Capping Sparks increases SE Revenue streams

[Qualo]

Its actually a pretty incredible idea to cap sparks for the player base and will likely increase SE revenue by a lot. Many players use sparks/accolade farming to raise gil to purchase items they want/need. A few players turn to RMT to buy gil for the same end purpose. By capping this stream, more players may be turning to RMT to get the gil they need. RMT will need to increase their accounts that 24/7 bot in order to make up the difference in their income per character.

Maybe with all that extra money they can hire people to police the bots...

[Alhanelem]

Your post made my brain hurt.

Obviously, this (the original post) is a facetious comment and isn't meant to be taken seriously. Or at least, I pray that it is.

[BST]

I will then insist that the newly hired people target the buyers only, because that is what keeps the sellers around.

[Qualo]

@Alhanelem - I obviously have no insight into their thinking when they came up with this plan. My cynical mind just sees this as a way to increase revenue while claiming they're going after the RMT. Do you think this change benefits real players in any way? I don't see it but maybe it'll become more apparent once its implemented.

@BST - come to Shiva or one of the other servers. The air is much cleaner out here.

[Rolodex]

I'm honestly shocked they didn't tie the limit to PoL IDs. What is to stop RMT from multiboxing with one set of characters, hit cap, load a new character from each account and start the process over. It's been a hot while since I played though so I'm hoping i'm missing a piece of the picture because all this does is make selling gil much more lucrative since the only ones really affected by this change would be people that only have one main.

[Lockhart]

I'm honestly shocked they didn't tie the limit to PoL IDs. What is to stop RMT from multiboxing with one set of characters, hit cap, load a new character from each account and start the process over. It's been a hot while since I played though so I'm hoping i'm missing a piece of the picture because all this does is make selling gil much more lucrative since the only ones really affected by this change would be people that only have one main.

I do not believe that most of the RMT tie their accounts together. I think they would create completely separate accounts for the sake of protection. If one account does get banned, the others will continue to breath, whereas; if they are on the same SE ID they would loose everything.
If your discussing limiting the number of characters created on a single POL ID, the limit has always been the same, if they reduced that now it would effect real people who have created legit characters. I could be wrong, but I dont believe a RMT would be willing to pay more per month to add more characters to a single ID, for the same reasons as above. Regardless of what popular theory is, even PLing a new character to 99 from level one with no missions or time investment would take days. Instilling missions would extend this timeline more. Therefore; it would take a month or longer to fill all character slots on a POL ID. This could all be lost immediately with the proper reporting from the player base. I don't feel RMT would find this a worthwhile investment currently.

[Rolodex]

I do not believe that most of the RMT tie their accounts together. I think they would create completely separate accounts for the sake of protection. If one account does get banned, the others will continue to breath, whereas; if they are on the same SE ID they would loose everything. ... Therefore; it would take a month or longer to fill all character slots on a POL ID. This could all be lost immediately with the proper reporting from the player base. I don't feel RMT would find this a worthwhile investment currently.

You are making the assumption RMT play within the rules. Getting from 1-99 with bots is a trivial issue and considering the cost per a million gil is a bit more than 1 dollar there is nothing stopping them from PLing a new character from 1-99 within a day via pos hacks and then abusing the heck out of the next gain exp RoE. The only thing they might change is tying up dynamis zones for currency, which sucks for me since that is one way I like to farm for gil since everyone hates farming in those zones. Putting the cap on the POL ID would be a huge hamstring for RMT since they would have to burn an entire account for RoE farming rather than cycling out their alt characters. It really would be more cost effective just to add new characters to the ID for a dollar and continue on their merry way. Like I said, i'm hoping i'm missing something but so far it seems like all this cap does is discourage players with a bit of time to farm gain exp when it pops. The only exception to that would be the ones that mutlibox but that's more a grey area.

[Lockhart]

Even at one day per character, this would take half a month. Which is a significant time investment, much larger then they are used to. On shiva you might have been lucky thus far about not having dynamis currency bots, however, on asura those have been around forever. Considering the 20 bots a zone from other areas, if they all turn to dynamis boting, there will likely be over a thousand bots in dynamis! Back to your point, considering the time investment required, I maintain the stance they would spend too much time building the account and processing through each different character to profit enough to make it worth it. I honestly believe if people were buying before, hardly any will buy at the price $1/million. If demand reduces greatly, RMT will not profit.

[Lockhart]

If people are willing to pay the prices listed above, SE should just abandon the current way of things and adopt Pay To Win, they could make billions before everyone decides to quit or shutting down anyhow.

[Rolodex]

From a quick search it looks like the average rate is 1 mil per dollar so you are right in the fact it's not going to be profitable but now i'm worried they will just flood other avenues. Like you said, i'm from Shiva, so hopefully the only place they flood is the crafting market. I already treat this game like a FF styled phantasy star online with the trust system so suddenly seeing RMT out in the wild will be a bit of a bummer. We already have someone setting up shop selling job points and using bots to PL the buyer. I only hope it's some multiboxer rather than RMT locking out everyone from the Mol/Sil gate camps. I wonder why SE would be this heavy handed in sparks nerfs if they don't even IP ban obvious RMT.