I’m sorry but there is a serious contradiction here in the issue being addressed, and in he way it’s being addressed.
Clearly your one true objective is to keep the market/economy as pure as possible. This is clear by your measures being taken to combat RMT. Here’s the problem though…your measures are so decidedly overbearing that you essentially eliminate the desire to partake in it from the get-go.
Even when you have a token active, you’re limited to a number of trades that is possible to deplete in less than a week if you’re leveling with friends. The mechanics behind how the Market works is so confounded and arbitrary that it basically discourages its own use.
What this leads to is essentially nobody wanting to bother with any of it. They will ignore trading, thus ignoring social interaction, and ignore the market, thus eliminating their influence on the economy. The less influence from players there is on the economy, the less of an economy there is period…
So what you’re doing here is discouraging the act of partaking in the economy, while at the same time saying that what you’re doing is in an effort to protect it. There’s nothing to protect!
On the other side of the coin, I can almost guarantee you that most people would probably rather run the risk of inflated economies and possible economic effects as a result of RMG, than suffer the restrictions you have found as being necessary to combat it. A game’s retention is all about game play, and when you force game play to suffer at such a level, you hurt your retention rate, and that means you lose players more than you gain them. Yes, I consider economy dynamics as a part of MMO gameplay, and apparently so does IMC as they are clearly working so very hard to protect it.
The point is, if you make your system so uninviting, and so exclusive that there are no players on the field, there’s no reason to keep playing ball. We can take a little bit of rain (RMT), but if you start throwing red flags and blowing the whistle at every single action, the game gets irritating and less fun to watch (sorry for the sports analogy).
So this is a bit of strange recommendation but here’s my solution.
Remove 1:1 trading restrictions.
Remove the market limitations.
The benefits of just these 2 things would spell not only a huge up-tick in IMC’s favorability rating among the players, but would enhance the entire experience of social interaction within the game in more ways than one.
The bad side? RMT is not hindered by your methods in doing what they do, and to that I say: Oh well? Many MMORPGs deal with RMT, and you going to such lengths to do something that not even the successful MMOs on the market have ever been able to get rid of completely is not helping, only hurting the experience for honest players.
Your solutions are ham-fisted, and overbearing, and I’m really disappointed that there actually appears to be extensive logic that you have discussed internally as to why these solutions were put in to place…because I consider the logic to be utterly flawed and not well thought-out.
TLDR; we can take a little RMT influence on the economy if it means being able to have a more free economy period. I think we’re all willing to accept some of the disadvantages of unhindered RMT companies, if it means we can trade with friends and use the market in a sensible way that most online games employ.