World Balance is doomed until ..

[SaitoHikari]

Negative, the one reason we have these people buying Gil in the first place, is because its driven by extremely high and insane prices for popular and or useful items.

They wouldn't bother buying accounts (RMT) to spam adverts and run BOT programs if it didn't make them enough money in the first place.

And on the flip-side, why would a company want to stop RMT, they have to keep buying accounts, its making them money, if they wanted an end to it they easily could, making Gil a static item like Tombstone currency would be a start, remove it from moogle mail and in-game trading, that would be a start, more can be done.

Good point with the last one, I suppose, considering I did note during my time in Leviathan that there was an army of bots that had made it far enough into the MSQ to be doing the Central Coerthas phase, which means they had bought the full game.

Even so, you have to consider the luxury items that AREN'T tied to crafting as well. Night Pegasus Whistles? Hunting Hawks before the Diadem overhaul? Anything requiring crafting mats that aren't normally obtainable through DoL/DoW classes? Those will just skyrocket even harder, thus encouraging gold buying even more. It's a hell of a feedback loop. Not to mention the actual effect it will have on each server's economy is largely unpredictable within the context of this game. Apply real world economics to a video game all you want, bots don't exist in a real life market.

It's a hell of a risk to take when there's already one solution players can already take - invest in the gatherer/crafter classes themselves. The devs shouldn't give a damn if people find them boring. I'd imagine they're actually insulted at the notion of people telling them to do something about marketboard prices by going through a huge effort to link server markets together, with reasoning that only really boils down to 'I refuse to participate in half of the content you've designed that other people are benefiting from without any issues, and I want you to create a workaround for me (while I sit here insulting the people that put in the effort to invest in those classes by calling them names such as 'greedy self-centered control freaks - your own words from page 2') even though it won't actually make the market more accessible to the majority of players since people are somehow magically forgetting the fact that the way DoH/DoL classes work is still in a closed loop that pure combat players can't participate in'.

One thing I can already see from a mile away is that such a move would absolutely crash the materia VI market. After all, there's so many more people participating in combat with zero interest in crafting and gathering. Consider the population of DPS in relation to healers and tanks, then apply that to pure combat characters VS people that have everything leveled (although I imagine the population ratio is worse than DPS in comparison to healers and tanks).

Is -possibly- cheaper prices worth killing one of the only reliable ways for those players to earn gil?