Dancing Salvage Bans.

I like those pants QQ not as much as Trackers Kecks and Thaumas Kecks, but pld can't wear kecks =(

Running around naked is not fashion.

Oi! Those Subligar are comfy! Ok?

this came from my friend who used to be a gm who I can't name...


however on the main site's US terms of service:


They never have/will need to give you notice on a ban. This is not your property. As outlined further in chapter 2, which moreover categorized the game in a capital state up to and including modifying (RMT/Reselling/botting). The chapter is one of the primary reasons why they do not allow botting. No notice need be given. You agreed to this when you read the contract. When the contract is revised, the PlayOnline user must accept the new terms. If you find grievance with the decisions of Square Enix you may send a detailed letter to Square Enix, Inc. Legal Department, 999 North Sepulveda Blvd., 3rd Floor, El Segundo, CA 90245 USA as outlined by section 10.3 of the ToS.

We've been trying to tell him that for several pages.
But he stands by his point that he won't accept that until he's been tried and proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of his peers.

Ban4life is extremely drastic and unecessary imo regardless. This game is old as can be and let's face it. Not exactly a huge draw of new players joining ffxi. So why ban anyone whatsoever when the vast majority of the whole player base does cheat and use 3rd pt tools in some shape or form. 1mth 3mth 6mth bans would be slightly more reasonable. I don't know why SE went all emo over nothing. If cheating is such a serious crime then why not ban everyone using windower plugins and whatnot. That is against The User Agreement right? Wether SE considers it a minor or major offense is irrelevant. Some ppl have invested many years of thier time and energy into this game and discarding them like trash is extremely foolish and hurts SE themselves more than anyone else. Ridiculous that SE didn't show this sorta force towards RMTs bk in the day and even in ffxiv RMT atm yet they show zero appreciation towards thier player base. Amazing.

While i do aggre, like in any country laws and judgement, there is no, or shouldnt have, disproportional punishment.

You cant judge with same laws a serial killer with a shoptlifter. One would deserve perpetual prison, but you cant just gives perpetual prison for any and every person commiting a crime.

Even more as, at least in theory, prison isnt just meant to be punishment, but also, to rehabilitate that person to be reintegrate to society. Just the person who has no chance at all to be reintegrated is receive extreme penalty.

But thats in real world, its not supose to be the same in a game as the rules are solely created by a single entity, that also judge players and execute punishments.

But i believe banning has happen since day one. Its just that it seems to never appear to happen with players that interact in forums often. But just check rmt tactics: always playing very poor developed chars, with basic gear, basic ws, seems to prefer transfering gil through AH than with direct trade. They are aware of banning and each ban is a loss in terms of cash, no matter how you look at it, so its just the forum comunity that has been impressive blind with that regard. How many times do we see people saying SE does not care with cheaters/boters/rmts? That kind of behaviour, as well those false words spreaded made some few people careless, and they ended being caught.

And if bans have been happening since start, as you can see in stf site, that means they have too little influence with game population. Just check in forums, how many were actually banned? Maybe 10, 20 players? Probably even less, and surely a lot less than necessary to make worse the game. And possibly, the enough number to make game better, making playerbase more aware of consequences?

I like this.

I just want to add one thing. See all square is really doing is shooting themselves in the foot.


"Trying to hard" etc.

I highly doubt it, at this point you are in fact still a paying customer which is still playing Final Fantasy XI with your other character(s).
You have given no indication of taking your case to S-E, instead you keep talking to us trying to convince us that S-E's done you wrong.

By the way, considering you've only shown us a lm-11 chances are that you can probably play with your precious mule again since it's been 4 days. Which means that you can start barking at the right tree, have at it.

leviathan alone had 10-20 real players banned in the last 2 months, multiply by 16 servers and you're looking at 200+ (leviathan lowest population, so it's probably even higher)

hard to conclusively say it's bad for the game, but do know a lot of people do minimally invasive botting to supplement low playtime and their friends will have much less to do with them gone

bigger problem is probably them ignoring afk botters entirely for 2 years, it got to be common enough that it's shifted many people's idea of effort:reward to a potentially irreversible state

..job points for example can be capped in a matter of 40 hours per job(compare to merits of old, where a single jobs group 1+2 totaled 77 merits at 25k/hr.. not that much different especially if you factor in a need for general merits), thats a reasonable goal to work at but anyone who was afking 30+ JP/night isn't gonna be thrilled to join a party for 6/hour

XD you're not allowed that, only arbitration unless the sum of rewards are greater than $10,000 XD, some other section in ToS. I remember when someone sued them because their grandchild was addicted... SE won tho, since they have that lovely message at the beginning.

as for the argument "They're losing sub money" the reality is they lose even more money when rmt activity happens, which is why they'll ban even normal people for botting. Think about it, and I know this argument came up before, if Alex was still 9k instead of 7k because of the short bursts that people did to get it down to 7, don't you think a LOT more people would be doing salvage, getting more money circulated, causing people to "have more fun" because of more gil per character rather than it all dropping to the few ppl who cheat salvage. Not that anyone who buys it is bad as someone else explained (no harm done when you buy something how are you to know they cheated you just paid whoever gave you cheap).

As for botting of any kind, IMO anyone who tries to mess with the game that much should definitely be banned. In the opinion of SE again you pose 2 risks to their game:

When you are botting it is RMT like behavior so they don't care if you really are a NA player (yes NAs sell gil too) you are selling what they own, it's like borrowing an avocado plant from your friend, and selling all the avocados it produces, no harm to you done, to your friend yes.

You are messing with things that are beyond normal limitations of a player. What I mean to say is that by taking another program and slapping it on (I know you HAVE to know at least a little basic programming to be able to do bots). Doing this means you are modifying the game. Who's to say that you aren't going to take certain codes and use them in a game you create. Now in real life that's just copyright law, which is what the ToS is mostly about anyway.


that is all can't understand that don't bother XD but just clarifying as if I owned SE. Yes getting banned suck and I think they did do a lot this round, but who knows maybe the game will get funner and more gil will get passed around because things wont sell as cheap. (remember when dyna coins were like 8-10k a pop ; ;).

Im not so sure I buy into that any longer due to SE own behavior themselves. After all SE has learned from ffxi RMT why did they make ffxiv a RMT reborn? They didn't cater to final fantasy fanbase. They made a game to attract a potentially wider audience. Then by accident made it an extremely friendly environment that's perfect for RMT activity? As if they learned absolutely nothing from ffxi RMT activity. Strange.
I play on xbox. Can you tell me that Im playing the same game that everyone else plays? Right. Everyone has broken SE rules and regulations. So I don't see why ppl consider it acceptable for SE to b4l other players for minor things when they themselves are just as guilty. Idgaf bout SE rules & regulations just like nobody else does. It's a RMT joke to begin with. Always has been.

Please expand upon this because I can think of numerous measures FFXIV has in place to limit RMT activity.

Is it 100% successful? No. Have we, as players, felt detrimental effects as a result of SE's measures to combat RMT in FFXIV?

Resounding YES.

I don't play RMT reborn so much so not sure what they have or have not done yet so it's actually probly better if you expand yourself instead.
I'm not sure why it's so hard to catch RMT who blatantly w/o even trying to hide the fact they're breaking Rules & Regulations w/ shouts that spam chatlog to the point real players cannot communicate in shouts or /tells every :30? w/ same offers. The only thing FFXIV is missing is ingame RMT billboard advertisement.
All SE did was give us 200? possible mules to blistadd. iirc

Botting does not equate to RMT and cheating is cheating, no matter what you're doing.

Except there are multiple accounts of people who did the salvage exploit with HQ bosses, who were literally generating 3k alex per day per character, who were slapped with 3 day bans, and their accounts didnt get lit up with any rollbacks either.

I do think the lax punishment from the salvage stuff is what started all of this. There was a long and angry thread on the JP side of the official forum (plus a thread or two on the NA forum as well).

I would say it didn't help. It had an effect where people saw a major violation get treated with a lax punishment as motivation to commit more infractions. Due to the backlash of the lax punishments from Salvage PoS hacking they are now punishing in a manner to satisfy those complaints...

Problem is the lack of consistency in discipline.

Is it possible that they wanted to bait out people that will be repeat offenders?

Given dwindling subscriptions, and assuming collective roll-backs were off the table as they take time and effort to do, it seems like a possibility to give these people a chance to stop.

It also would have given them a quick stop-gap while they develop a more sophisticated way to detect exploitation.

What doesn't hang one guy might hang you.

When you can get thousands of alex per run, with minimal effort on a throw away and funnel it to a main, no one is going to stop doing it.

If they would just fix their ***. These issues would arise much less often.

But as it's been stated before, the only thing Square is consistent about, is their inconsistency.

People who got banned are mad that the people who did the same thing months ago didn't get banned.

Okay.

I don't think SE has a guidebook on how they mete out punishment. Whatever their flavor of the month is, they'll respond accordingly.

Did the sun rise this morning? -> Yes -> Fck it, let's ban a few people
Did I get a raise for last month -> Yes -> Fck it, let's ban a few people

Should you be mad if you were banned for cheating? No, as your punishment fit the crime. Should you be happy if you were temp'd for cheating? Yes, rejoice. You got a slap on the wrist where you should have been banned. In general, you should learn from your mistakes. If you got temped for cheating previously, got suspended, and then got perma'd this time around, the fck were you thinking? You didn't learn your lesson.

SE's sense of justice tends to emulate the Criminal Justice system in general, so I can't fault them on their lack of consistency.

Just stop cheating until SE is done feeling the need to axehammer. This will all die down, and something up with spring up in it's place. I give it til Summer to where people start botting Legions.

Your main is next. Live in fear!

I'm admittedly in this camp. I got so accustomed to botting my job points, sparks, and what have you that after being banned, regardless of how tempting it may be to create a new character, I know it'll ultimately be an unfulfilling experience for me. Don't take that as a legitimate complaint, mind you- I'm aware that I violated the ToS and was punished accordingly. It's just a matter of that being a large part of the enjoyment factor for me(as bizarre as that may sound to an outside observer), and knowing it now comes with legitimate risk, my motivation is nowhere to be found

So due to dwindling subs, they will have left those accounts who made 3k alex daily unbanned, but start banning anyone whos farming CP solo for more than 2 hours "cause they might be botting"?

They weren't going to get anyone to come-back to the game by banning people that got "cheesy" mythics.

If they "suspend" (using the phrase "72-hour ban" is moronic as we have better words in the English language to express the same meaning), those players are pretty likely to return to enjoy their mythics. The only subscriptions lost will be outraged players.

SE knows how many people were suspended so I would guess they hedged on suspended accounts > outraged accounts.

Now, having sent out a nice warning shot to all the salvage exploiters, they ban w/o question.

We don't have numbers in front of us to determine whether or not it's "cost-effective" but I'd venture to guess SE does and made the more "cost-effective" call. It is LITERALLY their job to do so.

So you cheated, were banned, and now that you'd actually have to work hard for everything over again WITHOUT cheating, you're not motivated anymore.

Okay.

Guys need to really put the video game back into perspective. There is such a huge culture of getting ahead of everyone else by having the shiniest weapons first, by having the most shinies, and getting the highest numbers everywhere. When you no longer look and feel cool among your friends, the fun ends. That sounds exactly like an unhealthy addiction.

Competition is great, but when it drives you above and beyond the norm to be "great" and "have fun", it's likely time to just pick up another new hobby. Its probably not a bad idea to have 3-4 different hobbies to fall back on, so when one isn't available or fails you, you can do something else. Reading/Writing, Bodybuilding, sports, family, vacationing, education, etc all can provide relief from this game. I know it does for me.

lolragequit player base? jealousy. That is extremely funny and sad to think such ppl even exist.