Quote Originally Posted by azura84 View Post
Yes, and I'm having a change of heart about allowing free market of it, because it would ultimately become unfair as you say, and the only way SE could battle that unfairness is to put a bunch of money and time into anti-cheat software and hardware locking houses, and even then it would not really stop people from profiting off it. Profit isn't exactly a bad thing is really what i wanted to express, but when the supply can be disrupted by tycoons so for the whole world is when you have a problem. Unfortunately the only other option is what hey have done, which is basically punishing everyone. A 24+ hr invisible timer certainly stops black market dealing but it also hurts everyone else, I think Jojoya or Themarvin have the most elegant solutions; ie reducing the invisible timer to 3-4hrs (still works against black market dealing and an easy fix) and/or reducing the number of clicks per hour on the placards (harder to implement but still not a bad idea)
I would be fine if SE let marketforces work on the houses provided that the gil went out of the economy rather than changed hands between the players, as that would be a short term spike in housing prices, provided that SE had an auction and the houses always start at their lowest offering as initial bid, and each successive bid was at least an increase of 1% over the current bid. And I would be fine with this if SE had a time token system in place where a player could buy a token for RL currency and then sell the currency on the market (so they are indirectly buying currency but SE pockets the money), with the option for players to buy the time token for gil (which would help pull gil out of the economy).

The problem, however, is when you have players that are shuffling around houses you end up with houses going for many multiples (if not at least an order of magnitude more) than what SE says the house is worth, and the gil gets shuffled around that way as it becomes far to easy to allow for other forms of payment besides gil (like dogecoin) for FFXIV stuff... and that opens up a whole can of worms that can lead to shady things where accounts get compromised and people get ripped off.