Economy

Who else is interested to see the impact on the FFXI economy on the merging servers?

I certainly am.

Any thoughts?

K-k-k Khroma!

Mighty! back to the mines for you.

I'm expecting prices to go down for a bit, then slowly go up again.

More people, suppliers and consumers, seems like a good thing to me.

Ditto. I know a lot of people on Remora were holding off on selling items because they were worth so much more on Leviathan. Hopefully that ends up driving prices down (which Levi buyers will probably like), because some of the Levi prices would rape my Remoran wallet.

I personally ended up pulling 12 stacks of rolanberry pies because they're worth double on Levi (that and between slow selling and tax it wasn't worth keeping up).

I'm expecting a sharp drop as a glut of goods comes in from Remora, followed by a gradual price rise again afterward. Remains to be seen what effect the increased population will have though on supply/demand.

Same number of mobs/drops for twice the people is the way I see it

sounds about right heh

Well the way I see it, first we'll get prices going down for a bit. Let's say there is 18 Behemoth Hide on Pandy before merge and 18 on Asura before merge. 18 on both AH is showing that they do not sell in 30 seconds so there will be a lot for a bit. Some of those people will want to sell them fast and will put the price down. If they already sell for 100k cheaper on Asura, all the people from Pandy who have them up might put them back for lower. Price will crash a tad bit for a short period of time. When most items flooded to AH by the merge will run out they will become more and more rare and price will go up. Same amount of behemoth pop and still not many sky shells and limited Wyrm pop.

As of popular farmed items classed as selling "very fast" I do not see any problem with them. Let's take Silk thread, 14k a stack on Pandy, 16k a stack on Asura. Pretty similar. Double the amount of people who will need them so I think in the end it will probably stay the same on supply and demand. The merge won't cause Silk thread mob camps to be overcrowded, too many sources for them. Maybe the price will go down a bit because people will suddenly see 40 stacks up instead of 20 and will think if they don't cut their prices they won't sell fast. But I think people who are farming popular material as their main source of income won't suffer that much. (You might get a bit less for your silk thread stacks but you might also end up paying less for your food, arrows and ninjutsu tools).

One thing where I can see the possibility of a "problem" is things like Megalobugard Tusk. Drop rate is low and it's going for 200k on each server. It will probably be harder for someone who use to camp that NM a lot for income. Might get a bit less claims on NM and I don't think the item will start going for 400k. Might be more hunting time for same amount of gils due to higher competition. But if everyone camping those items find it harder to get them now they can decide that they worth more due to increased difficulty and sell them 300k instead. It should sell for more if the campers stick together for the AH price. Might end up being less drop but more money when you get it.

The way the economy will go will have a lot to do with the behavior of the sellers. There might be a panic at start but it should regulate itself after a while. I would not worry too much about not being able to get a steady income with farming after the merge.

I might be totally off... we'll see!

In terms of prices, I would expect prices to reach a median between the two previous servers, though the difference between say Gardua's prices and Lakshmi's prices aren't that wide. There are a few exceptions to that, for example certain RSE, but the prices on big ticket items has been reasonably balanced across servers before the merge by players who bought low on one server and sold high on another, eventually smoothing out prices.

In the end, there will be the the right amount of buyers and sellers; there is an equal gain of demand as there is supply. The availability of some rarer items may increase, e.g. Tactician Magician's Cloak +2, because they simply never existed on some servers, but nothing major.

The loss of the AH items at the merge may have some impact; I know Garuda lost some 12 mil worth of big ticket items to the AH, but that may not represent a significant amount of gil when looking at a normal day at the AH.

I do expect some short term price manipulation, but that's it.

Yeah, that's the part I'm seeing that will cause prices to go up.
That's probably very likely for regular materials. Rare materials that require NM camping will probably spike for reasons by Atua above.