Gardening Ban Criteria?Follow

My account was extremely active. We were considering a prize in our social for anyone who beat me on time online. So far I had the closest beat by 3 times. Oops now they can guess how many hours I have which was part of the contest.
I just finished CoPs last week. :D I have three level 75s and crafting ww to 100. Lots of sub crafts. I like to do non-fighting stuff best so craft, dig, whatever looks good. I run an active social linkshell. Yep the account is active. And I only have one account. So far.

From my personal experience, I'd put it at around 330 gil profit per plant per day. So 3.3k-ish gil per day per mule.

Edit: This is if you do Wildgrass Seeds and NPC everything other than crystals.


It's a little surprising that they didn't ban all 4 of your accounts. But seriously, put yourself in SE's shoes. 4 separate accounts loaded up with mules all doing gardening. How is that not suspicious?

Edited, Jul 9th 2009 3:38pm by svlyons

Dear Square-Enix,

Free trials need limitations.

Thank you.

I'm intrigued how people with a handful of gardening mules got banned, but the guy with sixteen accounts worth is still up and running.

I'd be more inclined to buy that if you had screenshots or something. :P

Just tossing this out there, but have any of the banned ever ported a stranger for gil? When I was looking at the RMT PWNER details I started thinking of ways in which people could be flagged as associated with an RMTer. You'd likely have to have traded gil with someone and porting for cash was a logical conclusion. It doesn't even need to be a farmer, maybe even just a purchaser?

I am the "officer in an endgame linkshell friend" that Magicide is talking about. He knows what happened because he is a RL friend and was in the same room as me when I was on live chat with SE. I was told it was for RMT, not for 3rd party programs, nor a credit card issue. He knows me and all my linkshell mates know how I feel about RMT. I despise it and have always taken a strong stand against them. You can think what you want about me, but I KNOW I didn't do anything wrong. Hell, the gardening mules weren't even technically mine. My husband activated them when I took 18 months off from the game because we had twin babies. He needs the gil to fund his relic... he has a full time job, travels all the time and is the leader of a large end-game linkshell on Asura... how else is he supposed to fund his relic??? He will never buy gil and if SE would get their head out of their *** they would see that all the gil generated on my mules and went to HIS account. All they have to do is look at all the ancient currency he has amassed (and his stage 3 gjallerhorn) to know what the gil was for.

SE needs to realize the mistake that they have made and set it right for us innocent players that were caught in the RMT banning crossfire. I don't even care if they apologize or not... I just want my account back!

For what it's worth, I called a GM and asked about this issue.

I have 16 total characters and 13 of them garden. I send the harvest to my main and NPC everything except the crystals and the crap greens, which I sell on the AH.

I explained that I had 13 gardening characters and that I planned to NPC my harvest. The GM told me not to worry about it. He/She said that banning doesn't take place in a vacuum -- that the STFU won't permaban without looking into things. He/She further implied that those who believe they were banned for gardening were probably banned for something else.

I can believe this, even with people saying they were told otherwise, because a while back my account was banned for (as far I knew) no reason. I called SE and the first person I spoke to told me I was banned for 3rd party tools. This was crazy, because I mostly played on console. It took several reps before someone said, "Oh, your account was hacked [it turned out to be ffxi atlas, btw] and the STFU will give it back when they're done with it." Took two weeks to get it back after that.

So maybe this is bigger than just gardening.


Here's the Conversation I had with the GM

My best wishes to those who were banned -- for whatever reason. It sucks and I truly hope you can return.

~DW

Note: Yes, I am aware that GMs are not necessarily the final word and that they are in-game CSRs. I think we all know that, those of us who are reading this.

Is it Friday already?

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.'


Does an almost fully meritted 75 WHM with cooking skill at 76 come close enough to "main character"?

Also, just because I was NPC'ing the crops doesn't mean I wasn't contributing to the overall economy. All of my profits went toward gear or crafting supplies. That gives SOMEBODY money, no?

It very likely could be. If you have multiple accounts all on the same CC then the CC links them to you and to each other. If it's on a walmart gift card there is really nothing attaching that account to anyone. They have only the name on the account itself but no solid proof of who that is.

Another question: Did these gardening accounts that have been banned start off as trial accounts before they became normal accounts?


Edited, Jul 10th 2009 2:54am by Lobivopis

That's pathetic and lazy on SE's part. Just a terrible way to handle the problem.

What about using Open Mog? There seems to be some correlation with that as the rumor is that there is an exploit involving the Open Mog house and Gardening.

Any comments from people currently banned would be much appreciated. Thanks.