Don't buy mogstation items from 3rd parties.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I feel like this is a testament to how pricing in the mog station is so egregious that buying off a 3rd party, sketchy site with a questionable discount seems plausible to most people. Mogstation items far too expensive for what it offers, no dye option, character locked, gender locked, etc. and the account-wide items can easily pay for 2-3 months worth of FFXIV subs. The mogstation is also unfriendly to people living outside the US with some of those items costing upwards of $30-$40 CAD. That's insane and you should only see those prices in F2P games. No region price matching is the sole reason why I think the mogstation is just a lazy cash-grab which seems to be a standard in the industry as of late. Sad really. I thought SE was better than this.

I disagree, simply because gil buying is a thing. People will do anything to get either cheap items, or bypass work.

[Final-Fantasy]

One has to ask themselves why this is a thing to begin with.
You could make more money selling everything at $1, which in turn would make it impossible for anyone to resell!

[KageTokage]

One has to ask themselves why this is a thing to begin with.
You could make more money selling everything at $1, which in turn would make it impossible for anyone to resell!

They aren't paying a penny for the stuff they're selling, so they could still theoretically pull a profit, albeit an extremely small one.

I don't doubt that they can automate this kind of stuff if the RMTers can automate the creation of thousands of accounts for their gil farm bots on a weekly basis, either.

SE really seems out of the loop as to just how badly people are exploiting their game if they only caught onto this just now and it makes me think they're just legitimately clueless when it comes to things like botters/hackers as opposed to oblivious.

[RitsukoSonoda]

IMO 3rd party discount price vendors for digital goods are always a scam in some capacity. Sometimes its specific people knowingly committing credit fraud. Others its a type of phishing to steal your card/account info. In the end. Just don't do it.

[RitsukoSonoda]

I disagree, simply because gil buying is a thing. People will do anything to get either cheap items, or bypass work.

Correct. These types of things will prey on the lazy and unintelligent even after harsher punishment is instated. RMT in video games could be globally classified as cyber-terrorism and people would still do it.

[seraf]

How can they determine what codes were bought as gifts and which were sold? Because I do buy my friends mogstation items from time to time because isn't that what the "buy for a friend" option is for?

[Vahlnir]

Correct. These types of things will prey on the lazy and unintelligent even after harsher punishment is instated. RMT in video games could be globally classified as cyber-terrorism and people would still do it.

Yeah. It also doesn't help that the sources of RMT or questionable business practices can't really be targeted a lot of the time because they are often run out of countries that genuinely don't care. It's a tough battle to fight and I do think that SE really does do their best. We're definitely in a better place than we were when this game started. RMT spam was rampant to the point that most people had to set themselves to busy status to not get annoyed.

[Dustytome]

How can they determine what codes were bought as gifts and which were sold? Because I do buy my friends mogstation items from time to time because isn't that what the "buy for a friend" option is for?

The difference is you aren't using a stolen card that results in a charge back. It's much more obvious when an account not only makes a ton of mogstation purchases, but none of them are actually used on the account and a chargeback is pushed through after the codes that were sold to the account are activated on dozens of other accounts.

[Takamorisan]

Unless the main company announce third party as distributor you are shooting yourself in the foot.

[JackHatchet]

A few years ago I knew of one website that resold codes at the sale price. They eventually quit, because it wasn't worth the effort. But you buy codes when Square-Enix has 50% off sales and just sit on them until someone offers 75%. Cheaper codes for the buyers, and the seller is completely legit. And they make a small profit.

I don't buy from third party, but when I see fantasias go on sale for 50%. I generally scoop up 10ish of them just to incase I need them later or I want to gift one to a friend.

So while it's true that Square-Enix 'doesn't give those companies discounts' they absolutely still give discounts.