We need an AH

[CapnBash]

It should have come to them from experience in XI. RMT ran the economy there for years. SE started making big gil items like O.Kote rare/ex and they had a team dedicated to investigating and banning gold sellers. They used to have huge ban waves. It seems this time around they went with the approach of designing things to directly combat RMT activity, but ignored the fact that if it sucks for gold sellers, it's going to suck even more for legitimate players.

This whole game feels like it was designed and developed in a vacuum where people were sucked into the big groupthink machine. It still boggles my mind how they have a decade of experience and solved problems in XI, yet they still exist in XIV. Where's the forward progress?

You're right, but I forgot to add "from this game". The whole group-think thing has really messed this game up. SE should've done a hell of a lot more research before going about things the way they did. It's like they wanted to make the game better than XI, but they didn't realize that XI had some very good things they could have borrowed from the get go. To all of those people bashing WoW and other MMO's, I can agree with you guys that I don't like all of the aspects of those games, but in order to make great games (or anything really) you need to have good references, and MMO's like WoW and etc. have certain things going for it that make them good in some ways, and SE can learn from them to an extent.