Asura Inflation - What's Going On?

Stikini Ring was 18-21M for ages, now 50m. Rostram was 39-40M for ages, now 90M. How has this happened?

Rostam has been 90+ for a several months. I'd say since september at least? Probably more.

When you only see a few on AH and barely any on Bazaars it kinda makes sense because of Demand/Offer, and Rostam is surely still in high demand.
But when you see several on Bazaars and 20+ on AH you kinda start to wonder how so many sellers don't undercut each other, as it usually happens every bloody other time for anything in the market where there's more offer than demand.

1. Maybe mat prices increased
2. Maybe a strong crafter left the market
3. Maybe some rich dude is trying to control market
4. More gil incoming to the economy
5. Maybe some exploit was patched

There's no chance Rostam has been 40m for years, it doesn't make any sense economically to even craft at those prices.

Stikini rings are expensive because gilsellers stopped farming Sparkling Stones, so supply of Koh-i-noor has hit rock bottom, meaning Stikini ring supply is also rock bottom.

For some perspective, I don't have a Smithing shield, but I looked through all of my data for Su5 weapons and found the most profitable one I've had the absolute best luck with and converted it to Rostam mats, using Asura prices:

Macuil Horn: 70 x 150k = 10.5m
Dark Matter: 66 x 700k = 46.2m
Ruthenium Ore: 73 x 1,126,125 = 82.2m
Moldy Dagger: 162 x 2.3m = 372.6m
Ratnaraj: 160 x 2m = 320m
Relic Adaman: 295 x 500k = 147.5m
Jadeite Crystal: 147 x 2m = 294m

Total cost = 1,273,000,000

Lanun Knives: 10 x 1.5m = 15m
Rostam: 17 x 40m = 680m

Total sales = 695m

Congrats on making your smithing shield, you just lost 578m. Best case scenario.

Turn that 40m into a 90m and you get 1.53b, for a profit a little under 300m, which I think is fairly reasonable for the luckiest possible scenario. If you want to get depressed I can share some of my unlucky Su5s with you.

I'm not surprised of prices being that high.
And I agree I doubt Rostam has been 40m for a long time, if ever. Maybe during the era of the medals dupe?

I was more making a point about other similar weapons using pretty much the same mats, yet they get sold for 60-70m and Rostam, while also being way more present in stock, gets sold for 90.

I guess Rostam being more requested while the others being barely wanted (Demand/Offer) could almost explain it but... not entirely imho.


I mean Rostam 90+m, ~3 sold per day, more requested but also waaay more available in stocks.
Gandring ~70m 1.5 sold per day, less requested but way less around the market.
Barfawc, ~60m, 0.2 sold per day, waaaay less requested and way less around the market.

The mats to craft these are pretty much the same.
Then again we could make the example with some other weapon with similar cost but cheaper price and the same could be said about some other weapons being sold for 130+m
Furthermore, you could say the same about necks. Some have identical mats but incredibly different prices.


So yeah, I'm sure Demand/Offer plays a big role into deciding which gets sold for more and which for less, but I doubt it's "just" that.

Have had similar experience, if not worse. Since SU4 weapons are virtually worthless now, the SU5 needs to get up to 140m to make it worthwhile. Some of the less sought after are already hitting that level.

Highly suggest keeping track of your expenses if you aren't already, it can get very chaotic with 7 mat items and it's not clear how much, if any, gil you're making. I've made a net profit on all my shields, but not on all items. It's obviously pretty random but (at least on Carbuncle) it's generally profitable in a long-term.

I'd say with material prices where they are on Carbuncle (and apparently Asura, which is pretty similar), 75-85m is pretty fair for Su5s. Leaves a little room for profit with reasonable luck, but not being unreasonable and gauging. 90m is on the high side, but Rostam are in high demand so :shrug:

I feel the reason why it's so hard to make money for "legit" players in the current market is because I'm 100% sure there's a looooooooooot of duped medals/mats which are still around.

When you have hundreds of those mats for free on multiple mules, of course it's a lot of gil saved and, in return, you can still make a profit by selling for less, whereas for those prices it would be a total loss for any other "legit" player.

Rostam hasnt been 40m in years.... Where is this CAP coming from. I agree prices have been on the rise for the last half a year, but not THAT much. More like from 65/70m - 85/90m now. Other items have also gone up somewhat but not an extreme amount, maybe 10-20%.

I was more surprised about Beitetsu being >1m per stack for several months (price seems to be goin down again now?) and Relic-related currency and stuff which all spiked up a lot for no reason at all, at least as far as I can tell, but that too didn't last more than 1-2 months.
I still have no bloody clue why they spiked so much and so fast, but w/e I guess lol

At least on Carbuncle the answer for REMA mats is the same as Stikini rings: gilsellers stopped farming them, so supply is low, demand remains the same, price goes up.

Are they even banning bots anymore?

I know they weren't very diligent in the past, but there were still occasional ban/suspension waves leading up to the whole maintenance mode announcement.

Once they allow that to go completely unchecked wouldn't one expect inflation to just take off?

Depends on the bot, TBH. Most players aren't botting dynamis or REMA mats, they're botting trials and EP. SE is not enforcing the player bots but (in my experience) they either banned the salvage/dynamis/HTBF/ambu bots, or they just found a more profitable game to put their bots into. Lots of things are much rarer on this server and there aren't mules sitting around with thousands of them in their bazaars. You don't see bots in dynamis anymore, and rarely see them in Mhaura or Aht Urghan. I'm inclined to think the gilsellers just moved on or have other revenue sources and it's not that SE is cracking down on bots, but IDK.

Yes they are, I personally know a handful of people who were banned in the last 6 months or so and most seem to think it was related to botting EP. There were a lot in Sept/Oct at least among the people I have spoken to. I haven't seen as many REMA mat bots running around either, but that could just be because they quit or moved on. It's worth pointing out that people who bot tend to be less hesitant to do things like use movement speed hacks or warping around zones, so it's equally possible it was those things for some of them, hard to say for certain.

The criteria they use is really unclear. Some multiboxers had multiple accounts banned to varying degrees (a few given 72hr bans, others permabanned), others had one banned and no others. I know other who have been running bots for years on end with no bans at all. You can run around some areas and see bots everywhere, mostly botting EP or JP. It's been suggested that they are randomly banning players who are engaged for a period of time beyond what is reasonable, but whatever it is, it's inconsistent and random. Their stats claim between 800-1000 bans a month by the STF but that's a mix of reasons (RMT, bots, 3rd party cheats, etc), so hard to know exactly what those are for.

So yes they still ban for botting, but it's rampant in certain areas especially for EP and enforcement is very inconsistent.

Naturally I haven't been tracking details of Stikini Rings super closely, and not sure how far back you're remembering 18-21M, but the timeframe I remember that kind of price during was when there was an HQ exploit where you could forcibly cancel any non-HQ with full preservation of materials. This would have had highest impact on synths with single tiers of HQ, since you couldn't verify the tier until after the fact (so you could maintain all your materials on any NQ Lanun Knife rolls, but you couldn't guarantee Rostam vs. Lanun +1), but still would have had an impact on Su5 market.

Anecdotally, agree on my backwater server definitely meaningfully less old school Dynamis bots which would impact Stikini specifically, but can't speak for Asura. Before I unsubbed last time, I would see 2-3 in every city while I would try to farm relic armor, and there was a yell bot trying to offload a clearly botted amount of currency constantly.

I assume there's some level of semi-consistent banning going on because the Salvage bots I observed while doing my last mythic round still had the new player flag which I thought would wear off after a few days of 24/7 (but admittedly don't remember how long it takes to wear off naturally), and I see a pretty consistent stream of bots finishing up limit breaks whenever I'm hanging out in Ru'lude.

I think a lot of it is that fewer groups are actively doing Dynamis Divergence and Vagary and with several SU5 and JSE necks being near mandatory and odyssey pumping massive amounts of gil into the economy along with sortie pushing Vagary mats up due to empyrean upgrades. These pressures have been around for a while but a lot of it was suppressed until recent months with frequent statue crusher campaigns that tanked the medals market starting around the 20th anniversary. The bot bans have also contributed but the effect of that has been more in ambuscade or HTMB accessible mats.

If your goal is to maximize profit you'd be better off selling at the market rate for a higher margin. If your priority is to sell quickly, you can probably move the raw materials faster than the finished weapons.

The only real reason to undercut below the point at which legit crafters can turn a profit is to deliberately frustrate or run them out of a given market, but it's usually pretty obvious when someone attempts to do that.

Has it been 1 or 2 years since the gil introduction of Odyssey segment farming?

People can make 1M+/day just from that and there currently isn't a similar gil sink. As a time goes on, inflation will continue to get worse as more gil enters the economy.

We need more content than Odyssey / Sortie and definitely something with a gil sink.

The gil sink are the 1.125m crafting mats. I break that ***all over the floor constantly, and people turn them into NPCs for JSE all the time.

Almost certainly not at the same rate as people are doing Ody, but it is a very real gil sink.

That's pretty much how I felt. From my pov even before and after the 20th anniversary, SE pretty much is done with FFXI.

You can't argue with the stupidity on the official forums.

I think this applies to most servers, or at least Leviathan included. Many crafting mats have doubled in price, few of the halved when they didn't sell well. It's annoying when your in a position where you need things like Dark Matter or Tartarian Chains that require multiple people just to enter. Other items don't make sense for prices, like the Khoma belt, that needs the 1.12m item or whatever x4 but sells for 3-4m lol.

Khoma Belt can come from gobbiebox, nobody is crafting them and then selling them for 3-4m

Are there less bots doing Vagary now? It makes sense that using the items to make emp+2 caused some inflation there but no so much.

Maybe my time perception was wrong on dagger, but definitely not on ring. It was 21m not that long ago and 50m is a huge leap. I regret you can't look back on FFXIAH far. Maybe Scragg will be able to show data further back. The forcing HQ glitch and duping make sense too.

I have a poor perception of time due to not playing regularly for years, but how long ago was it that Kraken Club was 600-660M? I remember it jumping up to 800M fast from there whenever that happened.

I also remember when some 100 pieces were UNDER 100k each, and were 100-120k for the longest time (I made 2 Aegis and 2 Ghorn then) and now they are 310k/400k/400k and were as high as 500k at one point. Why would RMT stop botting Dynamis? Were SE actually banning Dynamis botters when it had been ongoing for 10 years?

How has nobody mentioned the sparks bots? They haven't been active the last 3 weeks(seems SE actually started banning them when they announced their ffxiv crossover stuff), but there have been 18 of them on every server, 36 on most, botting all weekend for most of the last year. Rough estimate of 600-800 billion gil added to the economy in 2023 from them.

Obviously crafted things went up in price over the last couple years, medal dupe being fixed and craft exploit being fixed. But, I think the changes over the last year are primarily from direct inflation.. you can see it in the mats as well as the final products. Odyssey reward gil may play a (much smaller) part.

Stikini were 30m in October on Carbuncle, so that should give you some perspective, it's definitely been < 6 months.

Dynamis currency went up for the same reason, there are no gilsellers botting dynamis and no human players can be arsed to farm dynamis for relic currency, but people still wanna make relics.

I think 90% of the inflation you're seeing is due to reduced RMT activity.

KC was 600m like...a year ago maybe? If you want to check historical prices for expensive stuff, check smaller servers, the AH history goes back further and for stuff like KC, people transfer to sell them cheaper, or buy them cheaper, transfer, and sell them on the more expensive server, so it tends to even out.

Oh, and as far as "are SE banning them or have they stopped on their own" I think that's an interesting question and one I'd love to know the answer to but...how would anyone possibly know?

Regarding gil sellers it's probably a bit of both. They've moved on to other ways of making money or moved away from the game altogether. Also SE might be bringing down the banhammer more often but that could be wishful thinking.

I keep hearing of people being banned for "buying Mlevels". Not sure how true this is but it does seem RMT have moved to selling M levels more than anything. Also lots of people shouting they paid 200M for Mlevels or V20/25 clear and the rmt just logged off.

I mean anecdotes are anecdotes and people who were banned are not the most reliable source for information about why they were banned. SE doesn't tell you why you were banned and even if they did, there's a pretty obvious incentive to cover up why. Nobody's gonna come out publicly and say "I got banned, I buy gil, bot, use Tako, use Cureplease, buy ML, merc, and use JA0 wait." Much more likely, they pick the least offensive thing they've done and go with that.

Small sample size, but among my friend group there have been fewer bans/suspensions in the past few months than there were last year.

Maybe the RMT have realized that they can just con idiots out of their gil and they don't need to actually put in any work anymore, so they stopped bothering with in-game activities.

Also worth considering that these "RMT" who are stealing gil from people and pretending they're gonna do EP or Gaol clears could just be regular *** players who created a mule.