Why is this not the solution?

[Jojoya]

I also see almost no one with these mounts, and I personally know at least one billionaire who has said he's not spending his money on it regardless of how much he has. The issue here isn't that big ticket gil sinks don't work, the issue here is that they didn't offer anything someone wanted.

I know a lot of players who have them. There were plenty to be seen when the vendors were first added. People bought them because they had nothing better to do with their gil.

You don't see them now because they're rather boring as mounts and players like other mounts they have more. It doesn't mean they don't have the mounts.

Your gil sink doesn't accomplish much because while a house is something that players want, a real estate purchase system would push prices out of the range of the ordinary player so only the wealthy could buy with gil they aren't using. Or desperate players would resort to RMT to get the gil they need.

It's not closing the RMT loophole at all. There are wealthy players already selling their gil under the table to players who want gil but fear the gil selling websites (one of the hunt discords had members spammed by such a player a couple of months back until the admins kicked that player). If they can't get their real money by selling the house direct, they'll get it by selling the gil needed to buy the house. That gil comes right back to them ready to be sold all over again.

Which will absolutely function as a gil sink, yes. What it won't do is remove the incentive for RMT bots to buy and flip houses, which is the other benefit of this idea..

The only way to stop RMT in housing is for SE to stop giving players control over specific game addresses and move to an instanced system that allows every player to get the house they want, similar to what other MMOs use.

As long as we have wards and a limited number of each house size/location, we will have RMT whether it's buying the gil needed to purchase or buying the item direct.

There will absolutely be a response to this that defeats the purpose. You have 10B gil spread across yourself and nine retainers when this is implemented? Good thing you can make alts, which also have nine retainers each.

Except part of what I mentioned was removing the ability to store gil on retainers. Retainers would be a temporary bank for what's received from marketboard listings, with that gil being automatically transferred to the player when they go to interact with the retainer, same as we automatically get gil when completing a duty/quest.

You also forgot that players can now get a 10th retainer if they have the paid companion app.

What I suggest would reduce the account wide gil cap from a potential 440 billion down to 4 billion.

And assuming they can't do that, they'll just start spending the gil, which will cause inflation.

Inflation that would be very short term at best because players won't have as much gil to spend after the lower gil cap goes into effect.

It's rarely the poor players selling the big ticket items. It's the players who have lots of time on their hands to play and they've become rich because of that extra time they have to farm for the rare items that bring in the big gil.