We anticipate that even with this update, third parties will continue

[Avoidy]

Imagine doing this around the holidays, lmao
SE is so hard to read, I swear to god. Sometimes they'll cut down on the cash shop features or straight up stop selling the game and cite the game's long term health as a reason for it. And then other times in the middle of a content drought they'll release a mount or something in the cash shop and charge like 30 dollars for it instead of just implementing it into the game as content, or they'll put out some bugged outfit for 22 dollars, etc.

Basically sometimes it feels like they hate money, but other times it feels like they're milking this game and its player base's good will like an endless cash cow. I genuinely can't figure them out. Imagine having this problem for years but picking the holidays to decide to finally do something about it, and then the solution doesn't even stop the RMTers (and you recognize and acknowledge this) lol.

On another note, banning the bots/RMTers won't do anything. They just make a new account that stays active for months and generates loads of profit. You've gotta go after the customers, because they have way more to lose and can't gain it back easily since they'd rather pay others to cheat for them than cheat directly themselves. Once potential buyers see that there's an actual risk involved, they'll stop buying and the revenue for RMT-folk dries up. No idea why they focus on banning one side of the RMT chain but not the other.

[RobynDaBank]

It seems weird they'd do this before Christmas, but I guess it might be because of that. As the amount of purchases spikes, so might the amount of purchases made from the fraudulent means they mentioned.

IDK. I hate the decision personally.

[hammersickle]

absolutely deranged dream logic from the suits at squenix

[JamieRose]

They had an announcement a long time ago regarding the possibility of having your account punished for purchases made on 3rd party sites. People would buy up codes using stolen credit cards, sell them on ebay and then Square would be left dealing with the chargeback and a customer that thought their purchase was legit (or didn't care and just figured SE wouldn't bother). It's obviously continued so they needed to take further steps. As with others, I hope more items open back up to gifting. I'm sure they'll be looking at the feedback on this as well as the sales on items that are restricted from being gifted now.

edit:
This one: [Important]Regarding the Fraudulent Purchase of Optional Items (Mar. 1)

All your telling me is that this move by Squeenix is a massive overreach.

[Iscah]

You know that friend you sent the songbird dress, so that they could make an alt on your world for your bonding? Can't do that anymore. I mean, yes, people can go to a bonding in starter gear, but I always thought it was nice to gift the maid of honor a dress or something for a friend's bonding if they were from another world. Now I can't do that.

On this point, you can still gift your friends a nice outfit to wear, but using in-game tradable glamour. If they're just wearing it to the wedding and then deleting the character, they can even borrow it, wear it and give it back to you – and then you could pass it along to their real character later.

[SenseiMaria]

But surely the amount they lose in chargebacks would be lower than the amount spent on gifts of mounts/minions/emotes

To be blunt, no. The amount they lose in the chargebacks is magnitudes higher.

If one browses several of the more popular 3rd party item selling websites, they can find seller accounts which have sold tens of thousands of items of item codes each by looking at their sale history and reviews.

If we low ball it and say each item was just purely $10 (which is blatantly not the case), Square would have lost $100k+ on each of these accounts frauding them. And these seller accounts purely use stolen credit cards and issue chargebacks (or the rightful owner of the card issues the chargeback), which not only screws Square out of tons of lost revenue, but also hits them with chargeback fees and problems from the big payment companies like Visa.

While I think its ridiculous that they can't verify if the receiver account has the minion/mount when the lodestone API can track it easily and they need to fix that ASAP since it's going to bite them hard, I do get the idea behind these changes. The chargeback scams are extremely damaging, both on lost revenue and company business fronts.

I am being restricted... over pixel money... and other people's criminal behavior that you ADMIT OPENLY they are still ABLE TO DO?

Why did you not just make it so that the items can only be bought with credit cards and make it so those credit cards have to match exactly the name and address on the account buying it?

1) Yes, they can still do it. But you either missed or ignored a very crucial line here:

As a reminder, should you accept a gift purchased via fraudulent means, the item(s) may be deleted, and your account may be subject to penalties for taking part in real money trading (RMT).

They just implemented tools to check who the items are being sent to and take appropriate action. So while the RMTers -still- can do it, their business has been severely restricted because now there is a very high risk that the person buying will get disciplinary action, leading the buyer to not want to risk their entire account to save a few $$$. The code resellers are going to get extremely throttled due to this.

2) This wouldn't impact much, in the grand scheme of things, and in fact, would cause more problems for the common person than the RMTers. A good majority of the stolen cards they use are from compromised FF14 accounts. They get in, buy as many codes as they can with the credit card attached to the account, and sell the codes as quick as they can before the chargeback is initiated from the person. The information is already there for them; having to make the card match every detail would just be a burden for the average user, it wouldn't change anything on how the RMTer operates in their scam. This would also screw with some pre-paid cards I'd imagine, doing another thing to hurt the consumer but do nothing to hurt the RMTer.

[ElysiumDragon]

Gil sellers and this bunch are two separate RMT issues. This new policy exists to tackle both buyers and sellers of RMT cash shop items purchased using stolen credit cards, which costs SE a fortune in chargeback fees.

[Iscah]

While I think its ridiculous that they can't verify if the receiver account has the minion/mount when the lodestone API can track it easily and they need to fix that ASAP

What would that check prevent?

All the scammer has to do is buy the item on a character account that doesn't own the item.

Am I misunderstanding this?

[Riotblade]

I can't do events with these restrictions. Now we'll have to cancel the FC EVENT. This is quite disappointing. I do wish they had another way to tackle this instead of regular law-abiding players taking the brunt of it.

[Stormpeaks]

I can't do events with these restrictions. Now we'll have to cancel the FC EVENT. This is quite disappointing. I do wish they had another way to tackle this instead of regular law-abiding players taking the brunt of it.

The biggest thing being that this wont hurt the RMT sellers in any way, it only hurts legit players