Actually, it's pretty simple. They can have a status option where you can only receive whispers from friends, free company/linkshell members and people in your group, and then in order to send friendship requests, have such a feature require lv15-20 and the story steps up to that point done.
The issue people don't get with RMT is that RMT only exists in games with heavy gold grinds, and FFXIV is one of them. The tier IV materia cost 400-500k a piece, craftman ones 200-400k a piece. ilv100+ gear costs in the vicinity of 1 million gil.
To give you some perspective, you can chain run dungeons and raids for an entire week or two and still not come close to making 500k-1 million gil. So your income is solely tied to gathering/crafting professions. Except there's a problem, because gathering/crafting professions only make money at high gear levels and when you're among the first in the market. So the new guy coming into the game, hits a crafting profession to 50, finds out he needs to spend more than a million gil to just gear that crafting profession on, and then he needs to repeat the same time consuming and costly process on several other professions because in order to do high quality crafting you need cross class skills and good enough gear.
So, yeah, don't expect people to stop buying gold because the game makes the gate to entry or time investment to afford relevant items/crafting proficiency such a juicy incentive for people to resort to third parties.
This is the flaw with market games, always. The combat portion of the game outside selling raid runs always gets the shaft in money making and people are forced to craft/gather when they might not be interested in neither just so they can feed their goddamn chocobo some stat food that costs 20k gil a piece and a single dungeon run may at best yield 4-5k gold in rewards.


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