3 questions

[Esoa]

1. Do weapon upgrades for my fellowship NPC increase his damage?

2. Does it matter if I skip a tier on a weapon upgrade? For example, I couldn't find any Hydro Axes around so I used a G. Katana for the lvl 3 upgrade. Then I plan to switch back to G. Axes at the 4+ upgrades.

3. Where does all the gil come from? I hardly sell anything to NPC's so I imagine I've taken more money out of the economy with AH and chocobo fees than I've put in with quest rewards and selling to NPC's. If everyone is selling back and forth on the AH, the gil that drives inflation has to come from somewhere.

[little ninja]

1. yes
2. i didnt know people played with npcs still.
3. repeatable quests, rank missions, avatar battles, npc, the 2 gambler npcs, mobs. gil buyers hold large amounts of gil, then with the increase of gil sales, more gil is released into the economy, causing a inflation spike,

[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.

[Meth]

1. No. NPC equipment has been said to be purely cosmetic. The only thing that is certain to boost NPC stats is the Hydra armor set you can equip @ level 70.

2. To be honest I'm not sure. I had a buddy switch weapon types but when he did he started from weapon 1. Being that last G.Axe I need is never on sale, I will try giving a different level 7 weapon to my NPC and post the result here tomorrow.

3. I have nothing to add, I agree with the above posters.

Here is a nice link for NPC info:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/index.p...PCs_Statistics

[Esoa]

1. No. NPC equipment has been said to be purely cosmetic. The only thing that is certain to boost NPC stats is the Hydra armor set you can equip @ level 70.

Here is a nice link for NPC info:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/index.p...PCs_Statistics

NPC armor is purely cosmetic. The link you posted and what I've read (including what the first responder wrote) say nothing about the weapon. Since you actually supply the weapons it doesn't seem unreasonable that they provide an upgrade. Also, since your NPC can use any of the weapons of the type that you supplied, there doesn't seem to be much point in upgrading if they don't increase damage.

[Aeni]

That's a really nice view of our problem, Irisjir Callard. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who like to lose money. Most people tend to want to make profits rather than lose money. Also, most crafters do end up buying from NPCs (A lot of time the mats are actually cheaper) and then they sell to each other. I think there's just way too much gil in the economy circulating. If you reduce the total amount of gil overnight (Say, make 90% of all gil from everyone's pocket go *poof*) Then you'll see the prices just plummet and items become worthless in value very, very quickly.

IF that's how you see inflation as...

[Irisjir Callard]

That's a really nice view of our problem, Irisjir Callard. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who like to lose money. Most people tend to want to make profits rather than lose money. Also, most crafters do end up buying from NPCs (A lot of time the mats are actually cheaper) and then they sell to each other. I think there's just way too much gil in the economy circulating. If you reduce the total amount of gil overnight (Say, make 90% of all gil from everyone's pocket go *poof*) Then you'll see the prices just plummet and items become worthless in value very, very quickly.

IF that's how you see inflation as...

Actually, I think if 90% of gil vanished overnight, things would hardly become worthless. Relative price would skyrocket. The actual numbers might go down, say 100 gil for a 1000 gil item, but instead of regarding any given item as 'worthless', people wound instead regard those items as too valuable to sell.

For example, a person buys a scorpion harness for 9 million gil, then 90% of gil vanishes. Now the same "worth" of the harness, where worth means "same percent of the gil in the economy" is one million gil. However, the person who bought it is hardly likely to accept that math, and will probably regard its worth as closer to 2 million gil. Thus the price relative the economy goes up.

As to the point of everyone wanting to make profits rather than lose money...you are entirely correct. I fall into the "make a profit' category myself.

Unfortunately, my economic view is full of problems but I have few solutions to offer, aside from a tightly controlled market (basically making every item NPC vendable or rare EX), or increasing the NPC prices for items. Neither one is very appealing, as you can see.

[Meth]

NPC armor is purely cosmetic. The link you posted and what I've read (including what the first responder wrote) say nothing about the weapon. Since you actually supply the weapons it doesn't seem unreasonable that they provide an upgrade. Also, since your NPC can use any of the weapons of the type that you supplied, there doesn't seem to be much point in upgrading if they don't increase damage.

That is true, it doesn't mention the effects any weapon upgrade has either way. Just going from my own experience here; I have not noticed any change in damage output after weapon upgrades. Let me translate that to what it really means; I don't pay attention to my NPCs damage output. The thing about weapons, is the weapon you give is not what she wears. And some weapon upgrades are the same level as the weapon they have (for example the last two G.Axes are both 34). IMO, the weapons serve as a NPC bond boost, and an NPC visual upgrade. That's just an opinion, I could be way off track.