SE refusing to ban gilsellers..... (Hmmm...)Follow

To give an example of what a "casual" player goes through to anyone who might actually read this, I've got a LS mate "Dany" who works 2 jobs and raises 3 kids, and is getting ready to be married for his second time. On top of all that he LOVES FFXI. He wants to succeed at this game, and he wants to be recognized as a "good" player. However, he doesn't have the RL money to buy gil. Nor does he really have time to find parties and level as he only gets to play a couple hours a night. So... he spends most of those couple hours a night mining, crafting (at least 5 crafts that I know of are at 60+), and fishing. After about 2 months of doing nothing but these "money makers" my friend has worked up a total of 506,000 gil.

Is that a lot of gil? Sure, to him. Can he buy all the gear he needs to become the type of character he wants to be? Not when one of the most basic items he needs costs 2,000,000 gil. His hard earned 500k adds up to basically squat. This is not a run-of -the-mill example, this is a real person who plays and has been in my LS since the US release.

Now that I've properly labeled the problem and fed a true example I'd like to go ahead and post a solution. If the biggest tribute to inflation in the game is the amount of gil floating around the server then the best way to go about fixing it would be to get rid of a lot of that "worthless" gil. Now there are probably several different ways that SE could go about this, but I've come up with two that I'm going to list here.

1: The absolute quickest way to reduce the amount of gil on the server would be to simply delete gil. Have a GM go in and delete gil in EVERY character's inventory. Kill all of it and have people start from scratch or kill half of it and have people work back up, if/when it gets bad, do it again. Now this method, though quick, will probably **** off a lot of players and make people quit, but here it is for all to see.

2: This method would take a lot longer, but it's the most user-friendly of the two, also happens to be my personal favorite. Introduce several item-vendors that sell items SIMILAR to these NM drops. Maybe sell a pair of level 14 boots with DEF3 DEX+2 AGI+2 for about 500,000gil. Are they as good as Leaping Boots? No, so people will still farm up Leaping Boots. Are they viable option for someone who doesn't want to spend 2,000,000 for Leaping Boots, who has only leveled jobs that NOONE will take to the BCNM (like DRG), and who doesn't have enough time in-game to farm up Bounding Boots and still get into an exp party? Sure. On top of that, however, when someone pays that 500,000 gil guess what? That gil vanishes back into cyber-space. So... you're keeping the "casual" player happy, reducing the amount of Gil on the server (and thus reversing inflation, or at least halting it), and adding one more way to stop the gilsellers/buyers.

SE could even take this another step farther by making players have to do a quest before they even have access to the vendors that sell these items. You could put them out in Tavnazia, or Sky, or make a new area that a player can only access after certain "events" have been completed.

Everything here is, of course, just an example and SE would be welcome to set whatever prices, and create as many of these "lesser" items, as they wished. Think about it though. They could make a "weaker" version of every item in the game if they wanted. Who'd spend 20 million on a Peacock Charm when they could buy something slightly higher level or slightly weaker at 2 million, and when they did that's 1 million less on the sever, the value of gil goes up.