PLEASE REMOVE OR LESSEN RESTRICTIONS ON GARDENING FOR NEW PLAYERS

There should be a forum rule/guideline against using all capital letters

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

Is earning gil from gardening still so game breaking (now that you can make tons of gil in abyssea)? Assuming you were going about it the legit way and just farming gold chest items you'd still make gil faster than if you're gardening I would think? Since last June, without even trying, I've made 5 million gil selling scrolls, pop items, synth mats, and trash gear from abyssea and if I'd touched the 5.2 million cruor I've stored up for anything other than brews I could have made significantly more.

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My take on mass gardening was that it was more or less legalized RMT. For very little effort, just throwing an additional $1 per ID at SE meant relatively risk-free gil. This is not something every player can do, but the difference between this and something like dual-boxing is that characters out in the field at least risk death, EXP loss, wasted gil on food/tools/meds, and of course time. On top of that, it's assumed they're competing for limited resources like an NM, HELMing spots, or even a good EXP camp.

Put simply, it was possible to make millions upon millions of gil per month with enough mules. From the RMT perspective, that would mean in order to prime an account for NPCing, they'll need to have spent at least $70 for the game, IDs, and monthly subs after the 30 days. With the amount of time they need to invest, being overt in moving funds can pretty much blow up in their face easily and so they're back to the point where any money they could've made selling things off is lost in trying to start over again if they were actually able to sell it off to begin with.

Back to players, though, they'll need to stomach that same initial investment and waiting period. While a ban is unlikely for personal use of harvested gil, it's still currency largely created from nowhere and some might be tempted to sell off excess. Their economic value is largely toxic, too, as the simple result is unnatural potential inflation that multiplies the more readily it can be done. Good for the people with plenty of RL cash to spare. Not so much for those who don't.

Realistically, the only way to remove the gardening nerf is to go through all possible yields and tweak their NPC values accordingly. Gardening should be a tool used to provide unique goods to other players, not junk other players would never want and instead NPC as primary source of gil for the gardener.

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Originally Posted by Seriha

Realistically, the only way to remove the gardening nerf is to go through all possible yields and tweak their NPC values accordingly. Gardening should be a tool used to provide unique goods to other players, not junk other players would never want and instead NPC as primary source of gil for the gardener.

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I have/had no intention of using gardening to make npc junk. I want to grow chocobo food and ingredients for cooking.

>.>

Maybe that is how some people garden but it seems like that would be an awful time sink for a not great return. But then again - maybe I am doing it wrong.

Like I implied, it's pretty much money for nothing. More pro-active players could make more, but an equally ambitious player could do the same on top of gardening and walk out that much richer. Some have allegedly funded relic weapons in this way. 3-5 minutes a mule per day, all for the cost of the initial seeds and some cheap crystals come feeding time. No competition, no undercutting at the AH, just a paycheck every few days.

I can sympathize with wanting to make things for personal use and not being able to, but this is an unfortunate side effect of people abusing the system and SE not making the right call with their response.

But blocking me from gardening isn't stopping anyone with an account older than 90 days from abusing gardening...

And again, I feel for ya. SE didn't make the right call with their initial reaction. They instead should've looked at NPC values so what you get never exceeded the value of what you put in when dealing strictly with NPCs. For now, all I can suggest is maybe asking a friend or shellmate who plays regularly if they could garden for you until your 90 days pass.

Meh, I will just suck it up - this thread is less "fix this for me" and more "fix this so that no one in the future has to deal with this crap."

The worst part of it is - the game doesn't give you a message about what is going on - so if a new player WAS to start gardening, and never get anything more than 1 crappy item per pot, they might just think it sucks and never try it again.

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Originally Posted by Olor

The worst part of it is - the game doesn't give you a message about what is going on - so if a new player WAS to start gardening, and never get anything more than 1 crappy item per pot, they might just think it sucks and never try it again.

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I second this issue, would like something to be done about it.

Hey everyone,

We definitely understand your concerns about the restrictions on gardening for new players and also for current players that create new characters. We will talk to STF about this and see what is possible.

However, please keep in mind that the currently low amount of RMT activity is mainly due to these kind of countermeasures, so it might not be so easy to loosen up on these restrictions as there is a high possibility that RMT activity will grow once again if we ease up.

We will keep you posted on any info we receive.

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Originally Posted by Camate

Hey everyone,

We definitely understand your concerns about the restrictions on gardening for new players and also for current players that create new characters. We will talk to STF about this and see what is possible.

However, please keep in mind that the currently low amount of RMT activity is mainly due to these kind of countermeasures, so it might not be so easy to loosen up on these restrictions as there is a high possibility that RMT activity will grow once again if we ease up.

We will keep you posted on any info we receive.

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I also think it has a lot to do with how irrelevant gil has become in the game as well. There are simply a lot of ways to aquire gil/items in-game now, so there is less demand for it in general. I think if you guys could ease off the caps on secondary crafts we may see even less of an impact from gil selling.