No, no... thank YOU for saving us a bunch of time.

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Even if you have gil at start, I think this game requires a bit more than just the gil. Yes, you will do more damage, or heal better, but even without gil, you can level higher and look for a decent income (geee how many Rams I killed when I started...).
I gave 20-50k to good few new players. They were all so excited to be able to buy some gear or some spell. And that excitement after few days vanishes together with their chars.
Get to 30 (can do that in Dunnes only almost), open job that u want and play it. There are enough ra/ex items that you can get to be decent (ish) and at then at higher lvls you can start farming stuff for gil to get HQ items or just higher lvl items.
If you aim at gil, there are options since early levels in any case.
Sad how people give up before even starting

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Work Hard. Play Harder.

When AH prices seem high to you, that means everything you put on AH will net you a lot more cash, too.

Get to farming drops, get to HELMFing, use the money to start a craft, go go go! Put in the time, and before you know it you'll achieve some level of financial freedom that you can use to gear up your favorite jobs.

That's an important part of the classic game and some of its appeal. Rising from a nobody dressed in tatters to a shiny hero with wrecking spells.

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Baleful Badger

There's plenty of private servers that list stuff on the AH for 1g. Perhaps that's more up your alley, OP.

If you played retail in the era this server is emulating then you'll know that the prices here are pretty normal. I'm new too and the prices seem reasonable. There are plenty of ways to earn gil.

Others in your same situation are succeeding. You feel you are not able to. This is a misconception. You don’t lack opportunity, you lack willingness.

Might as well play retail then, you can hardly call it a challenge if you can get level 99 gear after vendoring a single crystal.

New player here, recently leveled warrior and ninja up (40 and 23ish) along with thief to 15 for TH. I checked the AH to see the Haubergeon was going for over million gil. To a new player, this seems like an astronomical amount of money, but I just keep reminding myself that I had to do it on retail back in the day, so I should be able to do it here too! On the plus side, once you get Haubergeon, you're pretty set to 75 for the jobs that can use it. Most jobs have similar gear where it's THE piece to have, so from a time/value of money perspective, it's a good investment!

One aspect of the economy that is far different than retail during era is being able to afford a Noble's Tunic after a couple of weeks of playing! That tunic used to be a luxury item for wealthy WHMs only. It's good to see that the Haubergeon is still expensive. Having notoriously expensive pieces of gear is fun, especially when you can finally attain them.

Nasomi AH prices are ridiculously high I agree. It's from the mining section though. Players can mine at a rate of 300k per hour in some area's. And the spots are incredibly limited. Not enough for everyone to do it. I fish at 10 times slower rate of income per hour. It takes me ten days to do what I miner can do in 4 hours. But with no competition I can do it as much as I can on my days off. But I will never be able to make gill at miners pace. Where do the people who buys the items off the miners get their gill. It's too from mining. Mining is the largest market in FFXI. Fishing brings in the gill onto the server but it's the smithers who spends the gill. And that takes miners.