” and because of major patch incoming, but as soon as it comes out, prices (and thus profits) rocket-jump for months?
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