Equipment Exploit

Agreed!

Hope the solution they'll come up with won't completely destroy Gearswap and similar addons though.
But I doubt they have the means, resources, manpower and time to go that far, right?

Honestly, all they need to do is add a slot check to equipset on the server side. While it's entirely possible they change the packets or memory in some manner, it's extremely unlikely it will reduce the flexibility provided by 'legitimate' packet based equipment addons. The simplest and most effective fix would not even require an update to windower/ashita/gearswap/ashitacast.

Honestly, if this was such a huge issue for people, then it would be fixed by Windower and not by SE.

I, for one, look forward to the upcoming bans.

Windower can't fix it.

It's not doable through gearswap as is, that means people are using their own addons or a modified gearswap to accomplish it.

If byrth were to patch gearswap to make it more difficult to modify in some way, people would just use their old copy. By now they've had the sense to back it up.

If windower team were to patch the packet hook to directly prohibit equipping the same item in multiple slots, people would just use ashita.

If windower and ashita were to both patch the packet hook, those intelligent enough to do so would write their own packet hooks.

At that point, they can accomplish it and nothing anyone but SE does can stop it.

Therefore, it needs to go through SE.


Seriously, this was explained on page 1. You've been trying to ***up this thread the entire time, I have no doubt you already knew all of this.

Tbf I assumed they decomposed equipment into the individual equipment instructions and passed them into the hypothetical equip function, thus subjecting them to all the same checks. Apparently not, though.

Gearswap would need to be modified in at least two places to make this work the way people want it to work without causing some really stalrange behavior, so I am not too worried about people using it for this.

So, you are saying that people would go out of their way to cheat without using Windower or Ashita to do so? Isn't that obvious?

It seems like the only people who care about this are those who run and/or have a very vested interest into Windower. Like you.

Most of us don't really give a ***, because not many of us can do this, and in all honesty, we are the ones who benefit from this the most because of supply/demand economics. More supply = less price for HQs = more people able to get HQ gear.

Actually, I don't care about people cheating. It's their account, if they want to cheat, let them. In case you forgotten, my first post here is questioning as to why you were accusing nameless people of cheating without providing much proof, and then you provide only one screenshot of one character and then accuse any/everyone who has HQ'd and sold stuff as possible cheaters.

You don't seem to understand the futility of this whole action. Square Enix isn't going to look at this website, not enough people care to force SE to fix this, and, by all means and testimonies, they are either going to fix it and/or ban people exploiting it. But in all honesty, nobody cares. Except you.

Is he really not breaking any forum rules? This is ridiculous.

Just because you benefit from something cheap doesn't mean the game as a whole benefits from having a massive exploit available. Anyone trying to legitimately craft is negatively impacted by this. It could also negatively impact you(people duoing omen or other high end content using hugely overpowered equipment sets would lower the price of things you might farm from that content).

Just because SE doesn't read this forum doesn't mean it's not going to help draw attention. The more people know about it, the more people will send reports, make OF posts, use the exploit visibly, or just generally bring it into the light. I also wouldn't necessarily say they don't read it, as Camate was well known to both read and post here. It's entirely possible someone else was given that task now that he's resigned.

If it doesn't interest you, cool. It obviously interests other people or there wouldn't be about 6 pages of speculation/useful posts. Unfortunately, the other 3 are you trying really really hard to say this thread shouldn't exist while bumping it and contributing to it's length.

If you want cheaper items due to an exploit, also cool. It's far from a unique viewpoint. However, the rules of the game state that the exploit shouldn't be used, and crafters have reason to want it gone.

Finally, I haven't used windower in over 3 years and while I speak to and respect most of their dev team, I have not contributed in any way to it's development.

Arguing with you is not breaking any rules

Yes, people who craft are negatively effected by this. But in all honesty, who do you know who is exploiting this? Can you even name one real character, and not from a screenshot of a mule (obvious mule who is named Magicshop or whatever).

You would be more productive and have a faster response time for this if you report it to GMs and STF. Which, by the sounds of it, you did. So did a couple of other people. It would be faster if you actually named names too, even for this thread, instead of saying "this could happen, but I don't know who does it."

Actually, the majority of this thread is speculation about what items could be duped in slots and their effects. Basically, taking this one step further from just crafting to using it in battles. Your "awareness" thread just created more speculation and even more people who could possibly use this for their own benefit, instead of shutting it down. Kindof counterproductive, don't you think?

Don't care. If it's gone, fine. If it stays for a couple more months, fine.

Don't you have several mules/bots with mythics and such, or am I thinking of somebody else who claimed such activity recently? Not that I care anyway.

RMT have been offering thousands of dollars for a Kupo Shield account for this reason. Only one of them needs to fall into their hands before this becomes a huge problem. You seem to think that access to this exploit is gated to only a few people who understand windower/ashita. It's not, it's incredibly easy. The following example only took me about 5 minutes to write.

More people banned means less FFXI players. :(

They just start fresh.

It would take them a couple of days to get to 99, and about a week after to get back into the game.

This doesn't seem to be of any concern to SE. We're talking about a company that has commanded a monthly subscription for 14 years without blinking an eye.

Imagine a mass ban on a low pop server like Cerberus where the average daily numbers hovers around 250-300. You'd think SE would care about keeping each remaining server thriving and active as much as possible, but...

Nope.

As I mentioned before, the stick doesn't always come right away. People are often canned months after their offenses whenever the GM's/STF has had time to sift through the evidence of EACH offending player and have made a determination based on just cause.

If I had names to name, I would name them. However, anyone who is smart enough to exploit this also likely has the foresight to put the equipment on in their mog house, craft in their mog house, and return to a normal set before exiting to sell their items(or just never leave MH and send to other chars to sell). That means that an intelligent user of this exploit will never be noticed by players, and SE will have to get involved to catch them.

As far as evidence it's being used, the fact RMT are offering thousands for shield is strong support that it's known. Even stronger support is the amount of jinxed/voodoo items that have reached price conditions where:

expected HQ rate with best possible gear * value of HQ
+
expected NQ rate with best possible gear * value of NQ

is significantly less than total cost of materials.

Yes, people can be stupid and undercut to the point they're literally taking a loss on a crafted item. However, this happening on such a widespread scale is a pretty big indicator something bigger is going on.

This would count as a player warning. And I'd have to delete it. So please don't.
Just report them to a GM.

Facts

Why is this guy still posting? He is clearly trolling this thread and should be topic banned at the least, so annoying to see his posts in here.

Some things are easier to track than others. For example, I have had a 100% monopoly on buying a certain bottleneck item from AH for some hexed gear for a reasonably long time. An item that is prohibitively hard to farm in bulk quantities necessary to do large batch synths of said item. In the past 2 weeks 3 copies of the resulting Jinxed item have appeared for sale for prices that would indicate a desire to unload the item quickly.

Definitive proof? Nah. Does it really matter? Nah. But if you craft, you probably have a good idea of what is going on within your own server.

KN's been topicbanned for obvious reasons.

Sorry on the slow trigger, I'd hoped me showing up would remove the need to actually resort to that

Argh. I can't believe a crafter is going to have to break this down for the buyers out there, but apparently, someone has to.

I was talking to a fellow crafter last night about this, and here's the best way I can explain it to those of you who think this only hurt crafters.

Scenario-

Player Avesta is a really bad guy. He's a taru,we shouldn't be surprised. He's also good at coding, and has figured our how to equip 15 weavers torques at once. He cranks out 10 Adhemar Bonnets+1. But see, Avesta is no dummy. He doesn't list them all. He stats shouting on a dummy character to sell one at a price lower than any other clothcrafter can afford. He does this for the first 3,until his competitors finally realize, they can't afford to even make that synth.

Then, he waits a few weeks. And starts selling his remaining 7 at a higher price than they should be, because he has destroyed his competition. If they ever appear again, he can afford to undercut for one or two, but then jack it right back up. Eventually, he'll jeep materials at a price that only makes sense for him, and he'll control the market, and you'll pay what he decides.

Eh, in practice I doubt that would ever happen. Most of the time exploits are abused, they're treated like a cash grab because you never know when they will be fixed.

But, but... Avesta wasn't a crafter! He was just an expert RDM soloer who showed us how to single-handedly defeat Byakko (and a slew of other NMs) by himself!

I mean, isn't it widely known that SE made a special pair of bangles named after him?

Jokes aside, your post does make sense.

So reported these "people" to SE or GMs yet? I'm
Just curious since stil SE has not publicy talked about this let alone nothing in the bug thread. It's not like SE goes to FFxiah for "issues" to fix.

SE deleted all the posts about it on the OF because they don't want people to know it's there and exploit it. They aren't going to make their own post for the same reason.

Once they have time/resources to patch it, they will do a maint and correct it(likely with no note or mention of it).

Sorry I'm super late to this. Why have I not seen this patched in the update notes from this past month? I don't read a whole lot of these threads so its possible I missed it.

They almost never acknowledge exploits, they patch them silently.

That doesn't make sense they posted plenty about the salvage exploit let alone they even detailed how people were doing it and if they do it they will ban you. Let alone stating what or why they deleted it is a huge assumption. I just talked to a different GM today he states "it's not an issue." The one 2 days ago says it's a bug will get fixed in next update. Today "not an issue." Either way people if you do it you might get caught and banned. Others keep doing what you're doing the end over with.

Beneficial and sometimes harmful bugs tend to get fixed before updates. Couple weeks ago they actually completely removed the npc until they could figure out what they problem was from the zone and then took down the zone to fix it.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/51880-FINAL-FANTASY-XI-Updated-%28Dec.-26%29

Yea, they posted about salvage exploit.

Others they have fixed but haven't posted about(in no particular order):

-Ability to buy items you couldn't afford and go into negative ampoules from einherjar npc.

-Ability to withdraw infinite gil from the coffer in mog gardens.

-Ability to get unlimited assault tags. Ability to get unlimited imprimiturs.

-Arbitrary item generation from meeble burrows npcs(including afterglow weapons)

-Item generation with a manipulatable buffer in walk of echoes.(Could create copies of any item on any character you have, even going cross-character.)

-Item generation with a slightly manipulatable buffer in Provenance(Could choose from any ID that could be represented by the bitmask of xxxxxx????????????????).

-Arbitrary item generation from imperial standing NPCs.

-Arbitrary item generation from cruor npc in abyssea-paradox.

-Unlimited cluster withdrawal from the crafting moogles.

Almost every one of these could cap gil in under a day, some in a matter of a couple hours. There are probably more I'm forgetting. Some were patched by emergency maintenances with no note. Some had the NPCs removed and later reinserted with little explanation. I don't think they revealed the extent of the exploit in any of these cases, certainly not before a patch was made.

Thanks for that link, I couldn't find it. I was wondering how someone already had a +3 item a week or so ago, though it could just mean they were spamming Omen on RUN since release.

But now that I have just learned duping cards was possible, not surprised at anything I see anymore.