FFXIV: Economy

The economy in an MMO is a massive part of the game. There are some people who play MMO's solely to play the market. Recently I've found myself to be one of those people, since I've just come back from playing WoW where at level 10 I already had 100+ gold.

I was never able to do that on FFXI. I think it might have been because I didn't fully understand how it worked but I also know I wasn't the only one that had troubles with it.

Trying to earn gil when you just start playing the game is nearly impossible which makes upgrading armor and weapons just as hard which in the end either leads to

• People stopping playing the game
• Begging for gil
• Buying gil for real currency

It does get a bit easier the higher in level you go because you can farm items from lower level monsters which brings us to that point. I 100% agree with the idea that you need to work for making big amounts of currency in a game but the amount of farming involved in a lot of Asian MMO's I think is a bit ridiculous.

A lot of people don't have the time to play all day to get enough money for items or armor, for a lot of people they get 1-2 hours per day to play and that's it.

The #1 thing for an MMO to grab new players is to make it easy to play for the first 10 or 20 levels and that includes introducing the economy. I think this is one major mechanic of the game that Square Enix need to look at if they plan on making this a commercial success out of Asian territory.