Quote Originally Posted by sarehptar View Post
I think a lot of people suggesting that stopping the spam will have zero effect on the RMT are pretty short-sighted. Demand has a serious effect on sales, and if you can curb demand by limiting awareness of the product, you can indeed curb sales. Imagine if a major company with an aggressive marketing campaign was suddenly outlawed from advertising and could only advertise briefly and furtively before being caught. Would that company get as much business as it did before its advertisements were stopped?
Like cigarette companies? They are still a plague, they whine about losses but any obituary about their industry would be incredibly optimistic to say the least (or in your own words, "short sighted").

Let's use the drug dealer example--yes, major busts on large amounts of drugs are great because they take the product off the market. But imagine if no drug dealers were allowed to hang out on the street corners in the first place or could only do a single sale before being caught (this is not feasible IRL, but it is much more feasible in-game). The accessibility of drugs would dramatically decrease. Suppliers would have fewer people to peddle their supply out to because far fewer people would know where to buy in the first place.
Let's use the worse example you could possibly conjure, the war on drugs is a misguided failure. You can't artificially strangle supply from any end other than demand in a market economy.

Are players who buy gil always going to buy gil? Yes. The truly dedicated gil buyers will always be there. But with fewer advertisements, fewer (new) players will know where to go to buy gil in the first place.
This is naive to the extreme, people who want to buy will find out where to buy. I don't recommend revisiting your war on drugs analogy for this point because it is an even worst example than the last time it was tried. The advertisements are an exercise in competition; to make the choice for the buyer. The answer is not how we can roadblock them from getting what they desire because that is an arms race you can't win, but why they desire it, and if these reasons can change.

I also agree that the possibility of abuse for new reporting systems is being exaggerated. There are already plenty of ways to harass other players in this game. If Square was so frightened of adding anything that might result in possible abuse against other players, we wouldn't have the vote kick feature at all.
There are thousands of accounts banned every week what on earth makes people think that the problem is that they're not playing whack a mole fast enough? How do they reconcile the fact that an automated reporting system as suggested is a reactive system which means absolutely nothing is done to stop tells from happening in the first place? If this much banning does not stem the tide it is obvious that a ban is not an effective countermeasure, because that is a cost of business and it clearly isn't steep enough to crush the margin.

Obviously the biggest grievance isn't the existence of RMT, which exists in every online game, but the visibility of it. The easy fix is to introduce filtering options which 3rd party apps are already providing into the UI (or you know just get that addon API out as the community proves it can fix issues faster than SE). The impossible fix is to target the RMT itself, and the only way to stop them is to make sure there is no money to be made in the game. If you are to be serious about addressing RMT you have to address the factors in both ends of the transaction; why are players motivated to buy gil, why is it profitable for those who want to sell gil. It requires changing the design of the game fundamentally to reduce the avenues of making money and reduce the need to buy gil, and if this cannot be reconciled with other considerations of game design then it is not a solvable problem.