So one thing that always seems to get overlooked until it comes up in RP is the actual value of a game's currency. We as players tend to accrue a lot of in-game money over our play hours, but the question remains: how much really is "a lot" when it comes to roleplay?
I've seen items from vendors that sell for as little as a couple gil, upwards of several hundreds. Repairing your gear can take multiple hundreds of gil. But how accessible are certain items or services to the average Eorzean? How much gil do you need to be categorized as "rich" versus "dirt poor", and where is that middle line where you can live comfortably but a lot of things are out of your reach?
Let's hear some thoughts!
From how I feel about the game so far in the way I spent my currency in game, I'd imagine the "wealth" would be summarized as thus.
Rich - 1mil+
Middle Class - 500k>
Lower Class - 10k>
Poverty - <10k
That's just my view on what denotes wealth in the game, since I at one point had 30k on my character from questing alone, and someone had mentioned they ran out of gil because of all the teleport costs so I handed them 10k to help them along. (That and I wasn't questing anymore so I didn't need the gil myself)
But how accessible would teleporting really be in the in-character world of Eorzea? According to the game, our characters are fairly special people - certainly above average in opportunity and such. I'd hesitate to think the average normal citizen would have the ability to teleport (though that brings up an entirely separate topic on the reality of the Teleport spell and its costs - if one can teleport anywhere, why would it cost money ICly? But that's a bit off-topic).
I'm always wary of using gold sink and PC market prices (i.e. prices on the broker) as guides for the actual economy of a world, because player characters tend to accrue a lot of gold, but obviously the majority of people in the world aren't player characters.
(07-12-2013, 01:47 PM)Naunet Wrote: [ -> ]But how accessible would teleporting really be in the in-character world of Eorzea? According to the game, our characters are fairly special people - certainly above average in opportunity and such. I'd hesitate to think the average normal citizen would have the ability to teleport (though that brings up an entirely separate topic on the reality of the Teleport spell and its costs - if one can teleport anywhere, why would it cost money ICly? But that's a bit off-topic).
Actually, there's an easy answer for this - gil are the material components for the teleport spell. The further you need to teleport, the more gil you need to successfully make the transfer.
It could also handily explain why gil is valuable in the first place - it's not
just shiny pieces of metal, they also have a practical use.
The idea of gil being used to purchase material components for teleportation is interesting. This "teleportation standard" has some interesting implications, not the least of which is that it makes quantity of adventurers an important element of the economy. Places with a lot of adventurers or others who can teleport end up richer by definition, so they'd start taking steps to attract and build up those adventurers.
IMO, gil as the material component presents some problems, as it reduces the money supply. People would start hoarding gil when adventurers came around, as reducing the money supply increases the value of money if prices remain constant. Adventurers would experience sky-high prices, would never be able to get loans, etc. Because the reduction in the money supply locally essentially removes wealth from those who transact with adventurers, there'd be a strong motivation not to do so; it's not as if that gil is going back into the economy -- it's just going away. The problems end up being similar to that of mercantilism, with adventurers being disliked because they create a net negative balance of trade.
I think that the problem we have with trying to apply economic principles to gil (outside of descriptive analyses of the actual in-game market established by players) is that the concept of gil itself is weird for the setting. Why would the three city-states, who while nominally friendly aren't unified except against the Garleans, use the same currency (excepting the "teleportation standard" argument)? Who controls the mints? Why are beastmen carrying gil around? I'm not sure we can do anything better than declare gil an abstraction of wealth of various sorts. That still doesn't explain why you use gil to teleport, though.
The gil price is likely imposed by the city-states to pull revenue from the use of their Aetheryte crystals. Now, one could rent a Chocobo or a Carriage or something, and that'd be cheap. Aetheryte travel is instantaneous, however, and costs a premium to use. After all, I'm certain the Aetherytes themselves need upkeeping as people continue to use it over and over again. They never explicitly say this as far as I know, but I believe it's something we can just infer. In 1.0, we had anima, which was a sort of "energy" as it were. Teleporting too much, too often would make you sick and weak. Hence when you ran out of anima, you ran out of your mental fortitude to teleport. That was canon. I don't know if they've completely nipped that concept, or if perhaps aether-based travel is easier now due to the calamity.
That being said, beastmen actually don't carry gil. They each have their own currency which is a part of their drop tables. The only beastmen that might drop gil would be the Qiqirin, the Goblins, and the Mamool Ja, since all three have been seen to have interactions with the five races and city-states.
I think this is getting away from the original intent of my post - though it's an interesting tangent.
What I was really trying to drive at in my OP was seeing what kinds of definitions we could surmise regarding relative wealth. How much money would an average, working-class individual possess? At what point does one cross over barely scraping by to living comfortably? When does an Eorzean become "rich"?
Here's a basic question that, if answered, could help inform these questions: About how much gil do ya'll think a simple apartment would cost?
We don't really know canonically, honestly. They never really give any values, at least they didn't in 1.0. I'd wait until we see housing prices. That will give you a general idea of wealth in Eorzea. Just need to take a look at the cost of the largest plot of land, and base it around that, really.
The prices for player housing are going to be based of PC gil income, not the average income for an average citizen of Eorzea. It would be a mistake to base estimates of cost of living on something intended to be a gold sink for the game.
See, that's just the thing -- I don't think we can extrapolate at all, really. We don't know enough about what gil represents or how the economy works to really guess how much such a thing would cost. If you go by in-game costs directly, you'll probably get a very inflated value. If you try to construct a purchasing parity index similar to the quick and dirty "Big Mac Index" -- let's call it the "Potion index" -- and link it to a similar commodity in country of similar economic structure, you'll probably come up with weird values because the costs in game are set for game balance, not economic accuracy.
That said, if one did want to go down the PPI route, I'd recommend creating either a basket of goods or one specific good -- say, the cost of a cheap meal at the Bismark -- and call it an index value of 1, equivalent to a fast food meal in a related real world country. Then, compute the index multiplier in that other country for something you want to value in gil, then convert back from the index to the cost in gil.
So, for instance, let's say a cheap meal in Limsa costs 10 gil in game. That's index value 1. For the sake of argument, let's say a cheap fast food meal in a coastal fishing city in US runs around $5. A cheap apartment there is $465 per month. That gives it an index value of 465/5 = 93. So, in Limsa, a cheap apartment would be 93 * 10, or 930 gil per month.
Obviously, one can easily poke holes in the above analysis, which is why I don't like it very much.
I'm not really satisfied with this state of affairs either, but I just don't think we have enough information to do anything other than call gil an abstraction of relative wealth for now.
So I
did a thing. The data collected is just from Ul'dah's Sapphire Avenue Exchange, but I think this provides some very important insights into the potential financial reach of the poor or working class versus, say, a high-falutin' adventurer or the finer folk.
Take, for example, food. There's an NPC in the Coffer & Coffin who describes marmot meat as low-quality (and thus, probably the cheaper side of meat, considering it's favored by miners and such, who aren't going to be making a lot of money). Marmot steak sells from a potwatch for 9 gil. You can use this understanding of the relative value of marmot to compare to other food items, both raw and processed, and from that I feel comfortable saying that any food item over 15 or so gil is probably considered to be a splurge for the average poor or working class individual (such as those cooks or leatherworkers or other such employed individuals just trying to get by).
If you compare the cost of meat to the cost of clothing, you can see quite clearly why the refugees in Ul'dah are having such a difficult time making a living. If they can barely afford to eat, it's unlikely they can afford any clothing much more than rags. As my fiance puts it: "Three chicken breasts for five dollars, or one shirt for thirty? Guess I'm going naked for a month."
Anyway, there's more that can be said about this (such as drawing tentative conclusions regarding the types of materials lower class individuals use for their clothing/jewelry vs. the more comfortably living), but I need to get some packing done.
(07-12-2013, 06:30 PM)Naunet Wrote: [ -> ]So I did a thing. The data collected is just from Ul'dah's Sapphire Avenue Exchange, but I think this provides some very important insights into the potential financial reach of the poor or working class versus, say, a high-falutin' adventurer or the finer folk.
Take, for example, food. There's an NPC in the Coffer & Coffin who describes marmot meat as low-quality (and thus, probably the cheaper side of meat, considering it's favored by miners and such, who aren't going to be making a lot of money). Marmot steak sells from a potwatch for 9 gil. You can use this understanding of the relative value of marmot to compare to other food items, both raw and processed, and from that I feel comfortable saying that any food item over 15 or so gil is probably considered to be a splurge for the average poor or working class individual (such as those cooks or leatherworkers or other such employed individuals just trying to get by).
If you compare the cost of meat to the cost of clothing, you can see quite clearly why the refugees in Ul'dah are having such a difficult time making a living. If they can barely afford to eat, it's unlikely they can afford any clothing much more than rags. As my fiance puts it: "Three chicken breasts for five dollars, or one shirt for thirty? Guess I'm going naked for a month."
Anyway, there's more that can be said about this (such as drawing tentative conclusions regarding the types of materials lower class individuals use for their clothing/jewelry vs. the more comfortably living), but I need to get some packing done.
I think this is the right approach, but I also think some caution is needed. Some of the cheaper items seem to really make a mark when you buy them in bundles/stacks. I can see some of the pricing of these NPC vendor items seem more geared in relative relation to "starting out" and being low level.
If you start a character out, 200 - 400 gil is a substantial investment (IMHO) since you don't have much gil in your pocket; I myself put off dying equipment for a bit, wanting one of the 216 gil ones, although even at 60 gil, it adds up as you try to dye yourself.
I do sorta see the OOC balance of all this on the economy. Armor should be expensive : It always is. It seems to balance with the rate one initially gains money in the game doing quests. Also, consider the normal gil drops when you just kill animals in starting zones, which tend to be 1-2 gil on average *IF* the animal drops coin. Also consider the material components, such as Animal skins, that one can sell and how much they go for. This may add to how much a "poor NPC" has on hand to establish a level of income (plus all the gathering classes that we can assume some NPCs have).
As for adventurers, it really does seem like you are elevated above the norm. To me, this seems more akin to "Western Gun-fighters who collect bounties": You make good money as long as you keep taking those hard jobs which others do not take. Just in Limsa Lominsa alone, it seems they talk about you and your adventuring and show you consideration in numerous ways (a pair of shiny shoes to wear to the ball that you get for free, for an example). So, I would definitely put adventurers above the norm for NPCs, financially, even though we start out dirt poor (but that's true about every RPG game).
The problem I see with trying to give value to in game currency is that you really can't. For example using the list of gear you show for an example, by around level 10 a single character is already wealthy enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life and ten more. I made a new character for this current test and reached level 20 today and I've already got almost 40,000 gil. By that, I could afford several suits of high end armor, all the food I could ever want, potions to drown myself in, etc.
So while it's fun to think about, it doesn't really work well in practice because players amass wealth far above and beyond what you would assume is the economic norm for non-players, and they tend to do it very quickly.
There is an IC explanation for why teleport costs gil-namely to pay back the loans from Ul'Dah business men that financed the repair and reconstruction of the Atheyirite camps after the Calamity. Source-the NPC who approaches you after you atune yourself to the crystal in your starting city.
(07-12-2013, 11:53 PM)Ashren Snow Wrote: [ -> ]The problem I see with trying to give value to in game currency is that you really can't. For example using the list of gear you show for an example, by around level 10 a single character is already wealthy enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life and ten more.
A single PC character - not an average citizen of Eorzea. Not everyone RPs an adventurer, and certainly as I said, the majority of people in Eorzea are not adventurers. I think it's absolutely critical when considering these kinds of things to divorce the large gil accumulation you get OOCly from playing the game, from the theoretical
actual gil accumulation any typical individual in the world would get from a roleplay standpoint.