Salvage Bans v 2.0

[D44kpunk]

Eh, he's not entirely off the mark. Regardless, if they did the jail server thing, one character getting busted should flag the whole account (and maybe CC), thus getting all mules/alts ported with the inability to create on legit worlds.

yeah i'm not sure how you could think he's not entirely off the mark, all these "cheaters" would have quit years ago when SE had not been banning if what he said was true, botting/flee hacking etc was extremely rampant. also literally no one would have played in the HNM era since literally everyone used a claim bot of some sort back then.

you just seem to like to play devils advocate so i'm not sure why i'm bothering, but it's also worth pointing out that the majority of people "cheat" for QoL improvements (ja0wait/occasional clipping/speed hacking), not full blown hacking/botting and most condemn such things

[vivbiibasjiu]

Go gameshark a game and see how long the fun lasts. It's only "fun" in an online game because your gameshark gives you an advantage over others. That's just how humans work. It's not fun if everyone else has gameshark mode on too. That's why people cheat. 1% of the elite endgame population botting HNMs still gave a massive advantage over the 99% peasant population, hence why people did it because it was fun to AFK in Jeuno with cool gear to e-peen over the vanilla noobs. It give them a dopamine shot knowing their linkshell was hot shit over everyone else on the server. Once there is no achievement from cheating, it will get boring quickly and people will quit quickly. A jail server means literally everyone is cheating, which puts them on the same ground as people on vanilla servers who don't cheat: they have no distinct advantage. People who demand an advantage start cheating, otherwise they would still play legitimately. No such option would exist on a jail server, so they would stop playing.

[Gustave]

Go gameshark a game and see how long the fun lasts. It's only "fun" in an online game because your gameshark gives you an advantage over others. That's just how humans work. It's not fun if everyone else has gameshark mode on too. That's why people cheat. 1% of the elite endgame population botting HNMs still gave a massive advantage over the 99% peasant population, hence why people did it because it was fun to AFK in Jeuno with cool gear to e-peen over the vanilla noobs. It give them a dopamine shot knowing their linkshell was hot shit over everyone else on the server. Once there is no achievement from cheating, it will get boring quickly and people will quit quickly. A jail server means literally everyone is cheating, which puts them on the same ground as people on vanilla servers who don't cheat: they have no distinct advantage. People who demand an advantage start cheating, otherwise they would still play legitimately. No such option would exist on a jail server, so they would stop playing.

Get over yourself. Folks are not botting/modding for the sole reason of getting an advantage over you. Windower, clipper, ja0wait, and spellcast/gearswap added a lot of features that were built into the next generation of MMOs. The first time I logged into FFXIV ARR I couldn't believe how much the HUD reminded me of FFAssist (anyone remember that?).

[Byrthnoth]

A jail server would probably be rife with botters competing for the best bot camps, one-upping each other and building better bots for fun and profit. I think it could be really fun. People would move at 200% all the time, but a lot of people do that whenever you can't see them at the moment anyway. It wouldn't be very different from normal servers in most regards, and I'd be able to be with likeminded players.

Things like buffer overflows would still be a problem (everyone having infinite gil and an ability to create arbitrary items would remove a lot of the fun from the game), but SE could actually monitor the jail server and permaban for stuff like that while fixing it on normal servers. Concentrating the high probability offenders would make finding such exploits much easier.

[dasva]

Go gameshark a game and see how long the fun lasts. It's only "fun" in an online game because your gameshark gives you an advantage over others. That's just how humans work. It's not fun if everyone else has gameshark mode on too. That's why people cheat. 1% of the elite endgame population botting HNMs still gave a massive advantage over the 99% peasant population, hence why people did it because it was fun to AFK in Jeuno with cool gear to e-peen over the vanilla noobs. It give them a dopamine shot knowing their linkshell was hot shit over everyone else on the server. Once there is no achievement from cheating, it will get boring quickly and people will quit quickly. A jail server means literally everyone is cheating, which puts them on the same ground as people on vanilla servers who don't cheat: they have no distinct advantage. People who demand an advantage start cheating, otherwise they would still play legitimately. No such option would exist on a jail server, so they would stop playing.

You really don't understand players or people in general do you? Mind you the vast majority of the "cheats" aren't really what would normally be called a cheat they just happen to be against SEs ridiculously absurd rules... and many of them have been added to the game by SE. If anything you were saying was true the people who were using extended maccros would've quit when SE added them... or the people using basic windowering would've quit when SE introduced it... or hell doing legit ja0wait or effective flee hacking has always been possibly with some effort and yet people still use the tools for that's right convience not to get a leg up on the competition in a game with almost no direct competition to begin with

[Sirious]

That jail server idea would be hot shit son. I'd even consider re-installing and paying again if it got my main moved to a server where I could play with other detainees lol. No holds barred etc.

It'd be a HELL of a lot more fun. All the plebs and whiners can have their shitty servers where they have rules and limitations, and we can fuck with the matrix.

More or less.... a private server, right?

Well, it'd be a blast for a little while, but it's still the same game, and after a month I'd be doing the same exact thing I was after that. Well... maybe not, I'd see people I actually like there, so maybe we'd all fuck around and still do things... no way to know for certain.

[vivbiibasjiu]

A game with rules and limitations! Perish the thought.

[Gaztastic]

I don't care for the bots or anything major. I just enjoyed being able to walk like I'm not trudging through molasses. The default movement speed was horrible. Not to mention getting animation locked or stuck on others. Or targeting an enemy, stopping, pulling out your weapon dramatically, then running to it. Just a bunch of irritating mechanics to the game.

[Niiro]

A game with rules and PS2 limitations! Perish the thought.

Spoiler: show

[Hoshiku]

I have heard from several people that this has happened to them about being banned right after their monthly subscription was paid. I have never been banned so I do not know how hard it is to get your account pro-rated for the days you did play before the ban after they received payment. It just seems like SE likes banning people right after they pay for their account though this is probably just a coincidence.

Also, for those that mention bans ceasing I have heard of a few more bans within the last week, so it seems like they are still going on though not as big of a group ban atm. I am sure it is working up to another big ban again soon.

Sorry was at a conference and forgot to check the thread. I'm not talking about pro-rated from SE. In the US if you have a problem with a charge on your credit card (i.e. double charge or charge for goods/services not provided) you can contact your card company and have the charge removed. That is called a charge-back. SE really hates those (there was some drama with them several years ago which I think lead up to the choice to have someone else handle their billing).

[Kyreth]

Instead of banning ppl SE should just all throw them into 1 seperate server. People can still enjoy the last breath of the game and play with likeminded fellows. But that solution would be too un-japan for them I guess.

Again, it's the devs getting their final acts of vindictiveness now that it doesn't do much to the bottom line. Bans that actually hurt, since you can't generally just re-up and have time to be timely on the end game conent.

Some of them make the people we call "white knights" on BG look like apathetic lumps on the whole issue.

(Meanwhile, S-E is making massive bank on FFXIV...and not banhammering like maniacs there. Coincidence? I think not.)

[Kyreth]

You really don't understand players or people in general do you? Mind you the vast majority of the "cheats" aren't really what would normally be called a cheat they just happen to be against SEs ridiculously absurd rules...

...which hilariously, most of the players actually follow.

It's always been the "high performance" types that went with any advantage they could get, while the average plebs not only didn't use them, they often didn't even know they were possible or had the miniscule technical aptitude needed to install them.

The world of no animation locks, high movespeed, no JA waiting etc. has always been a bigger subset of the kind of players that hang out in forums and try to push the envelope, vs. the average joe who doesn't even need lockstyle because he never even changes gear.

[dasva]

I'd hate to play wherever you are where most the players don't even swap gear...you must have struggled to complete content that came out before the eventual gimps (can't imagine cop back in the day). I can't think of any group I've been in since I started that did that and that includes people who never formed and back when being lvl 60 was considered high lvl. And most of those that did play vanilla and didn't forum (including myself for a long time) still tried finding ways around like spending times of time looking for movement speed gear and having 20 flee boots on me at several events. Or using pinning techniques or blink casting or using multiple macros.

Also gotta love this black and white ideology though. You are either a completely ignorant in the dark horribly player who apparently is so technically inept they can't click download and then double click an .exe or you are some kind of super hacker trying to cheat everyone in the game out of something. Clearly no one ever used windower simply to be able to look info up while playing. Nobody didn't simply not want to spend 20 minutes walking. Or die because the game is coded idiotically to lock you up any number of times but only to players. Nobody just got tired of hitting 3-5 macros for 1 action. Nope we are all just a bunch of 90 year old grandma's or Eugene "The Plague"s

[Spicyryan]

Go gameshark a game and see how long the fun lasts. It's only "fun" in an online game because your gameshark gives you an advantage over others. That's just how humans work. It's not fun if everyone else has gameshark mode on too. That's why people cheat. 1% of the elite endgame population botting HNMs still gave a massive advantage over the 99% peasant population, hence why people did it because it was fun to AFK in Jeuno with cool gear to e-peen over the vanilla noobs. It give them a dopamine shot knowing their linkshell was hot shit over everyone else on the server. Once there is no achievement from cheating, it will get boring quickly and people will quit quickly. A jail server means literally everyone is cheating, which puts them on the same ground as people on vanilla servers who don't cheat: they have no distinct advantage. People who demand an advantage start cheating, otherwise they would still play legitimately. No such option would exist on a jail server, so they would stop playing.

I love how you are trying to be some behaviorist here. You have baseless opinions on people, how they think, how they act, what they want, and the emotional responses of people you don't even know.

TL;DR You don't know shit, and are out of touch with real players.

[Kyreth]

I'd hate to play wherever you are where most the players don't even swap gear...you must have struggled to complete content that came out before the eventual gimps (can't imagine cop back in the day). I can't think of any group I've been in since I started that did that and that includes people who never formed and back when being lvl 60 was considered high lvl. And most of those that did play vanilla and didn't forum (including myself for a long time) still tried finding ways around like spending times of time looking for movement speed gear and having 20 flee boots on me at several events. Or using pinning techniques or blink casting or using multiple macros.

Pre-Abyssea? Basic in-game macros vs. gearswap-ish programs were the norm. Post-Abyssea? A disturbingly large number- I'd even say half the PUGs I saw in Adoulin didn't so much as even bother. Kinda depressing, isn't it?

And yes, there's plenty in between...but guess what? It doesn't fucking matter. Were you doing stuff that let you do better than the guy sticking to vanilla macros to beat content? You were part of the problem, and you skewed the difficultly level of the game upwards, making third-party stuff increasingly a "need" to do things at the top vs. an option. Were the devs part of the problem? Absolutely, by not answering quality of life stuff earlier.

You decided to go around the rules because they're stupid? I think some of them are stupid too, but I didn't fuck with my game because I might think that not being able to use my hands to carry the ball in soccer is stupid, but it's still against the rules and you -don't do it if you want to play soccer-.

The game has been developed for years with content that's been frustrating in part because people have been doing exactly that. Lots of sidegrades? Lots of demand because hey, we can super-macro our gear for perfectly situational layouts! Long runs everywhere? Well, fuck people are clearly doing it in a satisfactory time by their standards so they must not need more shortcuts. (Never mind it was because people were just clippering in higher runspeeds vs. actually getting the devs to add in a warp/higher runspeed system). Content that takes huge feats of gear-exchanging wizardry to be the first to do? Well, we have our bleeding-edge players who can do that- as long as they're using a third party program. So the next wave of content will be built with those players in mind.

Whether it was "for the better or not", third-party programs warped the development of the game and papered over the need for changes that might have been addressed earlier, otherwise. Good in the short term, damaging in the long run. And in order to keep a decent sized playerbase, the long term was sacrificed until now.

[Hoshiku]

That is absolute nonsense. I knew players who had swaps to multiple books of macros in their macros to allow them to swap as much gear as they needed to perform well. People who use just windower macros pre gearset days were able to keep up with or outparse people using spellcast and gearswap. Those tools certainly make things easier but it was possible to play well without using them.

[Byrthnoth]

I RDM tanked a few times with full set swaps and a billion macros on the PS2. It worked, but holy hell was it a pain in the ass. Took me 3 presses to get into and out of any gear set and I had to wait a little bit between macro presses so I didn't terminate the previous macro before it completed. I used to solo sea on PS2 as BLM/NIN (for the most part), but I don't feel it dramatically impacted me there because there was a paucity of gear worth changing at the time. A press out and back for each spell on the same book was manageable, with two presses when standing up or resting. I even wrote a guide for it at the time (http://byrthnothgaruda.livejournal.com/2401.html).

There is, was, and likely always will be a notable gap between a player using 3P equipment swapping and a player on vanilla FFXI. It isn't as important for melee now as it used to be because stat inflation/vomit decreases the benefit you gain by swapping to a WS set, but it's still incredible for magic. My BLM has 80% casting time reduction and some mid-teen amount of instant cast, which costs me zero delay to implement (unlike the 1+ second it would take on vanilla FFXI to swap into such a set). That's a dramatic increase in DPS. Even my Dancer had a considerable amount of fast cast and instant cast for Utsu.

[Sephiran]

uhh, i never once said i was gathering testimonials. also i'd advise ignoring the poster above me, seems to only post stupidity until he's proven wrong/called out then immediately stops posting about whatever he was previously posting about

I know you're not gathering them per say. But you've asked a couple times and showed interest in the subject.

Spoiler: show

I find it funny that the moment I agree with or at least share interest with you on anything, you leap to change your positions ever-so-slightly in such a fashion that the word "and" cannot be used to conjoin two concepts related to the two of us.

On another note, I'm gonna submit a message to Scraggs for the algorithm behind the database numbers. Jaerik has not responded yet and the "about" page says he's retired. Again, I believe I made it all quite clear how it works, but I feel everyone wants un-refutable proof. So the quest continues!

[Ramzii]

i would rather honestly get all of my characters jailed if they created a jail server. it'd be infinitely better than playing on current XI since apparently i'm not even allowed to log on anymore or i'll get banned

[Kyreth]

i would rather honestly get all of my characters jailed if they created a jail server. it'd be infinitely better than playing on current XI since apparently i'm not even allowed to log on anymore or i'll get banned

So, the client keeps looping a chant of "YOU FUCKED UP" instead of the POL music when you login or something?