Ulli :<

[aurik]

aurik do they own charybdis on your server as well?

They all pretty much had joyeuse at one point. I don't know if they bother to kill him anymore, since they are like 90% blm damage based now and rarely use paladin tanks.

[Coephoros]

I think most people have way way less than 20m gil now, the average banstick triage would probably look more like 300 mil per server.

25+ amemet skins sold on asura yesterday alone, 100% from RMT sources. That's almost 5m just from 1 NM in 1 day.

The bans are hitting people with quite a bit more invested than the average joe. 3M an account isn't enough to deck out a mid-level toon at even modest gear levels. And you're not banning the average noob, you're banning the guy with 3 level 75s botting his way through events DESIGNED to make him gil.

And the 25 amemet skins are spread across how many different RMT groups? And how many RMT crafters were the buyers? You've even got gil circulation among the gilsellers. So 25 skins sold for 5M; only 5 HQ capes sold for 4.5M, and 15 or so NQs sold for a wtfpwned 150K. You're still looking at a net loss there for the gilsellers.

[Machazareel]

I know of a shitload of hackers who are dirt poor, so that doesn't serve to make any decisive point.

[aurik]

I think most people have way way less than 20m gil now, the average banstick triage would probably look more like 300 mil per server.

25+ amemet skins sold on asura yesterday alone, 100% from RMT sources. That's almost 5m just from 1 NM in 1 day.

The bans are hitting people with quite a bit more invested than the average joe. 3M an account isn't enough to deck out a mid-level toon at even modest gear levels. And you're not banning the average noob, you're banning the guy with 3 level 75s botting his way through events DESIGNED to make him gil.

And the 25 amemet skins are spread across how many different RMT groups? And how many RMT crafters were the buyers? You've even got gil circulation among the gilsellers. So 25 skins sold for 5M; only 5 HQ capes sold for 4.5M, and 15 or so NQs sold for a wtfpwned 150K. You're still looking at a net loss there for the gilsellers.

Check for yourself: http://www.ffxiah.com/item.php?id=1275&sid=28
Line, Malic, Ryuit, and Zerone are all "real" players (although the Ryuit account has been sold at least once)

1500 accounts banned over 30 servers is 50 per server, 7m each is 350m total.

It really doesn't matter how much "value" is banned on a player, we're talking about actual gil being destroyed. Most people do not carry that much gil around -- they save up and buy 1 expensive item, rinse repeat. Furthermore, I'd wager that people who POS around generally will have much more value stored in goods than in gil, which means that we're actually destroying more value on the property side than on the gil side with the bannings.

[Ashira]

I feel the need to sign up for an economics refresher course after this thread.


What I don't get is, those people who claim seeing Ulli spawn after killing just the PH for 2 hrs, assuming other shells are killing the other statues, why does it seem Ulli takes so much longer to spawn if everything in the room is killed?

Because there is no way to ever leave any statues up in that room on Odin anymore, if that's some sort of requirement like someone theorized. I went on a Thursday morning run with the JP members in my LS, probably my first time up there since the Ulli change (I remember camping all around the center), and it was... completely.. packed. People EVERYWHERE, claiming anything that popped.

They need to ban every one who has a random assortment of letters as a name, or two random words put together, or any sort of combination of any server name or 'ffxi' or attribute/ability in the game. And give legit players that get caught in the wayside the opportunity to prove they're legit, by perhaps not having a credit card that pays for 100 accounts as its payment method. ._.

Ok, overreacting maybe. I know everyone says that SE won't ever really do anything because of the money they make with all these accounts out there, but it does seem just absolutely crazy. You can't go anywhere without running into highly suspect groups exping, etc.

FFXI is my first MMORPG, so I never knew about such a business/problem. Those people that have played other pre FFXI and WoW, was this as prevalent in *every* game? Or is there something more accessible or lucrative about this game?

I mean, obviously I've read up on the history of the notorious and whatnot in this business, but that's different than experiencing it personally, there, in your gameplay, affecting your time.

[Lordender]

whats funny is i'm leveling war and going to ding into a ridill and Ebody but not a hadiate ; ; fuck RMT

[Alastaire]

whats funny is i'm leveling war and going to ding into a ridill and Ebody but not a hadiate ; ; fuck RMT

You're going to ding INTO a Ridill and an E. Body. And you're complaining.

<.<

[*Shinzon*]

Really late response, but all it takes is following the RMt to locate which PH it is. They use a program that labels each of the statues that pop in the room and only kill that place holder, its the simplest thing in the world.

P.S. yes theres only one PH.

[shinobi_tabi]

well this thread really progressed from ulli to like ffxi 101 but everyone seems to have the same problem, ffxi's rmtonomy.
The obvious solution is SE needs to step it up to really combat these rmt who keep coming back with new toons in those alliances lvling 24/7 type ppl, really...
I am not here to tell you guys another solution is to quit and play a mmo game without rmt?(is there? lol)
People should really bitch to SE more about letting the playerbase decide on stuff a little more, or some kind of greater influence...

[anhero]

se doesn't give a shit about you.

qft! can i qft myself? well, i just did. sorry if some huge time paradox comes from this.

anywho..i propose we start saying "$e". they'll _never_, _ever_, EVER, NEVER do anything about rmt. waiting for it to happen is like waiting for peeance freeance.

[Lordender]

how about we go to china, find their sweat shops and choke them to fucking death :D

[CaptainObvious]

I remember back in the day when you could XP at Ulli and there wouldn't be a single person there then he'd pop and there still be no one there.

Ulli is just reason #23432 why this game is going downhill fast.

[Okuza]

Those people that have played other pre FFXI and WoW, was this as prevalent in *every* game? Or is there something more accessible or lucrative about this game?

WoW-RMT is a joke. It's so easy to make gold there that gold soon looses all value. Also, all the good end-game gear is ra/ex from instanced areas. You have to go yourself and no one can block you from going there.

EQ was different. That's where RMT was born. It's where all the RMT learned that blocking access meant higher profit. It's a lot harder to block access there, though, than in FFXI. EQ has such a huge rich end-game that you can literally kill HNM 24x7 if you're the top shell and still not kill them all. 'Course a lot of that is stuff being killed just to keep others out of the end-game, but there's still a TON of it.

FFXI is uniquely designed to support RMT. It has almost no end-game and much of the end-game that exists is easy to monopolize. Not only that, but unlike other games, currency is extremely valuable in FFXI end-game. EQ was mostly barter end-game because platinum couldn't buy anything useful; EQ-RMT sold items mostly, not gil -- much harder to for them to move (they needed to "warehouse" truckloads of gear on mules or ra/ex stuff directly off the kill). With FFXI, SE has created a situation that is an RMT's wet-dream.

--

Here's what I sent FFXI regarding the whole RMT issue -- mostly driven by Ulli frustations, but it's germane to the entire RMT problem.

Please stop supporting RMT in FFXI. With all the announced bannings of RMT and cheaters, this might sound like an odd complaint. Honestly, I've never seen any evidence that RMT are actually banned. The RMT I see every day are the ones in sky (Tulia). They are always there. They are never banned. They claim and kill every single NM the instant it spawns. They can do this because they are simply exploiting the game system as designed by SE. This system gives an enormous advantage to RMT over regular players. SE could change the system with minimal effort to give equal access to non-RMT. SE has instead made a change to one of the spawns (Ullikummi) that makes it even easier for RMT to claim over real players. The obvious conclusion is that SE made this change to help RMT. I'm hoping that's not the case.

If SE's goal is to fight a battle with RMT, bannings are the way to go. In that case, the only true casualties will be the real player. If SE's goal is to win the war against RMT, instead borrow strategy from Sun Tzu and Musashi: make it so SE wins without lifting a finger to fight. Unlike battlefields in RL, SE controls the physical laws of the game completely. So, change the battlefield -- change the laws of physics for the game. Make it so continous and tireless play by RMT-bots doesn't prevent regular players from playing the game, too. Make it so the entire concept of a claim-bot has no meaning in the game. Here are two small examples of how this can be done with very simple changes.

First, permit players to spawn any NM. The spawn could be driven by a farmed item (like water for Olla or seals for BC orbs), gil (like Dynamis), CP, IP, time & missions (as for ENM flags), etc.. Individual story and cut-scenes behind each NM spawn method would be quite nice, but ultimately the details are unimportant compared to the concept. If players can spawn any and all NMs on their own schedule, RMT can't prevent people from playing the game. There is no need to buy gil to pay off the RMT in order to access the content they're blocking.

Second, if random spawn NM are left in game, change them so that they spawn pre-claimed by a randomly chosen person in the area. This eliminates the advantage of a 3rd party tool user. There are many ways to select the claim-victim -- people could "register" to claim a particular HNM so the HNM doesn't randomly pounce on some poor hapless XP party. Perhaps place some HNM-bait on a ???-marker. Then again, it might lend a bit of fun to be pounced on when not suspecting it. Details again are unimportant compared to concept. Eliminate the need to claim things faster than the guy next to you and you've removed the entire point of using a claim-bot; RMT could no longer monopolize an area. Regular people could just play the game.

The sign-on page for FFXI has a wonderful paragraph imporing players not to ignore work, school, friends, and family. This is a marvelous philosophy that the game system unfortunately does not support. Instead, the game system promotes those that do in fact ignore school, friends, and family -- whose job it is to play the game. It permits RMT to effectively block access to areas of the game via monopolization and thus charge their own admission fees. Real players did not sign up for these extra fees and SE certainly isn't receiving them.

Timeliness on fixing this is critical. Quiting the game (or just quitting the shell) versus buying gil in order to access sky has become a common conversation in my sky shell. This is not pleasant. I really would rather the topics were more about playing the game rather than how to get around the SE-supported RMT monopoly of sky.

[Dark Vincent]

Those people that have played other pre FFXI and WoW, was this as prevalent in *every* game? Or is there something more accessible or lucrative about this game?

Hmm to be honest the games I've played before also had RMT problem. And some were much worse than FFXI, specially when the games were flawed to the point you could set up multiple bots to do anything for you. Usually there wasnt a "RMT company" like IGE behind them, just random players benefiting from system exploits, but they would abuse it hard, specially because they played too so they just wanted to have the biggest advantage over others WHILE earning money as well.

As for WoW... WoW's soulbind system is pretty good, but in the end these companies still profit even there. If not through game currency sales, through power leveling and other crap services.
MMORPGs as a whole have much room for improvement.

Second, if random spawn NM are left in game, change them so that they spawn pre-claimed by a randomly chosen person in the area. This eliminates the advantage of a 3rd party tool user. There are many ways to select the claim-victim -- people could "register" to claim a particular HNM so the HNM doesn't randomly pounce on some poor hapless XP party. Perhaps place some HNM-bait on a ???-marker. Then again, it might lend a bit of fun to be pounced on when not suspecting it. Details again are unimportant compared to concept. Eliminate the need to claim things faster than the guy next to you and you've removed the entire point of using a claim-bot; RMT could no longer monopolize an area. Regular people could just play the game.

That would be pretty terrible ;/ I know I wouldnt want to camp crap for 3 hours if the chances of me getting it are just random. And imagine the amount of lag in the zones due to people crowding HNM areas to increase their chances of getting it (I know it's already like that, but imagine worse, and increase the worse 3x). It would be a retarded battle of numbers.

EDIT: added stuff

[Plow]

yeah in WoW the gold means nothing, but people will pay people real life money to *BOT* level their char, knowing full well it's going to be botted

[Heian]

This whole thread makes me lol hard.

Ryko hurry up man its gonna be sad when I hit 60 before you seeing as how I only play like 8 hours a week.