Current and proposed housing changes do not address rampant RMT issues

[Jojoya]

Not to be pedantic but this is naive.

RMT house flippers usually have multiple accounts and can move around their characters between FCs as needed.

They also have vast gil reserves to fund each of their low level alts with 50m - which is what they are gonna do come 6.1

Also currently, if you delete the character which is the FC Master, the next appropriate member in the FC gets automatically promoted to FC Master - this allows for FC house sales to bypass whatever waiting period SE puts in place.



Agreed on the fully instanced system. Ward housing is profitable to RMTers because it is limited.

I'm well aware that they have multiple accounts and will move their members around.

They still usually only operate with 4 members per FC to spread things out since 4 is the minimum needed to be eligible to purchase. Do they have all those FCs bid on the same house, or do they have them bid on different houses?

In either case, they're still left competing against all the FCs with multiple members buying their own entries.

As you said, currently a FC Master can be deleted because any member can be made FC Master. We don't know if that will still be true in 6.1 when the new restrictions get implemented. It could be the game won't allow the character to be deleted if it's a FC Master, and a player can't transfer FC Master to a different FC member if none are eligible. That's something we'll have to wait until 6.1 to find out. It still won't be a true obstacle but it will still hinder RMT operations, which is the most we can reasonably expect as long as SE wants to continue to use a limited resource system.

I don't think you really understand the scope of RMT operations. They have billions of gil on hand and operate with multiple accounts. One operation I've been tracking for the last ten months has to have, bare minimum, 9 accounts they use to move around. That's potentially 72 ticket purchases. 10 out of 200 might not be significant, but 72 out of 200 increases the odds sharply. The other advantage they have is they don't have to worry about trusting members with the gil, it's all the same operation. They can balloon their target FC to 72 people and have them all bid on whatever large just demolished. Have a decent chance of winning it, and if they do sell it a pretty penny in whatever currency they deal in.

Will they clean up when Ishgard housing releases? Maybe, maybe not. But after that, when the housing situation is full again and there's just he occasional house demo'ing and everyone bidding on it, this is when they'll dominate all over again.

The only way to stop that is for the devs to finally realize this isn't tenable and figure out a way for all players to have housing without this system even being necessary.

I get the scope of operations. They're still going to have far more competition than they did in the past and that's going to hinder them.

I also expect their advantage to primarily be during new ward additions, not after the initial supply sells out. Once the initial supply sells out, you're going to have hundreds to thousands of players competing over the few plots that become available. Having 72 entries out of 800 is still 728 chances you don't win.

RMT isn't going to go away as long as the ward system exists. But at least the lottery will narrow the gap between RMT advantage and player/FC advantage in getting a house.