![](https://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/mybb18/images/reksio/flecha.png)
(07-12-2013, 11:55 PM)ManaaniWanderer Wrote: 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.
The original aetherytes were Allagan relics that had been in use for... well, basically since the Allagan Empire was in power, and they were not only a source of cheap, easy transport, but each Aetheryte also supported one or more remote gates, at a fraction of the size of the current aetheryte crystals.
Then Atmos showed up and messed them all up. An odd side-effect of that was, for a short while, you could teleport with no anima cost.
Then they all blew up. It's possible the old anima cost was actually some sort of in-built safety system by the Allagans to avoid overuse.
The current Aetherytes are much larger and more imposing, but by definition less sophisticated. They're essentially as close as they can currently get to the old aetherytes, and for the most part they work well. They can't support aetherial gates, however, and I imagine they require upkeep (No anima system, after all), whereas the old ones were basically designed to function forever with no maintenance.
Re-creating such a network obviously wasn't cheap, so a teleport fee is only natural.
Adventurers can probably be considered to be nontypical as far as wealth. The average refugee might have to scrape to afford a prime cut of dodo to treat her kids, whereas the same cut is essentially vendor trash to an adventurer. But at the same time, our characters are considerably healthier and more skilled than the average. Threats that could spell the end of normal people are almost trivial to us.
I imagine there are tradeoffs. Adventurers have a high mortality rate, thanks to the danger of our profession, and in the storyline you see a few adventuring groups have some fatalities (Getting whisked back to your homepoint on defeat seems to be rare or nonexistent in game lore, and I would suggest it might be treated as a game mechanic only)
So, we live hard, make good money, and even the poorest adventurer is better off than the refugees by level 5 or 10 (But the assumption is many don't SURVIVE that long). However... we're also taking disproportionately huge risks. And in addition to that, the tools of our trade are by necessity expensive.
And for those who craft... skilled labor is always more valuable than nonskilled, and even as a manual laborer like a miner, it's implied you have the skills and sense to actually follow the veins and mine selectively, rather than just swing a pickaxe at rock and hope for the best.
So, a successful adventurer is likely always going to be seen as affluent, or at least well off. We're not sen as homeless vagrants because we're scary competent. But at the same time, we're not envied because the stuff we do is dangerous, difficult, and requires us to farm most of our money back into our trade to make a go of it.