Why is this not the solution?

[Jojoya]

The whole point of a gil sink is to stop this. After the first few months to a year, prices will drop significantly.

Purchase-based gil sinks don't do anything if the item the player wants to purchase isn't available.

SE would have to increase supply, and that by itself would cause prices to drop as houses (or whatever item) became easier to obtain.

I never claimed it stopped RMT entirely. I said it would get RMT bots out of housing, because they won't be spam-clicking something they can't flip for a profit. You will never stop RMT entirely.

Except profit is still there in the currency that matters - real money - and that's always been handled outside of the game.

Which SE won't do because potato. Leaving people like us to argue about the best ways to season a [xxx] sandwich.

If you feel like it's nothing more than a sandwich with unsanitary ingredients, why are you wasting time talking about it?

I didn't forget anything. I just picked a number and you assumed I forgot something. And also, great, get ready for mega inflation when they decide to spend all that gil on the market board rather than lose it.

Like they're going to wait. They'll spend it before it goes into effect. And please don't tell me that SE should set the dangerous as hell precedent of just getting rid of gil without telling people. Great way to destroy trust. And no they didn't do it before either. They slashed a zero off of everything, including prices. Its like how some countries do old/new currency to stop zeros from adding up.

Why would you randomly pick a number lower than maximum when you're trying to discuss maximum wealth potential?

What are you expecting them to buy from the marketboard that would cause the mega inflation? They're not going to sit there buying Mahogany Logs for 1 million gil each nor would all the players selling them list that at that sort of price.

I never said they would wait. If they bother spending the excess gil, they would do it before the cap was lowered on items that they want. Who would they likely be buying from? Other rich players who have the rare big tickets items and who will likewise get hit by the lowered cap.

Any inflation would be purely temporary. It would disappear once the cap was lowered and prices returned to their normal patterns because all the excess gil was removed.

I also never said that SE wouldn't give players warning in advance of the change. Of course they would let players know it was going to happen.

Is this a problem? That's basically how capitalism should actually work. More time and effort equals more money.

Where did I say capitalism is a problem? Neither capitalism nor the free market economy is at issue here.

The root problem the outrageously high gil cap coupled with our ability to generate gil on demand instead of having to find ways to acquire gil that already exists in the game economy. Real life may not have a gil cap equivalent but as individual and businesses we're also certainly not able to generate new money on demand - that is something governments reserve for themselves and they're usually very careful before resorting to it. If you want money in real life then you need to do something that will get someone else to give it to you.

Compare that to the game. If there's something I want to buy on a character but I don't have enough gil, I don't have to sell things to another player to get the gil I need. I've got multiple ways of getting the gil I need, some being more time efficient (leves, treasure maps) and others being very time inefficient (random mob grinds for gil and crafting materials to sell to vendor) and yet others falling in between (roulettes, challenges logs, dungeon grinds for gear drops to sell to vendor).

If the item I want is sold by a vendor, there's no problem.The vendor is a gil sink removing what I just earned from the game.

If the item is being sold to another player, then I just infused the player economy with a fresh amount of gil that will contribute to inflation because the market tax only removed 5-10% of what I had earned.

If SE didn't want to lower the gil cap but wanted to get serious about gil sinks, then they should consider a tiered market tax based on per unit sale price. As an example, keep it at 5% for items with a unit price up to 10k gil. For unit prices of 10,001 to 100k, increase it to 10%. For unit prices of 100,001 to 1 million, increase it to 20%. For items over 1 million, increase it to 40%. Scale the seller tax in a similar fashion while retaining some discounts to incentivize sellers to place their retainers in the less congested markets (assuming SE still hasn't solved the global market programming issues they had mentioned back when world visit was announced).

That would do double duty when it comes to inflation checks by both pulling more gil out of the player economy and encouraging players to price lower to keep out of the higher tax brackets. Yet I imagine most players would like that idea even less than the idea of lowering the gil cap. Lowering the gil cap would only impact the wealthy players. A tiered market tax would affect everyone.