(08-30-2016, 08:17 AM)Arvid Greave Wrote: See, the market economy and the housing economy are very different things. The market is very fast. I can see 5 items up, buy them up, and resell them the same day for double the price and that's perfectly fine and well. Or I can buy 3 items, price them very very high, wait for someone to undercut me and then I can undercut them and make a profit over a week or so. Not against any rules at all. I'm not talking about buying a house just to flip it for a profit. That guy didn't get a profit. Sure ok yes it's against the rules, so ban him, but why aren't the actual house flippers who already have 900mil+ from doing this NOT getting banned? I don't know where any profit relinquishing came from. I'm not sure where you were going with that.
Then we got the people buying smalls for 20mil, selling for 60mil the same week. Keep an eye on reddit and you can see the same plot go up and down as someone tries to flip it again and again. 160mil a medium, far more for large and that is absolutely ridiculous. We all know there are people out there who buy only to flip. And they never flip cheap. How do you get proof of it to report it unless you're part of the deal and therefore on the chopblock yourself? Nothing is being done about those transactions. No one at SE is batting an eye. Why not? Why should anyone have to report a transaction of over 40mil gil at all? That doesn't show up on their side and raise any red flags of RMT? Why aren't they reinforcing their own rules? Why do we have to report them/have them report one another in the first place? You can try, certainly you can try, but you risk yourself reporting them by making a party finder saying you're buying. But HOW are these large masses of gil going by unnoticed? They just ..don't care. I don't know what else it is. Because houses are moving still. And for far more than they ever did before the 'NO HOUSE SELLING' rules came around. 15-20mil used to be standard for small houses but not anymore.
I mean the last time I had to report someone for using slurs in a dungeon I literally had to look up the guy's server on lodestone for the GM. The chatlogs, timezone, location of my character was not enough. The GMs don't have the tools for this? They can't open up the lodestone and check the character's name for the server, and where that character was at the time? What kind of customer service are we paying them for? I've never been asked on any other mmo to do half of the GM's work for them. But it certainly somewhat explains why they also don't really care about all of this house flipping going on. Hopefully we get as many apartments as we think we're going to and here's hoping they're a little more than just private rooms.
It is incorrect to say that no one at SE is batting an eye when they called for people to report house flipping and selling plots for profit in a live letter. Clear as day in a live letter. SE is not to blame for you not doing as they asked when someone violates the terms of service. Further, the fact that a similar behavior is allowed on the market board, does not mean that house flipping is in anyway justified when they have said "We don't like this, don't do it." It is specious reasoning to say that they don't care at all when they have bothered to clarify the point in a live letter, and given a method of action that you as a player can take to help them solve it. One can come up with as many reasons as they like as for why a behavior against the ToS might be justified in their eyes, at no point does this truly justify anything. It also doesn't change the fact that a behavior is against the ToS.Â
One's personal experiences with a GM do not encompass the entire experience of everyone who has reported anyone for any reason. I'm sorry you have had a negative experience with a harassment claim, but that does not justify people breaking the ToS at any point. Houses are moving still, sure. People still buy gil with real money and bully people with parsers, too. People speed all the time on the road irl, but saying "everyone else was doing it" is not a defense that holds up in court, ever. Someone getting away with something is not an indication that SE doesn't care. It is just an indication they haven't been caught yet. If they are not being caught because you refuse to report the people doing it for reason x, then you have given them tacit approval. In doing so, it can be argued that you become part of the problem.Â
Snatching up a house to inflate the price to make a large level of profit when relinquishing the plot is about the same sort of act as when that douche bag bought the rights to an AIDS treatment medication and jacked the price up. Yes, you can argue that it is simple supply and demand, and that it is all SE's fault for a flawed housing system. This does not make the action right. Particularly when the people who created and own the game say it is wrong. Flawed systems do not absolve an individual from making bad moral or ethical decisions.
