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why it kicks my ass
Mattatron
Member Posts: 226
If you're not familiar, I was suspended for almost 7 days and then penalized 2 million gil, apparently from the only emails and communications I was afforded by the company for cheating in the manner of participating in rmt transactions or botting, or apparently both as the form letter was all i was afforded.
It really kicks my ass.
I reported teleporting mining bots. I had blacklist (ignore list) pages long of the city gil sellers. I have bookmarks in my firefox, and I scan over them, and I'm bent out of shape.
I really, really, liked this game. The crafting system is GREAT. I hadn't seen a crafting system in which I really wanted to participate since the early days of EQ2.
The adventurer leveling story was interesting and the combat was fun. This is a really good game, and I'm ok with the 30 bucks I spent and the time I played it.
I feel f'd off and I do not believe for one instant there is any real tangibility behind the "investigations" they say they have.
IF they'd investigated they'd see the breakdown of money I made making crafting components sold for 100 to 5k gil at a time. IF they'd investigated they'd see my highest sale was a fortunate 120k in a multi-piece 1 star crafted clothes sale. IF they'd investigated they'd see I reported cheaters and avoided people who were obviously not part of legitimate playing.
Their "investigation" is nothing.
It really burns my ass I still think about this game, had fun, would continue to have fun, but got the raw end of their made-up problem-solving process to combat corruption.
This has never happened to me in any other game. I still have accounts on a number of triple A mmos I'd only have to pay to reopen. I've never been accused of impropriety.
The game is so good it actually crossed my mind to resub and just start over to see the content, but I won't.
I don't even know how I feel, if this post is a flame or a fan endowment. I guess I really want to say the game is good except for the fact they spent no real resource into investigation and customer service. I want to say what happened to me can happen to anyone, any time, but maybe they took a step back and realized they did it poorly. I don't know.
This game is really good but they f'd me and I'm sad. I guess that's it and the last word I'll say on it.
Comments
Phry is correct. I'd say it's still on Square Enix. I guess we are supposed to barricade ourselves in and never use the Market board.
I sell 5 K shards, I can't control who buys those shards. I said it on their forums too and got a 10 day ban. They need to go back to making single player games because they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to MMO games.
If you are a shop owner, and someone buys from your shop using counterfeit currency, and when you try to bank that currency, the bank discovers the 'fake' currency, they remove it from circulation, you take a loss. Does that mean its the fault of the Bank that your now out of pocket, or the fault of the person who used the counterfeit currency to buy from you?
The ones to blame are the ones from who this counterfeit currency originated, the victims are the ones caught up in the passage of the 'counterfeit' currency. This is why RMT trading has to be stepped on, and hard.
In real life I can tell false money and if I decide to accept it that's the risk I'm willing to make.
I can't tell what's RMT gil on the game. Hell I don't know who I'm selling to, I just put it in the market.
Plus it looks like SE just takes all the gil from rich players, doesn't matter if only 50% or so is RMT.
If you are a shop owner you have the ability to inspect the currency before you take it so unless it is a really good fake if you are paying attention you will most likely catch it when you sell stuff on an ah you have no way of seeing who is buying it. There has to be a better solution for getting after these gold sellers without punishing innocent subscribers.
Removing the illegally acquired currency from the game is standard practice in EVE-Online as well.
It is also common practice to remove duped items from a game once the exploit has been identified and fixed.
How could they NOT remove it ? It completely changes the game balance when the amount of currency and/or items that are generated far exceeds the original design.
Besides, it is virtually impossible to determine the innocence of anyone who receives (by whatever means) large amounts of "illegal" currency or items in a game. It could be the end result of a very sophisticated scam. The goldsellers are very innovative when it comes to finding new ways to carry out their illegal trade.
You don't seriously expect that SE will employ a large team of forensic auditors who can trace and analyse the movement of illegal currency through 3 or 4 layers of intermediary transactions in various player accounts until it reaches its final destination ? SE is a game developer, not an arm of the IRS.
ok I said it was last word, and I really thought seriously about posting this one more message. make fun of me if you want.
why can't the developers, anticipating corruption , make software (of course because every mountain is meant to be climbed) so that the corruption can be intercepted in contingency?
no, I know you're going to say because that will even be superseded. so know that and build a monitor.
look. these people want to build and market an mmo. I can look at wikipedia and see that online worlds have been a point of contention in real/unreal currency and subsequent manipulation.
you're telling me, after years of this medium being in existence, it just slipped their minds to not take the economy aspect seriously, and half-assedly bone legitimate players.... because they can't do any better?
hello. 1998 called and wants its argument back. give me a break.
again, last statement. really i won't post in this thread again. i apologize.
sounds like the audit process is only half done, they have to then return the essentially stolen products, within the audit log should list the items bought sold, it is a simple matter to recreate or return the product so the original innocent player is not out of pocket. Remove the cash, but why does this system penalize the OP for the effort he/she went to in crafting and marketing.
If the product sold required time/effort rare components isn't this doubly insulting to the honest player?
Honestly you can't do just one thing without the other, smacks of half assed quick fix with no long term insight into solving the problem.
What is next, will your items that you bought vanish if they're found to be a product of botting?
How did you know that sword was not dropped legitimately?
You could log in one day and be completely naked since bot w supplied material x which proper crafter y turned into armor z.....
/ponder
in every game people buy the in game currency sorry is a fact, want to beat it, sell it yourself, honest players won't buy it anyway, time poor players will have a legitimate safe method to acquire the currency they were going to buy anyway. Its like pot smoking in the Netherlands, make it legal remove the problem those who want to can those who don't just bypass the shop. Naturally there would be constraints, there would be a maximum, but then the economy remains in the hands of the game company not the third party sites with all the associated security risks they entail.
Diablo 3 tried this and lets be honest, did anyone really mind? People who couldn't farm the 50 million for a weapon could still buy/compete have fun. In the end though everyone realized this is not what Diablo was all about.
Ps stop making me spell in american!
http://absoluteretribution.enjin.com/ Guild Website and Recruitment link
Everything is "easy" if you don't have a complete overview and understanding of ALL the moving parts...
You say "SE can have 3 people per world on a server and monitor RMT spam". Sure, SE could employ another 150 people to monitor General chat 24/7. The only problem is, who would actually willingly do a job like that ? And how would you keep them awake during their 8 hour shift of chatbox watching ? And if they do succeed in staying awake, how do you protect their mental health ? And would the game still be profitable if they have to pay an extra 150 employees ?
Fighting RMT costs money. Money that could have been spent on the improvement of the game. The goldsellers are intensively focused on one aspect of the game, and all the power of their human ingenuity is focused on achiving their singular goal. The game developer is faced with the considerable challenge of making the lives of goldsellers very difficult, whilst making the game absolutely open and accessible to legitimate players. It's a very difficult task.
I can do it for free on my realm. Also I dont think it will be hard to find 3 community moderators on other realms for free.
Regardless of the need to remove the GIL they should have done more to protect the crafters who lost item, but they've proven before they really don't understand the concept of proper customer service.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
This is true on its face, but think about it. To perform such an recoup, they'd have to go through not only the items, but each sub-item gathered to create that craft (and any sub-sub items that had to be crafted to make the base components), and check each individual one against the 'marked' gil via the market boards to see if it was bought, gathered, bought with illicit gil, etc. Think about just how -long- that process would be. You're talking about individual attention to potentially -thousands- of items per player, tracked in the movement of 360+ billion gil. It's just not realistically feasible.
You can't just give the banhammer to some random people.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Sorry you lost your virtual currency .
However think of it this way , you took one for the team to get rid of the 100+ other players who didn't obtain their currency using legit reasons .
Thanks for being that guy who took one for the team .
That's some pretty broken logic and you know it.
Square needs a better way to regulate RMT damage. Throwing players under the bus every time an RMT account is found won't be healthy for the game.
Just this - I mentioned this in the last QQ thread.
No one paid any attention, their "woe is me" attitude was far more important.
The problem is that they didn't really do very much investigation, because they just reduced everyone's gil by the same amount (the whole dividing by 100 thing). That's not indicative of a company going through transactions and tracing the origin of the gil used, only removing the gil that was ill-obtained. That's a company using a "scorched earth" approach to the problem, based on an arbitrary basis of "how much gil they think someone should have".
If they had really done research, and traced the gil of each transaction, then everyone should not have conveniently had their gil reduced by the same factor. Their "research" much more likely involved seeing if the player themselves were involved in buying directly from gil sellers, which would warrant a permanent ban. If that wasn't the case, they may have looked for some known RMT names in there, or traced the gil to known RMT'ers. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even do that much, but rather just said, "Okay, they can be un-banned, but reduce their gil to 1/100th."
That is not a well thought out or executed plan. That's a scorched earth approach. They used a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel.
It's amazing to sit here and watch how people are going so far out of their way to paint SE innocent in this whole thing, as though "they did all they could". Looking at the facts of it objectively (not through a filter of trying to "defend SE and FFXIV"), it's quite easy to see there are much more in-depth ways they could have looked at the situation.
These kind of blanket decisions are not new to them. Was anyone here around for the first server merges in FFXI, and remember how horribly SE handled name conflicts? That was another example of them using a "scorched earth" approach to a problem, rather than a carefully thought out and executed one.
How so??? No one talks about it in game. Hell most werent even aware of it even though SE put an announcement of it at login. The majority who are on the fence with this game are focused on the upcoming patch/update. No one cares about this.
And like someone pointed out its was a 72 hour ban, Trusting some random person without any evidence other than rumors and hearsay is real broken logic and I hope you know it.
Pretty much this - no one cares.
I'll be rolling into Crystal Tower with my ilevel 90 gear anyway. Have fun with that Vanya.
Oh yeah, keep ignoring the obvious fact that there were huge gil fountain exploits. Or that non-legacy servers were more rich than legacy servers. Or the MULTITUDE of other issues that contributed to the bans/gil removal.
Do keep complaining though, that'll surely get you somewhere!