(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.