Please, Don't Buy Gil!

[Canadane]

I can understand why someone may turn to buying gil. Though I'll never ever advocate it.
The thing is, most of these people probably just don't realize how easy gil is.

Timeworn map parties literally just print gil.
Crafting and gathering is straight up gil for your time spent.
Running a single dungeon is enough gil for most day to day expenses.

[TwistedTea]

So legacy server players that have more gil compared to the other servers, shoved a lot of gil to smallers servers making inflation everywhere.

I'm actually curious about this. I was tracking item prices on sites like Mogboard and FFXIVMB for months prior to World Visit:

Sure there are legacy players with lots of gil/gil capped etc. But those of us who are not legacy players playing on legacy players have to deal with vicious undercutting and make less gil per item.

The counter argument is that, we can have more sales since there's a higher population.

But on the previously smaller servers,prices were higher and crafters especially, seemed to make bigger profit margins.

Secondly, the presence of bots on the smaller servers is higher;so more inflation.

Anecdotally, looking at the sales history of items over the weeks, after World Visit, prices on Balmung rose because wealthy crafters from the other servers were buying out our 'cheap' stuff.

Before World Visit, a million gil on Balmung would buy you a lot more than say a million gil on Couerl/Zalera etc.

If anything, it seems like those on populated servers became 'poorer' because our purchasing power has declined

[Canadane]

It's been a very long time since they took 10% of our legacy gil away.
I have a feeling it's mostly been normalized.

[Wanzzo]

...

Also, note that even an 'official' solution doesn't fully prevent outside sources...but it does severely limit such. For example, if I was playing WoW and wanted to buy gold, I would absolutely do so via the official token that (a) isn't risking an account and (b) probably actually costs less. (I cannot confirm if it costs less for sure, as I haven't touched WoW in months [always enjoyed this game more in recent years], but last time I looked it up out of curiosity it was +/- 10% of the 'official' channel if one did it another way.) Would I love to see all the bots vanish? Absolutely. Would I settle for 95% of them vanishing, as happened with WoW? Also yes.

As you stated, the best way to stop gil sellers is: reduce the number of gil buyers. I just don't believe talking about it will have the impact you're looking for, but an official channel probably will. I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a gil buyer for a moment. If you can buy x gil for $y and risk your account, or x gil for $1.1y and know that it's perfectly safe, would you pay the extra 10%? I know I probably would (if I couldn't basically print gil as an omnicrafter and omnigatherer, myself). If the majority if people would...there's no longer a market for the non-official channels. If you couple that with something that can't be taken out of the SE atmosphere (i.e. a token of some sort, rather than cash), there's no profit incentive (or at least severely reduced profit incentive) for current gil sellers (as they do this to get RL cash, not to get a new mount or minion).

I understand wanting to do something, but I'd rather fix 95% of the problem with one step instead of putting in 100x the effort and maybe fixing 0.095% of the problem.

Well, that's make a lot of sense for sure!
I just hope that this kind of solution works in this game as well. But, sadly, this not work in all MMOs out there...

Anyway, until they do something like that, we could talk about it :P