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I am a crafter and I can safely say it's not always the crafters fault on why they jack up the prices on items. Many times it'as the people farming who get greedy as all hell and jack up the materials then the crafters have to charge the finished good higher to pay for cost of makeing and then for some profit.

I feel your pain. I'm ussually stuck farming my materials (seeing as I cook, woodwork and do alchamy(not at 60 at any of those yet so can do all 3 then decide which one I wanna lvl to 100) . It's a huge time sink to farm, make your materials, run around a bit to get the npc materials, go to the AH to find there are no crystals that you need, cry, tele around the world, find there are none anywhere, cry for a bit, go farm the crystals on a lowbie job, (or kill ele's...depending on the weather, lol). So I rather like large amounts of gil after spending forever getting stuff to make a decent profit. And most of the time, you break anyways and are stuck with leftovers which you either sell inividually or use them up yourself. (which is where my sneak oils prism powders and sheihei go to....other jobs) So really, can't blame the crafter at all, they need to make gil somehow. Heck, one of my freinds made 1.2mil off of baby choco food...I think I'm gonna make some myself for my baby and for profit. (just needa find out where la theine mullet is sold, lol)

wow...do you even know what time it is?? Dude people go on and on and on about a shell being an "RMT Linkshell" for the love of god PLing new people and hunting high level mobs does not make you a ******** RMT. Also just cause you can not come up with a good answer to the question does not mean i am "Pro-RMT" so you can back off with the witch hunt bullshit kthxbi.

How do you spot a Gilselelr or a group of them if your so god damn enlightned on the ******** subject. Christ you act so oblivious to the fact that they are there. And since everybody on this forum so far hasent come up with a way to distinguish a normal player from a RMT how do you find them?

That is part of the game with supply and demand though. If there is to much of one thing tryign to be sold and there is not much of it being sold then the price will drop. Most people do'nt try and lower the price a s**t load cause they want to get the most out of there items. Its not unfair its just part of the AH game, one that pisses everone off from time to time but still part of it none the less. I find my self leveling several crafts all at one time cause i get to the point with some crafts that it is not worth the money at that time. Not being a "one-trick horse" helps with being able to make something else untill the price of some item drops, cause of supply and demand. Funny how its a big cicrle really.

I don't know why people complain about the economy myself either. I mean when you think about it. Who REALLY controls it. SE has given that power to the player. And your average player is between the ages of 14-24. Thats like putting your average high school in the white house and wondering why things in the nation aren't going as smoothly.

As for RMT, I don't have a big problem with them. The one's who hack and break ToS rules aren't included in this. But I actually know a few RMT players, some are nice some are well...they fit the stereotype.

The problem is people play this game with the belief that other players are obligated to be nice to them. But the cold hard truth is that in FFXI, all is fair in exp and gil. If you loose claim on a NM and its stolen, if miners come and mine on top of you, or a party pushing their way into your camp. Its a competitive world out there. And you should have that mindset, whether its RMT or not.

People blame RMT for the economy. And yeah RMT are sneaky. Lets say you have item 'x' on AH and it usually goes for 50k. Well RMT notice it sells very slowly but seems to be growing in demand.

So they put the item up for 100k. Then they logout and get on another character and buy that item for AH, then send the item to another character who puts it back up on AH for 100k. Log on to another character and buy it.
So eventually the price list looks like that item is being sold by many different people for that price.

Then you get to the point where the natural greed of players kick in. They see, oh wow this item I bought for 20k way back when is now 100k. I'm going to sell it. So they join in this price jump fest. And then some players are slower to change and try to undercut the price back down, but.....

There's a gillseller at work here. They'll buy out the undercutters at bidding at something like 98k sent it to another mule and put it back up on AH for 100k and continue to camp AH to weed out the undercutters while keeping the price of the item nice and inflated to their liking.

Economy wise, Gilsellers are a spark and the players are gasoline. After prices get nice and high the general population jumps right along to try to get as much gil out of it as possible themselves. In this sense, greed becomes contagious..

As for spotting a gilseller is actually kind of easy most of the time, but there are many kinds of RMT builds.

The exp'ing group is made up of one tank 4-5 mages and sometimes a thf. They are all from the same nation, all rank one, and all wear lvl 10 dunes items long into the 30ish lvls or so.

Then you have your farmers lvl 45+ thf's rank one, no sub job sometimes followed around by a mage or two.

Sometimes the name is a give away. Not because its someone named Quoxttlei, cause i've seen some GS with pretty decent names. But I'm more talking about the characters with similar names. On Siren server the most recognizable are the Zoa's all of their names start with Zoa and and with some random letters like Zoahhf.

Though statisticly most GS aren't very fluent in english I consider that a sterotype and generally never factor that into determining if someone is RMT or not.

But I am beginning to thing the 'communicational ignorance' is just a ploy to confuse regular players. I had one GS camping a NM with me (VE back when the drop was worth something) and I kept asking them questions and talking to them and they didn't understand english or auto-translator and just spoke uttter jibberish to me or typed in chinese (Or what I believe to be chinese.) Well an hour or so passes and I get the claim and I get a tell from the GS in PERFECT english. "Hey man, did you get the drop?" I shook m head and left (though I did get the drop)

I mean some GS's are nice and some are just mean. Like some players are nice and some players are mean. I just take them at face value as in the end they are all people who should be judge on their own merits.

As for the fact they sell gil. Well, I have less of a problem with it because most of them go out and earn gil just like us. They simply are more dedicated and organized about how they go about it. But atleast they have SOME kind of work ethic. I tend to be less tolerant of the ones who buy the gil.