It's been officially stated before that this is a limitation to help circumvent RMT activity.
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It's been officially stated before that this is a limitation to help circumvent RMT activity.
However it does no such thing. We know the RMT are on several accounts at once, at times multiboxing entire full parties unto themselves. They can simply trade the gil between accounts (and back again if needed) freely and safely. Once again, it's only the legitimate players who suffer for this, not the criminals.
Having to trade does greatly limit their efficiency however. You can only trade a maximum of 1million gil at a time. This means they need to make 300 trades to exchange 300mil. This time adds up and gives SE more time to catch them as well as makes it harder for the RMT to keep the main hub filled and at the ready.
It may not seem like much on the surface but think of it as a ripple. One hurdle can greatly slow the process and allow other things to happen.
I didn't know of that 1mil limit. Does it also apply to mail?
Edit: I just checked the answer to that question and yes, it does apply that same limit to mail.
I think trades are faster than mails (if you don't count travel times which could be longer or shorter depending on where the character is and where the closest useable mail box/moogle is) so you could probably do 2 trades in the time it takes to do one mail. That negates the time saved of sending 300m to an alt via mail slightly.
Also, if they are multiboxing across so many characters at once, they probably don't even need to send to alts on the same account.
Which has basically done nothing to stop the RMT activity. Of all the MMOs out there, FFXIV has the least efficient way of managing RMT. There is such a thing as going too far, and by limiting players on their OWN account, they have in fact done that. As mbncd has said, this only hurts legitimate players with a single account, not the RMTers who have multiple ones.
Sadly, it's not a matter of SE figuring out how to do this; they've made it clear they don't want this allowed. You used to be able to get around the imposed limitation and SE "fixed" it.
Terrible decision, but don't think for a second that it's just some system limitation.
And that's a great reason that terrible decision should be reversed.