Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
To be honest I wonder if the RMT excuse is just that... an excuse, and if either the servers somehow will explode if we mailed each other more frequently or they feel the ability to mail alts would hurt retainer sales.

In 8 years playing WoW for example, where you can mail alts, guild members, random players, whoever you like... I've never once been mailed by an RMT seller or seen any issues arise.
Play any MMO, RMT is a problem. The way to combat RMT tends to involve multiple things:

1. Intentional throttling of anything that text can be sent through. (otherwise all a bot has to do is run through a crowded area, log the names, and then go to a mailbox to spam everyone every few minutes.)

2. Limiting what can be sent or traded without going through the markets/auction house, otherwise you'd have RMT just constantly sending everything through it.

3. Making menus verbose enough that it requires reading, (eg many identical item icons require mouse-overs) and not simply manipulate the client.

In all the years I've been playing MMO's (which goes back to the original beta test of Ultima Online), if there is a hole, it will be exploited, and will not be noticed until it impairs the performance of the game.

Just because the mailbox seems slow, doesn't mean it's intentionally slow, it means there's a lot of checks. A lot of Japanese software (be it games or applications) are menu-hell's, but it only looks that way to us because you can't represent long words with one kanji character.

Every time a menu is opened or closed in this game, it tells the server. Every time something changes on the screen, that's an update from the server. The only stuff never actually transmitted to the server are things on the system menu. That's why when you switch to another PC your shortcuts/HUD and System settings aren't saved.