Quote Originally Posted by LandricFrey View Post
You're right, it isn't easy, but I'd like this thread to be about solutions, not just saying "there's nothing we can do." We can make a change; it wont rid of us them, but it may reduce what is a severe problem it is, even in MMO terms. In all my 15+ years of playing MMO's, I've never seen it so bad and so consistently as I do with FFXIV.
To be honest, when it comes to the RMT spam, there really is nothing we can do that will also not effect legit players. They have already made trial accounts worthless as far as RMT goes, since they can't /tell or join a FC. The simple truth is that SE is doing the right thing, just not enough of it. The more time and effort it takes for the RMT Company to gather its product, the higher they must price it to make a profit. The higher the price, the fewer customers they will have. The fewer customers, the higher the price goes to make a profit, and so on.

As a small division of a larger corporation, the FFXIV team has a limit to their staff and budget and I seriously doubt that the CEOs in charge of Yoshi’s budget browse the forums, much less the English forums. When they drop content support for FFXI later this year, maybe some of the team there will get assigned to FFXIV and with some extra staff they will be able to do more policing of the RMT stock and farmers.

I guess the point that I am trying to make bluntly is that putting any tools in the hands of the players is asking for abuse, and the team working on this game are doing what they can with what they have.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see RMT vanish overnight, but unless 100% of the player population refuses to buy gil, there will be no motives for the RMT companies to scale back their operations.

Now, thinking back to the drug dealer scenario, one thing SE could do is set up the RMTers. They could work with various players to have the player buy some gil, and SE watches the transaction, tracks the gil back to the mule and farm bots. Doing this, and publicly saying they are going to do this would hurt RMT, hurt them BAD.

I can see it going like this. SE posts an RMT "Sting" ad on the forums where people can sign up to help out. Player A gets an email from SE and is offered a free 30 days for participating. SE provides the player with a prepaid credit card and directs them to a specific RMT website where they buy XXmil gil. After the gil is delivered, they report the name of the character that delivered it to them, the time it happened, and then turn the gil over to a GM. The player gets a free 30 days, SE gets a head start on tracking down the RMT gil-flow, and the RMT companies get to try to figure out how to combat these kinds of stings without losing lots of product. It would likely push them out of the realm of "affordable" by the standards of most players, and in turn reduce the sales pressure from spammers.