Tackling RMT: What creates buyers in the first place?

[GTK0HLK]

-snip-

I dont think all of them take part. but it is easy for me to assume that, since as a NPC said, My ideals are inviolate, invincible.(but willing to follow a better path if there is reason.., Don't want to end like that "Dead End"s, jk)

But yes, harsh Punishments should exist.
Specially if said account is just used as a Ad Bot.<if stole, it's frozen til reclaimed. if not reclaimed for a long time. then deleted>

There is no excuse for the Grown adults who don't have time anymore to play, as life overwrites the game every time.(though the game still needs improvement on catch up mechanics, and Gearing and other things. Nothing Excuses RMT, not even Complacency, or the Fact it's a MMO)

[Bacent]

I for one blame most players on the marketboard, for what I consider, foolish selling practices.

Stuff like that happens IRL. You just don't do enough to actually see it so to you it 'doesn't exist'...


In games it's literally just laziness. People are so accustomed to getting stuff when they want it and just paying extra to get it even sooner.

People undercut because they want to sell fast. I'm one of those people that will undercut everyone because I want my crap to sell fast. I ONLY make money from maps/desynthing basically. I make a lot of money from that. I undercut because 1) It sells faster. 2) I don't care about the item and someone will make better usage of it. 3) I have kind of liked the idea of making some people angry that I undercut by weird amounts from how many people complain about 'omg how dare ppl undercut'

I mean heck. I'd consider you a bit of a foolish player thinking that 'people who undercut are foolish'. People will ALWAYS undercut. If everything was the same exact price, then it's a game's fixed economy (Like in solo games) and there'd be no point really.

There's no set price for anything. It's demand driven economy.

If people didn't have the 'I want it now and I'll pay extra just to get it now' mentality, then we wouldn't have this kind of problem. It's why they say patience is a Virtue. People don't have any patience, unless they're a doctor. Then that's a different issue.

[VelKallor]

Tackling RMT: What creates buyers in the first place?

Greed, to put it mildly.

[Wissp]

What creates RMT buyers?

Farming gil in the game for an hour will net you what? 50-100k depending how good you are at it?

Seller offers gil for say $5.00 per million

You make $25.00 a hour at your job.

So for one hour of RL work, you can just buy 5 million gil instead of grinding for 50K in that same hour of time.

Yeah, THAT is why they do it. It's the whole 'work smarter not harder' thing. Honest? No. But when time is more important and valuable than money, you will always have takers WITH money willing to go the easier route, risk be damned.

[Tiramu]

And do we ban the people who sold something on the AH and received money that was purchased with real money?

What? No, of course not. I meant tracing sellers from buyers, and buyers from sellers. Not people who sold an item legitimately that a gil buyer purchased.

But of course, you know that already.

[Tiramu]

I dont think all of them take part. but it is easy for me to assume that, since as a NPC said, My ideals are inviolate, invincible.(but willing to follow a better path if there is reason.., Don't want to end like that "Dead End"s, jk)

But yes, harsh Punishments should exist.
Specially if said account is just used as a Ad Bot.<if stole, it's frozen til reclaimed. if not reclaimed for a long time. then deleted>

There is no excuse for the Grown adults who don't have time anymore to play, as life overwrites the game every time.(though the game still needs improvement on catch up mechanics, and Gearing and other things. Nothing Excuses RMT, not even Complacency, or the Fact it's a MMO)

No, of course not. However, the majority of gil buyers are not going to be casuals who are making their way through the MSQ and doing some fates. You dont need large amounts of gil for that and the game throws stuff at you for that stuff. The majority of buyers will be more hardcore players who want extremely expensive stuff.

[rainichan]

Instant gratification.

RMT isn't just gilbuying, it's also: buying clears for EX/Savage/Ultimate and buying cash shop items at a cheaper price. Also included sometimes is actual cheating plugins (not here for the debate on if chat bubbles are as bad as "move here to resolve this mechanic") because the creators of those sell them for actual money, and even account buying. The easier that someone can get what they want, they'll do it, even if it means breaking rules and possible account termination depending on how bad the infraction is (or how many they've already gotten.)

Gil in this game is incredibly easy to come by. I had enough to buy a small house without touching crafting/gathering classes for a very long time just by passively earning it or by doing treasure map runs and making 3x what I was spending on the solo maps back in HW (still works, I do it when I want a boost in income) so just putting a cap wouldn't do anything but make people buy it more to reach the cap faster. Prices wouldn't go down either, they'd rise as others have mentioned to get that same desired hit of dopamine.

As for the other things I mentioned, getting the new shiny weapon that takes a bunch of work? Nah, I can just pay someone to do it for me! I have to do it myself? Fine, I'll just buy a program that cheats everything for me in the fight, ggez. I don't want to have to PAY the devs for things out of the cash shop, I want to pay LESS because I still want the item, so I'll go to a third party and buy a code for half the price!

For as frustrating as the current gift lock on the cash shop is for people, right now it's a necessary evil to get a handle on fraudulent purchases on the most popular items (except Fantasias, for whatever reason.) The crackdowns on twitch streamers with their plugins is also part of that, even if they're the most innocent and not-actually-cheating plugins ever (chat bubbles, the fancy job icons, the cooldown timer one the devs have adopted, etc) because that's just what they're showing, what are they hiding (even if they aren't)? Seeing them used by streamers can also show others "well if they can do it so can I" and it perpetuates more sales because "well I want to do what they are, and I'll use the same tools." Maybe not for everyone, but when it gives that impression to the incredibly impressionable... it's a big rabbit hole that's more like a large sinkhole from how it has changed over the years. The news that they're finally expanding the staffing for things against RMT (I'm hoping that also means the STF because god they needed that the most) is great and hopefully means that they can get a handle on things faster and easier, and create/upgrade/update tools to help them combat it easier, instead of being behind in the stone ages.

[Amarande]

What? No, of course not. I meant tracing sellers from buyers, and buyers from sellers. Not people who sold an item legitimately that a gil buyer purchased.

But of course, you know that already.

Trouble with that is that they, too, are part of the problem, even if they are innocent of wrongdoing.

Which is what really makes it a huge problem, once the dirty gil has been bought it gets spent in legitimate transactions on the MB and contributes to inflate the economy - which in turn is what's believed to be driving people buying gil in the first place.

At least, people who should know better, anyway. I expect a non-trivial amount is also done by the greenest of sprouts, who should perhaps indeed be given a benefit of the doubt (I suggest based on the account being new enough, if it's still their first month of subscription and they've played little enough that it's reasonable they might not know better): early on, until about the time you unlock the Challenge Log, you really do have very little gil (little enough at first to even make teleporting or a newbie vendor item a fairly big ask), and you're usually being hawked at by gil sellers from the very first minutes of play (since you start in a city from the very get go, unlike most MMOs where you start a ways away and don't hit a big social hub till maybe 5-10 levels in, when you've at least had a chance to get some bearings). This actually used to be even worse (because the starter gear used to be ilvl 1, making it a considerably bigger investment vs. your bankroll at the time to meet the "ilvl 5 in all slots" requirement that occurs just a few quests into MSQ especially if you did not find and do the right sidequests). Under such circumstances, I could easily forgive a sprout (especially if they haven't yet received any Mentor guidance or an increasingly hard to get NN invite) for thinking the game will be this parsimonious throughout and fall for the advertisement.

Lowering the gil cap actually sounds like a reasonable partial solution, as especially when you consider the difficulty in moving assets between one's own characters (unless you have multiple simultaneous subscriptions or are in a FC where you actually have access to chest gil), it would legitimately slash the amount of gil in circulation (which should have some alleviatory effect on MB prices).

Other than that, I'm not sure what else there is to do. I don't think it's appropriate to pull a Neopets level of scorched earth (where even innocents who had no way of knowing their items/money were illicit were banned in order to excise the problem), and the only other thing I can think of is what Blizzard did (i.e., eat the RMT sellers' lunch by offering an official, controlled means to purchase players' currency through a cash shop item), but this has been shown to have grave effects on endgame (arguably, literally virtually transforming WoW into P2W by proxy).

[RitsukoSonoda]

TBH... The largest factor in creating gil buyers is a lack of consequences.

The buyers generally are the ppl that want all the stuff in the system but do not want to work the system to get it. This goes also into those ppl paying RMT for clears on high end or endgame content as well.

The game economy in FFXIV has a serious inflation issue which is partially caused by RMT but IMO primarily caused by the game's design on it's own over time. Quests and activities will still generate exponentially more gil than the game's gil-sinks can remove in the same amount of time. The marketboard for the most part just moves it around as only the tax amount is actually taken out of circulation. Someone in SE needs to brainstorm ideas of optional side activites or NPC purchase consumables that would entice players into spending gil on them regularly.

However part of me wonders what ppl actually buy gil from RMT for in this game aside from wanting a large or medium housing plot as doing MSQ on a new character will generate enough gil to make a small obtainable unless spent foolishly or buying those golden mounts from NPC vendors. Are ppl actually just dumping it into stuff on the marketboard?

[LianaThorne]

Not to be that person but it's really not hard to make gil if you sit down and try things that require some brainpower. For example, if you want to avoid the marketboard and just want to make gil through selling stuff to vendors, you can make enough in a day to afford a small house through just farming GC seals with masterbook crafts (or dungeons if you're allergic to crafting) and selling stuff to vendors. You can flip demimateria through desynthesizing and make a decent chunk that way through vendors.

It's really not that hard. Just have to like, actually put in some effort and have patience which seems to be a big ask for some people.