[Irisjir Callard]

I dunno much about NPCs.

3. By refusing to sell to NPCs, you are actually compounding the problem.
Yes, you read me right, by not pulling gil out of a ranom guy's ear you are contributing to the increasing oversaturation of gil in the economy.

There is a school of thought that it's best to 'keep the money circulating', therefore people will buy from and sell to other people (Auciton house) before they go to a NPC. This actually compounds the inflation problem, instead of releasing it, and I will explain why.

As a result, enourmous amounts of gil and other 'common goods' (I will be treating gil basically as an infinitely stackable item for this expose) are stagnated among the players. Things like bird feathers and rabbit hides, that could easily be sold to and bought from NPCs, pile up in auction houses and inventories until the market becomes saturated. According to the aforementioned concept of money circulation, however, instead of selling these items to NPC, they are sold on the auctionhouse for slightly below NPC vend prices. The amount of gil, all other considerations aside, remains constant.

HOWEVER, lets say that instead of selling all our bird feathers and rabbit hides on the AH for a few hundred gil, we sell them to the NPCs. We only make fifty gil instead of two hundred (our net worth -150) and we add fifty gil to the economy. (E +50).

It looks like we jsut made the problem worse, but wait...

Someone needs to make arrows. And there's no bird feathers on the auction house. So they go to the clothcraft guild and buy feathers for, say, 100 gil apiece.

Well after they buy one feather, the economy is -50. And after they've bought the whole stack we already sold and made 50 gil off of, the economy is at -1150 gil.



Do you see how that little example worked out?

Of course, one person selling bird feathers to NPCs isn't going to make a lot of difference in the economy. It's the buyers that really make the waves. But if people (meaning "the teeming masses") just got into the habit of buying and selling from the NPCs instead of having literally our own economy, a great deal more gil would be vented OUT of the economy than sucked IN.

Don't worry about completely losing all gil everywhere. Gil is input constantly into the economy from beastman drops, notorious monsters, missions, quests, BCNMs, and even the very act of selling to the NPCs.

But be aware that, at this point, unless there is a society-wide change in people's views of FFXI economy, inflation is a slow but steady fact of life.