Time to address the real problem - RMT buyers

[Deveryn]

I'm not too sure on the crafted front either. Crafted gear these days isn't that expensive so long as you give it a week or two to calm down. If you're in some kind of world first raid group and need that day 1 gear, you'll have a dedicated crafter or five on the team anyway.

I've seen enough gripes about the pricing to think otherwise. It's not the crafters' fault though. It's not quick and easy to do all that. I know from experience.

There are people out there and even on this forum that are still doing without because of pricing. Imagine how many more are just thinking about spending a little extra cash. They probably have a bunch of extra retainers as well because they don't know how to approach their inventory.

What kills me is that SE is more than capable of tracking down buyers and banning them. Look at the lottery fiasco. While it was a fiasco... it also showed that SE could really parse data across multiple server mechanisms (the lottery module, housing module, etc) and recreate what happened to then make it right in the end. If they are able to handle reverse engineering that whole mess but can't do something simple like tracing gil transfers between RMT and buyers?

I'll say it right now - if there were actions I could take in game that would get me banned, that would be enough of a deterrent to make me not throw away years of time spent on my character for ill-gotten gains.

Reminds me of some exploit in FFXI in some raid zone. There was some way to multiple drops or something like that. It was clearly an exploit. The players were warned not to do it and then the ban stick came out and destroyed many end-game raiders with wanton destruction. Go after the players and stop the RMT.

It's really not that simple and beyond their scope. (to whom it may concern: please slap yourself if you even thinking of saying "small indie company" in response to this.) A lot of people trade money whether they're passing it to alts or handing out prizes. The only clue might be in the name of the character, but even that can be a problem as many people get their accounts hijacked.

[dspguy]

It's really not that simple and beyond their scope.

Never said it was simple. By pure definition of the TOS, it is within their scope. That's like saying players that brazenly use third party tools are outside of their scope.

However, I do agree it isn't simple. Ultimately, the judgment calls would probably need a human a look at it, but a script could flag accounts based on various factors. For example, let's say they track the number of times a gatherer hits a node. Let's say a gatherer can commonly hit 3 nodes per minute. Put up a flag on an account where a gatherer hits up 1000 nodes in any 6 hour period. That isn't an outright ban of course. But, let's say that gatherer happens to trade list those 3000 ore on the MB (or trade them to some other mule). And then it shows that the player transferred millions of gil to another player or purchased some high-priced item that is well outside the standard deviation of MB sales (30M gil for a potion).

I'm overly simplifying it, but there are telltale signs. But it requires someone to look into it. Someone that needs to be a paid a salary. Just like everything else in life, it boils down to money. Let's say the RMT Strike Force needs 300K/year in salary. That's about 1,600 subs just going to pay their salary, before we even talk about other expenses. However, 3 people doing this job might be enough to make a dent if it was their only job. And over time they'd probably come up with better strategies than some guy making a forum post. At least, I'd certainly hope so.