Vanadiel, what's not to love? There's magic, moogles and catgirls... its got everything an entire expansion world literally at your finger tips. Want to be a Dragoon? Warrior? Or my personal favorite a Redmage? You might be asking yourself what is this game? None other than Final Fantasy XI.
Let me start by saying FFXI will forever hold a special place in my heart for many many reasons, but thats not why we're here perhaps another post. Instead we're to talk about something more specific, RMT or Real-Money Traders.
In the beginning years of the game often while trying to painstakingly make your way to Jueno for the first time to receive your chocobo license or leveling your subjobs, you would come across a few curious players that sort of just stuck out. They were often scantily clad in little to no armor, being chased by hordes of goblins and/or had seemingly random names that were just a jumble of letters. Most of the time however you could find them in their usual spot just outside Bastok hunting a low leveled Notorious Monster named Leapin' Lizzy in hopes for one item in particular with an extremely low drop rate called Leaping Boots. They would then take said boots and put them on the in-game Auction House at an increasingly inflated price, as they effectively soon created a monopoly on the item they were free to control its price which in turn caused other items to inflate.
Gil, as the monetary coin found within FFXI was extremely difficult to earn. Quests and missions often times rewarded you with Gil but in very low amounts of 5-50k for upwards to 6-10hrs of play time and with low level items like Leaping Boots selling for 1-3M Gil it made for a very tough very realistic market. This created the perfect environment for RMT to grow into the scourge that would one day penetrate every corner of my beloved game.
The Auction House served as a market place where players could buy and sell nearly any item in the game unless it was 'exclusive' to your character. Here a player could place their hard earned items on sale in hopes to one day buy something better, but with a stack of 12 Silk selling from 2-8k at a time and it taking 1-2 hours to farm (actually this means slaughtering thousands of mobs in this case Crawlers, but farming sounds nicer) that one day might be quite a few off, so thats where Real Money Traders came in.
Real-Money Traders or RMT, were a group of players that would play for the sole purpose of gaining Gil, as much as they can and by any means possible. Hunting NMs, HNMs(Hyper Notorious Monsters), farming, hacking accounts, ect. Then you as a player who doesn't have the time to live your life 24/7 on the time suck that was FFXI could go to an outside website and buy Gil for wait for it.... Real Money. Much like the micro transactions we find in most mobile games these days you could purchase large sums of ingame coin in packages that they would then send to you via Moogle Mail found in your Mog Home ingame. Thats right these RMT little did they know were paving the way as crypto miner pioneers.
