STOP the Gil Selling Tells PLEASE!

[Mythre]

Continued...
Over the course of 2 weeks to 1 month prices will become stable.

Bam. Done.

RMT will still be there but now gil will have no real meaning except for the lazy; Example: you don't want to spend 60k to buy a stack of hq food... you can just level your Cul in 2 days doing Leves and make it yourself.

I am on a server where almost everyone is 100% max level all or close to it so everything is cheap anyway. Hell I'll craft my own stuff from scratch. However when you grind something for a day's worth of work and only make 60k because RMT flooded the market with hundreds of stuff where the prices go from 200k to 40k in 6 hours there are problems.

The only major gil sinks in this game is housing and relic. Relic being bad as your most likely paying an RMT 600k for a grade 4 det off the market board; those other grade 4's ya got? Useless trash now. Your better off grinding dungeons.

[Mythre]

"So correct me if I'm wrong, but you want to stop RMT by making the thing people pay real money for worthless thus ruining the entire marketboard and destroying crafters and gatherers server-wide"

Gathers can gather there own stockpile and craft if they need to.
I play both.

Marketboard will still be workable with high lvl items and low mats will still be worth something, if not at least to NPCs.

[Havenae]

Step 1: Create a report function straight from the chat menu.
Step 2: Create a 'PLEX'* system similar to what EvE Online has
Step 3: Allow players to sell 'PLEX' ingame for currency.
Step 4: Create a system of Player moderators with functions to disable chat for abuse. They dont need to be paid, it can be strictly volunteer. Other MMOs have done similar systems in the past for game-guides.

* For those who don't know what 'PLEX' is in EvE, it is a system where one person buys game time (like 1 months worth) and then sells it on the player market for in game currency. It is essentially legally buying currency but by providing SE with increased revenue rather than some currency farmer in Indonesia. Open the possibility of 'F2P' (while still remaining subscription based) by working for Gil to buy game time from other players. It is then up to the player market to determine the going rate of the 'PLEX' item and takes the market completely away from the RMT companies.

It works pretty well from what I've seen in other games who have done it. It isn't perfect but it reduces this bullshit a lot more than waiting on SE to BANHAMMER all of them. But it also wont do all of it, which is why you need report function and moderators as well to fill in the spaces that the 'PLEX' system misses. It's all completely doable and would benefit in more ways than simply getting rid of annoying tell spam.

[Grimmel]

As I have said in past threads about this..

Square-Enix needs to block China from being able to make NA/EU/JP accounts since they have their own game and servers now.

They did this for FFXI back in the day when it was a problem as well and it did a lot better once they finally kicked them to the curb.

[kyuven]

Square-Enix needs to block China from being able to make NA/EU/JP accounts since they have their own game and servers now.

.

RMTers would just use VPNs.
They only seem to be a problem on NA servers.


Also the OP wants to nuke the economy because RMTers are nuking the economy...
Um...
Wow.
I'm actually speechless. This is such a scorched earth policy it's ludicrous.
SE will never set a limit on how much a specific item can be sold for on the MB. They'll set an overall cap (99,999,999 last i checked?) and minimum (1 gil) but the amount of work required for what you're asking for is absurd.
They'll also never up the amount a piece of materia (or any item, really) sells to merchants for. They want LESS gil in the game, not more. Completely devaluing your currency rather than actually addressing the problem (that of RMTers) is ludicrous.

[Omni-Vocational_Ryan]

Continued...
RMT will still be there but now gil will have no real meaning except for the lazy; Example: you don't want to spend 60k to buy a stack of hq food... you can just level your Cul in 2 days doing Leves and make it yourself.

I am on a server where almost everyone is 100% max level all or close to it so everything is cheap anyway. Hell I'll craft my own stuff from scratch. However when you grind something for a day's worth of work and only make 60k because RMT flooded the market with hundreds of stuff where the prices go from 200k to 40k in 6 hours there are problems.

Relic being bad as your most likely paying an RMT 600k for a grade 4 det off the market board; those other grade 4's ya got? Useless trash now. Your better off grinding dungeons.

So you want to make everyone become independent and fend for themselves instead of a free market system? btw don't forget that grade 4 crit materia. Stuff is 750k on my server.

[LineageRazor]

Your not going to get rid of RMT but you can ruin the items that they try to sell to make players pay 20mil for a sky pop item cus they claim bot back in FFXI.

I think you're really confused about the nature of RMT in FFXI, both past and present. RMT never bot-claimed and sold HNMs - that was PLAYERS that bot-claimed and sold HNMs. Even if they had, though, it would have been among the LESS harmful things that RMT did, because hostage-taking of that sort doesn't introduce new money into the economy - it just cycles around the money that's already there.

No, the damaging RMT were the fish-bots, and anything else that introduced new money into the system. These RMT pretty much destroyed FFXI's economy at one point... I think it was in 2008? After a huge Christmas sale, so much new gil was dumped into the economy that everything in the game increased to roughly twelve times its previous price. Items once selling for a million gil now cost twelve million. That was the event that FINALLY got SE to start treating RMT seriously. It was when the anti-RMT task force was created, and when they finally started their waves of bans.

Also, while it is true that RMT doesn't have much of a presence in FFXI anymore, it's mostly because it's an old game with a much smaller customer base than it used to have. While the RMT task force DID to an admirable job of curbing RMT after the gil crash of 2008, they still had a notable presence for many years afterwards.

As for your suggestions, it's difficult to imagine how increasing the NPC sale price on materia would do anything NEGATIVE to RMT. They can spiritbind just as well as any player - in fact, they can spiritbind BETTER than any player, since they can devote 100% of their time to it. Sure, you might be able to get 20k for your grade 3 materia sold to NPC, but thanks to the flood of gil RMT are generating with their own spiritbonding, your 20k is worth less than 100 gil would be right now.

Unless... is all this frustration at not being able to buy a house? That's the only upside I can see to this situation. Massive, overwhelming inflation will make purchases FROM NPCS stupidly easy. Once this plan was underway a while and RMT had truly driven the value of gil into the toilet, someone could sell a stack of raptor skins for ten million gil and get enough money to buy a house. Except, of course, if money was that easy to come by, there wouldn't be any houses left to buy... And also assuming that SE completely failed to notice the massive inflation and left the house prices the same, when it's far more likely that they'd massively inflate house prices in order to better serve as gil sinks.

[Tiggy]

New NPC Price: Raise all grade 4 materia to 100k, Grade 3 to 20k, Grade 2 to 10k, and Grade 1 to 2k.
This way you can still make something for your time spent.

And is an equally great way to flood the market with cheap easy to obtain gil causing run away inflation. This is not a good idea.

Markets already trash as is unless SE is going to start being malicious with cheaters to prevent damage being done.

Your "fix" is a great example of two wrongs don't make a right.

[Able]

It is getting absolutely ridiculous on Sargatanas. They're even shouting now. Haven't seen them do that since early access. Essentially, the game is unplayable for me without /busy.

[Thayos]

This can be solved without any overly complex counter-measures. Here's how:


Step 1: Create an in-game "report RMT activity" flag by right-clicking on /tells

Step 2: The "report RMT activity" option only appears on /tells or /shouts sent to the player; a player can't /tell another player and then flag that player (this, and the next measure, 100% prevents player abuse and RMT retaliation).

Step 3: Automatically *blind* the accounts of players whose /tells are flagged by more than 10 people during a single day; for /shouts, the number would have to be based on something different, like 50 people within a 1-hour time frame.

* A "blinded" account isn't banned, and still seems to function normally, but /tells and /shouts can't be received by other players... but without any notifications that communications aren't being received, RMT continue to use worthless accounts for advertising rather than start new ones. This would also reduce RMT efficiency. These accounts would all be flagged for reviews and possible bans whenever GMs have time to do reviews.

Step 4: Automatically clear our blacklists of banned/blinded accounts.


DONE. SE could solve this problem by tomorrow, if it wanted.

EDIT: Changed "report spam" to "report RMT activity," because I'd want it to be very clear that players not use this function to flag people who are shouting about casinos, hunt marks, etc.

EDIT 2: Also, SE could just ban these accounts instead of blinding them... but I think the blind concept is a good, simple way to kick RMT in the balls and make their time in Eorzea a little less valuable.