Quote Originally Posted by Delmontyb View Post
Several years ago when WOW introduced their subscription token, Yoshi-P was asked about it for FFXIV. He said that they are watching how it works in WOW and would bring it over into FFXIV if ether players wanted it, or if it was successful.

It's been several years, and I think it's been a success, not just at giving Gil more of a reason for existing, but also in crushing RMT activities, and more. They might still exist, but not at the levels we see them in FFXIV and more.

The question is, is there any update on this from Yoshi-P? We already have a currency Crysta that can pay for our sub time, so it would be great if there was a way for the market to allow for this, and that crysta would be used for more things then just sub-time. I think the obvious hurdle is that you would need the store to be in the game, rather than just on the website.

Thanks!
Every version of just straight buying the in-game currency from the cash shop in MMO's has been an abject failure, and has instead just made the RMT problem worse. All it does it put a cap on the price the RMT can achieve. It doesn't get rid of them, and thus makes it difficult to track. Bots still comprise 50% of the "active" players in a zone at any point in time where new characters are permitted.

If you want to end RMT, by cash shop, lock the servers down, and instead make players buy access to servers. Servers that are full or nearing full, set the character creation price to the same price as a new copy of the game, and only permit additional characters by players who already have a character on that server. Servers that are basically empty, set the price to low, and cycle which under-utilized server is "free to create new/trial characters" every week, so that the damage RMT can do is minimized. The only time our servers are ever free of RMT is when they're too congested for them to create new throw-away characters on.

A better strategy would be to just make physical authenticators mandatory. Or perhaps make it mandatory for full and nearly-full servers.