LS bank suspended

[aurik]

SE may not be able to sue and/or get a desist order for IGE, but they are well within their rights to ban IGE mules for ToS violations on the spot.

Are you are of the pseudo-recent case where a player of Second Life sued the creators for confiscating his ingame money because he acquired it through a bug in the game?

You can sue anyone for virtually anything, valid or not; whether you win anything is a totally different question.

However, it costs money to defend yourself in a civil court, so I'm sure it's something SE would prefer to avoid.

Which is exactly my point here, and it is why SE is not going to employ the aforementioned technique, with good reason.

It doesn't really protect them, though. I could easily go sue them for not enforcing their ToS, or for enforcing it selectively. I may not win, but they'd still have to pay money to defend themselves.

They can ask the judge to award them lawyer's fees but even that is after-the-fact and not guaranteed.

[chiz]

This is actually pretty encouraging, although it was obviously an error on their part. I wouldn't get so up in arms about it though, as long as they correct their mistake and re-activate your LS bank account.

Sure they could've done a bit more homework before suspending the mule account but realistically that's probably difficult given the number of cases they review as well as limited information determining if an /anon L1 mule is a LS bank or an RMT.

In any case, I'm glad SE has been able to implement some kind of systematic checklist that can monitor big transactions. I think in the past their standard company line was that they had no way of monitoring delivery box transactions or monitoring trades.

A big concern everyone had when SE started cracking down on RMT mules was LS banks being mistaken for RMT accounts but I think a quick conversation with any reasonable GM would clear up any confusion.

Good luck getting the bank back, if the GMs don't return the account then you have a reason to be upset.

[Ichthyos]

I don't know how an LS coffer's activity can be more suspicious than the RMTs that stay online 24/7 monopolizing NMs. SE is remarkable.

I don't understand how so many people think that Gil farming accounts are the same as Gil selling accounts. They're most likely different people and different organizations.

[Khamsin]

Yeah, but their ToS doesn't apply to real life. In our crazy world where a fat guy can sue McDonalds for making him fat and win, IGE would most likely be able to file charges against SE for this. Even if it is unlikely, SE, like any smart company interested in making a profit, will attempt to rule out any solutions that could end up costing them a large amount of money and time.

And this is why RMT is still such a problem.

Even though virtual items and gil are technically the property of Square Enix, a case can be made in a court of law that the player's time and effort were required to accumulate the items, and as such, are considered the property of that person, who can buy or sell what they own at their discretion, since there is no law against or regulations on the sale of virtual items. This is what a GM means when they give you an argument that you assume is half-assed when they refer to RMT vs. their legal department.

Basically, if SE tried to sue IGE for making gil transactions within their game, the only thing they'd end up doing is legitimizing the business, and lose money in legal costs doing it.

SE may not be able to sue and/or get a desist order for IGE, but they are well within their rights to ban IGE mules for ToS violations on the spot.

Which is what they can do, and enforce. Unfortunately, this is the scope of the "powah" of the ToS.

Unless demand wanes, the supply of gil never will. Since a case cannot be made to remove gilbuyers, RMT will continue to run rampant in any and all online games.

The most logical solution then is to reduce or eliminate the supply of gil, so that the demand never has to wane. If there is no supply, the demand is irrelevant. A RL millionaire could play this game and never be able to afford even a scorpion harness without farming the gil himself or camping serket for the claw (which would be possible without gilsellers anymore).

[Weltall]

Want to know something else funny? About a month ago, I was drunk, it was about 5 AM after the club at a Fafnir camp. My friend "Sugarplum - female taru", and I were talking shit to each other on ventrilo. It eventually went to tells, with stuff like:

"I am going to anal rape you in the ass sugar."
>>"Oh yeah, I am going to bite your dick off bitch."
"Bring it you bloody cunt rag."
etc
etc

Next morning I wakeup with hangover, get online, within 5 minutes get sent to GM jail. GM says I am being giving a warning about sexual harassment to another player. I said, of course, "WTF are you talking about?".

GM reply -> "Do you not remember your tells to a Sugarplum early this morning?"

Me -> "You fucking idiot, that is MY OWN Linkshell Officer and FRIEND IRL(obviously not a friend irl, but one of my best friends on game)."

GM -> "I see. I will now look furture into this, and I will contact the other player to see if she can attest to this."

Two days later - Get POL Mail confirming my warning was removed.

(Screenshots to come when I leave my sister's place)

[Jeryhn]

The most logical solution then is to reduce or eliminate the supply of gil, so that the demand never has to wane. If there is no supply, the demand is irrelevant.

The supply will exist as long as demand does. Don't kid yourself, you can ban all the gil-holding or gil-generating accounts you want, but when there's a buck to be made on gil, getting rid of these accounts are only temporary setbacks, as new accounts will be made to generate and sell gil, and they can be back to full functionality within one or two weeks.

A RL millionaire could play this game and never be able to afford even a scorpion harness without farming the gil himself or camping serket for the claw (which would be possible without gilsellers anymore).

This statement is a quite a bit unrealistic, because the value of gil is lower than that of the value of a dollar.

[Rawk]

I don't know how an LS coffer's activity can be more suspicious than the RMTs that stay online 24/7 monopolizing NMs. SE is remarkable.

I don't understand how so many people think that Gil farming accounts are the same as Gil selling accounts. They're most likely different people and different organizations.

I wasn't saying that the gilfarmers & sellers are the same accounts/organizations. I'm saying SE claims to do all in their power to stop RMT but these accounts, which obviously 'fund' it, are allowed to remain active.

[MisterBob]

This statement is a quite a bit unrealistic, because the value of gil is lower than that of the value of a dollar.

Why would you say that? If there's no gil available for purchase, then money cannot obtain it.

[Jeryhn]

This statement is a quite a bit unrealistic, because the value of gil is lower than that of the value of a dollar.

Why would you say that? If there's no gil available for purchase, then money cannot obtain it.

For maybe a day or two, at most a week. A gilbuyer won't suddenly decide against buying gil if he has to wait a week for the supply to replenish itself.

[Sixtail]

I don't know how an LS coffer's activity can be more suspicious than the RMTs that stay online 24/7 monopolizing NMs. SE is remarkable.

I don't understand how so many people think that Gil farming accounts are the same as Gil selling accounts. They're most likely different people and different organizations.

I wasn't saying that the gilfarmers & sellers are the same accounts/organizations. I'm saying SE claims to do all in their power to stop RMT but these accounts, which obviously 'fund' it, are allowed to remain active.

And I say to you that if SE starts burning random players with the name "Bibibobo" and ilk at the stake, they are sooner or later catch some legit players in their sweeps. Plus as soon as RMT's learn of this, while they might suffer 20-50% losses in leveled characters, the next step is they just buy up old JPN, NA and EU accounts, or get people who can spell english names to name the next set of replacements. Hell they are already doing this NOW.

You will almost never see a RMT toon get banned unless it's caught POS.exeing red handed by a GM, Being anon, online 24/7 and spamming "Cao ni me" when it loses a pull proves jack fucking shit. Even if they got IGE to turn over a list of people they buy gil from, once again you would just see a shitload of level 1 mules go along with some 75's and other assorted levels.

If Blizzard, who's done almost everything but ban all IP's coming out of greater east Asia to deal with RMT's, can't stop em, what chance does SE, who's game is very well suited for RMTing have?

[Khamsin]

This statement is a quite a bit unrealistic, because the value of gil is lower than that of the value of a dollar.

Why would you say that? If there's no gil available for purchase, then money cannot obtain it.

For maybe a day or two, at most a week. A gilbuyer won't suddenly decide against buying gil if he has to wait a week for the supply to replenish itself.

That's when they ban them again, and again, and again so there is never gil available for purchase. Or at the very most, maybe it'll be up for a day, then unavailable for a week again. Eventually, it will become unprofitable for IGE to pay for accounts and new CD keys (after every banning) and employees for weeks on end when they are unable to make any revenue from it during that time. A cost/benefit analysis by their marketing department would tell them to pull out of FFXI and focus on the other online games.

SE would just have to at least outlast IGEs willingness to continue to pay for all the overhead of a gilfarming and selling operation without turning a profit. It's like chasing a carrot on a stick.. the carrot is still there, it never disappears, but how long do you chase it before you decide its not feasible anymore and abandon it.

Being anon, online 24/7 and spamming "Cao ni me" when it loses a pull proves jack fucking shit

I'm willing to bet there's a lot more RMT that are online 24/7 anon camping/farming and spamming "Ni cao ma" and sending all the gil they make to the same group of characters than there are legit players doing that. They could very well use it to bust people and catch very few legit players.

[Sixtail]

This statement is a quite a bit unrealistic, because the value of gil is lower than that of the value of a dollar.

Why would you say that? If there's no gil available for purchase, then money cannot obtain it.

For maybe a day or two, at most a week. A gilbuyer won't suddenly decide against buying gil if he has to wait a week for the supply to replenish itself.

That's when they ban them again, and again, and again so there is never gil available for purchase. Or at the very most, maybe it'll be up for a day, then unavailable for a week again. Eventually, it will become unprofitable for IGE to pay for accounts and new CD keys (after every banning) and employees for weeks on end when they are unable to make any revenue from it during that time. A cost/benefit analysis by their marketing department would tell them to pull out of FFXI and focus on the other online games.

SE would just have to at least outlast IGEs willingness to continue to pay for all the overhead of a gilfarming and selling operation without turning a profit. It's like chasing a carrot on a stick.. the carrot is still there, it never disappears, but how long do you chase it before you decide its not feasible anymore and abandon it.

If there was a way to ban via system and such, like Live bans your system via the BIOS or some shit, I think they could do this. But as it is, most RMT farming ops are largely PS2's, with a smattering of PC's most likely. Lord knows the PS2 and a shitty 13' is cheaper.

[MisterBob]

This statement is a quite a bit unrealistic, because the value of gil is lower than that of the value of a dollar.

Why would you say that? If there's no gil available for purchase, then money cannot obtain it.

For maybe a day or two, at most a week. A gilbuyer won't suddenly decide against buying gil if he has to wait a week for the supply to replenish itself.

That's when they ban them again, and again, and again so there is never gil available for purchase. Or at the very most, maybe it'll be up for a day, then unavailable for a week again. Eventually, it will become unprofitable for IGE to pay for accounts and new CD keys (after every banning) and employees for weeks on end when they are unable to make any revenue from it during that time. A cost/benefit analysis by their marketing department would tell them to pull out of FFXI and focus on the other online games.

SE would just have to at least outlast IGEs willingness to continue to pay for all the overhead of a gilfarming and selling operation without turning a profit. It's like chasing a carrot on a stick.. the carrot is still there, it never disappears, but how long do you chase it before you decide its not feasible anymore and abandon it.

If there was a way to ban via system and such, like Live bans your system via the BIOS or some shit, I think they could do this. But as it is, most RMT farming ops are largely PS2's, with a smattering of PC's most likely. Lord knows the PS2 and a shitty 13' is cheaper.

Lol I remember back in the day they could actually ban your system in Asheron's Call, but that was because MS ran the billing system, so they could install shit into your windows to do this = = It was pretty crazy, even a reformat wouldn't fix it, the file would spare itself if you tried to.

[aurik]

The most logical solution then is to reduce or eliminate the supply of gil, so that the demand never has to wane. If there is no supply, the demand is irrelevant.

The supply will exist as long as demand does. Don't kid yourself, you can ban all the gil-holding or gil-generating accounts you want, but when there's a buck to be made on gil, getting rid of these accounts are only temporary setbacks, as new accounts will be made to generate and sell gil, and they can be back to full functionality within one or two weeks.

A RL millionaire could play this game and never be able to afford even a scorpion harness without farming the gil himself or camping serket for the claw (which would be possible without gilsellers anymore).

This statement is a quite a bit unrealistic, because the value of gil is lower than that of the value of a dollar.

As I said before, you don't tend a garden by pulling the weeds once and then letting them take over.

Here's what I would suggest be done to minimize the gil selling problem:

Right now, the fixed cost to make a gil selling toon is rather low; you buy the game once ($60 for the game and all relevant expansions) you level the toon once (2 weeks of shiftwork with plvlers for 6 accounts?) and then you farm up 100-200 million every month to sell.

Repeatedly banning accounts that sell gil will have a major impact on gil prices because, in addition to destroying the gil on those accounts,
1) time that was spent levelling the characters is lost and must be re-spent
2) CD keys for new accounts must be purchased.

If you catch them often, you will repeatedly incur upon them the rather-large fixed cost of starting up a new character. Quickly, mass quantities of gil will be extremely expensive, as the only "cheap" gil would be gil that was casually sold, by quitting players eg, which is generally not that much.

The second prong of this attack is to repeatedly wiped IGE bank mules. IGE (and similar companies) pays out a lot of money for gil, which then they flip for a big markup.

Let's say they mark the gil up 100%. That is, they pay $100 for X gil and sell it for $200.

If they buy $500,000 worth of gil, then they expect to sell it for $1,000,000. The cost of them doing business on this scale (paying employees, paypal fees, etc) might be $250,000, which means they profit $250,000. However, if you ban a meager 20% of the gil they purchase, they now only have $800,000 income, leading to a net of only $50,000 -- that is, you have reduced their profit by 80% by catching only 20% of their business. The only response they have to this is increasing their margin. Increasing their margin means rising prices means less people buy gil which is what we want!

Also, by repeatedly banning the RMT toons, you crank up the source cost of gil. By banning IGE bank mules and obliterating stock, you force them to raise their margins. Both of these actions mean really high gil prices, which means only really-hardcore RMTers will buy; identify who these are and ban them.

[Jeryhn]

That's when they ban them again, and again, and again so there is never gil available for purchase. Or at the very most, maybe it'll be up for a day, then unavailable for a week again. Eventually, it will become unprofitable for IGE to pay for accounts and new CD keys (after every banning) and employees for weeks on end when they are unable to make any revenue from it during that time. A cost/benefit analysis by their marketing department would tell them to pull out of FFXI and focus on the other online games.

SE would just have to at least outlast IGEs willingness to continue to pay for all the overhead of a gilfarming and selling operation without turning a profit. It's like chasing a carrot on a stick.. the carrot is still there, it never disappears, but how long do you chase it before you decide its not feasible anymore and abandon it.

You completely underestimate the greed of people who profit off of others.
RMT will always exist, because there are people who are willing to buy gil, end of story.

Simply accelerating the process at which is all happens is negligible, because they'll just raise the price of gil, and since gil is still worth much less than the dollar, people will still buy it, for higher prices, which allows them to create more accounts, to generate more gil, to sell at lower prices to appeal to more potential buyers, etc.

And to top it off, even legit players who play this game might still end up RMTing their account to get a bit of investment back, creating a new account with which to generate more gil.

Its a cycle, just like any RL market. If you accelerate it, you'll just run the risk of banning the actual legit players that this thread is concerned about.

[Sixtail]

Lol I remember back in the day they could actually ban your system in Asheron's Call, but that was because MS ran the billing system, so they could install shit into your windows to do this = = It was pretty crazy, even a reformat wouldn't fix it, the file would spare itself if you tried to.

That's fucking hardcore there. Shame they couldn't get away with it these days. Blizzard tried and people cried rape.

[Jeryhn]

As I said before, you don't tend a garden by pulling the weeds once and then letting them take over.

Here's what I would suggest be done to minimize the gil selling problem:

Right now, the fixed cost to make a gil selling toon is rather low; you buy the game once ($60 for the game and all relevant expansions) you level the toon once (2 weeks of shiftwork with plvlers for 6 accounts?) and then you farm up 100-200 million every month to sell.

Repeatedly banning accounts that sell gil will have a major impact on gil prices because, in addition to destroying the gil on those accounts,
1) time that was spent levelling the characters is lost and must be re-spent
2) CD keys for new accounts must be purchased.

If you catch them often, you will repeatedly incur upon them the rather-large fixed cost of starting up a new character. Quickly, mass quantities of gil will be extremely expensive, as the only "cheap" gil would be gil that was casually sold, by quitting players eg, which is generally not that much.

The second prong of this attack is to repeatedly wiped IGE bank mules. IGE (and similar companies) pays out a lot of money for gil, which then they flip for a big markup.

Let's say they mark the gil up 100%. That is, they pay $100 for X gil and sell it for $200.

If they buy $500,000 worth of gil, then they expect to sell it for $1,000,000. The cost of them doing business on this scale (paying employees, paypal fees, etc) might be $250,000, which means they profit $250,000. However, if you ban a meager 20% of the gil they purchase, they now only have $800,000 income, leading to a net of only $50,000 -- that is, you have reduced their profit by 80% by catching only 20% of their business. The only response they have to this is increasing their margin. Increasing their margin means rising prices means less people buy gil which is what we want!

Also, by repeatedly banning the RMT toons, you crank up the source cost of gil. By banning IGE bank mules and obliterating stock, you force them to raise their margins. Both of these actions mean really high gil prices, which means only really-hardcore RMTers will buy; identify who these are and ban them.

That's a nice idyllic theory. Hardly practical though, no matter how many numbers you throw into the mix. A gilselling account doesn't get banned until it becomes a problem which has already done its damage. There is no "nip it in the bud" method here, especially when it comes to the risk of banning legit players.

[aurik]

As I said before, you don't tend a garden by pulling the weeds once and then letting them take over.

Here's what I would suggest be done to minimize the gil selling problem:

Right now, the fixed cost to make a gil selling toon is rather low; you buy the game once ($60 for the game and all relevant expansions) you level the toon once (2 weeks of shiftwork with plvlers for 6 accounts?) and then you farm up 100-200 million every month to sell.

Repeatedly banning accounts that sell gil will have a major impact on gil prices because, in addition to destroying the gil on those accounts,
1) time that was spent levelling the characters is lost and must be re-spent
2) CD keys for new accounts must be purchased.

If you catch them often, you will repeatedly incur upon them the rather-large fixed cost of starting up a new character. Quickly, mass quantities of gil will be extremely expensive, as the only "cheap" gil would be gil that was casually sold, by quitting players eg, which is generally not that much.

The second prong of this attack is to repeatedly wiped IGE bank mules. IGE (and similar companies) pays out a lot of money for gil, which then they flip for a big markup.

Let's say they mark the gil up 100%. That is, they pay $100 for X gil and sell it for $200.

If they buy $500,000 worth of gil, then they expect to sell it for $1,000,000. The cost of them doing business on this scale (paying employees, paypal fees, etc) might be $250,000, which means they profit $250,000. However, if you ban a meager 20% of the gil they purchase, they now only have $800,000 income, leading to a net of only $50,000 -- that is, you have reduced their profit by 80% by catching only 20% of their business. The only response they have to this is increasing their margin. Increasing their margin means rising prices means less people buy gil which is what we want!

Also, by repeatedly banning the RMT toons, you crank up the source cost of gil. By banning IGE bank mules and obliterating stock, you force them to raise their margins. Both of these actions mean really high gil prices, which means only really-hardcore RMTers will buy; identify who these are and ban them.

That's a nice idyllic theory. Hardly practical though, no matter how many numbers you throw into the mix. A gilselling account doesn't get banned until it becomes a problem which has already done its damage. There is no "nip it in the bud" method here, especially when it comes to the risk of banning legit players.

Gil selling accounts have to do a lot of "damage" before they pay off the time and money invested in the characters. Even if they "break even" in the long run, why would they bother to when they could just go play WoW and make more money?

[Sixtail]

That's when they ban them again, and again, and again so there is never gil available for purchase. Or at the very most, maybe it'll be up for a day, then unavailable for a week again. Eventually, it will become unprofitable for IGE to pay for accounts and new CD keys (after every banning) and employees for weeks on end when they are unable to make any revenue from it during that time. A cost/benefit analysis by their marketing department would tell them to pull out of FFXI and focus on the other online games.

SE would just have to at least outlast IGEs willingness to continue to pay for all the overhead of a gilfarming and selling operation without turning a profit. It's like chasing a carrot on a stick.. the carrot is still there, it never disappears, but how long do you chase it before you decide its not feasible anymore and abandon it.

You completely underestimate the greed of people who profit off of others.
RMT will always exist, because there are people who are willing to buy gil, end of story.

Simply accelerating the process at which is all happens is negligible, because they'll just raise the price of gil, and since gil is still worth much less than the dollar, people will still buy it, for higher prices, which allows them to create more accounts, to generate more gil, to sell at lower prices to appeal to more potential buyers, etc.

And to top it off, even legit players who play this game might still end up RMTing their account to get a bit of investment back, creating a new account with which to generate more gil.

Its a cycle, just like any RL market. If you accelerate it, you'll just run the risk of banning the actual legit players that this thread is concerned about.

I agree. If you make it insanely hard for the CGF's to do, then their will be a lovely number of 'legit' players who will. IGE got where it was by being willing to pay idiots for fake money and at viable prices to start. The secound you make it possable again for someone to sell 10-20 million and make $200-300 dollars again, their will be people who run to do it. Remember the first wave of mass RMT bank mule bannings? People gloated in glee in LJ's and even on here about cashing out and making 400-4000 dollars and stuff without a bit of a reget other then "Cool, I got paid for my time' Lord knows on many servers, a lot of LS's are set up to make their members a chunk of cash. You think endgame is bad now? Wait till more then 10% of the players are doing it so they can make their credit card and car payments.

[Jeryhn]

As I said before, you don't tend a garden by pulling the weeds once and then letting them take over.

Here's what I would suggest be done to minimize the gil selling problem:

Right now, the fixed cost to make a gil selling toon is rather low; you buy the game once ($60 for the game and all relevant expansions) you level the toon once (2 weeks of shiftwork with plvlers for 6 accounts?) and then you farm up 100-200 million every month to sell.

Repeatedly banning accounts that sell gil will have a major impact on gil prices because, in addition to destroying the gil on those accounts,
1) time that was spent levelling the characters is lost and must be re-spent
2) CD keys for new accounts must be purchased.

If you catch them often, you will repeatedly incur upon them the rather-large fixed cost of starting up a new character. Quickly, mass quantities of gil will be extremely expensive, as the only "cheap" gil would be gil that was casually sold, by quitting players eg, which is generally not that much.

The second prong of this attack is to repeatedly wiped IGE bank mules. IGE (and similar companies) pays out a lot of money for gil, which then they flip for a big markup.

Let's say they mark the gil up 100%. That is, they pay $100 for X gil and sell it for $200.

If they buy $500,000 worth of gil, then they expect to sell it for $1,000,000. The cost of them doing business on this scale (paying employees, paypal fees, etc) might be $250,000, which means they profit $250,000. However, if you ban a meager 20% of the gil they purchase, they now only have $800,000 income, leading to a net of only $50,000 -- that is, you have reduced their profit by 80% by catching only 20% of their business. The only response they have to this is increasing their margin. Increasing their margin means rising prices means less people buy gil which is what we want!

Also, by repeatedly banning the RMT toons, you crank up the source cost of gil. By banning IGE bank mules and obliterating stock, you force them to raise their margins. Both of these actions mean really high gil prices, which means only really-hardcore RMTers will buy; identify who these are and ban them.

That's a nice idyllic theory. Hardly practical though, no matter how many numbers you throw into the mix. A gilselling account doesn't get banned until it becomes a problem which has already done its damage. There is no "nip it in the bud" method here, especially when it comes to the risk of banning legit players.

Gil selling accounts have to do a lot of "damage" before they pay off the time and money invested in the characters. Even if they "break even" in the long run, why would they bother to when they could just go play WoW and make more money?

If you thought RMT was only "breaking even" with the current bans in both FFXI and WoW, that the problem would have already been solved?

Sorry guy, you can't have it both ways. You either play a game where you run the risk the being banned for absolutely nothing other than looking suspicious, or you play a game where you grit your teeth through your gilselling competition. There is no middle ground.