Medals - A Discussion REBORN!

To be honest, I haven't told anyone at SE yet because it goes so deep that it's impossible to be repaired. Most of the big names you see on these forums would just be gone (except the RMTs).

The whole game is broken and worse, the trust.

I'm PMing you right now.

Ban everyone, shut down the servers. Burn the source code.

Plant a little hedge row with a tombstone plaque. 'this is not a sacred place, there is nothing of value here'

It's not technically duping.
It's packets-manipulation.
You manipulate the packets to make Aurix believe you traded him 100 of the correct cards (even if you didn't) and he gives you back a proper medal.
It's how it works and it's specific about Aurix.

Things like that (manipulating packets so you make an NPC or a ??? believe you traded something that you didn't) have been in game for ages but, at least the important ones, have always been patched by SE over time.
Appearently they didn't patch this one related to Aurix, yet.


Feel free to share more detailed information if you have any and want to correct anything of what I said.
I don't see any sort of additional influx of Detritus on the market though. I've been carefully monitoring the market and you can clearly see the difference, for instance, between Medals, Shards and Detritus.

This is just a sad post. That's not a comment towards you, just sad in general.

The only way this gets fixed if we MAKE SE fix it - pronto. And I dont even know what it is.

Which makes me feel powerless. It's like an elite group in the shadows is in on it, and I'm begging for a whistle blower.

This sucks.

If someone ones to anon me, I'll blow it up, without dropping names. I'll take it to every God damn *** forum and out a stop to it. I'll google translate to Japanese and post it there since NOBODY HAS DONE THAT YET AS OF 3:03 AM TUESDAY MORNING.

Then this must be it then. But Senk alluded to it being grander in scale and impossible to be fixed. Almost like there was no hope. But you're saying this has happened before... and it has been fixed.

We're out of the loop. I'm watching the thread view count go up but not many people posting. Somewhere, there's a group on discord laughing at us for trying to put a stop to this.

Again, not even judging, especially if you're RL finances are so bad that you have to sell gil for the pennies that it is. I'm not mad at the people, I'm mad at the fact that this exists and everyone is just shrugging.

But the server would have to check if you actually have the items (and remove them from your inventory data etc) or are you telling me that their server code is so bad that they just "belive" the client package without checking if the data makes sense (is valid)?

Things like that (manipulating packets to make the game believe you traded something you didn't) have been in the game since forever.
Some (most? the "important" ones at least) have been fixed I think.

The worst ones were tricks that allowed you to do the opposite, manipulate the "return" item ID from an NPC that gives you back something, so that instead of the items he's supposed to give you, he trades you whatever item ID you manipulate through packets, allowing you to receive even RMEA back.
As I mentioned tricks like this have been long gone since SE moved that packet information completely server-side and, ad such, impossible to manipulate through client packets.


I'm not sure if it's technically possible to do something similar for the Aurix situation where, as I mentioned before, you manipulate Client>Server packets to make the Server (NPC) you traded him something that you actually didn't.
I believe it's totally possible to do that and that SE has done that in the past but I'm not 100% sure, you should ask Cair or Comeatmebro, those two guys are real experts when it comes to stuff like this.


I'm not sure what Senk is talking about.
Either he's talking about things he doesn't really know about, maybe completely out of naivety and with good intentions, or maybe he means about what I just described.
But, as I mentioned, I think it should be possible for SE to fix it and they have done it in the past, they simply forgot to do it again for the "new" NPC Aurix they added 2 years ago.

The server should check stuff like that. It's how SE "fixed" things like these in the past, as far as I know. When they do that it becomes impossible to completely manipulate that sort of information through client-sent packets.

They appearently forgot to do that with Aurix? That's my wild guess at least.
Again: should ask Cair or Comeatmebro. They have deep knowledge of how some people exploited stuff like these in the past and that's how I assumed this medal-thing must be something similar to the past situations, where SE simply forgot to add this additional "server check".



Edit:
To go more in depth, I think the trick is not about pretending you are trading an item that you're not actually trading to Aurix, which would probably be more complex because of already existing server checks.
I think it's more likely about item quantity. Like you trade 2 cards in 2 separate slots and you make Aurix believe that one of those slots has actually 99 cards and not just 1.
On a hunch I think it works like this.
That way you can go through the "item check" because you actually have those items and are actually trading them, but you trick the server with the quantity.

It could be something completely different of course, I'm just saying it's probably something like I said.

I just wonder how much this has shortened the lifespan of XI. Since if this really is so big, and has been this big for 2 years now (which we dont know), you would think it has a direct influence on the rate at which people aquire Dyna D upgrades for relic, since you can buy upgrade items with medals.
Imagine how much longer people might have worked on their reforged gear if this dupe didnt happen.

My point exactly. The bleeding needs to stop.


Only Mr. Happy can save us now.

What "lifespan"? This game has been on autopilot for years and the only thing keeping it going is the players who continue to support it. SE would have pulled the plug a long time ago if not for its still significant popularity despite it's age. It makes them money, they will keep it going.

I don't think this is as big as some people want to believe.
It's been around for a long time, probably in the careful hands of a truly restricted number of people who made a keen and somewhat moderate use of the trick to avoid completely crashing the market.

It's only recently that, appearently, the trick become known to more and more and more people over a short amount of time who decided to exploit it badly.
First they were careful about it, then they had the bad idea, all at the same time, to use that trick much more because there was a campaign active, thinking if I do this during the campaign nobody will understand I'm cheating on these medals and everyone will believe it's simply a result of the ongoing campaign!

Too bad that, appearently, too many people had the same idea at the same time and, as you can see, the market crashed badly with thousands of medals in bazaar and the price reduced by over 50%.


Yet this thing never happened, this much, before.
Which kinda confirms what I just described, i.e. that this trick wasn't really as widespread as some think it was.
And also that, for some reason, it wasn't really thoroughfully applied to Shards/Voids (which you can obtain by trading Aurix medals) either, otherwise you would've seen an artificial saturation of shards on the market, whereas if you look at what happened over the past 2 years, the saturation of shards/voids has been pretty "natural", meaning that the number of "artificially" produced shards/voids wasn't really that huge.



So to answer you: yes it had an obvious impact on the game economy. No it wasn't really huge, until people got stupid recently and overdid it with medals.

It directly impacts what goals people have in a game and as such when they get bored of it and quit cause they completed all their gearsets.
edit: I obviously did not mean the lifespan from SE's point of view.

Which campaign?

So you would have preferred it take longer to finish your relic sets? That whole system is a chore to begin with.

That’s not what’s going on, I knew as much as you until yesterday, it’s much more easier than you think.

Last month there was a Divergence Cards campaign, i.e. the amount of cards you would get was higher than normal.
More cards => more medals.
I ended up with over 8 medals of each type just with our regular cards split/sell we do at the end of each Divergence run in my LS.
There have been campaign like these in the past.
When it happens the price of Medals always went a bit down, but never as much as this time of course, and I believe it's for the reason I explaiend in my previous post.

Too many people thought nobody would've noticed their medals-trick if they overused it during a campaign.
Too bad too many people had the same idea at the same time, appearently.

Then if you know more please do share what you know for the good of the community, or are we supposed to trust you just like that?

I'm not trying to be mean at all or to disrespect you, but please try to get in our shoes.
Would you trust someone who comes in a post and claims he knows god-forbidden secrets that no human mind could ever fathom, but then doesn't give proper details to support his claims?

Plot twist: Organized hoax by a group of people with tons of banked gil to cross-server jump and buy up every medal for a period. Gather back on Asura. Sell cheap for short time. Recap gil on bazaar characters so no more sell cheap because capped gil char can't sell things out of bazaar.

Cry wolf in yell. Yell a lot. Have multiple LV1 mules yelling too to fan flames.

Do this during both the weekend and during free-to-play so returning players are there like "how are things". Asura sheep stampede. Get the community worried. People gather for popcorn with their eyes twinkling with the thoughts of unlimited gil.

Take to the forums as well. Make up complex stories of duping (because alex duping was a thing; adds merit) and when that grows stale, change song to item trade manipulation (based off of the ancient fishing result manipulation exploit of 2003).

Sit back. Watch the world burn.

Honestly, I never post if I don’t know, or I say as much. I didn’t know yesterday and asked for info, I got it.

I can’t go into details because of the scale. If I did, then the game outright dies and everyone with it. I’ll try to think about it today, but what Thorny did is the best thing to do for now.

All I can say is that you can’t fix this exploit unless you roll back to something like 2012, not sure, I was out of the loop back then. It’s THAT bad.

Are you going to ignore my PM?

*** this.

I have a feeling all these people who know about it and claiming that it cant be fixed - dont want it fixed.

You're killing me. And scaring me.

Is your reasoning for keeping quiet because your reputation would be ruined among your core group of friends? Because you would be a hero in the eyes of the public.

Or are you scared? Scared of what would truly become of FFXI if this became large scale knowledge? I'm not picking a fight. I'm genuinely curious.

The trick is real. I can tell these folks who know about it are good people in RL. They ain't trolls.

But when I find out about it - I'll end it.

No I was on the way to work, was easier to answer the thread.

Don't drive and text. You hold critical info. We can't have you dying - like this game apparently.

Lol, "reputation", that's not something someone like me cares about. There is no fame to gain from this situation.

I'm not going into detail because I don't want more people getting banned. If there is any ban wave, I won't be responsible for anyone getting banned.
As for blowing the whistle, people have blown it way before.

Employees are aware, they read this forum and some of them were in the know for years but choose to keep quiet. People's jobs are at stake, Japan won't joke with that.
That's why I keep silent about a lot of things, you don't toy with people's jobs.

However, if nothing is done within the week, I'll at least inquire about the why, just to be aware.
But, just to reiterate, there may be a ton of collateral damage when/if SE acts on this exploit. I wouldn't expect an action within less than 1/2 months, if not 3. The scope is way too big, even with automated checks.