Jump to content

What is gil worth to you?


Recommended Posts

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?

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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..?

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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. 

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. 

 

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. 

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.

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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 :)

 

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

 

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

Link to comment

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.

Link to comment

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:

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!

 

 

----

 

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:

Five billion' date=' six hundred million, eight hundred and seventy thousand gil! You've ruined me! Ruined meeeeeeeee!!!![/quote']

 

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' date=' I don't recall the exact figure. No doubt such a gift moved Nald to imbue this talisman with his complete graces.[/quote']

 

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.

 

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

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' date=' actually buy a boatload of the fuel from whomever Seseroga introduces.[/quote']

 

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!

Link to comment

I always find it helpful to use inexact phrasing as others have mentioned (enough for a meal at the CUL guild, enough for a chocobo porter to a distant camp, etc.) but when Jana hands anyone a large amount of Gil, I've made use of the promissory banknote as well.

 

I've also characterized her as someone who lives frugally but actually has a lot of money she's willing to drop on unexpected problems, so instances in which she pisses a lot of Gil away for a specific IC purpose are usually done with a banknote.

Link to comment

I always find it helpful to use inexact phrasing as others have mentioned (enough for a meal at the CUL guild, enough for a chocobo porter to a distant camp, etc.) but when Jana hands anyone a large amount of Gil, I've made use of the promissory banknote as well.

 

I've also characterized her as someone who lives frugally but actually has a lot of money she's willing to drop on unexpected problems, so instances in which she pisses a lot of Gil away for a specific IC purpose are usually done with a banknote.

 

I typically use banknotes, or for large amounts, I describe it in other terms like:

 

Weeks wages for a laborer, years wages, a laborer could work for decades and never see such a sum. Small house, large house, mansion. Suit of armor, trained chocobo, food for a week, etc etc.

Link to comment

So, we could use Eastern Cherry Trees as a form of currency almost huh?

 

:lol:

 

As far as I'm concerned there's IC gil and OOC gil. I'm pretty flexible with how people RP it with me though. 7gil for a drink, 700gil for a drink, whatever. In both scenarios 2mil for a date is absolutely insane.

Link to comment

Pricing things "appropriately" playing a smith character always has me second-guessing myself. I think the topic came up before, but no definite value was given then either. As Sounsyy said, it might just be something left nebulous and best handled by being vague as others have been. Still, I do like the 5 gil= $1 idea, and have always assumed there were larger denomination coins.

 

Though, truth be told, I usually make stuff up. I had Chachan ask for 50 gil for a letter opener he made, for example. And then just worry I picked a bad number until they pay it. :blush:

Link to comment

This was one of the Great Debates of the GW2 RP community (not just GW2RP, but-- the RP community of GW2) and I'm sure it's only harder to suss out in FFXIV, just on account of its... well... SE-ness.

 

Personally I don't have an IRL money comparison to make. When it comes to the infrequency IC gil usually comes up, consistency isn't terribly important, really- so most of the time you can just say "a little bit of gil", "a lot of gil", or "the appropriate amount of gil and a generous tip" or something like that, but if an exact number is necessary, I compare to the closest NPC equivalent I can find- armor vendors, food vendors, guildleve quest rewards, etc.

Link to comment

I use abstractions, but generally, because my character's earnings are entirely tied up in services and consumed goods, I don't really engage with this problem that often. To put it less delicately, she barely breaks even with all the traveling, eating and replacing gear. If I had other characters who were heavily invested in commerce, I imagine it would rapidly become a headache, because I *do* like to be exact from time to time.

Link to comment

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...