Why no Plex system?

[frostmagemari]

There are some fundamental issues with being able to purchase gil with real money through any system. It means changing some pretty substancial reward systems, most notably the crafting gear. Crafting gear is currently the best gear available the moment of a raid launch. Further, the best gear a crafter can get is also often purchasable with gil. In both cases someone would, at least for a limited amount of time, be able to get the best available gear by buying it indirectly with RMT which effectively would make FF14 dangerously close Pay-to-Win. While one solution would be simply to nerf crafted gear that is sellable, that seriously impacts the reward to time investment that crafting takes which is rather unfair to crafters.

Personally, although such a system would effectively allow me to play for free, I don't think it would be good for the game.

It would hardly be akin to pay to win.
If someone gathered the gil through selling off materials and bought all that gear? Isn't that pay to win?
If selling one commodity is a legitimate way to get gil from another player, why isn't a time-token valid? Both need to be gathered in one way or another, both are available to players (some having more RL cash than time, some having more time than RL cash), and both need to be placed onto the market board for another player to buy...

The more people put up the tokens, the less the demand would be and one player may end up selling their token for less, which means they can't buy all of the gear they want. All an SQE Game-token system would mean is that a legitimate player gets game time out of the sale instead of a gil seller fattening their wallet.