It's time to reevaluate the idea of adding a PLEX/Chronoscroll-like system to FFXIV

[Zfz]

Suppose this system goes online, I'm curious about its real effect.

(1) What is to stop RMT vendors controlling the prices on market boards? They do have a huge supply of gil.

(2) What happens if the RMT vendors just bot more, hack more, cheat more, use that "free" gil they got to buy up time cards, and sell them for real world money cheaper than Square Enix?

Mog Station - USD$12.99 per card, 1 month game time
RMT Vendor - USD$10.99 per card

Note that now they are actually selling game time which they bought with botted gil, i.e. Square Enix has let go of its monopoly on game time. It's even more profitable than selling fluctuating gil because game time has a official price tag. You just have to be slightly cheaper. Since the gil they use to buy up these cards cost only their bot subscription fees (or are stolen), they have a lot of wriggle room.

In effect, they become an officially sanctioned reseller of game time. And in order to be more profitable, they put out more bots, advertise harder in game, and they will also advertise for buying/selling the time cards in-game and there would be nothing anyone could do about it, because it is a legitimate tradeable game item.

What's to stop them spamming harder and longer than ever, now that they're actually trading something sanctioned by Square Enix?

[Bishop81]

Suppose this system goes online, I'm curious about its real effect.

(1) What is to stop RMT vendors controlling the prices on market boards? They do have a huge supply of gil.

(2) What happens if the RMT vendors just bot more, hack more, cheat more, use that "free" gil they got to buy up time cards, and sell them for real world money cheaper than Square Enix?

...

What's to stop them spamming harder and longer than ever, now that they're actually trading something sanctioned by Square Enix?

You assuming they aren't botting/spamming as hard as they can now?

[Vaer]

Suppose this system goes online, I'm curious about its real effect.
(1) What is to stop RMT vendors controlling the prices on market boards? They do have a huge supply of gil.

Well, that game time has to come from somewhere to exist, so if a legit player buys the game time card (from SE, SE gets the money when the purchase is made so they no longer care what happens to it) instead of buying the gil from the RMT than they otherwise would have, it still hurts the RMT in the end and SE profits.

The RMT now have to be the middle man in that scenario, and would have to bank on people buying it (trust issues) from them for real money.

The WoW token scenario is basically it becomes untradeable after it is purchased from the AH which is the only way to get it for gold, so you can't flip it anymore which would remove that entire scenario since you can't resell it. Other games don't have such restrictions, but it depends on the implementation. Blizzard goes even further since they control what it is worth based on an algorithm. You just place the item into the exchange queue and get a quote from them and you'll get exactly that much gold when it sells. Some things might change since it is in testing but that's how it works currently.