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MMO Creators Follow The Virtual Money Trail
Thanks to Wired News for its article discussing the dysfunctional economies of massively multiplayer games. The piece references an economic analysis by Raph Koster regarding Star Wars Galaxies, in which he mentions the game "...uses what is called a faucet-drain economy. You can visualize a spigot of cash coming into the game, a big ol' sink where the money sloshes around, and a set of drains where the money goes out the bottom." Virtual economist Edward Castronova also comments, concerned about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie: "The wealth distribution is not just unequal, it is incredibly unequal... Raph says it is similar to the distribution of wealth in (real-life) economies, which it is, but even the worst robber-baron economies were not this bad." In the end, though, Koster argues: "You don't get to ignore the economy, but absolutely, the goal is the fun, not Berkshire Hathaway."
Hmmm... I disagree entirely with the FFXI-related content of this post. To call crystals a "semi-rare" drop item is, to be blunt, completely wrong.
For those who haven't played the game, the crystal works as follows. Players can ask NPC guards in their home cities (or their embassies in other cities) to cast a spell called Signet on them. This is free of charge and any player can do it. The effect of the spell lasts for a few hours and it causes enemies killed by the player to drop crystals (there are also other effects, but these aren't significant by now.) So long as a player is under the effect of Signet, any enemy they kill that is strong enough to grant them experience points when killed (ie. Not more than about 5 or 6 levels lower than the player) has a chance (roughly 50/50) to drop a crystal, with an elemental property determined by the type of enemy killed (eg. wasps drop air crystals, worms drop earth crystals). In a party, if more than one player has Signet, you may well get more than 1 crystal per kill. In other words, these are extremely common items indeed.
In terms of cost, a stack of 12 of the cheapest crystals (usually Earth and Water) will sell for about 400 gil in the auction houses in the start-cities, while the more expensive ones (such as fire), will sell for 1800 a stack of 12. 400 gil is a pitance in game terms. There are many obstacles to a successful crafting career, but I'm not aware that crystals are really one of them. The biggest problem is that people try to get started in it before they know the game mechanics well and before they have the funds to cover the startup costs.