Take away gold transfers, boost the economy and kill gold sellers in the process.

I know all of the totally legitimate reasons why people would want to be able to transfer gil between multiple characters and among friends. But are those reasons really worth having gold spammers, auction house crashes and bots in the game?

I know that it feels like a huge feature to remove, but think about it. Being able to transfer gear would still let you help your characters or friends along. So many of the low level materials are available for vendors or cheap from the market that the difference between giving someone a few thousand gil to spend and giving someone a couple of stacks of whatever they were going to buy fairly negligible. It would be like an amazing way to stimulate the economy as the only people buying and selling on the auction house are those that do it for in-game profit, which is the way the free market is supposed to work.

(Continued in first post)

This wouldn't work in every MMO. There are things to closely tied to in-game currency. But with the Grand Company seals and potential for other types of currencies, wouldn't a greater variety of leves that provide seals to cover money sinks (I.e. grinding some special seal to pay for travel, repairs, etc. alongside gil to reduce the constant need for actual gil in lieu of something gathered potentially with other players) give players more options while reducing the viability of gold sellers?

I understand that gold sellers can suddenly become gear sellers for money, but this gets rather complicated. It increases the need for them to have higher and higher level characters in order to get the seals and materials needed, and if a good portion of that gear is bound to character, I think they would slowly fizzle out. Imagine forcing them to restructure with every patch, with every expansion and new features?

Wouldn't they essentially just become players of the MMO? And to have all that time go to waste as soon as an account gets reported? I think they would move on to other MMOs.

It's a crazy idea, but damn it if I didn't have to get it out. I would be willing to give up the comparatively small comfort of trading in-game currency for a solution that would reduce and in some ways eliminate people selling items for real world profit.

Thoughts?

I like the idea, radical but hell, why not give it a go SE. Good idea Kiro

Thanks. I was just reading all the threads about gold botters during downtime and it just hit me. Why the hell transfer anything? I mean, most people won't have alts until they are well in a position to support them since everything is done on one character. Just seems silly to keep dealing with gold sellers for the sake of avoiding the AH to twink someone.

Sounds good soo crazy it might just work. DO IT SE.

I think this works in theory but the playerbase like you said would get a bit annoyed. Plus, you'd end up seeing a lot of gil move through the auction house to transfer between characters. Essentially RMT would use a Retainer to place a really basic item at an absurd price and then the character with the money would buy that item, thus transfering the gil to the RMT. Further, to sell the gil back to the players, the player would then place another basic item on the markets for an absurd price and the RMT would then buy it to transfer the gil. Yeah they'd get double taxed on it but they'd still be able to move money.

Making it harder for everyone, does not get rid of the gil farmers. Gil farmers are the ones making real money, they are the ones that are going to try the hardest to get around anything that will allow themselves to enhance their capabilities.

I only get a rare 3-4 gilfarmer tells a day, I have shout filtered, and I have no other interactions or instances where I believe I have witnessed an action by a gil farmer.

I think it would be silly to make this problem out to be a bigger one than it actually is... as the only direct result of gil farmers botting or w/e is they are doing is cheaper materials, and by extension, cheaper finished prodcuts, for the rest of us.

What they could do is this:
Let you transfer between characters on the same account any times you want as long as the characters are on the same world server. (cause who cares its the same account and on the same server).
However, player to player trading and mail can have an X limit per day. Normal players that trade/mail with other players can still trade with others just fine, I doubt many people will do player to player trading/mail more than say 10 or 20 times a day (heck i almost never player to player trade except with friends). Gold sellers however would keep hitting the daily cap of number of player to player trades/mailing allowed, which would hurt the income of gold sellers since they can only sell to a limited number of people per day. Although this would depend on what the average daily trading transactions there are between normal players and gold sellers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Starfox71rt

I think this works in theory but the playerbase like you said would get a bit annoyed. Plus, you'd end up seeing a lot of gil move through the auction house to transfer between characters. Essentially RMT would use a Retainer to place a really basic item at an absurd price and then the character with the money would buy that item, thus transfering the gil to the RMT. Further, to sell the gil back to the players, the player would then place another basic item on the markets for an absurd price and the RMT would then buy it to transfer the gil. Yeah they'd get double taxed on it but they'd still be able to move money.

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This is already how it seems to happen. So this would do nothing but annoy the general population and not affect RMT at all.

The problem is this... As soon as you have access to retainers it becomes a trivial matter to do something along the lines of listing a single common item for an extremely large amount of money so that an individual could buy that item and give you a ton of money. Sure, it requires someone having a character who has already done quests to that point, but I would imagine that this sort of thing is already happening, and unlike a mail, becomes harder to track down.

Then there is the ability to add level 1 players to a FC, and transfer money through the company chest as a means of passing funds around through any number of holder accounts.

As for leveling those characters... I've already seen a few groups of players (all decked out in level 1 stuff) following a single individual who was doing all the killing and turning in for the related quests, so all those accounts they banned are already being replaced.


Sorry, but this sort of thing would only penalize normal players.

XI destroyed the gil sellers by introducing in-game items that were bought from npcs using non-tradeable currency. That'll happen in ARR eventually. The plague of gilBUYERS will drop off when you can only get stuff by farming events & mobs, and exchanging their drops (unique/non tradeable) for items.

Wait, are you saying get rid of any gil transfer between players, including through the market?

If yes, what would be the purpose of gil, if you can't use it as currency to trade with other players? What's the purpose of crafters and gatherers, if they can't seek compensation for their work?

If not, then why can't the gold sellers just transfer gil through the auction house, like they're already doing?