The Ethics of Optional Item Sales

[GenJoe]

Usually people who have issues with cash shops have never had a job in their lives and don't have the money to spend on in game items regardless, I find. Just ask your mom to let you use her card to buy dyes, OP.

As generalized as your statement is... I think you may be right.
I've never paid for any premium services nor participated in any RMT.. but I don't feel the least excluded because well, if I really wanted to, I could always just open up my wallet and pay a few bucks.. I simply don't feel it to be necessary so it's all optional to me.

I'm going to stop here and say this is where we agree to disagree. What you sell from the cash shop doesn't matter. F2P games allow this and have no subscription fee pay walls. They allow almost their entire premium item inventory to be traded/sold within the player base. Guess what? RMT bots still exist in those games too. Some they're quite rampant actually. So this entire argument I've seen lately that Plex/game time player trading reduces/chases away RMT is utter bologna. Again, you just want to pay $10 to get instant gil and not potentially be banned for it. I'm not saying it's wrong to want that, but that has never been nor will it ever be positive growth in a multiplayer game.

Did the cash-shop item trade in other games. Seen multiple times the long term effects of it. Many things changed. RMT was not one of those.

No, I would be on the purchasing end of things and actually open up my gil and put it back into the economy. But that's not important.

I don't know how RMTs would infiltrate the cash shop economy unless cash shop items have potential use in-game as gear, that would be a pay 2 win system and I'm not saying that's what SE should do.

What I am suggesting is that if SE keeps pumping out cash shop items that players trade for gil, there's no way RMT can do the same and make profit. They could still make SOME profit, but the structure/flow of gil would change from RMT <-> Player to: RMT <-> SE <-> Player. SE will be a middle man, cutting into RMT's profits.