I know all of the totally legitimate reasons why people would want to be able to transfer gil between multiple characters and among friends. But are those reasons really worth having gold spammers, auction house crashes and bots in the game?

I know that it feels like a huge feature to remove, but think about it. Being able to transfer gear would still let you help your characters or friends along. So many of the low level materials are available for vendors or cheap from the market that the difference between giving someone a few thousand gil to spend and giving someone a couple of stacks of whatever they were going to buy fairly negligible. It would be like an amazing way to stimulate the economy as the only people buying and selling on the auction house are those that do it for in-game profit, which is the way the free market is supposed to work.

(Continued in first post)