Quote Originally Posted by Gildrein View Post
Hello fellow adventurers!

To clear up your questions, we have checked with the Dev. team and found out the following.

As a countermeasure against RMT activities, the probability of gaining items through gathering will start to decrease after repeated attempts over a long period of time. After a certain number of attempts, items will no longer be obtainable through gathering.

To explain a little more on what goes on behind the scenes, there is an internal counter which measures how often a player has attempted gathering activities. Players will start with a maximum pool of 2,500, which will decrease by 10 each time a gathering attempt is successful and yields an item. Once this number decreases to 1,000, players will find it harder to obtain items. At 0, items can no longer be obtained through gathering.

Stopping gathering for some time will bump this number back up. The recovery rate is currently set at 100 per hour.

If you have ideas and feedback on this topic, please don't hesitate to let us know.
Making something hard on RMT is the same as making something hard on regular players, because they're pretty much identical, except for the whole selling of virtual assets thing. You cannot penalize one without penalizing the other.

Focus first on having a sustainable economy. There are some excellent points made in this thread:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-are-Worthless

The summary is that items should be leaving the economy at roughly the same rate that they enter it, gold should be doing the same, and trading of items between players should be easy.

By leaving the economy, I mean getting sold to a vendor, thrown out of the inventory, or disassembled for materials that could not be obtained any other way.