one thing Ive never understood about RMTFollow

they say they cause inflation by putting money into the economy... how exactly are they "putting money into the economy" when they use the exact same means to make money that we do, the only difference is they do it a LOT more/longer, its not like theye magically making money appear through glitches, duplication etc etc..

For example using a real life scenario causing inflation by putting money into the economy and lowering the value of a dollar would be if someone/the government printed/made more bills/money, now using a real life example of what the RMT are doing to cause inflation would be akin to me going from working 40 hours a week to working 100 hours a week, sure now Im making more money because Im working more but Im not adding money money to the economy Im just getting MORE of the money thats already out there/in circulation. How is that example any different than an RMT farming the same dungeon 2000 times a day to make gil? If one of us were to decide to do that would that then make us RMT (well not really RMT as we wouldnt be buying of selling the gil) so I guess I should say would that make us the cause of inflation?

IRL, a worker working lots of hours gets their money from their bosses, or the government, which got money from the people/other companies/government. It is a never-ending circle where money changes hands from the people to the government back to the people. No wealth is ever "lost" and none is created either.

In fact, printing money does not make us more wealthy (look up the "Continental" currency sometime on wikipedia).

In a game, however...

Money is generated by the game, that has an infinite source. It's value will only deprecate in the players' eyes. In-game NPCs will still see Gil being just as valuable now, as it is no matter how much money is in the economy currently.

Also, RMT can employ bots to infinitely generate more money from the game, and this will cause massive inflation in the Player Market (but not in the NPCs').

And Don't forget that RMT not only use bots to generate RMT, but a HUGE part of RMT profits comes from hacking the very accounts of their customers to get money and accounts to sell.

Ever used a powerleveling service? Even if you don't get caught, you lose out because RMT has your username and account details. Changed your password? They can keep trying until they figure it out.

RMT is a lose/lose for the whole community. They are vultures that don't care about anything but their own profits. Don't think for a second that they care about making your game easier. They want your money and they're not above stealing your account, nor do they care if you get banned for the practice of buying their services.

TL:DR; RMT are evil in more ways than just inflation. No player in their right mind should ever touch their services whatsoever, ever, for any reason.

EDIT: Check this link out. Blizzard did this for WoW, but the concepts apply to XIV and XI too:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/shop/anti-gold/

Edited, Aug 31st 2014 10:14pm by Lyrailis

"IRL, a worker working lots of hours gets their money from their bosses, or the government, which got money from the people/other companies/government. It is a never-ending circle where money changes hands from the people to the government back to the people. No wealth is ever "lost" and none is created either.

In fact, printing money does not make us more wealthy (look up the "Continental" currency sometime on wikipedia)." Umm thats exactly what I said. Also I never said RMT werent evil nor do I condone it Im just saying I dont see how its inflation if theyre using the exact same means to make gil that we do (except they do it with every minute of the day thus doing it more often and making more) and yes only an idiot would use a power leveling service for the exact reason you stated..... I dont think anyone dumb enough to do that, however IF they did how would an RMT hack their account if say... theyre using security token?, kinda hard to hack a 6 digit number that changes every 30-60 secs lol

yeah I did play during that time also. It was insanely high at one point yeah, but it did go back down to a reasonable level once square did something about it. I don't recall it ever being anywhere near that bad after that one time though. I didn't mention it in my post on purpose since that situation was such an extreme case. Prices became pretty stable afterwards despite their still being RMT though.

Edited, Aug 31st 2014 11:33pm by Keysofgaruda

Take a bot, hell, take several bots to (insert Lv50 raw gem camp here) and have them mine gems 24/7.

Cut the gems (don't have to be HQs, just spam Careful Synthesis to fill the progress meter in) and then vendor hundreds of gems.

"Oh, that's only 20 or whatever gill per gem." you might say.

Well, it doesn't take long to mine up a whole stack of that junk. Then that's 2,000 gil out of what, an hour's work? Multiply that by 24. Now you're up to 48,000gil. But what if you were doing it with 5 bots? Now we're up to almost 250k/day (1,750,000 in a week if you can math) from bots mining gems (that respawn infinitely). This is money made without a single keypress from the player's part. Even the 350k from a week of ONE bot running 24/7 is significant.

That is hardly the best way to make gil in XIV, but that's just a real quick "throw an example out there" type deal. I'm sure there's more ways that involve generating gil from the game.

Edited, Sep 1st 2014 12:05am by Lyrailis

Money is introduced into the system, thus lowering it's total value due to more being around, through quests, dungeons, selling drops to NPC's and exploits.

RMT are especially bad when it comes to this.

They generate items out of nothing, like with mining and farming bots. This doesnt actually do anything gil supply wise, since money simply exchanges hands, but it does ruin the total value of items due to oversupply.

They also generate gil out of nothing due to quests and npc'ing, which they have automated by now, same with dungeons for exp/gil/drops :/

And lastly exploits, in the first week alone people were mass abusing a way where they told the server they had a bilion gil, and the server simly told them "ok, sorry, my mistake, here's a bilion gil". Which simply ruined the economy from day 1. Not to mention the whole leve-quest exploits they did. Finishing one item and having it count for 300-400 turn-ins. There were plenty of people who suddenly went from level 1 to getting the achievement for making 1 milion gil through leve quests in an instant.

Bottom line, RMT are bad. They ruin economies in several ways, either by introducting more gil and making said gil worth less, or by introducing way more items than a legitimate player could, thus lowering the overal value of those things (as well as get a monopoly on it since you can out-sell anyone, or even buy and relist at whatever price).

Because if they weren't going to sell the gil that they generate (assuming they actually ARE generating it somehow via quests or NPCs or whatever, and not just obtaining it from other players), they wouldn't even be here playing the game and generating it to begin with.

I'm glad you understand how they effect inflation, but just so we're clear, this logic is incorrect. Most bots aren't used to get high ticket items that sell for millions, the majority have always been used to get items in mass quantity over a long period of time. For instance, the rusty subligar fish bots from XI, or the fleece bots when XIV first came out (you know the ones, the dudes who would sit on top of the rocks in Coerthas and immediately attack every sheep that spawned... all day, every day). These items never sold for a lot, the point was the quantity. Specifically with the XI example, those subligars could be sold straight to NPCs for large amounts, thus creating instant inflation since they just brought brand new money into the economy. Most RMT aren't about the big ticket items, because most of those require substantial work to get consistently and usually can't be botted easily. It's the low level, easily obtainable stuff that they can repeat ad infinitum that fund a lot of their efforts.

Edited, Sep 1st 2014 1:43pm by BartelX

Those might have existed, but they weren't anywhere near the best money-makers. What they were trying to do, was they were trying to keep valuable items out of the players' hands so that they could get them and sell them, thus increasing the players' desire for gil to get these items (since Gil was the only way to get these items at the time).

It was just as much about making money for themselves as it was preventing players from getting what they want (removing the competition, which is the game itself) so that the players feel pressured to buy gil because the price of these items are up in the millions of gil because of the rarity.

It was a triple-dipping kinda thing. They get to sell the said rare item, AND they prevent players from getting it from other means, AND they make the player feel a more pressing need to buy gil just to get this overpriced crap.

But for every bot at NM camps, there were 10+ more at the Subligars, logging bots, mining bots, you name it they botted it.

Now, someone above said that they prefer XI's economy......... I beg to differ. Everybody has their right to opinion, but I like XIV's style of gathering stuff for your own use. It severely lessens the amount of stuff actually sold on the market if you can go out and get everything yourself, but you're never going to stare down a recipe and go "meh... how am I ever gotta get this much ____ without breaking the bank?"

That's the reason my Goldsmithing mule in XI is only on 51 (or is that 53? I forget); I am NOT looking forward to the Mithril.....and then worse....the Gold grind, because there's just no reliable ways to get any of this junk that doesn't involve a massive gil vacuum and/or spending hours and hours and hours breaking pickaxes and mining pebbles.

In XIV, however, if I want, say Mithril......I'll go out and mine mithril. I can actually go out and gather what I need and not end up with 500 broken pickaxes and several stacks of copper and pebbles.

Once upon time, the Spanish invaded Central and South America to conquer and relieve the native Americans of their gold and take it back to Spain. It was common wisdom at the time that a strong national economy was simply measured by the amount of valuables that country accumulated and Spain was poised to become the strongest. What ended up happening instead was a severe devaluation of gold because there was so much of it coming back from the new world that gold wasn't uncommon anymore. By adding money to the system, all Spain managed to do was make their money less valuable because it became too common. In other words, it caused inflation: prices go up because money is less rare.

It was the French who later realized that amassing huge amounts of wealth wasn't how a strong economy worked at all. The economy wasn't about how much wealth in the system there was, it was about the "circulation" of currency. They chose the word "circulation" because it was analogous to blood circulating in the body. Just as poor circulation of blood causes poor health, so too poor circulation of currency causes a poor economy. So when people in the real world are working for their paychecks, it's not that new money is being created, it's that the existing money is being handed over from their employer who in turn received that from their customers who in turn received it from their employers or even the government, and of course the government gets their money from taxes.

The thing about an MMO economy is that it's not exactly the same as a real world economy. There are tasks you can perform in the game which create currency (completing quests, selling items to NPCs, etc.). This is done to simulate receiving money that already exists in the economy which is crucial for a new server. It should be offset by "taxes" collected every time you teleport or sell something on the Market Boards. What RMT do is exploit this money generation since it's often less conspicuous than amassing huge transfers of wealth. However, the effect this has on the economy is to increase the amount of money in circulation. And like the Spanish conquistadors, all they end up doing is devaluing the worth of gil so that prices rise, and cheaters come to rely on them even further to stay ahead of all the inflation (which makes the problem increasingly worse).

The pure DIY people loved the high prices, though lol.

Not saying that RMT is good, but some people profited highly. I knew a certain person who made millions of gil by just sitting in Sarutabaruta with a Lv45 THF farming basic items like beehive chips, honey, grass thread (from Yag necks), Bronze Ingots (also from Yag necks), Glass Fiber (Meteorites), Silk Thread, and Cotton.

This stuff was going for 20k-50k per stack with the Silk going for upwards of 100k per stack and it wasn't too uncommon to get a couple stacks in a 2-3h farming session. At one point, this person had ~30 million gil on them and they hardly ever left Sarutabaruta, and they self-acquired all of their crafting materials. The high prices in the economy didn't affect them much because they hardly ever bought anything.

But eventually this person wound up quitting the game because they weren't very sociable; they had a tough time getting into groups whatsoever and didn't have an endgame linkshell and eventually got bored of farming stuff. But damn, that's a lot of money for farming the newbie areas.

Now, like I said, I'm not saying RMT or their inflated prices were good for everybody, but... some players non-RMT... did profit. Mainly the farmers.

yes i re,ember the fish bots (it was one of the reasons the fishing system was changed to begin with), I also remember the mining bots (especially in mt zyloam)