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The Value of Gil - Printable Version

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RE: The Value of Gil - Twinflame - 07-13-2013

(07-13-2013, 12:28 AM)Naunet Wrote: 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.

Not to mention the amount of gil I have IC won't be related at all to the amount I have OOC. Deciding what's reasonable IC based on game mechanics is kind of how we infer any portion of the myriad things that we need to know in order to RP well. Knowing what a reasonable amount of money for the typical  low/middle/high class person is can be helpful for us.

This reminds me of some stuff we did in TERA, like working out economical exports and imports of different zones. And by "we" I mean Naunet and Ildur. Not me. I was just kind of "Yeah guys that's awesome. Do that."

It was extremely helpful for RP, though.


RE: The Value of Gil - Isilme - 07-13-2013

(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.


RE: The Value of Gil - Ashren Dotharl - 07-13-2013

(07-13-2013, 12:28 AM)Naunet Wrote: 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.

Sure, I can understand that completely, but one thing you need to keep in mind too (and I believe FreelanceWizard said this earlier) is that the cost of items you buy from vendors are scaled on PC income, not IC income. Looking at prices for certain things does give you a good impression of the economy, but not an accurate one. What is made readily available to us as players may be completely inaccessible to the normal person, or something that could be so common you could walk outside your front door and find it everywhere is given a price simply because the game doesn't support it being given away for free (Moko Grass comes to mind).

The fact that a full set of Hempen Gear will cost you... we'll say 555 gil based on a few pieces of gear I saw on the list you created, that seems like it'd probably be well out of the range for someone who is poor and destitute, but it's effectively nothing more than the equivalent of wearing a potato sack, and it's made almost exclusively out of grass you can find in every corner of the Black Shroud. So basically to clothe one person with clothing made out of grass, it costs as much as it would cost to feed an entire family (if we assume the average family is 3-4 peope) three meals a day for a week, to clothe everyone in the family it would cost them an entire months worth of food (assuming they are eating ONLY marmot steak, since I saw that mentioned as a staple food for poor people).

You can make hempen gear as a level 1 Weaver, so we can assume the gear is so shoddy that effectively anyone who knows how to use a sewing needle and how to pick some grass (that, as I said before, grows EVERYWHERE) could make it with little effort at all, and yet this clothing costs as much as feeding a family for a whole week? This is where trying to decipher the value of in game currency based on the costs of in game items pretty much goes out the window.


Value of Gil - K'nahli - 05-16-2015

Quote:Moderator Note:
Thread has been merged from this point on.



Has it ever been "decided" what worth gil holds against real life currency? I have genuinely no idea is 100 gil would be like $/£/€100 if not more, or if it's comparable to pennies.

Perhaps it's one of those things that is mostly overlooked for the sake of keeping things simple but I am looking at the Wine Tasting event for example and I want to know how expensive things should be deemed by my character.


Also, while we're here.... how much would you suggest an inn room would cost for the night(in Ul'dah if it matters) along with perhaps a simple meal?


RE: Value of Gil - Mercer - 05-16-2015

I refer back to the Aethertician for currency value. $20 for a haircut is pretty common in the states so 2,000 gil for a haircut adds up. It's similar to Yen in that case. There are no cents, just the monetary value.


RE: Value of Gil - Jaliqai - 05-16-2015

I've actually wondered this myself and have almost made a thread for it several times, but never did. I've seen some people play that 100g is a month's earnings, others that 100g is pocket change. (And the characters weren't necessarily 'wealthy', ICly.)

It would be really hard to have a set "standard" on currency value, I think.. But I would be really curious to see a survey done on player perceptions of it, nonetheless. Maybe given a list of items / services -- i.e. 'A mug of ale at the Quicksand is worth ___, a top shelf glass of wine is worth ___, a standard quality iron weapon is worth ___, so on.. -- and ask each person to fill in the blanks with what they (personally) perceive the value as?


RE: Value of Gil - Kellach Woods - 05-16-2015

(05-16-2015, 02:16 PM)Oswin Wrote: I refer back to the Aethertician for currency value. $20 for a haircut is pretty common in the states so 2,000 gil for a haircut adds up. It's similar to Yen in that case. There are no cents, just the monetary value.

It's not just that though - you get tattoo removal, make up, the works.


RE: Value of Gil - C'kayah Polaali - 05-16-2015

I've always used 10 gil to the dollar as a good ratio.

A hard boiled egg from a vendor is 5 gil, while I can get one from the corner deli for $0.50.

The best man jacket and slacks are 30k for the set. A nice suit at Barney's goes for between $1500 and $5000, so $3000 fits nicely in that range.


RE: Value of Gil - Qhora Bajihri - 05-16-2015

I think loaves of bread are a standard value of currency measuring thing, aren't they? I don't know if any of the vendors sell loaves of bread. Flatbread is worth 6g, but you can get those in packs of 6 for the price of a loaf on this side, so maybe ignoring that.

So a bowl of mutton stew costs 16g. A glass of orange juice, 7g. A level 5 sword will cost you 10 bowls of stew.

It's probably not a good way to do it, since I'm fairly sure vendor prices are arbitrary, and low-level vendor stuff =/= the economy at all, but it's how I usually think of it, anyway, since it's something that doesn't change. You can always walk up to the vendor and ask the price of a loaf of... stew. Once you get into high end adventurer stuff, you're talking a butt-ton of stews.

In the end, everyone's gonna think of gil differently, but that's not so different from reality. The value of your money looks different depending on how much of it you have.


RE: Value of Gil - Cato - 05-16-2015

It's likely that many role-players will have completely different ideas as to what is considered to be a hefty or minuscule amount of gil. I get around that by avoiding specifics and simply emote something along the lines of a 'hefty satchel of gil' for large transactions and 'a handful of gil' for smaller purchases. I've had no complaints so far.


RE: Value of Gil - Dis - 05-16-2015

I also tend to do the sackful/handful of gil method, and no one's said much so far.  I know Glioca, for the candies she makes tends to charge a moderate amount (50 gil, so if assuming that 100 gil is a dollar, her candies are .50 cents each, roughly).  Ultimately, I think a non-specified amount is usually best, since there's no way of getting a universal equal amount out without consulting lore devs.  That said, that might be a good question to propose.  They might consider gil more like yen, and less like a dollar, which would make a little more sense, I think.

We've seen that the gillionaire achievement requires 10,000,000 gil, and in yen, that's a pretty good hunk of change.  I think counting it more literally might be the easiest way to go.  It technically deflates the value of gil, but given that FFXIV is originally a Japanese game, it would make more sense to me if the currency is based on their own, rather than any other currency system.


RE: Value of Gil - OttoVann - 05-16-2015

I posted a thread about this a while ago that had a lot of replies about this. Ill see if I can find it. Might help you

Actually I was wrong its barely related

http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=8714


RE: Value of Gil - SunTzu7 - 05-16-2015

Much like pokedollars, I think Gil is traditionally equated to the same value in Yen. I could be wrong, but that's how I usually imagine it.


RE: Value of Gil - K'nahli - 05-16-2015

(05-16-2015, 04:57 PM)OttoVann Wrote: I posted a thread about this a while ago that had a lot of replies about this.  Ill see if I can find it.  Might help you

Actually I was wrong its barely related

http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=8714

I'm actually wondering If I had made this exact topic already a long time ago...
(And thank you for your replies so far, everyone!)

---------------
Thread has been merged with a topic that had the exact same name (+ a "the"!).


RE: The Value of Gil - Maril - 05-16-2015

(05-16-2015, 02:14 PM)Knahli Wrote:
Quote:Moderator Note:
Thread has been merged from this point on.



Has it ever been "decided" what worth gil holds against real life currency? I have genuinely no idea is 100 gil would be like $/£/€100 if not more, or if it's comparable to pennies.

Perhaps it's one of those things that is mostly overlooked for the sake of keeping things simple but I am looking at the Wine Tasting event for example and I want to know how expensive things should be deemed by my character.


Also, while we're here.... how much would you suggest an inn room would cost for the night(in Ul'dah if it matters) along with perhaps a simple meal?

Waaaaaaaaaaaaay back I went to a lot of the in game merchants and I tried to calculate, what a meal was to put together, drinks etc. To try and find out what a person might need in gil per day to survive comfortably. I then held that up against the dollar and my native currency and I somehow got to the conclusion that 5 gil = 1$
I'm not a big maths genius and my methods are a bit flawed since npcs tend to be biased in such a way that higher level item = higher cost because of the levelling curve and how you earn more and more gil naturally as you level up.
With that in hand, I have done lots and lots of googling to find out barprices, rents for a room etc. Tonight I did it for the wine/dine event as well. In my FC we decided to stick with that conversion rate, it's made the financial part of RP easier to handle - I can directly say, your character earns around this much per week and they can adjust - for example when they're punished for breaking rules and lose gil as a result, they can for example run around asking people for food because they don't have gil enough to buy any.

Anyways. A full three course meal (in like, a semi good restaurant) I think was around 200 gil, more expensive if you add alcohol, and rooms could be from 500 and up.. Following that logic. The lower the cost the shabbier condition? But I reckon a person could survive, if they had a regular place rented and made all of their meals themselves, on 1000 gil at week. And I mean survive, not live comfortably, there.

.. I hope it makes sense and can help you some. I wouldn't expect many others to embrace the same thing as us, but its a place to start I guess.