Don't buy mogstation items from 3rd parties.

[Iscah]

I don't think I've ever seen a "50% off" sale - it seems to always be 30%. Is it only Fantasias that sell at that discount? I don't pay attention to those.

Or do NA and EU get different sale discounts?

[JackHatchet]

Not sure if there's a difference. But I remember that one guy used to explain that codes all over the globe worked. So he'd just pick them up when on sale. But again, wasn't a very margin so he quit doing it. I thought fantasias were 50% sometime during HW. I could be wrong though.It's been a long time.

All I really wanted to mention, was that Square-Enix does do sales, and those sales allow third party resellers to list items cheaper than current value and still be legit. I just wanted to note that it's a possibility, and not everything is scammy like some people claim.

[Valdima]

You'd think this is just common sense.

[CazzT]

I would think that this would be a matter of common sense but...obviously they need to warn certain people.

In the immortal words of Tataru... "Common sense isn't." (if she neve actually said that, it's something she would say)

[KageTokage]

Yeah. It also doesn't help that the sources of RMT or questionable business practices can't really be targeted a lot of the time because they are often run out of countries that genuinely don't care. It's a tough battle to fight and I do think that SE really does do their best. We're definitely in a better place than we were when this game started. RMT spam was rampant to the point that most people had to set themselves to busy status to not get annoyed.

While they have gotten better about dealing with spammers to a degree, their response time to RMT spammers is too slow to really be meaningful and they should be doing some kind of shadowban that perma-mutes them in an undetectable manner instead of banning them entirely since that just makes them send in a replacement almost immediately. All they've done is prevent them from being intrusive via party invites, PMs, and other more direct forms of messaging.

They've also done basically nothing to actually address the methods the RMTers are using to get their gil in the first place, which are either dungeon/MSQ farming with hacking bot armies or large-scale market board farming operations with DoL/H bots (With evidence to suggest they actually span multiple servers at times with them sending over mule accounts carrying several hundred items to take over an economy with).

[Gula]

I would think that this would be a matter of common sense but...obviously they need to warn certain people.

While not an mmo, imvu (ancient 3D chat platform) had absolutely ok RMT. They only cut it when introducing a way for users to make real money from imvu directly. But before that? Something like this wasn't even a concern. So no, not common sense, just how many people bothered to read all the legal documents before signing up.

[Noodle_Trinidad]

All that wasted money that won't be used for the creation of new content...

It makes me extra mad to think that, wherever you go, there's going to be thieves and scammers everywhere.

Given the content count has been pretty much identical and/or less than Heavensward with worse Longevity thanks to Eureka I highly doubt much has been lost in the “content creation” side of things cause of the fraudelent cash shop purchases. At best we know is that some of that money went into the EU servers but given how many issues that all non-JP servers go thru on top of their horrid locations for the average player I come to highly question how much of the cash shop revenue is even used for the game itself.

Still I do think people shouldn’t be using 3rd party means to buy cash shop items since it comes at the risk of their account and the fact that generally such codes come thru nefarious means. At the same time this should be a clear message to SE about their absurdly high prices, especially things like Mounts and Glamour sets that cost about as much as a decent Indie game or 30-50% of a non-Indie game or Expansion.