*A Few weeks ago I undertook a quest to make money in FF14 Without playing the game! What transpired is one of the most entertaining exploit dives into an MMO Economy the world has ever seen!* 3.4 Million FFXIV players made these goods and I'm going to sell them back them at quadruple the price! As of a few weeks after we stopped recording the milk gambit ended up profiting just over 1 billion.
A slight correction: If you are on the Free Trial, you are not permitted to sell items on the Market Board, because of this exact reason. Squeenix knows if that free trial accounts were allowed to trade, the bot apocalypse would be 10 minutes behind
@@Elazul2k It's small in numbers though. I've never seen more than like a dozen in one place and they're actually kind of useful because it can be used to trace back RMT.
After Stormblood you can also sell them for 120% rate at the doma restauration up to 20K per week which rises to 200% and 40K per week after progressing restoration I think. not exactly sure about the numbers. but something like that.
@@thespiffingbrit an other crazyness you can buy items by a npc and sell it sometimes up to 10 times higher on the board. It neds some investigation sometimes but it is crazy.
@@TheReaverOfDarkness somehow, this feels like it could possibly look like something that could potentially exist in real life. I mean, if it wasn't for capitalism being so well regulated
@@ShapeshifterOS "Corrupt crony capitalism" Don't deflect the flaws of contemporary economic systems and practices onto nebulous accusations of corruption. You sound like a PragerU video title.
True. It comes to a point where the supply and demand of both servers balances out to a universal middle -ground where the prices are equal in both. .....that is to say if someone continues ferrying products from "Crafter/gatherer" servers to the "Warrior" servers. If not then give or take 2 days the market will crash all over again
All the arbitrage looks super high on those servers, on Chaos DC there is nowhere near such differences. Guess on NA people really have no idea how to play, you wouldn't be able to make those deals in EU. Except for milk, but that required significant investment to actually monopolise the product so not really doable with 100k starting gil, not even with 1mil. Side note - universalis actually is against TOS as being a third party tool, you are supposed to jump servers and check prices yourself, but hey, nobody can proove it so bans are not flying.
There are two things to keep in mind when performing this trick from someone who has been doing this at a low scale before this premiered: 1. Sales tax on market board sales are a thing. Therefore, make sure you pick items that have higher profit margins to compensate. 2. You may buy any item on any server, but you can sell on your home server ONLY, so this trick can either be very effective, be moderately profitable, or even fail to work depending on your home server choice. In short, home server choice MATTERS. EDIT: I understand that there's more nuance, which I recommend that everyone checks out in the comment replies, but these two tips are highly generalized in the same spirit of the video.
^ this is why famfrit was at the time we did this a great pick due to its difference in player type and spending habbits. Also there are ways of negating the sales tax by selling from different locations but that was a smidge above my goal of hardly playing the game
@@thespiffingbrit Why is Donald Trump pretty and I am not? But why does he only have a wife but I have TWO HANDSOME GIRLFRIENDS who I show off in my masterpiece YT videos? Do you know the answer, dear brit
There is almost always a city that removes this tax entirely, it changes every Saturday. Talk to a retainer vocate and ask about taxes. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE commit tax evasion, it's literally free money
@@thespiffingbrit How could this work in other games. Maby make a series out of it. Other games with servers and their own economies do exist. Would be fun!
At 19:30, Spiff is so proud to have sold Terebinth for 250g after buying it at 120g when he could have bought infinite quantities of it from an NPC vendor for 60g.
@@NotSoSerious69420 If you find it difficult to read the tool tip of the item you're buying, which literally lists what price an item is sold for by NPCs, then that's on you bud. I'm sorry that you're that challenged by 5 seconds of reading.
correction: in order to protect the game's housing and economy from bots, free trial players actually are capped at 300k gil and not allowed to interact with the market board in any meaningful way
it shows how less he informed himself about the game and this "so called exploit" for which he should get banned because he calls it "exploit" (you get banned for abusing exploits in the game tho because ToS ... xD) even tho it is not one is aswell obsolete after he made this video because everyone will do it now. hence this "exploit" is not longer existent xD.
Spiff has been a bonding topic at my dnd table. I remember this one time one of my table mates played a spiff, he was an English Dwarf with a penchant for tea and at the start of every single game he would say what his plans were in full Spiff fashion. "Hello everybody and today we are going to exploit the perfectly balanced dnd marketplace. You see our lovely dm [thank you so very much] doesn't realize how silly he has been and he is such a silly boy indeed." the dm gave him dm inspiration after that XD
Now that I know Spiff is an economist, his entire channel being devoted to video game exploits makes a horrifying amount of sense. Also, this functionally makes him the economist character from Corey Doctorow's book "For the Win" and that slightly terrifies me.
Sounds fun actually. How did the market work on your table. On mine, we could only sell the loot we got from drops for a set price. Would be interesting to see how others play it.
@@4louisMC I've played in a lot of different ways but my favorite is if *your character* knows of an item and goes to look for it, (roll 1d100) you could find it if it's in a reasonably large market. If the item is more rare the larger the market must be. Worked items sell for more than raw ones and arrows can be enchanted in bulk at the same cost as one arrow. So he cheesed the +1 arrow market.
I'm happy to have been able to intern under you. Truly a fantastic experience to beef out my resume a bit. I have gotten so many job offers ever since I put Jeef Bezos as a reference.
The funny thing is this isn't even an exploit, it's literally just how the server markets were intended to function. Trading focused players server hopping to maximize profits counters hyper inflation on servers without many farmers and prevents supply bloat from causing market crashes on servers with too many farmers. This is just how supply is normalized across a server cluster.
People on non-Famfrit love that us Famfritters are paying so much for their goods when in reality, they're all sad they live on some trash server like Lamia.
@@tavernburner3066 I mean even tho8gh it's isn't destroying the economy like brit says its still very profitable for those that do it and he's bringing attention to that so it should encourage more more serverhopping traders regardless
One thing to note: This works best when the item in question can only be crafted with items you can only get from killing mobs. If materials can be got from a vendor, that stabilises the price. If you can harvest or mine for it, there's ways to speed up the process. But mob drops? There's no support for those, and no-one has the time to endlessly farm mobs for gil.
mob drops items were/are designed for retainer gathering. the loot tables on mobs has been adjusted because of this or intended. bots farming mobs is simpler than bots farming gathering nodes
@@BlackTempleGaurdian yeah but venture tokens are very easy to obtain, a few unsynced duty runs and you can fill out the company seals with the gear dropped
Also that guy with the 400 mil is a genuine business genius. He gets that its about people not items. The second he said "funnel the viewers" i was like damn bro, if this man ever gets into business serious, he will absolutely rise to the top.
Remember everyone, Spiff bought the game, or paid for membership, in order to NOT play the game. The most commitment I have ever seen from ANYONE, truly!
When moving all the gil, just click the minus (-) button next to the field where you type the amount Doing that immediately sets to the max amount Saves you time especially
This also works the opposite way. When posting to auction, you can click the (+) button to go from maximum stack size to a stack of one. Edit : glad to see someone else post this tip. I logged on to post this because it's painful watching people type the max amount of gil in manually lol.
Love that I used to do this exact thing back when I played this game... One additional piece of advice for anyone that wants to do it - pay attention to stack sizes when selling. People seem to be much more willing to pay more per-item for a stack of 3 when they only need 3, than they would for a stack of 27 (or 99) as long as the total cost is lower. At the turn of the expansion, I went around and bought tons of the ALC and CUL crafted items used for Grand Company turn-ins just before the launch, so then because the level caps raised and everyone wants to level up crafting/gathering via GC turn-ins, all of a sudden there's a market for 3-stacks of ALC and CUL crafted items for the daily GC turn-ins and they sold like hotcakes at 2-3x or more what I paid on the week before the expansion came out.
It also makes me wonder how he's fared in his field thus far. A channel named Unlearning Economics recently put out an interesting video giving insights into the field of economics and how it often treats the people within it like shit. I have nothing to do with economics, but I still find this interesting.
@@marcogenovesi8570 Well not really, real life you have a lot of issues like securing start-up capital. Also I don't know if it's exactly "lazy" to not want to spend all your time server hopping so much as it is people wanting to do other things with their leisure hours. Video game economies are interesting but you definitely can't just 1:1 them with real life economies because there are always some very glaring differences. "Vendor price" for example is a price floor, and those largely do not exist IRL but they play a large role in how video game economies shape out.
@@Junebug89 Agreed you can really see this with different world regions too. USA sees gaming as hobby for everyone, even lowest income person in valuable dollars, most players super casual, huge market to cater to. Europe has way more nolifers and RMTers working game like a job in eastern Europe who earn little working real job in real life, can make alot of real money trading to richer European countries ingame. Then Asia where people literally work the game like a sweatshop, no fun allowed hardcore only or pay up.
I dont know if youre gonna see this, but i have a challenge for you. Play any of the Civilization Games, but instead of trying to win, you have to do your best to assist the first civilization you come across, so that they get the win.
That should actually be an interesting video. Cheating the AIs and winning is easy and expected, but making a stupid AI win from the side lines? That is a challenge.
Back in the day in WoW, you had two different economies on the same server (Alliance and Horde), in theory you couldn't trade between you Horde characters and Alliance characters, except the neutral Auction House in the goblin cities. Now the neutral auction house had some heavy fees. But if you kept the prices extremely low you could trade between your horde and alliance characters pretty easily, you just had to do it quickly enough before anyone else caught on. I would do this in the very early morning when hardly anyone was on.
REMEMBER: You cannot access the marketboard OR retainers on the free trial. You're also gil capped at 300k anyway-so while you can reach level 20 without buying the game, that's about all you can do re: making gil with this method.
You are also not limited to level 20. The free trial has no time limit and can play all the way to level 60, or the end of Heavensward (the first expansion).
Tip: To get the monies out of the hands of the retainers as fast as possible (a very important skill as you may see), all you need to do is to click the minus button when the withdraw value is zero. The system will cycle back and show the max ammount, which is all that the retainer has in hand.
*footnote* If you do this on a server with a lot of crafter/gatherers, the market prices will eventually self regulate since laziness does, indeed have a price, and if you exceed the threshold and get too greedy, they'll eventually just do it themselves. This strategy's effectiveness depends entirely on your server's player biome.
which is why he picked Famfrit, since its a pvp server so less people gather because gathering is more dangerous. Plus the WoW thing but I'm pretty sure there was an issue with it prior to the WoW exodus.
@@brianforsyth2225 for sure. Replicating it will entirely depend on the server attitude. Mine puts a ton of emphasis on glamors so you can only inflate the price a little before the omni crew catches on
@@brianforsyth2225 whaaat ffxiv has pvp servers?? i’ve never heard of pvp in the open world while gathering or whatever. 😧 it’s always in a separate instance.
@@brianforsyth2225 There is no such a thing as a PvP server in FF. World PVP does not exist, so other players never pose a threat for gathering. Sure the community can agree on a server where there is more people doing instanced PvP, but that's not making gathering any harder since World PVP does not exist in FF. If people prefer to spend gils than crafting or gathering, is just a matter of laziness or preference in how to server community plays the game.
Thank you soooo much for posting this. In only 2 weeks since it's debut, prices have leveled out for the first time ages. As someone who plays on Lamia and was appalled by the stupidly low prices, you have my thanks, and probably the thanks of the other 50,000 omni-crafters on this horribly over-populated server. We're finally back in go mode. To those who did this trick, enjoy your new millions, and thank you for helping to fix an ongoing problem! It's actually worth being a crafter again.
Lmao. I wonder if he expected this video to go live and then to have it patched or actually was just a function of a natural interaction through the game in realizing that the prices were so different between servers.
Omnicrafter was something special in 2.x, but they cut down the whole game more and more, so meanwhile crafting lost almost all importance - beside being able to easily repair your equipment anywhere you want. FF14 teams 'fixes' things by cutting off.
Funnily enough, I decided to start playing FF14 again because I have a guild and friends now AND after watching this I realized I could do this while I work from home, and I've managed to make myself enough money to never have to worry about money or whether I need to purchase a material or weapon. Thanks man!
Just imagine how much more Spiff could have made if he realized that several of the items he was buying from other servers were NPC shop items that were *already* inflated on the Market Board (such as paying 150 gil for an item that sells for 60 from an NPC shop).
Dyes and bait are the primary offenders. Also, dyes are an amazing market opportunity because they take basically nothing to make and people list them in bulk for low prices on the mb so you can just flip them, especially on RP servers.
@@kaltaron1284 Those NPC's are generally easy to get to. Well, unless you've not progressed far enough in the game to get to the area where they're at, since those high grade items will only be sold by NPC's in the most recent areas.
I just found this guy a few days ago and since then ive been binging these videos. Honestly one of the funniest content creators on TH-cam, and if you play the games he plays, the videos are actually super informative Dude is a legend
Sooo many times I have gotten into that same "fumble for money" situation trying to buy something out before someone else sees it and have no gil to do it...hysterical
After taking Economy 101 in college i started playing Vanguard. Vanguard was an MMO in the spirit of EverQuest (by the same lead designer) that tragically got bought out by Sony (who owns EQ) and was subsequently defunded and left to wither on the vine and die in less than 12 months. However, the game had 3 market places on 3 continents with no built in cross trading. You could buy goods on one continent then fast travel to another continent and sell them on that marketplace. I ended up doing a similar thing to the milk fiasco in this video with endgame resources. There were really high drop rates on endgame materials that were getting nerfed in the upcoming patch in a couple days. I used that info to buy EVERY SINGLE one I saw on all 3 markets (I was already semi rich with being the first player to be able to build player houses on the continent for my server). I made sure the markets on all 3 continents were bought out up to patch day. Then after the patch and the drop rate nerfs, I put the goods back up, one at a time, to find the market cap that people would pay. They sold at 2x, 4x, 8x, and eventually slowed down but still sold at 10x the original price. That may not sound like much but this game had a relatively low population and currency wasn't easy to accumulate at any level. The game had copper, silver, gold, and platinum currency (at 1:100 exchange rates)...and most players never had 1 platinum in the bank. Endgame loot traded in Gold. I turned 5 platinum into 50 in roughly 6 days (while only selling half my stock) and was instantly richer than 80% of the guilds on the server by simply taking advantage of a supply bottleneck that was announced to be coming. I basically used the DeBeers strategy of monopolizing a stockpile while also trickling that stock back into the supply chain to keep prices artificially inflated through fierce demand.
The beautiful thing is like The Spiffing Brit said people are going to jump onto this and actually fall into the pyramid scheme that he has created meaning they could make a small profit but Spiffing Brit can make 10 times more profit
This economic practice is called "Arbitrage" and is fascinating to see, organically, in a video game. Well done! (and for those who think this kind of thing is sketchy - vending machines are also a form of arbitrage)
@@HenriFaust Haven't played Runescape in over a decade but wasn't the market notoriously bad. I remember I once had a guy walk up and offer a ridiculous amount of money just to befriend him
I just noticed, the 14 gil milk was put up by "threads merchant" which was one of Hia Zhao's retainers. Spiff lost his mind all so he could buy from his friend
I've been playing this game since ARR, and oh boy... im happy to see PEOPLE doing this and not f**king bots!! The potions sell well due to the fact that win or lose the raid, the potion is gone, people will get through them FAST. EDIT: Super Ethers CAN be a small market too, Black Mages do like them to squeeze out an extra cast sometimes.
@@cabellism no problem, Food and Potions are good money makers. BUT you have to hit the first week of new SAVAGE tiers, 6.1 is not one of them. BUT we do have a new Extreme Trial and a new Unreal, so i would think there is a market to a point.
I just find it funny that like hes doing these tiny trades. gil in the millions is like nothing in this game tons of ppl I know have over a billion, in the past I wouldnt even bother putting something on the market unless it sold for 100k or more. that was back before they fucked crafting over tho I guess, but this is like not even close to the laziest way to make money farming aether sands just requires a few button clicks to make 50-100k
Yo where's the 1K+ upvotes on this comment? Anybody who played OSRS/RS3 knows how terrible it feels when you can't buy mats because they literally don't buy for 25-40% over "GE Value". Also applies to any MMO with global economies and such.
No, Spiff. It's only morally wrong IF they cost money to buy. That's slavery! What you're doing here is the perfectly morally acceptable 'unpaid internship' where they're gaining 'work experience'. Perfectly balanced and pro-capitalist, as I'm sure you're aware as an economist.
Technically they aren’t unpaid. One thing he never went over is the fact that selling in the board takes a little off the profits in tax. Those taxes are what pays the retainers.
Fun fact: In the Early 20th Century, African American workers weren't legally allowed to be held in peonage, so they were legally required to declare them as slaves, as slavery was actually legal at the time.
@@ryballs4569 that's an actual impossibility though. I make my gil selling one item, myself, but even if I buy up everything off everyone else, more appears within hours. That's just the market.
@@aircraftcarrierwo-class Aye. It quickly becomes unprofitable to try and deprive the market and price-fix. People realize it, and then proceed to make / grind a lot of the item you're trying to buy up, and you end up just being a better way of earning gil for others, than a way of earning gil for yourself.
It's hilarious how he's fixing the market prices in multiple servers, making a ton of money and cackling like a maniac while he does it. I can't tell if he's doing it ironically though. Do you think he KNOWS that he didn't screw over the people paying less, but rather helped the people facing hyperinflation? He called his character Jeff Bezos, but he's actually closer to Robin Hood. 😂
11:44 just a reminder: "Shop Selling Price" in the _tooltip_ shows how much it'll cost you to buy it off a NPC vendor yes, that fish costs 7 gill each for unlimited supply off a NPC vendor
I remember doing something like this when Star Trek Online first came to consoles. I stockpiled entire character bank capacities full of Kelvin Timeline lootboxes knowing that they would skyrocket in value once they were discontinued. I ended up being able to purchase every possible drop from the lootboxes without ever having to pay the real-world currency to open them.
To be fair, when I saw the title, I thought "oh no he's gonna be banned and he will fuck up the economy." But the more he explains it, the more I realize this will normalize MB prices because the more 'economists' will do this, the more the prices will normalize between servers. After some people of course make a crap ton of gil in the first few weeks of this vid's release. Thanks Spiff!
Yes traders waring off against each other actually produces more competitive pricing ironically. When you have 1 trade baron corner the market uncontested, the price hiking only gets worse. This video keeps calling this "inflation" which it definitely isn't, it's simply supply and demand.
@@LeiteLuke only if everyone is colluding in the prices (price fixing). If someone comes along and undercuts everyone else, and they can keep up with at least a part of demand, it introduces competition and will force others to push prices down or their items won’t sell
@@vinapocalypse this is already common on Crystal. Sometimes I post stuff that within minutes gets undercut by 10% of the value. Or some douche just puts it even lower by about 50% of the lowest value just to sell theirs first. And that sets the next trend for the next undercutter until you got a queue of like 50 new postings under that new price treshold. This method Spiff is doing will just normalize the prices because they will mark up on low priced servers (people getting their low price auctions bought in bulk) and mark down on high prive servers (where undercutting will become even more vicious).
The fish are exorbitant because some of them are required for the fisher job quests. That's why you see the quantity of it is usually 1 of it for 5k to 20k gil. Most of the market fishes actually help new players who might be too lazy to fish for an hour just to complete the quests. Good times playing FF14, i remember being able to afford a medium house with countless decorations just from trading in 6 months of playing. My account still had around 150 million gil when i stopped playing a few years ago.
I'm partially guilty of this. I did buy some fish for my fishing quests if it seemed like what I needed just wasn't buying. For the most part, though, I did do so properly for the other quests. I've been stuck on the lvl 60 or either 58 quest for months now because the fish I need to spear just won't show up. My FSH has been lvl 80 forever now since it's so easy to lvl doing ocean fishing. lol
I actually figured out how to do this on my own like 10 years ago when playing tons of World of Warcraft... By the end I had so much stuff for sale that it took all day just to list it even with macro programs. I got stupidly rich selling all the staples that everyone from level 1-30 would need to level their crafting. Copper, Iron, Tin, bronze, linen cloth, wool cloth, gems, herbs, etc etc etc. Then I started making stupidly expensive mounts that sold for 50k. The reason I lost a lot of my money is that they changed the game so that you only needed to buy each mount once for your whole account instead of once per character, so all the stuff I had massively invested in stopped selling almost entirely. Also I had to quit the game for a while and a lot of my stuff got deleted from the mailbox by the time I came back. :/ I did corner most of the markets and make a crapton of money though.
Some of my favourite market sca- I mean, "Tactics", is to buy an engraved hardleather grimoire from a merchant for 3k and sell it on the market for 10k or more. The grimoire is needed for an alchemy quest early on and people are too lazy to find out you can just get one from an NPC vendor and just buy whatever is on the market.
Hahaha this reminds me of myself when i started playing as a paladin as my starting job and my focus was just to gain more levels and better gear, so i mainly bought everything off the market board if the item was not available for purchase due to my lazyness to progress with the main quest, i think i had like lvl 68-70 gear when i started heavensward and it was so silly to see all that old gear that i had previously bought, as quest rewards...so i just sold them off as i got them to keep the cycle going
This works for basically every single piece of gatherer/crafter gear. People trying to grind through leveling a crafter often won't check to see if the Clothier NPC ten yalms away from them is selling the upgrades they want for a fraction of the market price, same with the level 1 weapons from arms vendors for people who want to start leveling a retainer assigned a combat job.
use to do this with pets in wow. new pet vendors would pop up now and then on patches, and sell a pet for 100g. id sell it on the ah for 800g and i probably sold like 100 b4 people caught on lol
I made my first 100 million gil or so just buying dyes at a vendor, then running like 50 feet to the market board and selling those dyes for 5x the vendor price.
when I'm not feeling very lazy I'll just set my character to craft a stack of 99 soot black dye or something while I watch youtube, that always sells well. or resell in smallish stacks whatever dye people need for fashion report that week. those usually go super fast
I made my millions in the materia market. I'm a healer main, so I get tons of tokens from adventurer in need bonuses to get top-end materia that I stock up on and then sell right as a new raid tier comes out. High-end raiders need a LOT of materia due to pentamelding but the materia only comes from max level dungeons and trade ins, so the demand is always high right as a new tier comes out. I once put up a full stack of 99 Savage Aim materia 9s for something like 250,000 gil. It took two minutes for it to sell. And what did I spend my money on? Why, the Respendent Vessel of Ronka, of course. 25 Million gil down the drain for a shiny mount. I regret absolutely nothing. All for the Skree
"there's no way to counter the new milk price on this server" Oh yes there is. We had some epic economic wars in WoW over this. Some guilds would get to greedy trying to corner the market, so you do the same, except they have deeper pockets, right? Wrong, because you can fund your purchases by relisting it barely under their prices, forcing them to buy it to protect their monopoly. Once your stockpile is big enough and they have invested a ton of money, you can start flooding the market just low enough to force them to either move prices down or else lose money due to taxes on buying your postings. You'll make less than they would, but you have much lower capital investment, and you break their monopoly. You gotta put in the time though, cuz you need to watch the market like a hawk.
most of spiffs exploits are usually things that the playerbase of the game in question already knew. if the exploits weren't well-known to begin with, then spiff likely would never hear of it, and wont make a vid about it
indeed arbitrage is a healthy for most video game economies. This video is mostly about exploiting a strange breakout disparity between famfrit and the rest of the data centre
Another simple way to make gil quick on the cheap is to walk to the dye vendor in Ul'dah who is just a few steps away from the market board, grab a bunch of dyes for 40gil a piece, and sell them for 600gil or more.
I just love how he threatened square enix by saying he'd reveal even worse nonsense. "If you strike me down I will return even more powerful than you could imagine!"
To be fair, this much is nothing. We have been doing this for years, and Square knows that much. In fact, making a few million like that when you're trying to make money is normal. The guy who made 400 mil on the other hand, is less normal but even then it's very feasibly doable. Honestly, it's not that this is an exploit no one knows about. It's just that it's so insignificant that most people don't bother with it.
@@wereowl9369 Yes I did. 1 billion after weeks of flipping one of the highest demand crafting material during the weeks with peak raid food consumption is quite normal. The reason why not more people are doing it is simply because gil is quite useless after a certain point. And people who are willing to buy the priced up milk are buying it knowing that the price is being manipulated. Most of them probably just think that the convenience is simply worth the higher price. I don't doubt that Spiff has an even crazier exploit up his sleeve, but this one is quite literally just the average state of FF.
Thebest Thing is when someone puts up a Item and forgets a Digit. Well i had a Gentleman forget 5 Digits. So instead of 8.679.000 Gil, he sold it for 86 Gil. Great Profit to this date
Same thing happened to me recently on a game I play called Pandora Saga, managed to pick up the game's equivalent of a very strong and rare materia, not for it's actual value (2,500,000g) but for a measly 250,000.
I don't know if it is still viable, but I always made easy passive gil by buying dyes from Beast Tribes and selling them for profit in packs of 5 to 20. People who didn't have the reputation or just didn't want to run to the place or didn't remember it would buy them up. Pay a few k for dye, and sell it for markups sometimes up to 10 times the price.
Hilariously enough, I almost thought this was a video on the RP side of things. Last night I made some 700k I think (didn't count lol) just sitting behind a bar and handing out nonexistant drinks. 100% profits with no investments whatsoever! Even if a drink is 1k, most people gave me 5k to 10k, and several regulars gave me this multiple times. One patron, with the condition I stopped calling him 'Mr. Moneybags', gave me 500k because he enjoys our spa. It was maybe me standing behind the bar for four hours having fun playing at being an absolute terrible, but very entertaining, bartender. Easy money.
Closest thing I remember to that is in EQ some breakdancing dwarf. In the bazaar by player run casinos dude would give a show for a few platinum. Best money I ever spent. He would spam emotes in the old model and the way they cut off he was popin and locking with the best of them. Adding flavor to the game is the entire reason some people play. If they got musical instruments like LOTRO every week there is a performance. Or that same old game before the bazaar, traveling merchants with rare and exotic weapons from the newly discovered continent. They'd spin a yarn about where the weapon came from so you'd hear the adventures of the heroes who were there. Not as epic as a bard's tale but that's how you got the info back then. The power creep mighta felt like you got scammed but then you remember your teacher/master/senpai how he told stories of steel sword and banded or bronze armor being the best they had while fighting dragons. Such an impossibility it made sense how he fought as mad and risky as he did.
I’m hyped! I play FFXIV and my favorite thing to do is scam lazy crafters out of their money on the market boards. I gather 99 of something and then scalp it to them lol.
Hyper inflating wool is where its at, trust me. Wool is used for most BIS leveling gear, and tufts (base raw material) can only be grinded off mobs in Heavensward. Ive made millions of gil in a single day. Been doing it on and off (whenever I play) since ARR rereleased, and you couldn't server hop.
@@DyingOx There are different wool used for different recipes, mostly based on the level of the craft. I recommend looking at the market board to determine which one is the most profitable one currently. You have to put in a little work and observation yourself. It can vary a lot. ^^
Okay, as someone who is taking his second semester of economics, Spiff is actually using real world economics in this video instead of some cheesy, easily abused, unrealistic tactic.
Absolutely. I think minus the buying-all-the-market-on-milk scheme, he's actually providing a service (which, admittedly, consists mostly of using his comparison software and sometimes clicking to visit another world) - but hey, if more people did that, the prices between worlds would theoretically just level out.
@@leviadragon99 Well, actually that's not a good example of a problem with global economics (at least if excluding the price distortion by buying up all milk) - if more people did the same as Spiff, guess what will happen - as the barriers for "global trade" in this example are literally zilch, the prices will even out between servers - to the point where people won't be seeing this "import-export" as a good use of their time. Say an item initially costs 200 at the farmers' and can be sold for 1000 at the PvP server, in the end it may cost 500 on the 'farming' server and you may get 510 selling it on the PvP server - at that point, most people probably stop their trading acitivities and rather spend their time doing other things. So prices for the farmers increase, and prices for the consumers=PvPers decrease - what's not to like about that? You can tell that the trading in there is currently absolutely underused, from the whole "item that costs 1300 is mistakenly listed at 15 and no-one buys it, for minutes" sequence. Which is also the classic situation where one or just a couple of big traders can freely distort the price as shown here - by buying just a couple hundred of those goods on offer, they literally removed the entire supply of that server.
Reminds me of a friend I had back when I played WoW that would almost entirely just play in the auction house. To him it was a trading simulator, then a fantasy game second. He made so much money that he has to make several alts to hold it.
In shadowbringer before my guild died two of the leaders were gathering the cash for a mansion and they were jusy racking up ridiculous amounts of Gil from crafting everyday and they still raided. One was static lead for a amueter in our guild that I was on, the other was a purple/orange parsing blm.
This is actually why I love FFXIV - this is a completely legitimate way to play the game, and is actually very good for the crafters/gatherers as well.
As a FFXIV player that's been playing for years, that's pretty much what I've been doing for a while and have over 80 millions and I've given 20+ millions to the members of my company! lol
Me 2,000+ hours into FFXIV: “Ah a Spiffing Brit video about FFXIV, I wonder what exploit he is gonna-… oh he is just doing what literally everyone does with the market board.”
Been playing mmorpgs since they have existed. There have been people doing this kind of shit since it started, definitely not what I would call an exploit.
@@diablo.the.cheater the term exploit implies that things are not working as intended, considering this is a facet of real world economics you can’t really say that.
the sheer panic that you went through trying to buy that milk for 14 Gil, i felt it, i was just chilling listening to the video and then i started to panic as well
I find it funny how the public sentiment's always like "How Come They Never Teach Finance In School". Yet they play games like this and don't learn anything lol. Making money in EVE Online's market place was my lesson in college on how market structure worked. Along with how it can be manipulated.
This reminds me of those really old WoW auction house challenge videos where folks just were seeing how much money they could make over a weekend. Used to watch a lot of those so this was very nostalgic. Great video!
watching your channel I learned more about money making than any actual "financial advice" -channel I've seen(not many :D coz i've found your channel early enough)
This was fun to watch because Spiff gets so excited when he finds something he can make a nice profit on 😂 Thank you for another amazing exploit video!
This reminds me of something I did on Luna PLUS many, many years ago. There was an item (I don't remember what it was called) that was involved in crafting of every single piece of gear in the game (armor, weapons, accessories, etc.). You could not buy them from an NPC and the only way to get them was to break down junk gear you got while killing mobs. The player shops sold them for around 1k each or so. I discovered that I could buy a level 1 ring for 100 gold, break it down and get one of those items from it. So I could make 10x profit just by doing the work of buying rings and breaking them down. It took a little time to go through buying and breaking all those down, but the return was fantastic! I even accidently caused the average cost in player shops for that material to drop to less than 500 gold each. Still profitable, but not as much anymore. Then the game died...
i remember doing something similar on a MUCH smaller scale when i used to play WoW. Back then in the early locations the items you got from gathering (like ore) took like 30 minutes to accumulate 99 of and then i could sell them on the marketplace for like 10k. it cost 0gold to get since it was just gathering low level stuff but apparently higher level players that had tons of cash didn't feel like returning to harvest in order to grind crafting skills so theyd pay high amounts for the starting materials. my character before realizing that left the starting location with like 2k and every character afterwards left EXTREMELY wealthy by spending a few hours on the marketplace.
@@Galeanthropist oh for sure. and its no where near what spiff did here. i was just pointing out that ive used a similar mechanic to make price tags (for my casual ass self) nothing to worry about cuz i could play through the game, buying whatever i needed. again filthy casual in WoW here so that was a lot quicker and easier than hunting down mobs for everything
I did something very similar with star wars the old republic, especially with the items you need to grind things like pvp. It's insane how much money you can make just by switching servers in MMOs
I am on Ultros and we would hear rumors every now and then that there were ppl playing the market hardcore on famfrit. This explains so many of my crafter friend's frustrations. And yeah the milk market legends was also a thing.
So I came across this video right after I got involved in buying berries to change the color of my chocobo and I was wondering if switching servers was the key. I was pleasantly pleased that it was the case but seeing how it’s a year later from the posting of the video and me not having a the speculative market passion, foresight or mindset I don’t think I could pull it off as well as you did lol
@@rylexander1 but his real 2 friends (who he also called interns or employees), were. 5he one at the end made the milk prizes going crazy so both could benefit from it..
So a couple things 1) lots do this, the second cross server play hit I made a killing off this, around 50 million in a week. 2) the launcher at the start with the pricing does break TOS, granted you can get it off the web too but still... Regardless it's always nice seeing your antics.
Yeah, it also depends on how the pricing information is gathered - it needs to be gathered and updated manually. Any automated systems are against ToS, and a few market board sites got the attention of SE many months ago and are now multiple days behind and/or behind paywalls.
AH, yes. Porn. Because simps fall for it every time. Not sure when it invaded the Crystal data center though, but I see them every time I go to Limsa Lominsa. ⌐⌐
I've been playing FFXIV for about 2 years now, and I hate to burst your bubble but Famfrit's economy has always been in the shitter - the WoW influx has only made it a little worse. Funny as hell to watch it go down the drain even further.
Keep in mind that stats are different on consumables depending on if they are high quality or not. Non HQ prices may be extremely low cause nobody wants to use them, especially pots
@@soldierorsomething They only got rid of some instances of HQ items, consumables are not those. You can see in the vid that there is the HQ icon on the items when he's about to buy em
I mean we have been doing this for 10 years, regular vendors sell items and then you can list them on the market board for 10x the price for easy money, many crafters just sit by. Board and buy what they need, same thing with dyes, lots of people forget about the dye vendor. Orange juice is required for a quest early on, you can buy it for 10gil from an npc for you can buy it on the market board for 300 gil(more or less)
Not sure if mentioned below, but check sale history. Something might sell high, but infrequently, making it less worth your while to try and play it on the marketboard. Also selling in specific amounts, according to what is used for recipes
Yep I was worried when he was using fish as his example. A lot of fish are completely useless in the last few expacs except for leveling desynthesizing (disenchanting for the wow friends) except that desynthesizing fish gives nothing of value that I know of.
I wasn’t necessarily sure how overinflated the prices were since I don’t engage much with the market board. But then I saw the literal first fish you are ever asked to catch as part of the level 1 fisher quest listed at 2 grand. MMO players are wild
You know what you need is mule interns. Set up characters on each server to buy up that servers stock, then trade your mule interns the items to trade back to the character on the server you wish to sell. Can monopolize the entire Data Center in this manner, instead of just 1 server. Edit, a second thought in a not to long from now period of time we will be able to visit other datacenters in our regions, assuming you can carry items through a data center transfer as you do a server to server transfer...you could effectively monopolize an entire region of the game. Brilliant Ol'Liz would be proud.
*A Few weeks ago I undertook a quest to make money in FF14 Without playing the game! What transpired is one of the most entertaining exploit dives into an MMO Economy the world has ever seen!*
3.4 Million FFXIV players made these goods and I'm going to sell them back them at quadruple the price!
As of a few weeks after we stopped recording the milk gambit ended up profiting just over 1 billion.
I'm drinking Yorkshire tea while waiting for this video 😎
E
*snazzy*
@@EEEEEEEE no
E
A slight correction: If you are on the Free Trial, you are not permitted to sell items on the Market Board, because of this exact reason. Squeenix knows if that free trial accounts were allowed to trade, the bot apocalypse would be 10 minutes behind
We were doing this to fight the remaining botters!
You are also limited to 300k gil and can not hire retainers, so this is very inaccurate on that front.
Yeah, as is it's a lot easier to tell the bots that do exist have to be tied to RMT otherwise it doesn't make sense.
This game already has a bot apocalypse. Gathering and crafting bots have been around since 2.0 to my knowledge and are extremely annoying.
@@Elazul2k It's small in numbers though. I've never seen more than like a dozen in one place and they're actually kind of useful because it can be used to trace back RMT.
Allagan Silver Piece: A item with the sole purpose to be sold to a npc for 500 gil
FFXIV Players: Sell on the market board for 199
Their logic is beyond our understanding
After Stormblood you can also sell them for 120% rate at the doma restauration up to 20K per week which rises to 200% and 40K per week after progressing restoration I think. not exactly sure about the numbers. but something like that.
Or hoard them so you can give it to the Doman Enclave for up to double the value.
Due to Doman Restoration you can even make a profit if they sell it at 500 gil due to the double price thing
@@thespiffingbrit an other crazyness you can buy items by a npc and sell it sometimes up to 10 times higher on the board. It neds some investigation sometimes but it is crazy.
Thanks for buying all of our junk on Lamia, Spiff. Everyone profits and everything is perfectly balanced, as it should be.
It all feeds into the famfrit dead end
i love you both for your comments
😂😂😂
@@TheReaverOfDarkness Your welcome LOL
@@TheReaverOfDarkness somehow, this feels like it could possibly look like something that could potentially exist in real life. I mean, if it wasn't for capitalism being so well regulated
I adore how the man plays the system for maximizing profit and straight up *repairs an economy* in the process.
Capitalism baby
@@StarboyXL9 capitalism usually doesn’t repair economies like that though
@@MigattenoBlakae No, corrupt crony capitalism doesn't repair economies. This video shows what a true free market can do.
@@ShapeshifterOS basically yeah, being able to put a lot of something for less "forces" to slowly reduce the price and so on and so forth
@@ShapeshifterOS "Corrupt crony capitalism"
Don't deflect the flaws of contemporary economic systems and practices onto nebulous accusations of corruption. You sound like a PragerU video title.
Plot twist: Brit isn't "destroying" the in-game economy. He's stabilizing it.
True. It comes to a point where the supply and demand of both servers balances out to a universal middle -ground where the prices are equal in both. .....that is to say if someone continues ferrying products from "Crafter/gatherer" servers to the "Warrior" servers. If not then give or take 2 days the market will crash all over again
Spiffcoin sucks. That's all I know.
@@vasilis1677 except that their monopoly on milk actually worsened the disparity lol
All the arbitrage looks super high on those servers, on Chaos DC there is nowhere near such differences. Guess on NA people really have no idea how to play, you wouldn't be able to make those deals in EU. Except for milk, but that required significant investment to actually monopolise the product so not really doable with 100k starting gil, not even with 1mil.
Side note - universalis actually is against TOS as being a third party tool, you are supposed to jump servers and check prices yourself, but hey, nobody can proove it so bans are not flying.
Yeah, they absorbed the overcapping money from the consumers
There are two things to keep in mind when performing this trick from someone who has been doing this at a low scale before this premiered:
1. Sales tax on market board sales are a thing. Therefore, make sure you pick items that have higher profit margins to compensate.
2. You may buy any item on any server, but you can sell on your home server ONLY, so this trick can either be very effective, be moderately profitable, or even fail to work depending on your home server choice. In short, home server choice MATTERS.
EDIT: I understand that there's more nuance, which I recommend that everyone checks out in the comment replies, but these two tips are highly generalized in the same spirit of the video.
^ this is why famfrit was at the time we did this a great pick due to its difference in player type and spending habbits. Also there are ways of negating the sales tax by selling from different locations but that was a smidge above my goal of hardly playing the game
@@thespiffingbrit Why is Donald Trump pretty and I am not? But why does he only have a wife but I have TWO HANDSOME GIRLFRIENDS who I show off in my masterpiece YT videos? Do you know the answer, dear brit
Also keep in mind Famfrit is too congested for new character creation as of this post...did this have anything to do with that?
There is almost always a city that removes this tax entirely, it changes every Saturday. Talk to a retainer vocate and ask about taxes. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE commit tax evasion, it's literally free money
@@thespiffingbrit How could this work in other games. Maby make a series out of it. Other games with servers and their own economies do exist. Would be fun!
At 19:30, Spiff is so proud to have sold Terebinth for 250g after buying it at 120g when he could have bought infinite quantities of it from an NPC vendor for 60g.
that is knowledge that you gain by playing the game
@@SakaiSteven Nah, you can gain that knowledge by reading the tooltip.
@@jonathanmiller9280 aka, playing the game. So many took tips no ones reading all that.
@@NotSoSerious69420 If you find it difficult to read the tool tip of the item you're buying, which literally lists what price an item is sold for by NPCs, then that's on you bud. I'm sorry that you're that challenged by 5 seconds of reading.
@@jonathanmiller9280 there is an obscene amount of reading in FF14 and if you play you know that. Sometimes you miss shit.
I see why it took dad so long to come back, your struggles with this milk has demonstrated exactly what he went through, Godspeed sir
Her: What do you do for work?
Him: I'm an extradimensional fish merchant.
She left with the rich economic milkman
Arctic Charbitrage. All deals are C.O.D.
Cool! I make burritos
@@kilyaded7332 That explains all the off-brand about the wife cheating with the milk man. We just didn't realize that guy was making massive bank
correction: in order to protect the game's housing and economy from bots, free trial players actually are capped at 300k gil and not allowed to interact with the market board in any meaningful way
So this is the "minimum wage" in a video game 😂
Free trial have no retainers either.
Thanks to that we have bots that pay a monthly sub fee XD
@@darkman121 Hey, if they gonna cheat, might as well force them to help pay for the servers before they are caught and banned. :))
it shows how less he informed himself about the game and this "so called exploit" for which he should get banned because he calls it "exploit" (you get banned for abusing exploits in the game tho because ToS ... xD) even tho it is not one is aswell obsolete after he made this video because everyone will do it now. hence this "exploit" is not longer existent xD.
Spiff has been a bonding topic at my dnd table. I remember this one time one of my table mates played a spiff, he was an English Dwarf with a penchant for tea and at the start of every single game he would say what his plans were in full Spiff fashion. "Hello everybody and today we are going to exploit the perfectly balanced dnd marketplace. You see our lovely dm [thank you so very much] doesn't realize how silly he has been and he is such a silly boy indeed." the dm gave him dm inspiration after that XD
E
This sounds absolutely amazing
Now that I know Spiff is an economist, his entire channel being devoted to video game exploits makes a horrifying amount of sense.
Also, this functionally makes him the economist character from Corey Doctorow's book "For the Win" and that slightly terrifies me.
Sounds fun actually. How did the market work on your table. On mine, we could only sell the loot we got from drops for a set price. Would be interesting to see how others play it.
@@4louisMC I've played in a lot of different ways but my favorite is if *your character* knows of an item and goes to look for it, (roll 1d100) you could find it if it's in a reasonably large market. If the item is more rare the larger the market must be. Worked items sell for more than raw ones and arrows can be enchanted in bulk at the same cost as one arrow. So he cheesed the +1 arrow market.
I'm happy to have been able to intern under you. Truly a fantastic experience to beef out my resume a bit. I have gotten so many job offers ever since I put Jeef Bezos as a reference.
The funny thing is this isn't even an exploit, it's literally just how the server markets were intended to function. Trading focused players server hopping to maximize profits counters hyper inflation on servers without many farmers and prevents supply bloat from causing market crashes on servers with too many farmers. This is just how supply is normalized across a server cluster.
People on non-Famfrit love that us Famfritters are paying so much for their goods when in reality, they're all sad they live on some trash server like Lamia.
@@FroggerbobT after seeing you comment it shows just how shitty this famfrit server is.
Dude shut up! Do you know how hard it is to get people to play merchant. Don't ruin the scam.
@@FroggerbobT Lamian here. Sadge at our prices
@@tavernburner3066 I mean even tho8gh it's isn't destroying the economy like brit says its still very profitable for those that do it and he's bringing attention to that so it should encourage more more serverhopping traders regardless
One thing to note: This works best when the item in question can only be crafted with items you can only get from killing mobs. If materials can be got from a vendor, that stabilises the price. If you can harvest or mine for it, there's ways to speed up the process. But mob drops? There's no support for those, and no-one has the time to endlessly farm mobs for gil.
unless its endwalker or shadowbringers to which the speed up is spam fates for bicolour gemstones and buying them that way
Retainers can pull those in at an absurd rate.
mob drops items were/are designed for retainer gathering. the loot tables on mobs has been adjusted because of this or intended. bots farming mobs is simpler than bots farming gathering nodes
@@Kaiketsu Retainers require venture tokens, making them still a hassle compared to other base resources.
@@BlackTempleGaurdian yeah but venture tokens are very easy to obtain, a few unsynced duty runs and you can fill out the company seals with the gear dropped
Intern Steve: wanting heating for his house
Spiffing Brit: *Laughs in economist* you get paid in exposure
As the custodes by the Emperor of Mankind, in TTS
@@Astroga159 TTS! Another scholar of the fine arts!
Its trickle down Bruther!!
Also that guy with the 400 mil is a genuine business genius. He gets that its about people not items. The second he said "funnel the viewers" i was like damn bro, if this man ever gets into business serious, he will absolutely rise to the top.
Economy: *Already broken*
Spiff: _Don't mind if I do_
Not only that he was coming over to my server (Lamia) to buy some of his shit.
Remember everyone, Spiff bought the game, or paid for membership, in order to NOT play the game.
The most commitment I have ever seen from ANYONE, truly!
1:25 he said did it on a trial account only
@@r2020E Free trial can't access market board my guy. Can't hire retainers either.
@@James__Russell You can access the market board to buy things, you just can't sell anything due to not have access to retainers.
@@lingwisyer88 Someone best tell Squenix to clarify that on their list of restrictions then since that's what it says for trials.
@@lingwisyer88 you cant access it at all,
When moving all the gil, just click the minus (-) button next to the field where you type the amount
Doing that immediately sets to the max amount
Saves you time especially
I’ve been playing for a couple years now. I’m glad to finally know this.
I wish I knew this 1,000 hours ago 😭
oh my god
This also works the opposite way. When posting to auction, you can click the (+) button to go from maximum stack size to a stack of one. Edit : glad to see someone else post this tip. I logged on to post this because it's painful watching people type the max amount of gil in manually lol.
Love that I used to do this exact thing back when I played this game... One additional piece of advice for anyone that wants to do it - pay attention to stack sizes when selling. People seem to be much more willing to pay more per-item for a stack of 3 when they only need 3, than they would for a stack of 27 (or 99) as long as the total cost is lower. At the turn of the expansion, I went around and bought tons of the ALC and CUL crafted items used for Grand Company turn-ins just before the launch, so then because the level caps raised and everyone wants to level up crafting/gathering via GC turn-ins, all of a sudden there's a market for 3-stacks of ALC and CUL crafted items for the daily GC turn-ins and they sold like hotcakes at 2-3x or more what I paid on the week before the expansion came out.
Spif being an economist makes way too much sense considering what he's been doing for years.
It actually only works because of the laziness of players not willing to switch realms themselves and buy it cheaper just like Spiff.
@@ThisisCitrus so just like real life
It also makes me wonder how he's fared in his field thus far. A channel named Unlearning Economics recently put out an interesting video giving insights into the field of economics and how it often treats the people within it like shit. I have nothing to do with economics, but I still find this interesting.
@@marcogenovesi8570 Well not really, real life you have a lot of issues like securing start-up capital. Also I don't know if it's exactly "lazy" to not want to spend all your time server hopping so much as it is people wanting to do other things with their leisure hours.
Video game economies are interesting but you definitely can't just 1:1 them with real life economies because there are always some very glaring differences. "Vendor price" for example is a price floor, and those largely do not exist IRL but they play a large role in how video game economies shape out.
@@Junebug89 Agreed you can really see this with different world regions too. USA sees gaming as hobby for everyone, even lowest income person in valuable dollars, most players super casual, huge market to cater to. Europe has way more nolifers and RMTers working game like a job in eastern Europe who earn little working real job in real life, can make alot of real money trading to richer European countries ingame. Then Asia where people literally work the game like a sweatshop, no fun allowed hardcore only or pay up.
I dont know if youre gonna see this, but i have a challenge for you.
Play any of the Civilization Games, but instead of trying to win, you have to do your best to assist the first civilization you come across, so that they get the win.
I unironically love this idea!
@@thespiffingbrit Im glad you like it! Love from Germany! 🖤❤💛
That should actually be an interesting video. Cheating the AIs and winning is easy and expected, but making a stupid AI win from the side lines? That is a challenge.
@@thespiffingbrit Bonus points for making a lower difficulty AI beat a higher difficulty AI.
@@thespiffingbrit Oh, the irony of having to say "unironically"!
Back in the day in WoW, you had two different economies on the same server (Alliance and Horde), in theory you couldn't trade between you Horde characters and Alliance characters, except the neutral Auction House in the goblin cities. Now the neutral auction house had some heavy fees. But if you kept the prices extremely low you could trade between your horde and alliance characters pretty easily, you just had to do it quickly enough before anyone else caught on. I would do this in the very early morning when hardly anyone was on.
acutally you couldnt play aliance and horde on the same server for the longest time
@@Jezuzss PvP servers had a cross faction restriction, PvE cross faction was fine, no clue about RP.
@@elliottbott7213 oh, well i only played pvp server for years, so i assumed thats how it was
@@elliottbott7213 RP were either RP-PVE or RP-PVP servers, which followed the same rules as their non-RP counterparts
Btw, you cant buy your own items on neutral AH, you have to have a friend Who buy It for you.
REMEMBER: You cannot access the marketboard OR retainers on the free trial. You're also gil capped at 300k anyway-so while you can reach level 20 without buying the game, that's about all you can do re: making gil with this method.
This was something spiff did not know!!! So buyers beware! (Games pretty fun though)
You are also not limited to level 20. The free trial has no time limit and can play all the way to level 60, or the end of Heavensward (the first expansion).
@@thespiffingbrit but are free trial players actually "buyers"? 🤔
@@erwark well, there is an inital $20 purchase to get access to the subscription-free trial that comes with the $20
@xXzeroDXx They can buy, but they can not sell.
Tip: To get the monies out of the hands of the retainers as fast as possible (a very important skill as you may see), all you need to do is to click the minus button when the withdraw value is zero. The system will cycle back and show the max ammount, which is all that the retainer has in hand.
You can also just spam 9999999999 and hit enter and it will go to the max value. But hitting the minus button is still less effort =)
I was going to mention this, but you beat me.
Spiff: I'M causing the greatest market crash in history!
Actual FF14 players: Huh, is it tuesday already?
Watching this as a GW2 player was fascinating. Just watching how another game's economy functions differently but also the same is wild.
*footnote* If you do this on a server with a lot of crafter/gatherers, the market prices will eventually self regulate since laziness does, indeed have a price, and if you exceed the threshold and get too greedy, they'll eventually just do it themselves. This strategy's effectiveness depends entirely on your server's player biome.
which is why he picked Famfrit, since its a pvp server so less people gather because gathering is more dangerous. Plus the WoW thing but I'm pretty sure there was an issue with it prior to the WoW exodus.
@@brianforsyth2225 for sure. Replicating it will entirely depend on the server attitude. Mine puts a ton of emphasis on glamors so you can only inflate the price a little before the omni crew catches on
@@brianforsyth2225 whaaat ffxiv has pvp servers?? i’ve never heard of pvp in the open world while gathering or whatever. 😧 it’s always in a separate instance.
@@brianforsyth2225 There is no such a thing as a PvP server in FF. World PVP does not exist, so other players never pose a threat for gathering. Sure the community can agree on a server where there is more people doing instanced PvP, but that's not making gathering any harder since World PVP does not exist in FF. If people prefer to spend gils than crafting or gathering, is just a matter of laziness or preference in how to server community plays the game.
@@brianforsyth2225 what are you talking about lol
Thank you soooo much for posting this. In only 2 weeks since it's debut, prices have leveled out for the first time ages. As someone who plays on Lamia and was appalled by the stupidly low prices, you have my thanks, and probably the thanks of the other 50,000 omni-crafters on this horribly over-populated server. We're finally back in go mode.
To those who did this trick, enjoy your new millions, and thank you for helping to fix an ongoing problem! It's actually worth being a crafter again.
Not a problem. - Hia
now i hope he also do the same on PSO2 so i can get better time gathering N-Messta 😂
Lmao. I wonder if he expected this video to go live and then to have it patched or actually was just a function of a natural interaction through the game in realizing that the prices were so different between servers.
@@buddermonger2000 I may have engineered some potions of it....
Omnicrafter was something special in 2.x, but they cut down the whole game more and more, so meanwhile crafting lost almost all importance - beside being able to easily repair your equipment anywhere you want.
FF14 teams 'fixes' things by cutting off.
As someone who made 5m gil to buy a house by having a milk empire a couple of expansions ago, I highly approve of this video ❤️
mommymilkers? or what milk?
Is that... fun? Having to deal with market dynamics in a game that's supposed to be about anime characters slaying dragons or whatever??
@@somedudeok1451 yes and no
My bro did buffalo milk and coke too lol I did music scripts
@@somedudeok1451 Sometimes you gotta make your own fun
Funnily enough, I decided to start playing FF14 again because I have a guild and friends now AND after watching this I realized I could do this while I work from home, and I've managed to make myself enough money to never have to worry about money or whether I need to purchase a material or weapon. Thanks man!
Just imagine how much more Spiff could have made if he realized that several of the items he was buying from other servers were NPC shop items that were *already* inflated on the Market Board (such as paying 150 gil for an item that sells for 60 from an NPC shop).
well he did say it was an MLM.. it just means the people reselling npc goods profited too!
Dyes and bait are the primary offenders. Also, dyes are an amazing market opportunity because they take basically nothing to make and people list them in bulk for low prices on the mb so you can just flip them, especially on RP servers.
@@Th3.W1nt3r.H41r What do you mean? Someone else posted it for the low price. He was scrambling to get the money to buy it before someone else could.
But wouldn't that involve traveling to that NPC or are they in the hub city as well?
@@kaltaron1284 Those NPC's are generally easy to get to. Well, unless you've not progressed far enough in the game to get to the area where they're at, since those high grade items will only be sold by NPC's in the most recent areas.
I laughed SO HARD at the milk segment. Your panicking for money cracked me up. I love your content man you are hilarious.
The chocobo music sealed it
I just found this guy a few days ago and since then ive been binging these videos. Honestly one of the funniest content creators on TH-cam, and if you play the games he plays, the videos are actually super informative
Dude is a legend
@@griffinq8003 always need a guy like this on the team
Sooo many times I have gotten into that same "fumble for money" situation trying to buy something out before someone else sees it and have no gil to do it...hysterical
Spiff shouldn’t be allowed to participate in any real life economy
Agreed
hahahaha its too late to stop me now! My Elon Bot just bought shares in all your human social media conglomerates!!!
I just bought the idea of capitalism as an nft on Reddit! Now you all must pay me £6.50 whenever you do capitalism! I own the media!
@@thespiffingbrit i need that bot too^^
@@thespiffingbrit hohoho! 🤣🤣🤣
After taking Economy 101 in college i started playing Vanguard. Vanguard was an MMO in the spirit of EverQuest (by the same lead designer) that tragically got bought out by Sony (who owns EQ) and was subsequently defunded and left to wither on the vine and die in less than 12 months.
However, the game had 3 market places on 3 continents with no built in cross trading. You could buy goods on one continent then fast travel to another continent and sell them on that marketplace.
I ended up doing a similar thing to the milk fiasco in this video with endgame resources. There were really high drop rates on endgame materials that were getting nerfed in the upcoming patch in a couple days. I used that info to buy EVERY SINGLE one I saw on all 3 markets (I was already semi rich with being the first player to be able to build player houses on the continent for my server).
I made sure the markets on all 3 continents were bought out up to patch day. Then after the patch and the drop rate nerfs, I put the goods back up, one at a time, to find the market cap that people would pay. They sold at 2x, 4x, 8x, and eventually slowed down but still sold at 10x the original price. That may not sound like much but this game had a relatively low population and currency wasn't easy to accumulate at any level. The game had copper, silver, gold, and platinum currency (at 1:100 exchange rates)...and most players never had 1 platinum in the bank. Endgame loot traded in Gold.
I turned 5 platinum into 50 in roughly 6 days (while only selling half my stock) and was instantly richer than 80% of the guilds on the server by simply taking advantage of a supply bottleneck that was announced to be coming. I basically used the DeBeers strategy of monopolizing a stockpile while also trickling that stock back into the supply chain to keep prices artificially inflated through fierce demand.
I can't believe that The Spiffing Brit is going to expose the pyramid scheme in my mmo
If I a person with no prior understanding of FF14 can find it then surely anyone can!
The beautiful thing is like The Spiffing Brit said people are going to jump onto this and actually fall into the pyramid scheme that he has created meaning they could make a small profit but Spiffing Brit can make 10 times more profit
@@thespiffingbrit You started explaining what you were doing and I was immediately like "wait no my trade secrets"
@Urazz transfers are free, and many people play economic games in MMORPGs. Especially in FFXIV.
It's not a pyramid scheme, just a standard inverse prosperity funnel.
TSB: "We're going to be destroying this server's economy."
Me: "Heh. RIP. *glances up at what server it is* OH FUUUC--"
Lemme guess that's your main server
Lmfao
Kinda glad I’m still suffering from shitty Queue times so I don’t have to deal with it, also famfrit best server
Same!!!
@@Dualumina Damn, are you Sherlock Holmes?
This economic practice is called "Arbitrage" and is fascinating to see, organically, in a video game.
Well done!
(and for those who think this kind of thing is sketchy - vending machines are also a form of arbitrage)
There's a reason basically every successful MMORPG with a market ends up hiring economists.
@@89Crono or use a shared marketplace like runescape
@@89Crono And that reason is that public education does not require economics as a class.
@@HenriFaust Haven't played Runescape in over a decade but wasn't the market notoriously bad. I remember I once had a guy walk up and offer a ridiculous amount of money just to befriend him
See, all I got from that is that vending machines are sketchy and overpriced.
I just noticed, the 14 gil milk was put up by "threads merchant" which was one of Hia Zhao's retainers. Spiff lost his mind all so he could buy from his friend
I've been playing this game since ARR, and oh boy... im happy to see PEOPLE doing this and not f**king bots!!
The potions sell well due to the fact that win or lose the raid, the potion is gone, people will get through them FAST.
EDIT: Super Ethers CAN be a small market too, Black Mages do like them to squeeze out an extra cast sometimes.
And food. : P Don't forget food. "walnut breed" ⌐⌐ Every crafter knows this one.
You just inspired me to start working on my Alch and Culinary, thank you bud. !!!
@@cabellism no problem, Food and Potions are good money makers.
BUT you have to hit the first week of new SAVAGE tiers, 6.1 is not one of them.
BUT we do have a new Extreme Trial and a new Unreal, so i would think there is a market to a point.
I just find it funny that like hes doing these tiny trades. gil in the millions is like nothing in this game tons of ppl I know have over a billion, in the past I wouldnt even bother putting something on the market unless it sold for 100k or more. that was back before they fucked crafting over tho I guess, but this is like not even close to the laziest way to make money farming aether sands just requires a few button clicks to make 50-100k
Yo where's the 1K+ upvotes on this comment? Anybody who played OSRS/RS3 knows how terrible it feels when you can't buy mats because they literally don't buy for 25-40% over "GE Value". Also applies to any MMO with global economies and such.
No, Spiff. It's only morally wrong IF they cost money to buy. That's slavery!
What you're doing here is the perfectly morally acceptable 'unpaid internship' where they're gaining 'work experience'. Perfectly balanced and pro-capitalist, as I'm sure you're aware as an economist.
Technically they aren’t unpaid. One thing he never went over is the fact that selling in the board takes a little off the profits in tax. Those taxes are what pays the retainers.
@@sternguard77 so basically Spiff is paying child support for his unpaid retainers. Sounds about right.
@@sternguard77
As well as room and board.
Can’t have his indispensable assistants croaking on him now, can he?
Fun fact: In the Early 20th Century, African American workers weren't legally allowed to be held in peonage, so they were legally required to declare them as slaves, as slavery was actually legal at the time.
@@sternguard77 And second fees on the buyers end which are higher if you're not at same market as the retainer
"We are going to destroy this server's economy!"
*proceeds to engage in the economy in the exact same way everyone else does*
"Our point is proven!"
economy is the real todd howard.
Something tells me everyone doesn't buy all of one item on the entire server
@@ryballs4569 that's an actual impossibility though. I make my gil selling one item, myself, but even if I buy up everything off everyone else, more appears within hours.
That's just the market.
@@aircraftcarrierwo-class Aye. It quickly becomes unprofitable to try and deprive the market and price-fix. People realize it, and then proceed to make / grind a lot of the item you're trying to buy up, and you end up just being a better way of earning gil for others, than a way of earning gil for yourself.
@@NukeCloudstalker if you had some friends helping you maybe it would he more feasible to control certain resources?
It's hilarious how he's fixing the market prices in multiple servers, making a ton of money and cackling like a maniac while he does it.
I can't tell if he's doing it ironically though. Do you think he KNOWS that he didn't screw over the people paying less, but rather helped the people facing hyperinflation?
He called his character Jeff Bezos, but he's actually closer to Robin Hood. 😂
11:44
just a reminder: "Shop Selling Price" in the _tooltip_ shows how much it'll cost you to buy it off a NPC vendor
yes, that fish costs 7 gill each for unlimited supply off a NPC vendor
Isn't that how much it costs if you sell it TO an NPC?
@@Skyblade12 that's the one on bottom - "sells for"
When withdrawing money from a retainer, you can just press the minus button in the window while at 0 to make it skip to the max.
Oh shit
Thank you
Omg this comment saved my life!! Ty!!
Watching him type in the amount *hurt* me every time.
You are a fucking legend.
I've always just spammed 9 until it doesnt let me anymore and the amount will autocorrect down to max
Moral of the story: It's easy being a merchant with interdimensional portals.
The plot of the guild in dune
That explains the interdimensional merchants on Suikoden Tierkreis then.
This is basically how isekai protags make money. Like no joke.
there is probably an isekai out there with that plot.
As a Famfrit player, I am silently wondering if I somehow contributed to your insanity and am cackling. I love this.
I remember doing something like this when Star Trek Online first came to consoles. I stockpiled entire character bank capacities full of Kelvin Timeline lootboxes knowing that they would skyrocket in value once they were discontinued.
I ended up being able to purchase every possible drop from the lootboxes without ever having to pay the real-world currency to open them.
Damn must have been rlly satisfying
That was an insanely smart moove, sir !! Well done 🤭👏
To be fair, when I saw the title, I thought "oh no he's gonna be banned and he will fuck up the economy."
But the more he explains it, the more I realize this will normalize MB prices because the more 'economists' will do this, the more the prices will normalize between servers.
After some people of course make a crap ton of gil in the first few weeks of this vid's release.
Thanks Spiff!
Yes traders waring off against each other actually produces more competitive pricing ironically. When you have 1 trade baron corner the market uncontested, the price hiking only gets worse. This video keeps calling this "inflation" which it definitely isn't, it's simply supply and demand.
Until they all join the same FC in order to cooperate and monopolize the market again lol
You know that this will inflate prices across all servers right? They will normalize, but up.
@@LeiteLuke only if everyone is colluding in the prices (price fixing). If someone comes along and undercuts everyone else, and they can keep up with at least a part of demand, it introduces competition and will force others to push prices down or their items won’t sell
@@vinapocalypse this is already common on Crystal. Sometimes I post stuff that within minutes gets undercut by 10% of the value.
Or some douche just puts it even lower by about 50% of the lowest value just to sell theirs first. And that sets the next trend for the next undercutter until you got a queue of like 50 new postings under that new price treshold.
This method Spiff is doing will just normalize the prices because they will mark up on low priced servers (people getting their low price auctions bought in bulk) and mark down on high prive servers (where undercutting will become even more vicious).
The fish are exorbitant because some of them are required for the fisher job quests. That's why you see the quantity of it is usually 1 of it for 5k to 20k gil. Most of the market fishes actually help new players who might be too lazy to fish for an hour just to complete the quests. Good times playing FF14, i remember being able to afford a medium house with countless decorations just from trading in 6 months of playing. My account still had around 150 million gil when i stopped playing a few years ago.
I'm partially guilty of this. I did buy some fish for my fishing quests if it seemed like what I needed just wasn't buying. For the most part, though, I did do so properly for the other quests. I've been stuck on the lvl 60 or either 58 quest for months now because the fish I need to spear just won't show up. My FSH has been lvl 80 forever now since it's so easy to lvl doing ocean fishing. lol
I actually figured out how to do this on my own like 10 years ago when playing tons of World of Warcraft...
By the end I had so much stuff for sale that it took all day just to list it even with macro programs.
I got stupidly rich selling all the staples that everyone from level 1-30 would need to level their crafting.
Copper, Iron, Tin, bronze, linen cloth, wool cloth, gems, herbs, etc etc etc.
Then I started making stupidly expensive mounts that sold for 50k.
The reason I lost a lot of my money is that they changed the game so that you only needed to buy each mount once for your whole account instead of once per character, so all the stuff I had massively invested in stopped selling almost entirely.
Also I had to quit the game for a while and a lot of my stuff got deleted from the mailbox by the time I came back. :/
I did corner most of the markets and make a crapton of money though.
Spiff: "Here's how I break the FFIX economy with some market tomfoolery."
Eve Online Players: "...Hold my Nanite Paste."
Oh dear gosh. Not that mess. Eve is a beautifully broken game some times.. xD
EvE Online Players: "So it's Tuesday?"
EVE online ..... i think that will be challenge for Spiff
@@mateuszkosior2827 Certainly. Getting exploitative in EvE takes a lot of effort and skill. The results can be pretty hilarious/devastating though.
EvE players are laughing at Spiff thinking he knows anything about economics.
Some of my favourite market sca- I mean, "Tactics", is to buy an engraved hardleather grimoire from a merchant for 3k and sell it on the market for 10k or more. The grimoire is needed for an alchemy quest early on and people are too lazy to find out you can just get one from an NPC vendor and just buy whatever is on the market.
Hahaha this reminds me of myself when i started playing as a paladin as my starting job and my focus was just to gain more levels and better gear, so i mainly bought everything off the market board if the item was not available for purchase due to my lazyness to progress with the main quest, i think i had like lvl 68-70 gear when i started heavensward and it was so silly to see all that old gear that i had previously bought, as quest rewards...so i just sold them off as i got them to keep the cycle going
And all the level 50 HQ items with requisite materia sell like crazy. I made so, so much money off of black pearl rings lol
Ah, the ole arbitrage play.
This works for basically every single piece of gatherer/crafter gear. People trying to grind through leveling a crafter often won't check to see if the Clothier NPC ten yalms away from them is selling the upgrades they want for a fraction of the market price, same with the level 1 weapons from arms vendors for people who want to start leveling a retainer assigned a combat job.
use to do this with pets in wow. new pet vendors would pop up now and then on patches, and sell a pet for 100g. id sell it on the ah for 800g and i probably sold like 100 b4 people caught on lol
I made my first 100 million gil or so just buying dyes at a vendor, then running like 50 feet to the market board and selling those dyes for 5x the vendor price.
this especially works if the vendor is one you have to put in work for to access like Snow White dye with the ixal beast tribe
when I'm not feeling very lazy I'll just set my character to craft a stack of 99 soot black dye or something while I watch youtube, that always sells well. or resell in smallish stacks whatever dye people need for fashion report that week. those usually go super fast
I made my millions in the materia market. I'm a healer main, so I get tons of tokens from adventurer in need bonuses to get top-end materia that I stock up on and then sell right as a new raid tier comes out. High-end raiders need a LOT of materia due to pentamelding but the materia only comes from max level dungeons and trade ins, so the demand is always high right as a new tier comes out. I once put up a full stack of 99 Savage Aim materia 9s for something like 250,000 gil. It took two minutes for it to sell.
And what did I spend my money on? Why, the Respendent Vessel of Ronka, of course. 25 Million gil down the drain for a shiny mount. I regret absolutely nothing. All for the Skree
@@Rogue2316 This mans global plan is above our primitive understanding ....... there is more to this shiny mount ....... i just know it
@@thenextbondvillainklaussch3266 Well yes, it is called "dabbing on the plebs", the greatest plan of them all.
Hot tip... Press the - button when on 0 gil when withdrawing and it sets it to max. Much faster than typing the number.
"there's no way to counter the new milk price on this server"
Oh yes there is. We had some epic economic wars in WoW over this. Some guilds would get to greedy trying to corner the market, so you do the same, except they have deeper pockets, right? Wrong, because you can fund your purchases by relisting it barely under their prices, forcing them to buy it to protect their monopoly. Once your stockpile is big enough and they have invested a ton of money, you can start flooding the market just low enough to force them to either move prices down or else lose money due to taxes on buying your postings. You'll make less than they would, but you have much lower capital investment, and you break their monopoly.
You gotta put in the time though, cuz you need to watch the market like a hawk.
That's honestly pretty interesting.
Yeah I’d watch a video about economic wars any day
Oh man, i cant wait to see this one. You know the markets gonna go nuts from people trying to copy whatever he does in this one
It's not a new idea. People have been doing this for a long time. Trading across servers is actually good because it helps to stabilize the prices.
most of spiffs exploits are usually things that the playerbase of the game in question already knew. if the exploits weren't well-known to begin with, then spiff likely would never hear of it, and wont make a vid about it
indeed arbitrage is a healthy for most video game economies. This video is mostly about exploiting a strange breakout disparity between famfrit and the rest of the data centre
Lol you never played RuneScape and it shows
@@thespiffingbrit I'm on Lamia, so I guess that means that it'll be a good time for my gatherers for a bit before it stabilizes.
"How much are we paying these people?"
"They're interns! They're free."
"Yeah, well, we're getting ripped off."
-Three to Tango
Another simple way to make gil quick on the cheap is to walk to the dye vendor in Ul'dah who is just a few steps away from the market board, grab a bunch of dyes for 40gil a piece, and sell them for 600gil or more.
I just love how he threatened square enix by saying he'd reveal even worse nonsense.
"If you strike me down I will return even more powerful than you could imagine!"
Gotta admit I’d genuinely pay to see him make good on his threat lol
To be fair, this much is nothing. We have been doing this for years, and Square knows that much. In fact, making a few million like that when you're trying to make money is normal. The guy who made 400 mil on the other hand, is less normal but even then it's very feasibly doable.
Honestly, it's not that this is an exploit no one knows about. It's just that it's so insignificant that most people don't bother with it.
@@zzlai6235 read spiffs comment he made 1 billion
Watch out, this isn't even his final form xD
@@wereowl9369 Yes I did. 1 billion after weeks of flipping one of the highest demand crafting material during the weeks with peak raid food consumption is quite normal. The reason why not more people are doing it is simply because gil is quite useless after a certain point. And people who are willing to buy the priced up milk are buying it knowing that the price is being manipulated. Most of them probably just think that the convenience is simply worth the higher price.
I don't doubt that Spiff has an even crazier exploit up his sleeve, but this one is quite literally just the average state of FF.
When Spiff says, "...this feels morally dubious," you know what's coming is going to be some of the finest tea ever.
Thebest Thing is when someone puts up a Item and forgets a Digit. Well i had a Gentleman forget 5 Digits. So instead of 8.679.000 Gil, he sold it for 86 Gil.
Great Profit to this date
Same thing happened to me recently on a game I play called Pandora Saga, managed to pick up the game's equivalent of a very strong and rare materia, not for it's actual value (2,500,000g) but for a measly 250,000.
@@AbyssPriestess is pandora saga even alive now? I remember playing it like decades ago....
I don't know if it is still viable, but I always made easy passive gil by buying dyes from Beast Tribes and selling them for profit in packs of 5 to 20. People who didn't have the reputation or just didn't want to run to the place or didn't remember it would buy them up. Pay a few k for dye, and sell it for markups sometimes up to 10 times the price.
I haven’t played in almost a year and it was nice seeing some of my competitors on the market board. Glad to see they’re still grinding away.
Hilariously enough, I almost thought this was a video on the RP side of things. Last night I made some 700k I think (didn't count lol) just sitting behind a bar and handing out nonexistant drinks. 100% profits with no investments whatsoever!
Even if a drink is 1k, most people gave me 5k to 10k, and several regulars gave me this multiple times. One patron, with the condition I stopped calling him 'Mr. Moneybags', gave me 500k because he enjoys our spa. It was maybe me standing behind the bar for four hours having fun playing at being an absolute terrible, but very entertaining, bartender. Easy money.
Closest thing I remember to that is in EQ some breakdancing dwarf. In the bazaar by player run casinos dude would give a show for a few platinum. Best money I ever spent. He would spam emotes in the old model and the way they cut off he was popin and locking with the best of them. Adding flavor to the game is the entire reason some people play. If they got musical instruments like LOTRO every week there is a performance.
Or that same old game before the bazaar, traveling merchants with rare and exotic weapons from the newly discovered continent. They'd spin a yarn about where the weapon came from so you'd hear the adventures of the heroes who were there. Not as epic as a bard's tale but that's how you got the info back then.
The power creep mighta felt like you got scammed but then you remember your teacher/master/senpai how he told stories of steel sword and banded or bronze armor being the best they had while fighting dragons. Such an impossibility it made sense how he fought as mad and risky as he did.
I’m hyped! I play FFXIV and my favorite thing to do is scam lazy crafters out of their money on the market boards. I gather 99 of something and then scalp it to them lol.
Also praise the lazy buyers for looking at an item sat at 100X its normal price and thinking sure that's a rational thing to purchase!
@@thespiffingbrit praise the lazy buyers but eternally curse the undercutters lol. Me and my FC mates constantly bitch about undercutters
the game of finding someone richer and stupider than you
@@thespiffingbrit you would at least think ppl would look at purchase history
you too?? LOL
I'd love to see you try to do this in ESO with the trade guild system and the lack of the marketboard. It would be hilarious. My GMs would go nuts.
Hyper inflating wool is where its at, trust me. Wool is used for most BIS leveling gear, and tufts (base raw material) can only be grinded off mobs in Heavensward. Ive made millions of gil in a single day. Been doing it on and off (whenever I play) since ARR rereleased, and you couldn't server hop.
Yep, I did the same for awhile even though I make a good chunk of change from crafting.
What kind of wool?
@@DyingOx just a shit ton of regular wool
@@ginichimaru001 there is no item/drop that is just “wool” could you please elaborate more?
@@DyingOx There are different wool used for different recipes, mostly based on the level of the craft. I recommend looking at the market board to determine which one is the most profitable one currently. You have to put in a little work and observation yourself. It can vary a lot. ^^
Okay, as someone who is taking his second semester of economics, Spiff is actually using real world economics in this video instead of some cheesy, easily abused, unrealistic tactic.
Absolutely. I think minus the buying-all-the-market-on-milk scheme, he's actually providing a service (which, admittedly, consists mostly of using his comparison software and sometimes clicking to visit another world) - but hey, if more people did that, the prices between worlds would theoretically just level out.
That's more of a nod to FFXIV's economic design than Spiffs economy ability.
And that in of itself, is very telling about how broken and exploitable global economic systems are.
@@leviadragon99 Well, actually that's not a good example of a problem with global economics (at least if excluding the price distortion by buying up all milk) - if more people did the same as Spiff, guess what will happen - as the barriers for "global trade" in this example are literally zilch, the prices will even out between servers - to the point where people won't be seeing this "import-export" as a good use of their time. Say an item initially costs 200 at the farmers' and can be sold for 1000 at the PvP server, in the end it may cost 500 on the 'farming' server and you may get 510 selling it on the PvP server - at that point, most people probably stop their trading acitivities and rather spend their time doing other things. So prices for the farmers increase, and prices for the consumers=PvPers decrease - what's not to like about that? You can tell that the trading in there is currently absolutely underused, from the whole "item that costs 1300 is mistakenly listed at 15 and no-one buys it, for minutes" sequence. Which is also the classic situation where one or just a couple of big traders can freely distort the price as shown here - by buying just a couple hundred of those goods on offer, they literally removed the entire supply of that server.
Reminds me of a friend I had back when I played WoW that would almost entirely just play in the auction house. To him it was a trading simulator, then a fantasy game second. He made so much money that he has to make several alts to hold it.
In shadowbringer before my guild died two of the leaders were gathering the cash for a mansion and they were jusy racking up ridiculous amounts of Gil from crafting everyday and they still raided. One was static lead for a amueter in our guild that I was on, the other was a purple/orange parsing blm.
@@booleanillogical4757 Yeah that's great and I feel the hustle 👌
But for this you've to play almost 24/7 and you can't do this for a long period ✌️
This is actually why I love FFXIV - this is a completely legitimate way to play the game, and is actually very good for the crafters/gatherers as well.
well, without addons it is yeah.
As a FFXIV player that's been playing for years, that's pretty much what I've been doing for a while and have over 80 millions and I've given 20+ millions to the members of my company! lol
@@CreateHarmony Teach me your ways
@@CreateHarmony if you have too much money, i‘ll take some :,)
Me 2,000+ hours into FFXIV: “Ah a Spiffing Brit video about FFXIV, I wonder what exploit he is gonna-… oh he is just doing what literally everyone does with the market board.”
And he didn't even do it well, considering he bought NPC vendor items at inflated prices on the MB.
Been playing mmorpgs since they have existed. There have been people doing this kind of shit since it started, definitely not what I would call an exploit.
To people who doesnt play MMORPG or used to play MMORPG with no cross server availability. This video is really interesting.
@@Lordborgman It is an exploit, not of the game but of the market, that is commonly done does not unqualify it as an exploit
@@diablo.the.cheater the term exploit implies that things are not working as intended, considering this is a facet of real world economics you can’t really say that.
the sheer panic that you went through trying to buy that milk for 14 Gil, i felt it, i was just chilling listening to the video and then i started to panic as well
Best takeaway in this: Siff yelling "GIVE ME MY MONEY!" at a small child. Just beautiful.
dropping this at 2pm EST on a Sunday is going to cause unimaginable chaos in every single FF14 server
Good thing we have a 24 hour maintenance tomorrow haha... I'm scared what will happen on tuesday
Tonberry won't know what hit them. Bahahahaha!
I find it funny how the public sentiment's always like "How Come They Never Teach Finance In School". Yet they play games like this and don't learn anything lol. Making money in EVE Online's market place was my lesson in college on how market structure worked. Along with how it can be manipulated.
When I was in college my professor wrote a paper on the Eve online market. We studied it in class and were encouraged to play Eve.
This reminds me of those really old WoW auction house challenge videos where folks just were seeing how much money they could make over a weekend. Used to watch a lot of those so this was very nostalgic. Great video!
those videos are still popular in classic wow :D
watching your channel I learned more about money making than any actual "financial advice" -channel I've seen(not many :D coz i've found your channel early enough)
This was fun to watch because Spiff gets so excited when he finds something he can make a nice profit on 😂 Thank you for another amazing exploit video!
This reminds me of something I did on Luna PLUS many, many years ago. There was an item (I don't remember what it was called) that was involved in crafting of every single piece of gear in the game (armor, weapons, accessories, etc.). You could not buy them from an NPC and the only way to get them was to break down junk gear you got while killing mobs. The player shops sold them for around 1k each or so. I discovered that I could buy a level 1 ring for 100 gold, break it down and get one of those items from it. So I could make 10x profit just by doing the work of buying rings and breaking them down. It took a little time to go through buying and breaking all those down, but the return was fantastic! I even accidently caused the average cost in player shops for that material to drop to less than 500 gold each. Still profitable, but not as much anymore. Then the game died...
i remember doing something similar on a MUCH smaller scale when i used to play WoW. Back then in the early locations the items you got from gathering (like ore) took like 30 minutes to accumulate 99 of and then i could sell them on the marketplace for like 10k. it cost 0gold to get since it was just gathering low level stuff but apparently higher level players that had tons of cash didn't feel like returning to harvest in order to grind crafting skills so theyd pay high amounts for the starting materials. my character before realizing that left the starting location with like 2k and every character afterwards left EXTREMELY wealthy by spending a few hours on the marketplace.
It was just far more time efficient to buy the low level mats en masse, and grind up the skill. Rather than taking the time to farm for them.
@@Galeanthropist oh for sure. and its no where near what spiff did here. i was just pointing out that ive used a similar mechanic to make price tags (for my casual ass self) nothing to worry about cuz i could play through the game, buying whatever i needed. again filthy casual in WoW here so that was a lot quicker and easier than hunting down mobs for everything
I did a private server a while back and was the only person using auctioneer. Fun times.
I did something very similar with star wars the old republic, especially with the items you need to grind things like pvp. It's insane how much money you can make just by switching servers in MMOs
This should be a series across different popular MMOs with marketboards.
Yes!
Waiting for the EvE Online one 🙃
I am on Ultros and we would hear rumors every now and then that there were ppl playing the market hardcore on famfrit. This explains so many of my crafter friend's frustrations. And yeah the milk market legends was also a thing.
So I came across this video right after I got involved in buying berries to change the color of my chocobo and I was wondering if switching servers was the key. I was pleasantly pleased that it was the case but seeing how it’s a year later from the posting of the video and me not having a the speculative market passion, foresight or mindset I don’t think I could pull it off as well as you did lol
Spiffing "You don't need anyone or anything to do this"
Also Spiffing "I'm bringing in people to help"
Interns aren't people silly
@@rylexander1 but his real 2 friends (who he also called interns or employees), were.
5he one at the end made the milk prizes going crazy so both could benefit from it..
So a couple things
1) lots do this, the second cross server play hit I made a killing off this, around 50 million in a week.
2) the launcher at the start with the pricing does break TOS, granted you can get it off the web too but still... Regardless it's always nice seeing your antics.
Yeah, it also depends on how the pricing information is gathered - it needs to be gathered and updated manually.
Any automated systems are against ToS, and a few market board sites got the attention of SE many months ago and are now multiple days behind and/or behind paywalls.
Out of curiosity, what is that launcher/app? I don't recognize it
The Spiffing Brit: "How to become a Millionaire in FFXIV without playing the game!"
Me, doing ERP Services: "PATHETIC"
Out of curiosity (definitely asking for a friend) how much can you actually make off of that?
I pay 200k an hour to the place I go. But it varies.
@@Soluscide i have seen businesses where you paid 250k-400k for 30mins
AH, yes. Porn. Because simps fall for it every time.
Not sure when it invaded the Crystal data center though, but I see them every time I go to Limsa Lominsa. ⌐⌐
@@Soluscide In my busiest night I earn around 7 million gil with plenty of tips. But, on average 1 - 2 million for a night (4 hours shift)
crazy how i love the little grinds, know im getting fucked outta coin but still just enjoy clicking away
I've been playing FFXIV for about 2 years now, and I hate to burst your bubble but Famfrit's economy has always been in the shitter - the WoW influx has only made it a little worse. Funny as hell to watch it go down the drain even further.
least you have one
exodus doesn't have one to begin with
that's why he picked Famfrit
the perfect victim to pull this off
@@Konpekikaminari oh hey Itai
@@Reynsoon hey(?)
@@abs_nobody Excalibur sits happily between both ends of the extreme and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Spiff: Calls a character an “intern”
Every NPC: sweating
This game needs Eve online players, the market would be normalized in an hour.
True lmao
Defo
Send em over.
its horrible, i cant place lowball buy orders
Don't worry, gold farmers are doing exactly that, stabilizing the economy, and after that, prices will go lower.
9:38 "Chai Tea" I can't
Keep in mind that stats are different on consumables depending on if they are high quality or not. Non HQ prices may be extremely low cause nobody wants to use them, especially pots
Huh you can still make HQ consumables?!?, i thought that they got rid of the whole "HQ" stat
@@soldierorsomething They only got rid of some instances of HQ items, consumables are not those. You can see in the vid that there is the HQ icon on the items when he's about to buy em
I mean we have been doing this for 10 years, regular vendors sell items and then you can list them on the market board for 10x the price for easy money, many crafters just sit by. Board and buy what they need, same thing with dyes, lots of people forget about the dye vendor. Orange juice is required for a quest early on, you can buy it for 10gil from an npc for you can buy it on the market board for 300 gil(more or less)
the second tier gathering items still sell for like 20k cuz people are too lazy to travel from one capitol to the other? ;D
@@chefv1king Depending on how much you're gonna make, that's not much.
Not sure if mentioned below, but check sale history. Something might sell high, but infrequently, making it less worth your while to try and play it on the marketboard. Also selling in specific amounts, according to what is used for recipes
Yep I was worried when he was using fish as his example. A lot of fish are completely useless in the last few expacs except for leveling desynthesizing (disenchanting for the wow friends) except that desynthesizing fish gives nothing of value that I know of.
I wasn’t necessarily sure how overinflated the prices were since I don’t engage much with the market board. But then I saw the literal first fish you are ever asked to catch as part of the level 1 fisher quest listed at 2 grand.
MMO players are wild
That fish is rare I can’t seem to catch it at a decent rate
Yeah literally catchable in all the water right in the same city spiff was playing in
You know what you need is mule interns. Set up characters on each server to buy up that servers stock, then trade your mule interns the items to trade back to the character on the server you wish to sell.
Can monopolize the entire Data Center in this manner, instead of just 1 server.
Edit, a second thought in a not to long from now period of time we will be able to visit other datacenters in our regions, assuming you can carry items through a data center transfer as you do a server to server transfer...you could effectively monopolize an entire region of the game.
Brilliant Ol'Liz would be proud.