Gardening Ban Criteria?Follow

Assuming POIDH, I think this might be the best advice from a GM ever.

If this is true, I can totally believe that a GM could get up, walk over to a supervisor, say 'Hey whats up with these gardening bans' and get a response of 'sh*tstorm', and give that quoted response back to the player with nothing better to do about it.

I would make a GM call from a gardening account just to get it flagged 'NOT RMT!' at this point, if that could help in any way.

I think RMTPwner v1.337 is turning Hal on us and deciding that if it just bans everyone there will be no more RMT at all.

Edit: Quotefail

Edited, Jul 7th 2009 12:42pm by Raelix

Final Post no duplicate. I will be posting this in the other Threads on the subject before i send it and wait at least sometime before i sumbit it to the BBB, Other people i may sign for in my complaint would be greatly appreciated

My Complaint:Many Loyal Customer's Final Fantasy XI account was banned due to "irregular RMT activity" that never occured

My Problem:Dear Square Enix,
Our Accounts on your game was banned because we were labeled as a Real Money Traders of some sort. I will testify that I as a loyal customer have never been part of said activity in your game. Many other fellow gamers have also been hit with this latest mass ban on July 3rd. From what the community can surmise is that it was multiple characters on their account that would send goods to their primary character so they could make IN-game gil(currency) for IN-game uses. Most of these individuals have contacted your costumer service and have been stone-walled because the issue has to deal with the STF which we can not contact to try to get this issue resolved.It seems to me that the higher number of bans they are pushing each month may be due to their search criterea increasing which leads to loyal non-RMTs being confused with RMTs. This will most likely lead to a loss in sales of both Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XI accounts if not resolved. Also you have no represenatives in the community that can assist us in getting this issue across so we are left to find our own means such as this letter.

Thank You for you time,
Stephen E. Peck

My Solution:I would like Square Enix to address the community of loyal gamers of this issue on their website, or at least e-mail those who have been banned for the before stated reason. Also prehaps a more human approach to the STF and their practices in finding Real Money Traders. Communication with the community of consumers needs to be opened.

Any suggestions to these would be appreciated since I am a Math Major(terrible at writing)

6 characters, my main and 5 mules on the same account.
All of my gardening mules are level 5 and my main has several 75s.
Two in Sandy, two in Windy, one in Bastok and my main travels around.
Three taru, three galka.
I sold all of my harvest results on the character which it was harvested, and rarely sent gil to my main unless it was an emergency.
All unique mule names.
BANNED

This is all so sad :(

I used to garden with the max amount of characters on one account, all my mules had the same name except one letter at the end to differentiate, example: Missya, Missyb,Missyc etc. That was only so I could remember the names while muling over stuff easier.

I don't play XI anymore, but I really REALLY hope SE gets their act together on how they will do bannings/control rmt before XIV comes out.

Winrar.


On topic, the general "rule" for the banned people appears to be 15-16 mules, many Lv1, all gardening (based on replies to this thread). The only exception appears to be Professor Lemmi. I hesitate to say "provided you don't have 15 or 16 mules, you'll be ok" because of this.

Oh, the similarity is clear enough. RMT have started to garden with thousands of trial accounts, using the exact same methods the banned legit accounts are using.
We know that much.
But the automated RMT hunting software can't see the difference, because there IS no difference. It's all about low level characters doing the same easy gardening and probably selling to the same NPCs to boot.

If you walk like RMT, talk like RMT and garden like RMT, SE thinks you ARE RMT. They don't wait for the accounts to unload their gil on the market, obviously.

I estimate somewhere between 50-100 players are rolled up with the RMT, but any legit player being banned over this is one to many.

So what to do about it? Petitions don't work. They never worked. Cancelling accounts until they fix it? SE won't even notice it. Harassing SEI agents is not going to help either.
The only thing that works is volume. People need to make GM calls, send emails to the STF, post on message boards. And please... none of that annoying hate crap we've seen in some other threads, that's counter-productive.

legit players are not using the same method as rmt, rmt are using a security hole in ffxi's network code to repeatedly harvest the same plants in open-mog without having to empty the pots.

Obviously you have never gardened Wildgrass seeds. When I was using all mules available on my account (now only use 7) I would pay about 57k for seeds for all mules, add in about 15k for crystals (when I didn't just farm them) and you have around 70k. A GOOD harvest would net me about 300k. So, we have a profit of about 230k per week. I DON'T call that Truckloads of gil. Since I only use 7 mules now I make about 100-140k gil per week. That's not even a pickup load.

As I've said before, its enough for consumables. RR items, food, tools, meds, etc. That's all.

Did any account get banned where there was an active 'main' character?

The vast majority of people that are reporting banned accounts seem to be 16 level 1 mules. With a few being 15 level 1 mules and 1 'inactive' main. All sending gil, or the gardening results back to another account.

My guess is there was some criteria of '16 characters doing nothing but gardening & NPCing the results that only send the profits to another account.' The 'legit' players that got caught in the crossfire were people that turned out to be doing exactly what the RMTs were doing (and were therefore indistinguishable). Since we know that SE is bad at telling who owns any given account this isn't a surprise.

W/ regard to 'it's not hurting anyone'. SE has always frowned on anything that just produces gil without contributing materials or final products to the player based economy (which is actually a good position). The main reason that any activity which produces lots of gil without contributing usable products to the economy is that it's inflationary, and only benefits the people doing it, at the cost of everyone else that's 'playing nice.'

Dude, take a blue pill. The real world is obviously too much for you to comprehend. Just go back to sleep and be a battery for our mechanic overlords for a while.

Yes. The friend of mine that was banned had 3 level 75 jobs and was a very active officer in an endgame linkshell, making events literally 6 nights a week. When the LM-17 hit she was literally booted out of Dynamis - San d'Oria.

No it doesn't, stop jumping to conclusions.