Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Niwashi]

Actually, it's pretty simple. They can have a status option where you can only receive whispers from friends, free company/linkshell members and people in your group, and then in order to send friendship requests, have such a feature require lv15-20 and the story steps up to that point done.

That's actually a pretty bad solution. It completely blocks legitimate new players from joining their friends (which may be their whole reason for starting the game in the first place), while providing a trivially simple obstacle to RMT bots, which can already level clear up to 50 easily if they have any reason to. (They're already doing it for their gathering/farming bots. They'd just port the first bit of that bot script onto their spam bots as well.) There's lots of other features that SE could add which make RMT harder without disturbing legitimate play at all. They need to start with those, leaving disruptive features as an absolute last resort, which hopefully they'll never need to use.

The issue people don't get with RMT is that RMT only exists in games with heavy gold grinds, and FFXIV is one of them. The tier IV materia cost 400-500k a piece, craftman ones 200-400k a piece. ilv100+ gear costs in the vicinity of 1 million gil.

Actually that problem doesn't come from too few gil sources, but from too many, and from a lack of corresponding gil sinks. You're talking about costs that come when players sell things to each other. The going rate for goods is whatever people will pay for them, and with loads of players sitting on millions of gil that they have virtually no use for, people will pay a lot for just about anything they want to buy.

The only major expense the game itself has is if you want to buy a personal house (but due to the number available, most players won't be doing that anyway). Besides a house, what other game expenses are there? There are gear repairs if you don't craft, but those don't cost much. You could spend money on teleporting or flying around if you don't like traveling, though that's almost entirely optional and still doesn't cost much even if you do it a lot. And that's about it. We've got lots of gil coming in, through quest/leve/FATE/dungeon/challenge rewards, and very little going out, so the result is inflation. The prices you're dismayed by are simply the result of that inflation.