A Difficult but Achievable way to end RMT without severely hurting players.

[Hyrist]

But IMO the root of the issue is that players need to just NOT buy gil.

More should do their part and HORDE gil, take it out of circulation or buy majority from NPC only(destroying gil). These are the 2 ways an individual can help the situation.

Thirteen years of this across every conceivable game with a multiplayer market has broken me of any faith whatsoever in a crowd solution. People are simply too varied, their moral spectrum too differing - and wherever there is a demand, there will be someone to make a market out of it. Therefore the core problem is to address the market. This goes doubly so for hoarding gil - unless the player has absolutely nothing to buy, all it does is raise prices - because too few players will hoard gear and not impulse buy with it.

And you don't need to target all job specific items on the AH, what you target is items most vulnerable to being cornered and over/under sold.

As a mental exercise, we can begin with the 20 largest single purchase value crafted goods, and their materials. Evaluate what their min and maximum cost values 'should' be for the in game effort involve, completely excluding the free market of the AH.

I still maintain that the two biggest issues that will end up hurting, well everything, are Job Point sellers and Mercs….

And in a late stage game you won't remove the Mercing economy. It's something players do as well as gilsellers. They have the ability to sell items they themselves can acquire with ease, therefore they'll offer it as a solution to players who otherwise can't access the content.

And, honestly, there's value in that system. A player who's trying to catch up is given an avenue to do so - and most revert back to playing content themselves in everything they can achieve themselves - the list growing with each purchase and accomplishments. This is all done without the level of expectation or attachment long term content groups force upon one another - a social element those who were successful in view with rose tinted glasses, but the majority have always despised. This is why things like Roulettes are so heavily successful in modern MMOs.


I myself Merced a Colada on RDM to get a jump start on weapon damage (Before Kaja was a thing.) I haven't merced any other items since - but that weapon gave me a jump start I needed to start working on my own upgrades.

To think of this more fairly, selling something on the Auction House is simply selling the service of acquiring that item after the fact - it’s Pre-Merced merchandise. Mercing is just enabling people to do it from content that cannot otherwise be sold.

The extreme level of mercing will die down once the inflation of gil begins to settle - once the value of gil returns, it won’t be as absurdly lucrative to Merc vs other grinding methods - therefore fewer people will do it.

From my assessment (take it with a grain of salt, I’m not perfect) - The core of it all boils down to just how inflated the whole market has become, and how lopsided it’s made the in game economy. If the top end of the current market becomes leashed, the system will begin to balance out and low end players will feel like advancements are more achievable, while high end players will feel like they don’t need to exploit the system just to stay with the pack.

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Rather than debate back and forth on the same singular point. I’d like to suggest something for those following along post by post -

What are the items on the AH you feel are most influential and are often being warped by Gilsellers and Botters alike? What minimum and maximum value would you like that item to be set to and why?

We can apply the same questions to items that are commonly being Merced as well. While I primarily wanted to focus on getting the Auction house stabilized, mercing is something we can add to the concerns, and could be controlled by the same system.