[DEV] Idea for gil Exchange

[Gilraen]

With the introduction of time cards outside of Japan an idea came to mind, inspired by another MMO's unique practice. In the MMO EVE Online players can purchase time in the form of PLEX, which can be injected into the game in the form of an item and sold for in-game currency (last I saw PLEX was exchanging at 15,000,000 in-game currency, give or take). Would it be legal to do the same with XIV's time cards? Naturally this relies heavily on players being upstanding people as time cards have no in-game representation, but given that the customer is paying gil for something someone else bought with their real money and no actual money is changing hands after the initial time card purchase the legality is potentially questionable.

Why would anyone do this? Why do people do it in EVE? It's an easy way to turn real money into game currency without having to pay an RMT. This, by the way, is how EVE has managed to keep their RMT activity to a minimum. After all, why pay someone in China for something you can do through the game developer directly. Now, I'm not suggesting Square adopt this as, in the time card's current state, it's heavily reliant on people being upstanding players and I think we all know how rare that is.

[Lemon8or]

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Do you want to trade your in-game gil to another user so that user will buy you in-game time? That IS the basis of RMT. I don't think SE wants that.

[Crimson-Falcon]

if i understood correctly

OP talks about exchange in game gil with time in sub

like TERA had something like that by buying some kind of scroll to extend your sub with in game gold

[Gilraen]

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Do you want to trade your in-game gil to another user so that user will buy you in-game time? That IS the basis of RMT. I don't think SE wants that.

Actually, RMT are giving you gil in exchange for money, quite the opposite of what I said and EVE practices. What I said was to use your own money to buy time cards and offering the code to someone else for gil. You are spending the money on a Square product, time cards, and effectively giving the code away for in-game currency. Noone is paying you any real money in any step of the process.

[LordSideKicks]

I can imagine a game time card would cost someone a limb ingame if this was introduced. Why not place a NPC in city where players trade the NPC gils for game time instead? Both bad ideas though.

[axemtitanium]

There was a LONG thread from the 1.0 forums on this very topic, which even got a dev response from Yoshida himself, and I'd be curious what current ARR players think.

Link for reference: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...m-in-FFXIV-ARR

[Althekiller]

The reason why it works in Eve is because Eve has many forms of controlling their economy through sinks. It would not work in any game like FFXIV. Also, a "PLEX" roughly costs 580-650,000,000 isk...

[Gilraen]

That and EVE's economy is almost completely player-based. Can't even get out of starter ships without dealing with another player, which makes the PLEX trade even more sensible in that regard. Hmm... where did I get my figure from in the example. Oh, the value of a dollar in isk, right.

[timwind]

To summarize your post:

1. You are pursuing SE becoming a RMT

2. You are assuming all RMTs are from China.

[Gilraen]

To summarize your post:

1. You are pursuing SE becoming a RMT

2. You are assuming all RMTs are from China.

Well, by that assertion, CCP is an RMT too given their model with EVE Online is my primary comparison. As has been said, EVE Online's economy is almost entirely player-based so the application here might not be ideal. And while you believe I think all RMT is based in China, I think it's important to note that China doesn't have the same laws in regards to RMT activity that the rest of the world does. There are RMT in other countries, like Australia, but in those countries RMT activity is treated quite differently (there was a story on an Australian RMT not too long ago, pretty funny at that). I leave those countries out because of the legal environment they are in.