I understand you guys are talking about. but there actually are some players who abuse FreeUser.
like, when you search 'patron' in AH, you can see tons of Patron marks which just one person registered with a lot of FreeUser accounts.
I think that's spamming whether some of those would be sold or not; of course, there are hundreds of much cheaper patrons in AH.
Do you think that's normal? although keep FreeUser being able to register item permanently, we should have some solution.
That's someone who bought those items most likely on a member/VIP account and posted it on a "FreeUser" account. That doesn't mean that the FreeUsers should be punished.
You could also turn around and say it's the problem of people who have more than one account and abuse events or exploit sales i.e. patron half off sales. But in the event of patrons, that's someone still putting real life money into the game in some way, shape, or form or gathering up resources and saving it until a particular point of profit, which they earned in one way or another.
The only way to "abuse" the FreeUser that I'm seeing is the fact that you get 5(or 10, I can't remember) listings and then making a billion accounts to sell all your stuff at the same time on AH, which is still a hassle to do in and of itself. When, again, using your example of patrons, you can just skip over those expensive listings and ignore them and eventually they will go away.
Someone is going to get punished for no reason because someone else decided to exploit something. Should we push the "agenda" that every other server claims we have where we're a "pay to play" server and punish those who do not buy MyShop en masse or every month by limiting FreeUser? Or punish those who make several accounts/dual account just because some people "spam list"? Should we also stop people who have multiple shops in Mega? To what end do we do this to?
FreeUsers also can't do it permanently. I haven't been able to compare between Free vs Member/VIP etc. but they all eventually expire within a month's notice. The best we can do is maybe make it a scale like this
Free User -> Links public for 2weeks
Member -> Links public for 3weeks
VIP -> Links public for 1month (aka duration of VIP, if I'm not mistaken)
This doesn't solve a user's supposed "quitting" when the relistings could be a number of factors (i.e. someone else relisting, they coming back and relisting, the owner of the account going under a different name without the consumer [luxmea in this case]'s knowledge, etc.) and not just "FreeUsers have extended public to private link time", to paraphrase.