SE Must Disable All Forms of Trade if They Want to Save the Economy

Though I disagree with the route SE has taken in dealing with bots, teleports, hackers, spammers, mules, and gil sellers (letting them run wild while they "collect data"), I understand it is what they've chosen to do...and if I am to continue playing FFXIV I have to deal with it.

However, there is something SE can do right now, today, to stop the RMT from bringing the whole system down around them. Disable all trade.

Turn off the Market Boards, disable direct trade, and disallow sending items via mogmail. Allow players to only buy and sell to NPC merchants until SE can figure out just what in God's name they are going to do about this epidemic.

I know this sounds drastic...but the problem is that bad. Drastic times; drastic measures.

Take away the gil sellers market and the gil sellers will leave, its that simple. Use the time to find their accounts and ban them.

That sounds fine as a temp thing to help weed out rmt and saving people their Gil but if your going to do that patch the Npcs so they buy for more than 1-3 gil x.x.

Yes, it's not that simple. If you disable trade, I have to level my crafting skills to make my own high item-level equipment. That's a huge investment either in time or in gil, as it requires a great heap of materials to level up. Given how little gil-creation there is in the game (1-time quests, guildleves, fates) that turns into forcing people to grind for mats, or grind for gil. If you're a casual player who only has an hour or less a day to accomplish everything you want to do in the game, you're essentially saying "Okay, for the next week, you're not going to get to be a White Mage, you have to be a Botanist."

The which, I do not want. Thank you very little.

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Originally Posted by Lasteran

However, there is something SE can do right now, today, to stop the RMT from bringing the whole system down around them. Disable all trade.

Turn off the Market Boards, disable direct trade, and disallow sending items via mogmail. Allow players to only buy and sell to NPC merchants until SE can figure out just what in God's name they are going to do about this epidemic.

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If I blow up a city, that city will no longer have a crime rate. This is a logical fallacy, and yours is the same. It's true, but it solves something through the auspice of Ellen Ripley: "It's the only way to be sure." No, it's just the course of easiest action, but as a solution it offers no benefit to the rest of the players.

Yes lets sink the entire economy and the game with it! If we can't play FFXIV without RMTs, noone can!

They would be better just shutting the game down then shutting the economy completely down.

We have to kill the economy to save it?

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Originally Posted by Lasteran

Though I disagree with the route SE has taken in dealing with bots, teleports, hackers, spammers, mules, and gil sellers (letting them run wild while they "collect data"), I understand it is what they've chosen to do...and if I am to continue playing FFXIV I have to deal with it.

However, there is something SE can do right now, today, to stop the RMT from bringing the whole system down around them. Disable all trade.

Turn off the Market Boards, disable direct trade, and disallow sending items via mogmail. Allow players to only buy and sell to NPC merchants until SE can figure out just what in God's name they are going to do about this epidemic.

I know this sounds drastic...but the problem is that bad. Drastic times; drastic measures.

Take away the gil sellers market and the gil sellers will leave, its that simple. Use the time to find their accounts and ban them.

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"We had to destroy the economy in order to save it"? I'm still trying to figure out if this post is a joke or not. Poe's Law in action...

This is the worst idea I've ever read on these forums. Damn, maybe I'm remembering things wrong from the 1.2X era, but it seems like these forums have really gone downhill...

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Originally Posted by JeniLinsky

Yes, it's not that simple. That's a huge investment either in time or in gil, If you're a casual player who only has an hour or less a day to accomplish everything you want to do in the game, you're essentially saying "Okay, for the next week, you're not going to get to be a White Mage, you have to be a Botanist."

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Exactly right, i am going threw this very thing atm, this combined with the unbelievable amount of gold spammers is litteraly driving me from the game. I would prefer to actually "play" the game and not just log-in for another "grinding session". I understand that some work is and should be needed to acomplish certain things and i don't want anything given to me. But what is needed to craft your own gear is really over the top, add in the annoyance of the spammers and this game is not really worth the time investment needed to acomplish anything and it certainly is not worth the money, period.

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Originally Posted by Balaur

If I blow up a city, that city will no longer have a crime rate. This is a logical fallacy, and yours is the same. It's true, but it solves something through the auspice of Ellen Ripley: "It's the only way to be sure." No, it's just the course of easiest action, but as a solution it offers no benefit to the rest of the players.

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Thank you for logic-bombing this properly on the first page.

Feel free to drop your mic before exiting stage next time. :D

I think that community volunteers chosen by SE would be their best bet "like the GM system back in Everquest" these people would be in game playing and could have the ability to directly report these accounts spamming etc to SE for review to get the ban hammer at a much faster rate.

This will not stop the RMT, but it will stop the spam. Your not ever going to stop the RMT in these games, I have seen games like GW II and Neverwinter where the game itself had a RMT market for game currency, and there were still gold sellers.

Teleports, hacks, bots, are always an issue, and if first SE created a GM system they could focus their energy on creating monitoring systems for these types of third party programs.

Actually economy can be saved in easy ways:

1) Ban RMT Spammers
2) Ban teleport hackers
3) Ban Bots
4) Institute better policies for countering future bots/hackers/spammers
5) institute better gil generators like in-dungeon mobs drop more gil.

economy fixed. The biggest step is 1 through 3. They really really really really need to start getting their ass in gear and banning the people that are ruining the economy by cheating. It's really whats driving me to stop playing. Not the toxic players, that I can ignore. The bots though are so overdone it's stupid.


Go look at how wow handles it, you almost never see spammers or hackers.

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Originally Posted by Zer0

Go look at how wow handles it, you almost never see spammers or hackers.

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Yet there is still RMT in wow. Not seeing it does mean they fixed it. it's just not speaking of the elephant in the room.

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Originally Posted by Haibel

Yet there is still RMT in wow. Not seeing it does mean they fixed it. it's just not speaking of the elephant in the room.

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No matter what you do, a company will never be able to solve the RMT problem completely -and- keep your customers, the best that can really be done is to solve the problematic actions of the RMT employees; Such as the chat-dominating spam or the teleport hacks, ect.

For the most part, WoW has gotten it right on their anti-RMT actions.. they haven't stopped it completely, but they have curtailed the advertising and the exploits that the RMT community uses that the average player does not notice it's existence and/or is not effected by them; In the case they identify large amounts of gold being transferred, they investigate and take the time to see if it was really RMT instead of just applying the ban-hammer and and let CS sort it out (Ie. Did the person buy a level 90 epic sword from you for a million gold, or did you trade them some roast chicken).

Is Blizzard's system perfect? No.. but they've found a balance between policing the RMT and the quality of life for regular players. Square also needs to find this balance, and i hope they find it soon.

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Originally Posted by Fistlandious

Exactly right, i am going threw this very thing atm, this combined with the unbelievable amount of gold spammers is litteraly driving me from the game. I would prefer to actually "play" the game and not just log-in for another "grinding session". I understand that some work is and should be needed to acomplish certain things and i don't want anything given to me. But what is needed to craft your own gear is really over the top, add in the annoyance of the spammers and this game is not really worth the time investment needed to acomplish anything and it certainly is not worth the money, period.

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Grinding session? Some days I feel like I'm logging in for nothing more than a botter/gil-seller reporting session.

I understand how important it is to report cheats but it disheartening to see the same ones out days or weeks after you reported them. And gil sellers now seem to be finding ways to bypass blacklists...

The only company that I know of, and made reference to in one of my other posts, that has a pretty good track record against RMT is CCP with Eve Online. Even they have a hard time trying to discern between legit player and RMT. They have an entire department, to my knowledge anyway, devoted to this and it's only a few people doing it. It's extremely hard and stressful to try and investigate so many people, to track every transaction that could be fraudulent. It's not as easy as some of you think it is. I'm not even educated in it, and I know it's nearly impossible to enact something that will protect players and punish evil-doers.

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Originally Posted by Zakalwe

Grinding session? Some days I feel like I'm logging in for nothing more than a botter/gil-seller reporting session.

I understand how important it is to report cheats but it disheartening to see the same ones out days or weeks after you reported them. And gil sellers now seem to be finding ways to bypass blacklists...

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I don't know how SE has it's chat system designed, but apparently they can occasionally get a message through the blacklist by simply spamming the message constantly.

Here is how SE can fix RMT. They can sell fanstasia potions to players for IRL money, and then the player can then choose to either use the potion, or sell it on the market. Players who would buy gil from a 3rd party would then goto the SE store and buy the potion to sell for money instead of RMT websites. They could also sell game time cards to people, that can then be sold on the market to players who cant afford a subscription, but have plenty of gil to pay for one.

Since RMT would have to compete with SE, they would go out of business, because it would not be profitable enough for them.

Sounds like what 'murica did in the Vietnam War: "We had to burn down the village to save it."

they have other games to support them. You could shut down the trading for 6 months, as soon as they start it back up. They will start selling again, gil sellers are like cancer. You can destroy yourself in the process but it does not mean it will go away.

Those who are directly involved with RMT and botting are actually a minority. The issue is that they are having a negative effect on the majority. It makes no sense to do something that will severely impact everyone. The only solution is to just keep doing what they are doing until they finally start overcoming the RMTs. At this point in the game's life, they are still trying to catch up. Once again, it is a matter of patience on the part of the players. Too many have too little of it....