New RMT conspiracy

[Pun]

RMTs have been POSing from directly in front of the signet NPC in North Sandy (on Ifrit Server, at least) to the jungles for a long-ass time. It used to be that I couldn't go use the outpost warp in Sandy without seeing a train of them all at the signet guy suddenly vanish and appear in the jungles. 99% of the time it was a hume female WHM with 5 BLM tarus in tow. I don't know how many times I fucking reported them. They have been openly POSing for months.

[Kaisha]

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.

I'd have assumed there'd be some server code already inplace that flags accounts that are repeatedly showing odd movement patterns......
(I'd shoot myself in the foot if I had to manually look for and delete a bunch of POS hacking RMT as an STF employee, their last report showed 1k users banned within a month for that)

Either that or they need to implement a little band-aid measure, flag impossible zone-times made between connected zones.

[EDIT] Those starter packs, do they have any limitations by anychance? I know WoW had basically everything disabled on theirs that would allow RMTs to abuse them.

[Landmark]

The most humiliating thing for gilbuyers would probably be for someone to post a list of everyone that has bought gil from IGE in the past 5 months and under which account on which server. That would be progress.

[Metalmyth]

Hi Everyone

I was a recent victim (Dec.6) of the mass hacking that just took place, fortunatley (if you want to use that word) my CC info wasn't changed and I was able to get my account back...stripped of 3+ years of items/gil. They basically made my account useless and I had no choice but to cancel on Dec.27 to wait and see what SE will do. SE's recent policy change or possible policy change has given me hope that a rollback may follow at which time I will reactivate.

As most of the victims, the RMT thourghly pissed me off as the holidays would have been a time I could have done some quests/missions I have been putting off due to time issues. As a result I have had a lot of time to think about what SE could do to piss off the RMT, although just a suggestion I was wondering what you all thought of:

RMT activity may never completley stop but their primary goal is to get gil and sell gil...but to sell it they have to deliver it, they can't use the auction house as delivery system as there would be no gurantee for the buyer that he would get the gil. Sending the gil to a players inbox would just throw up way too many flags for the STF as it can be tracked. Which leaves us with trading the gil in game....although it may be a pain in the ass for real players if SE were to disallow direct gil trades (player to player) and introduced a central point in each city that had a NPC in which you could deposit gil for a specfic player and a quick comment box as to what the gil was for (this would also be the only spot you could pick up said gil). This would give the STF a central spot to watch over all traded gil transactions, identify possible RMT accounts and the possible gil buyers.

If a specfic account does nothing but deposit gil for other players and the logs show that the suspect account does not really do anything to earn that gil (farming/crafting etc)...pretty safe bet it is RMT. If and when the STF is absolutley sure it is RMT...they could freeze the gil, In addition player's recieving gil from a suspect RMT account could be more closley watched...it would start to cripple the RMT buisness and potential gil buyers would become parinoid knowing that accepting large amounts of gil without justification could come into question.

I am sure that the above is not foolproof but at least it would be a step in the right direction to deter their activities....just a thought

[Spekkio]

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...?

while it's unlikely they'll change the client side code in a major way, server code is more possible as they are not limited to hardware from the last decade. it would be possible to put server side sanity checks on things such as movement. every 5 seconds, calculate the absolute distance between now and 5 seconds ago. if the distance>2*run_speed, jail. this wouldn't bar fleehacking, but it would control the situation to a degree. if this produced an undue strain on the server, it could be used specifically on high-risk zones such as mount z. that have low traffic, but high usage of poshacking. /sea davoi or /sea selbina will on average turn up under 10 players. the strain of running sanity checks on these players, or spot checks of players would be a manageable quantity to do and would catch a large number of the poshacking CGF over time.

[Sekkite]

From my understanding, until server technology has advanced to the point where checking your location server side often enough that POSing around would be impossible (and even then, the average gamer's PC would need to be massively better then what is out present day) without massive game lag or strain on the servers, then RMT will easily be able to dominate.

However, what I can think of off the top of my head is for SE to really consider the RMT implications of any content they consider adding in before it is actually released. The ladybug wing quest and the deathstone/angelstone thing are just being massively exploited by RMT.

[Wizerd]

Sending the gil to a players inbox would just throw up way too many flags for the STF as it can be tracked. Which leaves us with trading the gil in game....

Protip: SE tracks trades too. Just thought I'd point that out.

Also: if they're going to implement position checks in the client, all they would have to do is compare your speed to any current effects / gear you have on, to prevent fleehacking rather than just POS hacking. I don't think it would cause as much lag as one might suspect, since all they would have to do is gather your grid location (X, Y, Z) and where you could possibly be (the ranges) and see if the former falls into the latter's range. If it doesn't, flag the server. Not sure how often it'd have to check to be worth it though.

[darkwind]

Adding server side position checking wouldn't require better servers unless they are using apple IIes or something. Your position is updated server side every several seconds so you add code on a position update (or have some observer process running) to check the distance delta vs. an expected (max) delta from the last update and flag/log the movement if it's out of expected bounds.

While lag makes it tricky you could expect / allow enough deviation such that you would only really catch people who are going nuts. Alternately generally if you see a few violations by a lot of people probably no one is hacking and if you see a lot of violations by a few people probably they are hacking etc. This could even be done on the back end via database queries on a non-game server assuming they write every pos update into their database.

Client-side speed checking would be worthless. All you'd have to do is figure out where in memory the "flag the server" code is or the call to the speed check code or whatever and nop / hook it.

EDIT: I would be amazed if they don't do this (server-side) already to catch flee hacks and pos hacks. Handling updates server side shouldn't be ridiculous if you sent a direction & velocity or something but certain movements can screw that up (running in a circle) and can lead to rubberbanding (i believe is the term) if your client gets out of sync with the server. So, generally it's technically possible to handle updates serverside but leads to an undesirable play experience which is why mmos generally do it client side & flag transgressions for further investigation.

[Yuri-G]

I'm surprised they haven't already updated the Angel/Deathstone quests with a level cap, the potential for exploit is glaringly obvious. Hell you'd probably make a decent profit doing the quests legitimately on mules (if you're poor like me), with a friend/alt to kill the Jugner NM, so I can only imagine how nice the profits are with poshacking.

[Howard Roark]

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.

bolded cuz i think everyone missed how funny this observation was

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

I don't know you but you re now the king of those hilarious people that notice the cupcakes on the counter when the 2 hot chicks are making out

[ronin sparthos]

Im glad im so entertaining~

[Ansems]

They've been doing this for a while now. The RMT just don't give a crap anymore and are going as far as POS hacking out in the open.

All you can do is try reporting them before they drop off the goods and delete the character.

Yer sig trips me out

[Jeny]

They've been doing this for a while now. The RMT just don't give a crap anymore and are going as far as POS hacking out in the open.

All you can do is try reporting them before they drop off the goods and delete the character.

Yer sig trips me out

Why so?

[Muramasa]

The most humiliating thing for gilbuyers would probably be for someone to post a list of everyone that has bought gil from IGE in the past 5 months and under which account on which server. That would be progress.

That would be good. Could sorta work like that one website someone posted of botters server-wide. But that would require direct contact with IGE and would probably be illegal.

[Kyreth]

The most humiliating thing for gilbuyers would probably be for someone to post a list of everyone that has bought gil from IGE in the past 5 months and under which account on which server. That would be progress.

That would be good. Could sorta work like that one website someone posted of botters server-wide. But that would require direct contact with IGE and would probably be illegal.

I think that would be the holy grail of Taj-ness. Hack the IGE sales records, print a list of -everyone- who bought Gil.

No drama could exceed it.

[Hanyoko]

I always thought that most of the fishbots/questbots/etc were using the cheap starter packs (its what $2 ?). I'm assuming that its all the starter areas which is why quests like selbina clay, power sandals, lvl1 fishbot swarms were exploited.

I seem to recall that there were GMs contacting people when some of the NMs were added with draw-in. Somthing about illegal movement; not sure if this was flagged automatically or if it was player reported. If it was automatic, then there does appear to be a system for it; however it probabaly puts a name/server/etc into a queue for the STF to look into later.

There are lots of simple sanity checks that could be put in there. However the likely hood of them investing the time to actually do it (and risk breaking so much) is rather slim.

*edit* I remember making some modifications to a Quake Server build back when the client source was released. It was a simple threshold based movement check where every phase if the distance traveled was greater then allowed a variable was incremented; if it was valid it was decremented (min 0). When the variable was over a certain amount it would inform everyone logged into the server. If it continued they were banned. Ahh good times

[Fadian]

If a specfic account does nothing but deposit gil for other players

First off, i'm sorry your account got hacked. After reading what you said, though it would be a wonderful idea and a way to keep track of Gil Transactions, one problem I would forsee is some accounts/character getting banned for RMT reasons but they are not RMT. Only example I can give is one people use in game. A central bank for a LS that does nothing but sell high rank items but pay gil to it's members. With that being said, many people may think that mule/character is a RMT and ban when in fact it was a legit player for a high end game linkshell only paying it's members for the hard work they put in to gather such items.


In any case, I do have a few thoughts on this.

1. STF have been banning accounts due to same payment credit card method/number. If RMT are rebuying all these accounts how are they paying for them? If they use the same payment method/credit card info over and over it would flag the STF and they would ban the account for using the same credit card info. It has been reported that people who got banned had multiple accounts on the same credit card and those additional accounts got banned for RMT activity because of payment method.


2. People have mentioned this several times. Gil buyers. Someone mentioned they knew someone who got banned for buying in bulk. I wonder how many legit accounts got banned for gil buying?

[kamalii]

The most humiliating thing for gilbuyers would probably be for someone to post a list of everyone that has bought gil from IGE in the past 5 months and under which account on which server. That would be progress.

That sort of thing was done on Ragnarok several months ago...caused some LJ drama, but most didn't seem to care...gillist is gone now. I don't think it accomplished much, though.

[Silenus]

Assumptions I've had to (painfully) give up:

1. RMT will go away.
2. SE will make RMT go away.
3. Once RMT goes away, I'll have more fun playing ffxi.

[Kix]

although it may be a pain in the ass for real players if SE were to disallow direct gil trades (player to player) and introduced a central point in each city that had a NPC in which you could deposit gil for a specfic player and a quick comment box as to what the gil was for (this would also be the only spot you could pick up said gil). This would give the STF a central spot to watch over all traded gil transactions, identify possible RMT accounts and the possible gil buyers.

I know this was posted a week ago.. but I've been busy...
Just wanted to toss in that programatically, there is very little difference. They could just as easily make a 'record' of all person-to-person gil transactions over x threshold, as they could a 'central' gil transfer spot.
To us, it's different, but as far as tracking it, it really isn't.