Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Havenae]

this is a 100% player problem, if players didn't buy gil then prices wouldn't be so inflated. ppl gotta have their stuff now...

This ideology of "if no body buys they'll just go away" is so naive. They won't, not just because you will NEVER stop every player that buys currency from buying it completely. But because RMT companies KNOW there is potential profit that can be made. I don't know how many betas and launches any of you have participated in but let me assure you RMT is always there first. So it really doesn't matter if players buy or not because ultimately if you launch it, RMT will come. And they will continue to stay there until they are 100% convinced that no profit will be made. Which to be honest I doubt theres really a lot of overhead involved in setting up a bot to spam a game's chat system.

Also like it or not, economic design inside of games is partially responsible for giving rise to RMT (no it's not just this game, its various games in the past who never seem to have gotten the memo that most players no longer want to grind for hours on end to accomplish anything). Because developers have made in game currency exceptionally difficult to get in some case or require too much grind unless you just happen to get lucky with RNG. There are several factors and issues that contribute on that end, and I'm not going to waste time here listing all the ones I can think of let alone speculate on the ones I haven't. Yes players play a significant part but to sit and claim it's all 100% player created simplifies the problem far beyond ridiculous, its like saying two people have a conversation, said hello, answered each other questions, said good bye but then saying one never took any part in it to begin with. I'm not saying give players boat loads of gil/gold/isk/credits/ect and you won't have RMT, but if there is not a perceived need to consider measuring time over effort in terms of earning the currency as opposed to buying it, then RMT wouldn't occur. It is a multi-faceted dynamic that drives this particular section of the business. It is NOT as simple as "well if players would stop buying it..."

It's more along the lines of, "If players would stop buying it or if 'X' game developer would stop giving us turnips to squeeze blood out of and if players would stop buying it..."