New RMT conspiracy

[Quizno]

Your cost analysis assumes that the RMT are paying US prices for software/internet/computers/monthly fees.

That is how it works. Those costs are not negotiable. In fact they actually tend to pay a 10% premium for electronics and games in China because of import taxes, ect.

In any case the starter packs were an angle I didn't even think of. They are making a killing and will continue to do so.

[Spekkio]

Your cost analysis assumes that the RMT are paying US prices for software/internet/computers/monthly fees.

That is how it works. Those costs are not negotiable. In fact they actually tend to pay a 10% premium for electronics and games in China because of import taxes, ect.

In any case the starter packs were an angle I didn't even think of. They are making a killing and will continue to do so.

doubt they'd be paying a premium, i'd suspect they'd actually be paying less. they don't need to physically move the software in, just the codes. as such, import taxes aren't likely to be an issue to them. just crack the boxes open here, send the numbers to china, go to town. in addition, they may have a contract with a supplier to buy them in bulk at a reduced cost. if they're buying in the hundreds or thousands of copies for several gilfarming installations, they reach the point where they may well be able to leverage their economy of scale.

[ronin sparthos]

True, they can just torrent the games and buy the codes off SE and by doing so divert the costs for shipping and all that fancy stuff.

[Starr]

Someone got banned for buying 50m at once on Hades last month, must be more people like that out there, would take 3 to cover it lol.

[Plow]

Hence thats why the RMT are stealing accounts to cover the overhead of the operation as a whole. It must be frustrating as hell seeing your tools to make money with deleted time and time again as the entire process to collect gil ingame becomes harder and harder.

RMT have tried so many routes to try to support the gilbuying junkies that its come down to not being subtle at all anymore raiding, snatching, grabbing and overall trying to get as much as they can before they get banhammered by the STF.

I cant speak for all the gilbuyers as a whole, but on 2 occasions i have heard of gilbuyers spending over $25,000 on characters and gil to support their endgame means and once of a person spending over $50,000 on services relating to FFXI. The market is there so long as people with no real care for money and the community exists.

Back when inflation was high they could make money in the blink of an eye, entire zones were at the whims of RMT operations and accounts were cheaper by the dozen but now the economy has cratered out everything is worth so much more and in this game of high-stakes poker no one wants to fold. I can only speak based on what ive seen in this game since the NA launch but the RMT are only gonna keep pushing because to them the game doesnt have to survive or not when in the end all they have to do is liquidate out and move on to the next big thing and follow the paper trail.

Id imagine most people that buy gil arent big buyers, probably once or twice but their exists some really elite gilbuyers that shell out cash that would make your head spin off your neck.

I don't know you but I'm going to call you cliché guy from now on.

[Krelian]

The main aid to RMT right now is the easy ability to cheat in FFXI. Instead of SE just banning the most blatant cheaters once a week, they should find a way to completely prevent cheating from the start. That would cripple RMT as WELL as people who don't buy gil but do cheat and ruin other parts of the game.

[fndragon]

The main aid to RMT right now is the easy ability to cheat in FFXI. Instead of SE just banning the most blatant cheaters once a week, they should find a way to completely prevent cheating from the start. That would cripple RMT as WELL as people who don't buy gil but do cheat and ruin other parts of the game.

You know how to prevent cheating from the start? It's so simple, why didn't they just deselect the checkbox in their setup like so:

[X] Allow Cheating

/sarcasm

The point I'd honestly like to make, though, is that cheating is possible because movement et. al is client-based. Meaning that the server is lenient when it comes to movement speed and interaction. Basically it's a non-error correcting system because having someone disconnect due to being "out of sync" or having a wayward packet go to hawaii or something. Or I might be wrong, I really don't know enough to know if FF uses UDP or TCP for communications. But regardless, the movement and interaction is done client side and all their servers want to know is where you are instead of how you got there. And that's done because people still want to be able to play on dialup (bandwidth/latency issues).

[Julian]

Once SE gets the new policy in place to prevent people from randomly getting their accounts hacked, SE needs to move on to banning players who are found to buy gil. Post the names and servers publicly to put the fear of god into gil buyers. That, combined with continuous evolution of RMT farmer detection and removal, will both lower the demand for gil and increase the expense of RMT operations for the game. Eventually the RMT machine will have to move on to a more viable target, and we can finally get our game back. Not saying that things are horrible these days, because it was waaaaay worse in the past. SE has come a *long* way, and the desperation that RMT exhibit at this point is a clear indication of just how much it sucks to be them.

lol, that reminded me of when my friend hacked RO and I abused the hell out of it and they posted my account on the main page as getting banned for hacking XD

edit: and yeah, like it's been said above, cheating of this kind is allowed because of how the game was designed. They'd have to go back and reprogram all their stuff (and in effect break 50 other things) and we all know they're not going to do that.

[ronin sparthos]

If SE did that..... oh that possibilities.

[fndragon]

If SE did that..... oh that possibilities.

Public displays of who the hackers are? Aside from not being able to pronounce 99% of their names "ASDFJKL", etc., anyone who they can find abusing 3rd party tools are instantly banned, so there's no use for a public notice other than a high score board for dedicated hackers.

"Zomg, leethaxor made it to the banned list again! That's 20 in a row!".

However, SE probably can't or doesn't want to ostracize the portion of their playerbase that buys gil. Because as bad an enabling action as buying gil is, SE still wants gilbuyers to pay in every month. Plus they'd have extra trouble tickets about "ZOMG I never bought gil, asdfjkl is my personal friend and is repaying a loan I gave him/her/it".

[Gergall]

They'd have to go back and reprogram all their stuff (and in effect break 50 other things) and we all know they're not going to do that.

On the contrary, SE has proven time and again that they are completely willing to reprogram major game mechanics, breaking dozens of seemingly unrelated features in the process.

[calinz]

Changing mechanics is one thing, changing the netcode of the game is an entirely different thing. It's something that SE will probably never do because of PS2 users and how the game was programmed to operate using an ethernet cable and a dial-up modem. On the same note, SE will never make a graphics upgrade for the same reasons and additional stuff such as console limitations, keeping the game the same for everyone and general laziness(not to mention that it probably wouldn't be worth their time in $$$).

But isn't SE actually profiting from this whole thing? I mean IF the RMT do indeed buy thousands of new accounts each month, doesn't this mean that SE is making a huge profit on the amount of games sold? Or am I missing something here...?

[kuronosan]

Nah, you pretty much nailed it on the head. SE is cashing in on RMT stupidity, and RMT are cashing in on player naivete. The sad thing is SE obviously doesn't care about its players anymore, otherwise they would be more focused on assisting players who have been hacked and less focused on banning new accounts.

Makes too much sense, doesn't it? SE makes almost $10,000 off of every round of bannings when RMTs buy up new accounts and content IDs. Why would they completely stomp it out?

[Lordender]

its almost like SE coded this game without any thought of rmt or cheating could possibly occur!

[Lishje]

its almost like SE coded this game without any thought of rmt or cheating could possibly occur!

Wow, omg. Don't you know?

It's a Community game man!

[Doofus]

mmorpgs are like parties, self regulating

[Xhu]

A friend of mine has been mining like mad atm in Mount Z and sees RMT pos hack mining all the time. When he calls a GM and shows them the player doing it they say they can only investigate (never put the guy right in jail there and then) and sometimes the guy is there for a few weeks before he disappears.

I assume they are trying to trace a wider network to see where the gil goes and try and ban the source/more accounts but still - 2 weeks of bot mining at 300k a pop - probably few a day as its 24hr botted ... 3x14 - 42 ores x 300k each - 12m+??- thats a hellva lot of gil for a free acount with 500k investment to get there - or even just a testimony from a 2nd account.

Easily paid for by the starter pack and a ban after 2 weeks. And as soon as they are banned few days another appears and cycle repeats itself.

SE need to work out a better/faster strat imo.

[Koga]

If SE did that..... oh that possibilities.

Public displays of who the hackers are? Aside from not being able to pronounce 99% of their names "ASDFJKL", etc., anyone who they can find abusing 3rd party tools are instantly banned, so there's no use for a public notice other than a high score board for dedicated hackers.

"Zomg, leethaxor made it to the banned list again! That's 20 in a row!".

While some people would hack for the glory I highly doubt FFXi would be the game. Short of script kiddies this game is so easy to hack that its not a challenge and that would be a scoreboard for the kids to think they were cool when they found the offsets they needed.
I would consider a dedicated hacker someone who hacks the fishing system again so that you can fish in your mog house and pull up Gold bed's again. That would be a real "hacker" >_>

[cgr]

Hence thats why the RMT are stealing accounts to cover the overhead of the operation as a whole. It must be frustrating as hell seeing your tools to make money with deleted time and time again as the entire process to collect gil ingame becomes harder and harder.

RMT have tried so many routes to try to support the gilbuying junkies that its come down to not being subtle at all anymore raiding, snatching, grabbing and overall trying to get as much as they can before they get banhammered by the STF.

I cant speak for all the gilbuyers as a whole, but on 2 occasions i have heard of gilbuyers spending over $25,000 on characters and gil to support their endgame means and once of a person spending over $50,000 on services relating to FFXI. The market is there so long as people with no real care for money and the community exists.

Back when inflation was high they could make money in the blink of an eye, entire zones were at the whims of RMT operations and accounts were cheaper by the dozen but now the economy has cratered out everything is worth so much more and in this game of high-stakes poker no one wants to fold. I can only speak based on what ive seen in this game since the NA launch but the RMT are only gonna keep pushing because to them the game doesnt have to survive or not when in the end all they have to do is liquidate out and move on to the next big thing and follow the paper trail.

Id imagine most people that buy gil arent big buyers, probably once or twice but their exists some really elite gilbuyers that shell out cash that would make your head spin off your neck.

I don't know you but I'm going to call you cliché guy from now on.

I laughed harder than I should have after re-reading the first quote :D

[Sykes]

Hence thats why the RMT are stealing accounts to cover the overhead of the operation as a whole. It must be frustrating as hell seeing your tools to make money with deleted time and time again as the entire process to collect gil ingame becomes harder and harder.

RMT have tried so many routes to try to support the gilbuying junkies that its come down to not being subtle at all anymore raiding, snatching, grabbing and overall trying to get as much as they can before they get banhammered by the STF.

I cant speak for all the gilbuyers as a whole, but on 2 occasions i have heard of gilbuyers spending over $25,000 on characters and gil to support their endgame means and once of a person spending over $50,000 on services relating to FFXI. The market is there so long as people with no real care for money and the community exists.

Back when inflation was high they could make money in the blink of an eye, entire zones were at the whims of RMT operations and accounts were cheaper by the dozen but now the economy has cratered out everything is worth so much more and in this game of high-stakes poker no one wants to fold. I can only speak based on what ive seen in this game since the NA launch but the RMT are only gonna keep pushing because to them the game doesnt have to survive or not when in the end all they have to do is liquidate out and move on to the next big thing and follow the paper trail.

Id imagine most people that buy gil arent big buyers, probably once or twice but their exists some really elite gilbuyers that shell out cash that would make your head spin off your neck.

I don't know you but I'm going to call you cliché guy from now on.

I laughed harder than I should have after re-reading the first quote :D

The plot thickens!