Banned for RMT?Follow

The short answer is, yes, they quite potentially are stupid enough to handle the process that way. Saying they won't do something because it affects their bottom line assumes that they automatically know what's best for their bottom line. You can't assume the right hand knows exactly what the left hand is doing. Such is the nature of bureaucracy.

To make matters worse, they are dealing with contradictory goals. They want to hold on to their subscribers, yes, but they also want to eliminate RMT. To that end they create a Special Task Force whose primary purpose is to stop RMT. They have the ability to investigate and the authority to ban. They are, to the players, a faceless, anonymous organization that acts from behind closed doors and whose only accountability is to their own bosses.

And the real problem is, their own bosses may be completely blind as to what is actually going on in the game. The people they rely upon for this information are quite likely the same people that are doing the bannings in the first place: the STF. For the July 6 bannings, the STF will release a report saying that they banned x number of people for RMT, eliminated y gil from circulation, and all is well in the world.

In an earlier post, either in this thread or another, I referred to the STF as "gestapo-like". I wasn't being dramatic. It's a useful metaphor. These are the problems inherent when you have a single group of people responsible for being the police, the judge, the jury, and the executioner when it comes to the players. When that group makes a mistake, there's nobody to call them on it.

Unfortunately this is why the scenario of the STF member wanting to go home early, saying "***** it", and just banning everyone flagged by their automated software is entirely plausible. Yes, it adversely affects their bottom line. Yes, it damages their reputation as a company. But what does this guy care about any of that? His only job is to hunt down and kill RMT. And because he's likely the very same guy that the bosses go to when they get complaints that innocent players were banned, he can just say "I'm 100% sure that everyone who was banned was involved in RMT." Who is there to call him on it? He can just say what he needs to say to get the bosses off his back and take an early 3 martini lunch break.

I don't think that's the most likely scenario, mind you. Given the escalation of RMT tells and the degree to which they make and made S/E and the STF objects of ridicule amongst the player base for their inability to stop them, it's entirely likely that there was considerable pressure was applied on the STF to step up their game. Of course that increases the risk of innocent players being hit with the banstick, as clearly happened in this case. If the mayor of a city pressures the police to crack down on crime, you expect a rise in brutality complaints. It's just the nature of the beast.

And unfortunately, because S/E is a company veiled in completely ridiculous shrouds of secrecy that has absolutely zero meaningful fan interaction, the only recourse of the wrongly banned players is to beg for mercy from the very same people that banned them in the first place, under the slim hope that they will be willing to admit they made a mistake, or somehow (probably via negative publicity associated with the bannings) force the bosses to apply pressure to the STF to reverse the wrongful bannings.

I believe that people will not want to play FFXIV if they learn that the company will ban you after years of work spent building your character for absolutely no reason, via a system that offers you essentially no appeal, no direct feedback from the company itself (except for a few worthless customer support reps who might as well be bots for their scripted responses), and not even a concrete reason for your ban apart from lumping you in to an enormous, generic category.

That is our only real leverage here, but it should not be underestimated. S/E was willing to change the mechanics of some of their highest-profile HNM's due to a single bad headline.

Edited, Jul 8th 2009 8:50am by MagicideAsura

It would take a minute or two to tell I am not rmt. That's all. The ban does not just impact me and the others who were banned. It impacts everyone we know. I am sure everyone, even my best friends, will survive not seeing my face. Problem is they now know they could be next.
Is it worth it to garden anymore? They are going to have second thoughts. Is it worth it to farm to npc? It might get them banned. Is it worth it to do anything that earns gil? It might get them flagged. Should they complete CoPs? Why bother if the day after you get your ring, you get banned. Should you invest 500k to support a dynamis in bastok? Why if it gets you lots of wootz ores you can sell for a nice profit. That could get you flagged. Should you take the time and effort to level a craft? RMTs craft. Should you do anything that gives you a good steady income? Why put out the effort if it can get you banned?
Everyone that knows me, knows I am not rmt. They know they are just as vulnerable as I was. Everything they do now, in the back of their mind they have to wonder if it is worth it if they can just get banned tomorrow.
Is it worth it to develop friendships? If you do it is very painful to lose them by being banned or having them be banned. My very best friend, whom I have known now for 5 years, called me last night. We have always been able to chat ongame. She has the most wonderful southern voice. I had never heard her before. Another friend called me. A charming Australian accent. I dont think I could bear to lose the contact with them. The one said all day she kept asking herself what she was doing on the game. Its not fun without friends.
We are collateral damage but so are the people we know.

I believe that not only SE will be reading this letter so you should explain all the terms that are not common outside of FFXI. Suggested fixes for clarification (note: I'm Economics major so I'm not that great at writing either):

Real Money Trader(s) - you should add "(RMT)" without the "" behind for clarification and use RMT after.

STF - should be explained as Spacial Task Force which is a team designed by Square Enix to combat RMT.

Gamers - should be consumers to make it look more professional.

Other suggestions: You should stress that this issue should be resolved quickly before members of the community start writing on blogs and other websites about the issue. A few more news like this will give the impression that future Square Enix Online games will suffer from the same issues. This will definitely cause a lower than expected sales for future games. Square Enix will lose both current and future customers.

What was the search comment?

I am wondering if its possible that they are tracking login times? Like for a gardening mule you log on them for what maybe 1-3 minutes then log to another mule. Its possible they are bunching all "characters" whose logon time is under say 5 minutes on a normal basis, which would include RMT shout bots and gardening mules.

Anyonw who Does have a current gardening cycle, try chilling on said mule for a bit of time, perhaps Buy something, be it a flask of distilled water or whatever, but make it appearent that you are ont only gaining gil.

We all want RMT gone, but as in the past, SE just goes too far. They really do need to fix this ***** up tho, because this time, there really are a lot of innocents who were banned in the wave.

To those who have been banned, i wish you the best of luck in getting restored. As said above, this issue Really needs to get resolved.

Of everything I've read, it seems the underlying factor in all of the bans aren't just gardening, but gardening and NPCing some of the harvest.

I'm not sure why they banned over simply nerfing the buyback price of the recipe, or the yields from it. Even with banning, nothing is stopping the rmt from making new accounts and trying again, this time probably acting on a smaller scale to avoid the threshold which caused them to be banned. The players though get hurt a lot because they have actual work on the account which cannot be replicated even if they sign up again.

Considering that there is nothing exploitative about this at all, they shouldn't be banning. Yeah, people were probably going too far in terms of production, but that's SE's fault for enabling people to have ten + mules and multiple accounts. Banning is too final a step to be taken this lightly, and it especially shouldn't be done as a result of an automated process.

Especially since SE did not state that this was against the TOS, or the result of rule-violating conduct, for the gardening itself. If they ban RMT its cool, but by doing this, they should reverse the bans of non RMT people affected by it, because there is no other charge to be had-its using a legitimate gameplay tactic (although aped by RMT) according to the rules.

I think the bigger problem was that SE was way too slow on realizing the scale of gardening and vendoring the vendor trash from wildgrass seeds. They let it balloon to the point where both RMT and players managed to create a massive amount of gil in the economy, and they tried to fix it by banning the largest gil supplies. Unfortunately a lot of players also used this method, which is legitimate, and SE hit them too.

If i were SE, i'd work with people on a case by case basis to reinstate them if they were wrongfully banned, issue a public apology, and give those banned a free month or more of FFXI play. I'd also go and nerf the wildgrass recipe to prevent a huge buildup of gil again.

So, anyone keen to buy the next expansion or FFXIV after this? No, me neither. Great PR SE.

From what I hear coming from anyone I've talked to that played FF12, SE was counting on some sales drops.

Hey I understand you fully, and I'm worried for my main account. I have two characters main characters....75s on both War, Whm , Nin, Drg and Brd.

ZM done both, CoP done one, CoP almost done on the other and many other things as well...

It's upsetting to get slaped with rmt when you're not.

After reading a few pages of these posts and seeing gardening as the reason for most of the bans I thought I'd tell about our situation.

We (myself, my bf, and my older brother) all got the LM banned message. I received an e-mail right after saying it was from a charge back. So the next day I contacted SE and they unbanned my account right then, but the ban reversal service had errors and I couldn't log in until the next day. Right after I did my account my bf waited for 2 hours before he talked to someone and they said they couldn't unban his account until the next day because of the errors. The person who helped us said he would just have to contact them the next day and they would unban it.

The next day comes and he talks to them and they changed their story to he can't be unbanned due to illegal activities. They told him to wait for some e-mail that we still haven't received. When we contacted them again they just kept saying the situation has escalated too far for them to try to unban the account. Basically all I keep thinking is SE is saying, "I'm too lazy to fix something I messed up." They wouldn't even take more than 30 seconds to talk to us and then when we asked them a question they would totally ignore us and ask for our e-mail or some contact info.

My bf never gardened and his mules are basically only gear holders. I gave him some gil about a month ago, but I don't think that would be the reason to ban him. So, not only gardeners are being hit with the ban. It seems ppl that got hit with the charge back are also getting hit with the ban.

(If this kind of situation has already been posted here I apologize. I didn't feel like I needed to read all four pages of posts.) :)

who says it was trial accounts that were doing it though? If anything, they'd have to put a freeze on any account using a large number of mules trial or non. And I think part of the problem was that enough normal players were doing it too, which is why so many people got caught up in the bans.

The reason why I said nerf though was because its better than banning when SE can't determine rmt or not. Wildgrass gets nerfed? Well, it sucks, but hey, if anything it saves people money where they dont need multiple mules and accounts. Innocent accounts get banned? Very bad thing.

Wildgrass gardening on a pay account isn't profitable enough to support an RMT operation. It was only when the trial account came out that we started to see masses of smash names in Bastok Mines.



Edited, Jul 9th 2009 3:01am by Lobivopis