Hard limit on flipping house plots

[Jojoya]

Housing is intended in part as a gil sink. Owners do not need to recoup the purchase price if they are no longer going to be using it. They need to weigh the risk before they buy instead.

It's not like it's hard to make gil. If someone buys a house then later loses it when they stop playing, they can always earn the gil to buy another when they return to the game if they don't already have enough. There are plenty of gil sources and nothing major to spend it on other than buying a house.

Any official resell mechanism will increase house flipping. As Harmonea pointed out, there wouldn't be anything to prevent players from continuing to transfer additional profits through other means.

The only thing locking you to the game is you. You're the one letting ownership of virtual property bought with virtual currency in a game control your life choices. If you don't want to be playing then don't. If you lose a house you bought, so what? You can always buy another when you decide to you want to play again.

[Tohe-Spidhire]

If SE adds a system like the one you describe, and I still want 50m gil for my house but SE puts a cap of 20m on the transfer, all I'm going to do is STILL arrange a buyer externally and have him give me 30m on the side and 20m through the in-game system. If the in-game system is heavily taxed, I may transfer the house for 1m through the system and 49m around it.

Yep, that is fairly obvious. However, you need to think in terms that the black market largely exists because there HASN'T been an in-game system. By it's very existence, an in-game system would be the preferred choice due to its greater convenience over a sketchy black market. And with a cap in place, this signals to buyers when they're being ripped off by paying more on the black market.

In other words, the 100% markups only exists because SE didn't provide an in-game selling mechanism. With such a system in place, the ease of black market sales would become less convenient, and your boast of quickly obtaining 30m "on the side" is nonsense. You're going to be competing against honest players that are selling their plots for legitimate reasons.

Don't forget that, by virtue of an in-game mechanism being REQUIRED for doing the exchange, this puts a magnifying glass upon people involved in the black market (i.e., house flippers), where it becomes quite apparent what some people are doing, and it just takes one ban-hammer to resolve the matter.

[Jojoya]

Yep, that is fairly obvious. However, you need to think in terms that the black market largely exists because there HASN'T been an in-game system.

The "black market" exists because the supply doesn't meet the demand. An in-game system isn't going to change anything when players would still be able to dictate what price they're going to sell at regardless of any regulated system.