Method for Ending Gil Sellers for Good

If SE wants to squash Gil sellers once and for all, all they need do is implement a system similar to EVE Online's PLEX system.

Way PLEX works:

• Player X purchases PLEX which is subscription time of 1 month. (This appears as an in-game item in the purchasing player's inventory.)
• Player X can then sell this in-game on the in-game market for in-game currency.
• Player Z can then use their in-game currency to purchase the PLEX from the in-game market.
• Player X has in-game currency (Gil).
• Player Z has an item they can turn in for free subscription time. Player Z could in essence play for free indefinitely if they make enough in-game currency and continues to buy these items.

(Cont'd.)

Have seen this in other games and it screws the economy just as bad. There should be 0 ways to convert irl money into gil And that's all their is to it

SE has taken a lot of steps to combat RMT, It is important you take the time to report Gil sellers, They are being permanently banned and chat filters are being implemented to stop them from being able to communicate. The system is much like google spam, it gets smarter and smarter as its updated. eventually we wont see RMT so much, so please do what you can and report. GM's are looking into the issue. They are not just sitting. It just takes time, there are a lot of them.

So all player Z had to do is Buy gil from a Gil Seller at a cheaper price then the players are selling the Month Sub.

What is this fixing ?

$15 for an item to a month sub
Sells on AH for 100k gil.
Gil Sellers sell 100k Gil for $10.


Woo! Cheaper subs at anothers expense!

That's not happening, and that will not end the gil sell, it will just legalize it.

They need to start banning the bots and trace the gil movement. Even if SE add a legal way to buy gils the RMT just will charge a little less.

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Originally Posted by Blazn

Have seen this in other games and it screws the economy just as bad. There should be 0 ways to convert irl money into gil And that's all their is to it

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PLEX doesn't work that way, it doesn't create money. Players buy the PLEX from CCP and a PLEX item is delivered to there inventory, they sell this item to other player at market rate. The buyer of the PLEX then right clicks the item and that will add game time to his account. There is no sell to NPC and money is magically added.

There should be no way to turn IRL money into Gil, doesn't matter if it doesn't add any new Gil into the market. It isn't a way to combat RMT, it's just changing the distributor.

Method to end gil-sellers for good:

People need to stop buying gil from gil sellers.

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Originally Posted by Blazn

Have seen this in other games and it screws the economy just as bad. There should be 0 ways to convert irl money into gil And that's all their is to it

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This, so much agreed with this. Look how it ruined Rifts economy, it just utterly destroyed that game for me (aside from the terrible endgame)

By the Twelve, no...

How to end RMT for good?

Burn down the place of business of the RMT being sure to include all of their computers. Then do the same to the home of those that purchase from them.

A bit extreme... but other than ending all mmos, turning off the internet, or killing all humans, nothing will 100% eliminate RMTs.

Seriously though, I just want the RMT sellers and buyers to be more inconvenienced by their choice than they inconvenience the rest of the community. I think a Global blacklist tied to account not the character would go a long way to this... as well as automatically being sent to Mordion Gaol on entire account for spamming and excessive number of people blacklisting.

A gil seller is someone that tries to make real life money using something that is free to obtain and time. <-This is the supply.

One who buy from such individuals are rich (or obsessive/disturbed/need psychological attention) and want to use their surplus (hopefully) of money as a shortcut from the normal masses (you may call it laziness or the now common "I got no time to play, so I will pay"). <-This is the demand.

The supply can't exist unless there is demand. Breaking the chain by trying to prevent gil selling will not result in any actual reduction of gil selling. Stopping the supply would require humanity as a whole to be intelligent (sorry, not happening in this millennium). The only way to permanently stop gil sellers is to bypass them. SquareEnix would need to sell gils themselves, thus resulting in an official price for gil, which would lower profit of gil sellers and make their reputation at stakes (why buy from obscure sources when you can get it official?). Doing so would completely destroy the game's economy and allow players to rush through content even faster, making it simply impossible for SE to keep up the content unless they use radical grinding required content, which would lead to non-official sellers to rise up again.

Alternative? Prevent mindless chat spamming by disabling pasting in the chat box (no pasting = need to retype everything each replies). Remove paste option and the volume of messages a single person can produce will drop fast. A gil seller's spammer job will be harder. Harder job means more work, which means less profit. Less profit means the act of selling gils will be unattractive while ingame.

Simplicity is the key. Gil sellers are not what is to be addressed, but their ability to prevent others to enjoy their game by over filling shout chat with SPAM.

By the way, preventing pasting in a text box is really easy and quick while programming.

My opinion,
Lloyd Shade

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Originally Posted by LloydShade

disabling pasting in the chat box

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I highly doubt this will make a difference, you can make a macro or bot to type something out every few seconds pretty easily. In the end, the only people doing more work are the players.

I think they wanted to keep the paste because they also have macro's that paste commands into chat... so no paste means no macros... no macros mean a feature for the player base is removed. also means a player can't simply paste something like, "voice chat information: or a message they may need to say over and over." I am executing Move X, DPS!, CD 30 seconds" or even "He is about to AoE". not having pasting would make certain aspects of te game harder. I am pretty sure SE thought this through and opted to do what they currently are, which is banning on reports investigating and working on a complex chat filtering to stop them from talking when selling Gil. All in all its a work in progress SE has a good idea what to do. They have plans and are well past the suggestion phase. they are developing their methods for handling this issue

In my opinion, a real good way to stop gil sellers starts in the market themselves. You can see them selling things (mostly shards) on an enormous scale. One name selling around 10k to 15k shards, undercutting everyone by 10-20gil. I'm sure there's more invested in other items as well. Granted there are people out there who legitimately farm a lot of materials to sell, numbers in the 10k+ area just aren't very likely unless they were botting. So thwart their operation and don't buy suspiciously large amounts of items off the markets for "holy crap that's cheap" prices.

This doesn't really apply to items people can get from vendors, like copper ore and stuff, but really mostly shards. Can't buy them from vendors, take a few good hours of guild quests/farming to accumulate, and everyone needs them for crafting.

Also going to stress again, this is just my opinion and an observation I've made after watching prices and quantities for the past 2 weeks.

IF they make their money from the markets you can blame them for low gil! Man these guys sell 100'ds of crystals then get banned that gil is forever lost from the player base QQ.

just kidding but that sounds somewhat relevant now that i think about it. SE is taking measures to combat gil sellers, if you are honestly concerned and really do care about it to the point of wanting it gone, the best thing you can do is report. they DO get banned. do your part to help stop them and let SE work out their system and take care of it. trust me they want them gone just as bad.

*laughs at people's inability to read and comprehend the post before they reply*

It's ok though, seems to be the norm around here. To the OP, good try, but if you were hoping that people would take the time to understand how the PLEX system actually works, you'll be sorely disappointed. I find the part about Plex destroying economy to be doubly ironic, considering Eve's economy is light years ahead in just about every aspect, and far more healthy than games like 14 can ever hope to come close to.

To be fair though, PLEX have not eliminated RMT in Eve either, but it does put a damper on them.

Actually, all it did was provide RMT between the Game Company and the Player. purchase X that has Y currency value on the market, thats just the company becoming the RMT. People easily understand the system. It takes next to nothing to put together the eve system and compare it to the FFXIV ARR system and see easily where it wouldn't work. EvE is designed around Real Time Progression, that means that there is no "Rush to Endgame" or an even real endgame for that matter. its all about the constant progression. It is grossly unreasonable to compare the 2 due to the factors that keep eve going are different then the factors that would keep FFXIV going. Its like removing a tire from a car and handing it to someone thinking it solves their broken airplane.

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Originally Posted by Noata

People easily understand the system..

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If they did, then you wouldn't have had people claiming it will ruin the economy, because that is not possible. For example, let's say obsidians can be traded in for game time, how will it wreck the economy?

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EvE is designed around Real Time Progression, that means that there is no "Rush to Endgame" or an even real endgame for that matter. its all about the constant progression. It is grossly unreasonable to compare the 2 due to the factors that keep eve going are different then the factors that would keep FFXIV going. Its like removing a tire from a car and handing it to someone thinking it solves their broken airplane.

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Not quite, Eve is a sandbox game, and what 'endgame' is, is up to each player to decide dor themselves, which may or may not be isk related.

For ARR, the effect on endgame would be even less, considering how it revolves entirely around DoW/M and dungeon gear, and have almost zero ties to the economy of the rest of the game.

I also play EVE so I am familiar with PLEX, and RMTers sell PLEX as well, on the market. The only thing this might combat is the shouting, but the RMT would still be there.

Eve is real time progression how does its skills work (real time passes to learn) and through skills you are enabled to utilize certain features. and with no "Defined" endgame it has no Real endgame just what players spend there time doing. so when we talk End Game Content, you would say well there is none, the content exists the same across the board.

also changing the currency generation would lead only to a currency value change therefore would not ruin the economy. so that's not really the issue. but this proposal does not fix anything... as a matter of fact your merely milking more money from a subscription game, it would create gil sink issues, and solve nothing.. so again it is easy to see how this system wont work. also there is tons of RMT in eve...

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Originally Posted by Nullo

I also play EVE so I am familiar with PLEX, and RMTers sell PLEX as well, on the market. The only thing this might combat is the shouting, but the RMT would still be there.

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Pretty much, which is why I did say it won't eliminate RMTs, what it will do is set a price ceiling over them and discourage buyers from dealing with shady 3rd party, while allow the company to capitalize on future service in advance.

My suggestion for killing RMT : Prevent gil sending or trading.
If you want to help a friend for buying an item, you can directly buy the item, and for a company member, use the company chest.

In Eve, just about anything you want to do requires money since player actions basically make up 99% of the game's content. In FFXIV, you aren't required to make gil to do a good chunk of the game's content. you'd likely have to spend a great deal of your time grinding dungeons over and over again just to make enough gil to buy gametime with gil. You're not likely to see enough people grinding dungeons that much just for enough gil to buy 'free' game time to satisy the needs of all the lazy people buying from gil sellers out there.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

My suggestion for killing RMT : Prevent gil sending or trading.
If you want to help a friend for buying an item, you can directly buy the item, and for a company member, use the company chest.

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You can get around that by laundering money through the marketboard (although it'll be taxed). In fact, I'm fairly sure it occurs already. Every now and then you'll notice certain purchases that seem very out of the ordinary; I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the methods by which it happens. As an example, yesterday, on my server, someone bought out all the Allagan gold pieces on the marketboard, paying as much as 12K+ gil per piece. Behavior like this is highly dubious. (On a side note, depending on the world transfer policies, buying Allagan silver/gold pieces on a flush Legacy server could serve as an effective way to bypass currency restrictions. This instance, however, is too drastic for that to be the logic behind such an action.)

Along those lines, it's easy enough for S-E to simply parse the logs for any trades that involve gil amounts over a certain threshold trading hands, but it's much harder to do with the marketboard. For one, comparing each transaction against the standard deviation for that item is difficult since prices fluctuate wildly and items can suddenly sell for a ton, or the market can suddenly crash, and that's not even taking into account the computational cost of such a measure.

TL;DR: Pretty sure the gil sellers are already bypassing direct gil transactions.

Or, they could do what EME did(Yes, the NA publisher of TERA) and ban China from accessing their servers. Despite there being SOME other places that sell gil that may not be from there, the majority are from China. Tera does not have a single gold seller from what I can remember. Prevent a problem before it can become one, ban the source. That is the only real solution to stop RMT. Argue the point if you will, but from all my encounters of RMT in XI, they were all chinese.

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Originally Posted by Salem_Rain

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Won't work.

PLEX works in EVE because it has a carefully controlled and monitored economy - isk has a distinct real world value.

FFXIV's economy is... laughably managed, at best.

And even in EVE, PLEX didn't get rid of RMT. All it did was drive the prices down below the cost of a PLEX for the equivalent amount of isk.

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Originally Posted by Freyjan

Method to end gil-sellers for good:

People need to stop buying gil from gil sellers.

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Method to end crime for good:

People need to stop committing crimes.

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Originally Posted by Rommelx

PLEX doesn't work that way, it doesn't create money. Players buy the PLEX from CCP and a PLEX item is delivered to there inventory, they sell this item to other player at market rate. The buyer of the PLEX then right clicks the item and that will add game time to his account. There is no sell to NPC and money is magically added.

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It does screw the economy because buying ISK to buy PLEX was cheaper than paying for the sub.

Providing a legitimate way for people with money to spend it on gil in game would help to combat gil sellers. It's just like iTunes. Many people want to play by the rules, and if you give them a way to do it they will. What they found in Eve is that the market price of a plex in ISK was generally high enough to make it unprofitable for isk farmers to sell at that rate. CCP tracks a lot of market metrics, and they would know if it was hurting their game.
With that said, I don't know if this method would be a good fit for FFXIV. Trade volume is much lower in this game and These items tend to effect the market a lot because they cost so much. Sort of like a housing bubble

Ban the buyers and you will stop RMT. Once people realize their account is at risk they won't buy gil and thus no market for RMT.