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***RiniKett*** · **06-21-2016, 02:50 PM**

So, this has really bugged me from when I first managed my IC tavern to selling IC goods all the way up until, well, now.

Just how much is gil worth? Some see 100 gil as a lot of money, comparable to 100 USD IRL. Myself, I have always judged things based on the in game merchants who sell food for like...750 gil for a meal, so, maybe 7.50 American dollars or, since this is a Japanese MMO, 750 yen which converts to about 7.1 USD which is a reasonable price for a simple meal.

Why am I wondering over such a meaningless confusion? Because people have different reactions when you tell them "Here's a burger for 700 gil(7 dollars)." or "Here's a burger, you owe me 700 gil (700 dollars)." It is a big difference and has caused issues when trying to make a menu and further some RP with various people.

So I'm just curious what you all see it as. Is 700 gil a bunch of money or is it chump change?

Aaron · **06-21-2016, 02:52 PM**

Only poor people would whine about paying 700 gil when they probably waste more money buying useless shit off the MB on a daily.

SicketySix · **06-21-2016, 03:12 PM**

Keep in mind how much pocket space 700 gill would take up. Since one piece of gill is just that, 1 gill. That means you need to carry seven hundred pieces on you for a simple meal. Ain't nobody got time to count at that much for an Eft Salad.

So for me personally, 1 gill equals $1.00.

However if someone charges me 700 gill for a burger, i just roll with it and mark it down to what I think was a fair price and I leave it at that.

Arzilia · **06-21-2016, 03:16 PM**

Usually I use the first NPC merchants as standard. For example, initial equipment costs around 400 gil a piece and then it climbs up steadily as level increases.

If I see a burger costing twice as my first pair of leather gloves that better be the finest burger! =P

But I guess that leaves 1 gil being around 1 USD. That's just in my head anyway.

Faye · **06-21-2016, 03:25 PM**

(06-21-2016, 03:12 PM)SicketySix Wrote: Keep in mind how much pocket space 700 gill would take up. Since one piece of gill is just that, 1 gill. That means you need to carry seven hundred pieces on you for a simple meal. Ain't nobody got time to count at that much for an Eft Salad.

So for me personally, 1 gill equals $1.00.

However if someone charges me 700 gill for a burger, i just roll with it and mark it down to what I think was a fair price and I leave it at that.

^ This p much. I equate it to real life currency (USD), but I roll with however other players want to price things IC.

Kilieit · **06-21-2016, 03:29 PM**

My only measure is the PGL quest NPC who mentions something like 200 gil is "almost a week's worth of--" something, because she's cut off. So I don't know if she means a week's food, a week's pay, a week's gear repairs, a week's drinking fund...

I usually just fudge it, avoid listing specific numbers. I'm kind of crap with numbers anyway - I have a LD that means quantities are fuzzy at best to me - so I either estimate based on similar cost of in-game item, or I just say "some gil" - "not too expensive", "fairly steep", "pocket change", etc.

I think it's feasible to avoid listing specific prices on in-character menus and so forth. Provide the list of items, provide a general meta value-statement ("upmarket restaurant" vs "cheap grub"), and let people emote the payment like "hands over exact gil amount", "hands over payment plus generous tip", "hands over gil but is a little short", etc.

Valence · **06-21-2016, 03:31 PM**

Aetheryte travels makes me see gil as pretty expensive all in all. It is clearly stated in lore and by lore team that the fees are enormous for your average commoner. Take that at best it's around 600 gils for the longest trips, then yeah, gil is expensive.

A boiled egg is worth 2gils or something in NPC merchants. Stuff that is worth 700 I think, well... It's a lot of course. It's hard to reconcile. I could see it as some very luxury high cuisine or something I guess...

So, based on the boiled egg price for example, it's probably cheaper than the standard US$. Maybe half its worth? Still close enough in my book.

Kilieit · **06-21-2016, 03:46 PM**

(06-21-2016, 03:31 PM)Valence Wrote: Aetheryte travels makes me see gil as pretty expensive all in all. It is clearly stated in lore and by lore team that the fees are enormous for your average commoner. Take that at best it's around 600 gils for the longest trips, then yeah, gil is expensive.

Actually yeah that's a good point. Chocobo porters are much cheaper - and much more of what your average commoner would expect to pay for. Comparable to a private taxi, I guess?

And I'm afraid I don't have sources, but I seem to recall that adventuring pays, like... really really well. So the amount of money we earn as players - and as the Warrior of Light, remember, that's what we're considered to be in gameplay terms - can't really be compared to the average income of a regular person, even if you take into account the whole 3 minutes IRL = 1 hour in-game thing when it comes to per-hour pay.

I guess the other place you could look to, for inspiration if not confirmation, would be other FF games..?

Scaith · **06-21-2016, 03:57 PM**

I'm gonna have to agree that 100 gil to me is about a dollar, since some of the prices have always seemed appropriate for the pricing! Though, when it comes to higher amounts, it kinda goes out the window with the economy. Seeing player sales versus NPC sales, it's not difficult to see where the difference shows.

***Maril*** · **06-21-2016, 04:02 PM**

Waaay back when I came across a similar problem. I love details in my roleplay, and I like to be able to estimate how much gil my character is (or isn't) running around with. I decided to check out every NPC in all of the major cities (this excludes Ishgard, which wasn't available then) and noted down prices of various items - especially food and drink. I tried to roughly estimate, based on the vendor value then how much would it cost to for example make a breakfast.Â
I then tried to hold the number up against the US currency, and I tweaked it some after figuring out how many times one would eat per day if you were moderately well off, and also after talking with some people about how much income per month they'd regard as the bare minimum to survive on (in USD). After all of that, what I found was that 1 USD = Roughly 5 gil. Following that, every time I've sat prices for menus and various items, I have googled my way forth (since I have "feel" of the USD as being used to my own) to several US prices, picked an average and then converted it.Â

I should mention that I am not particularly mathematically gifted, and there's probably ways to be more accurate. I don't think that there's a perfect way to figure it out, without a quote from the loreteam, because even with checking with NPC's you have to remember that the NPC items are adjusted for example to be crafting-items. So they say okay how much gil does a lowbie CUL have at level 5 - so and so, and then you end up with a 2gil egg. Which means "basic" items sold by npc's that are used in higher recipes would be more expensive - though, I have noticed that vendor-based items get phased out intensely after level 15.

What I later on used with my old guild was the same conversion rate after some discussion, simply agreeing that within our group that'd be how it was understood. Otherwise, I just go along with whatever I am presented with - though I don't really like it too much when people use OOC gil because I have that sense that 1000 gil is kind of a big deal at least to someone like my main. So it doesn't really make sense (in that context) when someone then boasts that theyre earning 100k on a levequest, just to give an example.Â
But adding to that, it's really rare that I see people use big big numbers, and more often than not it's formulated as "a heavy gilpouch" instead of being specific.

Warren Castille · **06-21-2016, 04:13 PM**

I never use numbers when talking about gil. People use starting food as a metric, but you can also go spend 2k+ on some popotos au gratin in Ishgard, and I can't think of any fine dining place on the planet where some potatoes, cream and cheese runs you $250.

Instead, I just try to give approximations: Enough to eat for a day, enough for a fine dinner out, enough to change someone's life... That kind of thing. It gets across the same idea without needing to worry about how much gil a gil is actually valued at. The 1 gil = 1 yen conversion works out okay to start, but it doesn't scale so hot.

Hyakki · **06-21-2016, 04:33 PM**

(06-21-2016, 03:12 PM)SicketySix Wrote: Keep in mind how much pocket space 700 gill would take up. Since one piece of gill is just that, 1 gill. That means you need to carry seven hundred pieces on you for a simple meal. Ain't nobody got time to count at that much for an Eft Salad.

There are probably different denominations of coin so you're not stuck carrying around hundreds of 1 gil coins (unless you're one of those sadists that likes to pay for everything in pennies)

Allagan currency is a good example of this and I'd like to think there's an present-day Eorzean equivalent.

Aya · **06-21-2016, 04:35 PM**

I always tread gil as roughly one dollar in prices. It at the very least avoids awkwardness around someone reacting to a high price, when you meant it to be low Smile

In general I don't think the exact values actually matter.

In terms of what gil means to Aya? Just about everything ^_~

ExAtomos · **06-21-2016, 04:46 PM**

Mebbe it's a bit over-simplistic and stereotyping, but I also go with the yen mindset cause the game is made in JP. So, 100 gil = 100 yen = about $1. IC it's more a vague "you have the money or you don't" when it comes to pricey things like that 13k food item. >< But the REALLY exorbitant prices are contained to the player run mb, which is kinda ooc in my book. NPC rates are reasonable. Armor costing thousands? Sure. If I go to the market IC, I'm browsing some stalls somewhere.

Sounsyy · **06-21-2016, 04:50 PM**

Just by looking at this thread you can see that everyone views the weight of the gil differently. There will probably never be a consensus. Some view it GIL-USD 1-1, 10-1, 100-1 and so forth, some compare it to Yen... But even when looking at the in game merchant prices of things, there doesn't really seem to be a pattern to make sense of.

So if you're utilizing actual gil for an event, menu, or PC restaurant I'd definitely recommend putting in a disclaimer on your event page that lists the conversions that YOUR menu/event uses. So players know what to adjust their canon to. This seems to work pretty well, though most people I know still prefer generalized terms such as, "a large amount" "a meager gilpurse" etc.

Here's what one of my FC's posts on the bottom of their menu:

Quote:Please note that the Bountiful Chest uses a 100 Gil : $1.00 USD scale on prices.
YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED TO PAY ACTUAL GIL FOR YOUR MEAL / DRINKS.
This is simply added to the menu for an additional bit of IC flavor!

----

(06-21-2016, 03:12 PM)SicketySix Wrote: Keep in mind how much pocket space 700 gill would take up. Since one piece of gill is just that, 1 gill. That means you need to carry seven hundred pieces on you for a simple meal. Ain't nobody got time to count at that much for an Eft Salad.

This is why I (and many others) believe that gil has different denominations. We're expected to be carrying around hundreds of small, copper coins on our person. Even if the gil is the size of a penny, it'd be impractical to carry anything more than 50-100 gil around at a time. You'd jingle worse than a goblin everywhere you went. And we know that there are those who do carry around sizable sums of gil.

From the quest Blues on Emerald Avenue we know that there are banks, futures, and banknotes for handling larger sums of gil. So it makes sense that there'd also be coins of differing denominations and values, similar to how different Allagan coins have different weights. Otherwise, there'd have to be hundreds of trillions of individual gil pieces in circulation across Eorzea.

Just look at some of the values waved around by Ul'dahn tycoons like Memeriga, or the Lalafell who commissioned the statue of Nald in Milvaneth Sacrarium, Rorojaru:

Memeriga Wrote:Five billion, six hundred million, eight hundred and seventy thousand gil! You've ruined me! Ruined meeeeeeeee!!!!

Rorojaru Wrote:Thank you a thousand times over! It is for just such unexpected acts of kindness that I continue to give selflessly to the Order of Nald'thal. I recently purchased for them an elaborate statue of Nald for some ten billion gil or so, I don't recall the exact figure. No doubt such a gift moved Nald to imbue this talisman with his complete graces.

Note, neither of these lalafell make the cut as top six wealthiest individuals in Ul'dah, so the Syndicate boasts considerably higher sums. Most of this is likely in a bank somewhere or distributed only by way of banknotes. But even someone like Lolorito must carry pocket change, and I doubt he's walking around with a thousand individual gil pieces bobbing around his pockets.

Banknote Wrote:A promissory note documenting the considerable amount of gil borrowed in Wymond's name from one of the realm's most prestigious banks.

Wymond Wrote:Tell him you're workin' for a wealthy fellow who wants to buy as much ceruleum as he can with the gil promised on that paper. Then, actually buy a boatload of the fuel from whomever Seseroga introduces.

Anywhoozles, more lore on the gil piece, its history, the figures which are printed on it, and the like can be found in this Gil Lore Post. But there's also several other threads I found from way back discussing just how much players think gil is worth, and they all about came to the same conclusion, which is to say, not much of one. Everyone will be different, so its best to standardize per event.

Hope this helps some!

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