It's all a result of a result of a result. You gotta cut out the disease and hope it hasn't caused too much damage. It is possible to get rid of these players. It's obvious who is making multiple trades and sales of real estate it's obvious which accounts are being used to sell houses and pass along gold without any other activity. It's not impossible to track. With so few players involved it should be a no brainer on how to even track it and make a case against it.I agree with you - RMT is bad and should not be happening. But we have to reconcile our desires with what is possible and what is not.
There is an additional contributing factor that I neglected to mention in my previous post - it's smaller shard economy and shard shields. When you are on a lesser populated shard and you do not have a shard shield to Atlantic and back there are 2 problems:
1) It's very difficult to make gold by selling stuff. Even if you regularly get nice drops, it's very difficult and time consuming to sell them. Trying to sell anything of value on a vendor is unrealistic for 90% of items out there (monopoly items like power scrolls and lvl 3 masteries are notable exceptions). Moreover, many people a reluctant to sell anything, because there is a chance they or their friends might need this item later, and there is no place to buy it (see #2)
2) When you need something, generally you can't buy it. People will not place a 20 million item on a vendor if it takes 4-6 weeks to sell (not because it's priced too high, but because that's the level of demand on a smaller shard). So, those who can, buy stuff on Atl. And those who can't, buy the stuff for green gold and have it delivered to their shard.
This is going to keep happening until the economy situation is fixed one way or the other.
My only thought on why it's not done is that a) They may actually be providing a useful service for returning players that want to come back with some stuff they can buy with real cash. B) They can't afford to ban so many accounts. If your think they can't enforce this because of staffing issues then how will they enforce any rule they make?
Shard economy, shard transfer necessity, real money in the game... it's all enabled by a lack of decisive action. The culture of enabling this play style, to me, speaks volumes on where the Devs stand with it. It could be a windfall for more than just the players.
We've already seen where EMs were abusing power.