Alex Supply and Salvage Cheating- Accounts Not Banned?

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Originally Posted by Safiyyah

any "help" the exploit gave our server was minimal compared to the harm it caused.

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I don't understand this outlook. What harm was caused? Alex price tanked for a bit? Cool, now people buying up Alex can make Mythics for less. Oh, the people legit farming for gil got hurt? That's funny, cause if they still farmed it, then it sounds like they were ok with the price they would get for it. Prices rise and fall for these things all the time, people make huge deals of when Dyna currency rises/falls 500 gil, but in the end, if you're farming it for gil, you're still going to do so simply because that's the market price at that moment. Where is the actual harm?

And if it's over Johnny-Obvious-Hax getting 3 Mythics in the time it took you to brew your morning coffee, so what? Worry less about others and more about yourself. In no way does anyone having access to those things harm others.

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Originally Posted by Malithar

I don't understand this outlook. What harm was caused? Alex price tanked for a bit? Cool, now people buying up Alex can make Mythics for less. Oh, the people legit farming for gil got hurt? That's funny, cause if they still farmed it, then it sounds like they were ok with the price they would get for it. Prices rise and fall for these things all the time, people make huge deals of when Dyna currency rises/falls 500 gil, but in the end, if you're farming it for gil, you're still going to do so simply because that's the market price at that moment. Where is the actual harm?

And if it's over Johnny-Obvious-Hax getting 3 Mythics in the time it took you to brew your morning coffee, so what? Worry less about others and more about yourself. In no way does anyone having access to those things harm others.

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There is a minimum value where its worth spending time in one activity instead another. For sure, if someone farm alex, its because he judged that amount of cash was worth the time spent. Higher prices wouldnt change his conclusion, instead, just their profit.

But the harm is to people who conclude other means are more profitable than salvage based in a data generated through non legit means. Honestly, for me at least, alex is a stupid way to farm gil. Spending one hour for a random chance in a purse that can net maybe average 800k, isnt interesting. I would prefer skirmish or even dynamis. So, that people like me are driven to the others cash source like delve, skirmish, dynamis, where another profitable option that is salvage, keeps restricted to people who exploit a mechanism others dont have access. So, imo, more troublesome than the cheaters themselves, is the inequality of oportunity through a non legit exploit.

Personally, i dont care about punishment. I just want that those abusing to stop. If SE wants to bow to any rmt, thats their problem, just dont favor them despite legit players. I just ask to SE be more active combating those case. Its so damn easy to track.

I even extend this discussion to other cheats like clipper, cupper, etc. Delve and skirmish created a great market, be it selling materials, or be it selling drops. Obviously people have been since from start, using ilegit tools to beat content faster than legit players, thus profiting. And i firsr saw that when selling nyzul clear were the thing, ipersonally saw a group in phoenix with flee speed going through walls.

So, i ask, its so hard to monitor what happens in instanced places? Obviously allkind of dirty tricks happens there, why cant SE keep GM to monitor those places from time to time?

In the end, i dont even bother with cheaters. Im more pissed that SE is an accomplice of that.

Lame.

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Originally Posted by Pantafernando

There is a minimum value where its worth spending time in one activity instead another. For sure, if someone farm alex, its because he judged that amount of cash was worth the time spent. Higher prices wouldnt change his conclusion, instead, just their profit.

But the harm is to people who conclude other means are more profitable than salvage based in a data generated through non legit means. Honestly, for me at least, alex is a stupid way to farm gil. Spending one hour for a random chance in a purse that can net maybe average 800k, isnt interesting. I would prefer skirmish or even dynamis. So, that people like me are driven to the others cash source like delve, skirmish, dynamis, where another profitable option that is salvage, keeps restricted to people who exploit a mechanism others dont have access. So, imo, more troublesome than the cheaters themselves, is the inequality of oportunity through a non legit exploit.

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Fair enough, didn't really look at it that way, as you said, I never judged Salvage or Dyna to be worth my time.

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Originally Posted by Tomiko

I would have to imagine that most of them would quit. The game is already lackluster due to the lack of content (SE making Delve a joke didn't help one bit), so I imagine a rollback would be the final straw needed to get someone to quit.
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I could see a random rollback making someone quit... but rolling back items and gil that was obtained by means that were clearly known to be cheating idk I would find it odd that someone would get mad over having give back stuff they cheated to get. That's like boycotting a store because they made you give the stuff you shop lifted back

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but rolling back items and gil that was obtained by means that were clearly known to be cheating idk I would find it odd that someone would get mad over having give back stuff they cheated to get. That's like boycotting a store because they made you give the stuff you shop lifted back

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Assuming that the alex is the only thing they did for [insert time period here]; unless they can roll back specific items or narrow down gil that was generated by the cheat. In the amount of time this apparently has been around, a character could lose a lot of progress. So if in the process of rolling back a mythic, if they lost a year's worth of upgrades (delve gear, high tier bc, and other things done); yea, I could see someone wanting to quit over that

It's more equivalent of shoplifting and the store taking what you stole back, plus everything you had on you when you walked into the store as well (cell phone, wallet, car keys, cash, etc.)

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Originally Posted by Redbeam

Assuming that the alex is the only thing they did for [insert time period here]; unless they can roll back specific items or narrow down gil that was generated by the cheat. In the amount of time this apparently has been around, a character could lose a lot of progress. So if in the process of rolling back a mythic, if they lost a year's worth of upgrades (delve gear, high tier bc, and other things done); yea, I could see someone wanting to quit over that

It's more equivalent of shoplifting and the store taking what you stole back, plus everything you had on you when you walked into the store as well (cell phone, wallet, car keys, cash, etc.)

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Well I didn't mean like resetting them to exactly the way they were before more like just the alex or things gotten with said alex like gil/mythics which would probably be easier to do than resetting their character to the state it was a year before

Can the dev team atleast compensate players who play this game fairly? Letting hackers keep billions of gil is just unfair. Where's the "balance" now SE? @.@

Also that mentality of wanting to keep subscribers is dumb. I would say you are losing more subscribers while you keep the giving hand outs to hackers. Did you notice how the majority of the vanilla casual players left right after abyssea ended? And even before that. As the rise of "good" players who use 3rd party software to make battlefields easier and gil making faster, vanilla players started to disappear. Getting rid of these people would actually make this game interesting and on the difficulty the devs intended. Whenever new events come out they are easily conquered because of third party tools such as stun bots and clipper.

And come on SE, even free to play games have better means of stopping hackers. It's been over 10 years and the problem persists. Come on.

They will lose them anyway, a player that gets all his goals completed will have no reason to play anymore, it's like someone playing Borderlands 2 legit vs someone that used a hacked save with everything unlocked. It also destroys that persons idea of what a decent amount of reward for his farming time is, totally skews their rime/reward ratio.

I don't care about them getting a 3 day or perma, they simply should not keep the ill gotten gains though. That is beyond terrible. At least they had the excuse during king botting that they could not prove it, here they have the exact logs and still don't take action. Why have GMs at all? The only cardinal sin left in FFXI is making money off the game (RMT), you can get away with pretty much anything else it seems.

It blows my mind that you can cheat with a low chance of getting caught, and if you do get caught they tap your bum say naughty naught and let you keep all the stuff you cheated. That's not even a punishment, that's not a deterrent. As bad as the original salvage bans were this is too much the other way.

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Originally Posted by Afania

Oh and btw, lol@ anyone making comment saying "If SE ban all those cheaters the game will lose X% of player". Ppl tend to pretend their small circle of friends are the "majority".

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Exactly. If everyone who ran this cheat was banned and never heard from again, I can assure SE and the rest of the FFXI world that nothing of any real value would be lost. Earth and Vana'diel would both keep on spinning just fine. It'd be the same if I left the game tomorrow. Other than my best friend and maybe a couple others no one would really miss me. Unlike the cheaters, I'm wise and humble enough to realize my place in the universe.

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Originally Posted by Malithar

And if it's over Johnny-Obvious-Hax getting 3 Mythics in the time it took you to brew your morning coffee, so what? Worry less about others and more about yourself. In no way does anyone having access to those things harm others.

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While these elitist hackers generally have a circle of sycophants and multi-box bots to help them do things, they don't entirely live in a bubble. They do sometimes venture out into the public at large and compete with the rest of us for party spots.

And while I don't know how many mythics were actually produced by this, I know that the more legendary class weapons there are in circulation, the more expectations are raised that everyone should have one.

It's funny how much the games ideals have changed over the years.

If you just bought gil 6-7 years ago and were found out the entire server would shun you, you'd be kicked from your linkshell and no other shell would take you. You would never get party invites etc.

Now? You can buy gil openly, sell it (large numbers of the "best" players on the game sell or have sold gil at some point), you can hack and use apps infront of your shellmates openly, cheat, bot or whatever you want. Nobody will care, no linkshell leader will see it as reason to boot from the shell, infact they will defend them and figure out some way to see it as a good thing that they are doing it.

Botters and cheaters are generally subpar players not the "best" player, there are basically those that can't achieve things the legit way. Think salvage v1. The same peeps that botted HNMs duped salvage 35s and now .. alexandrites. All this for probably mythics that are are not yagrush !

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

Botters and cheaters are generally subpar players not the "best" player, there are basically those that can't achieve things the legit way. Think salvage v1. The same peeps that botted HNMs duped salvage 35s and now .. alexandrites. All this for probably mythics that are are not yagrush !

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That's why I said elitist instead of elite. Huge difference between the two terms.

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Originally Posted by Pixela

It's funny how much the games ideals have changed over the years.

If you just bought gil 6-7 years ago and were found out the entire server would shun you, you'd be kicked from your linkshell and no other shell would take you. You would never get party invites etc.

Now? You can buy gil openly, sell it (large numbers of the "best" players on the game sell or have sold gil at some point), you can hack and use apps infront of your shellmates openly, cheat, bot or whatever you want. Nobody will care, no linkshell leader will see it as reason to boot from the shell, infact they will defend them and figure out some way to see it as a good thing that they are doing it.

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I'm not sure I agree with that exact assessment, but I will definitely agree that most people just don't care at this point. We learned long long ago it's a waste of time reporting any cheating we witness. As long as it does not directly screw us over, we just don't care anymore. But I bet every last person who broke their asses over their mythic weapons would not be a'okay with someone hacking their way to several, and a good sum of gil that would get any RMT banned on the spot. It's clear SE skipped checking on duped items/gil and just plastered a 3 day ban and called it a morning.

I don't blame a soul who did it, but we all can do without the blatant bragging that goes along the lines of, "haha I stole this massive haul, sucks to be you guys who have to earn it legitimately!" So my kudos goes out to everyone who had enough sense to keep their trap shut and enjoy their stolen haul, which at this point seems every single person except ONE.

My last thoughts are this: Perhaps this hack was alittle more wide spread than it should have been. Perhaps enough people were using it that SE actually caved in and let them get away with it because the hit in sub numbers was too much for them to bare over mythic weapons that they know are to this day an overly complicated and unforgiving quest line, almost as if cheating is now an accepted necessary evil. The game ain't getting any younger.

I sincerely doubt that large groups of people are quitting over cheating. Using windower is cheating and I heard a statistic thrown out there that 80% of the PC players in this game use it. Most people I know who quit have done so for other games (WoW, XIV) or real life situations (move, grow up, get married, etc). Furthermore the biggest thing that is keeping the average player out of a pickup group is not the lack of a mythic weapon, it's the fact that the group needs X job and you don't have it. Most times I see shouts, they are only looking for R/E brd, R rng, R/E pld, and some sort of mage (a stunner or a healer). Regardless of if you had a mythic DD you would not be invited to join that shout.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

I sincerely doubt that large groups of people are quitting over cheating. Using windower is cheating and I heard a statistic thrown out there that 80% of the PC players in this game use it. Most people I know who quit have done so for other games (WoW, XIV) or real life situations (move, grow up, get married, etc). Furthermore the biggest thing that is keeping the average player out of a pickup group is not the lack of a mythic weapon, it's the fact that the group needs X job and you don't have it. Most times I see shouts, they are only looking for R/E brd, R rng, R/E pld, and some sort of mage (a stunner or a healer). Regardless of if you had a mythic DD you would not be invited to join that shout.

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We shouldn't have to threaten to quit over the cheating for S-E to do the right thing here.

Also, what you fail to understand is that players made hundreds of millions or billions from this. Gil is still a really big deal in FFXI. While there are a few rare/ex pieces that each job needs, you still need substantial amounts of gil for the following non-mythic items, just for starters:

AF1/AF2 119 gear
Skirmish augment items +2
Empyrean weapon, last 3 stages
Relic weapon, entirely
New HQ stat rings
HQ food

And of course you can find linkshells that will merc just about any item, provided that you have the gil. Since you can get a job to 99 in a day or two, if you have the gil, it's easy to have X job for an event in just a few days.

Gil isn't just some throwaway thing. It's not just the mythics that players built but also the gil that they made. One of them on Sylph was so blatant that he sold alex by the thousands on many days for months on end. I never bought from him, that I recall, but he must have made billions. I would not be surprised if some of that gil went to RMT.

This player and the others who participated in the Salvage cheating need to go, for good, I think.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

I sincerely doubt that large groups of people are quitting over cheating. Using windower is cheating and I heard a statistic thrown out there that 80% of the PC players in this game use it. Most people I know who quit have done so for other games (WoW, XIV) or real life situations (move, grow up, get married, etc). Furthermore the biggest thing that is keeping the average player out of a pickup group is not the lack of a mythic weapon, it's the fact that the group needs X job and you don't have it. Most times I see shouts, they are only looking for R/E brd, R rng, R/E pld, and some sort of mage (a stunner or a healer). Regardless of if you had a mythic DD you would not be invited to join that shout.

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And if cheating gives player more R/E/M BRD RNG PLD etc, the gap between a none cheater and cheater gets bigger, thus they get less invite and quite more often.

Say if 50% of ppl are cheating and running around with R/M/E jobs, you'd have to compete with 50% of player for a spot without it. Further more SE would have to make the content harder to balance the fact that more ppl has R/M/E.

If nobody cheats, only 10%~20% of player would won R/M/E and you only have to compete with 20% of ppl without one, and the content would be easier for those ppl as well.

So indirectly it would lead to the above issues and more ppl would quit.

I think I play a very different game than you guys. I play with a group of friends and have had help making most of what you just listed. I have had to pay for very little aside from food and hq rings. I rarely join shout groups even though I actually have the jobs they are looking for because playing with people I don't know is a gamble. I also don't think this is the gil generating exploit you should be concerned about destroying the economy (at least they fixed haks).

When people commit disgusting cheating that affects everyone why do some people try to legitimize it by saying windower is cheating too?

Jaywalking is against the law, does that mean someone robbing a bank has a free pass because everyone jaywalks at some point?

Leave the stupid windower is cheating nonsense out of this, this is as bad cheating as you can get and not even in the same ballpark. You may be able to argue windower vs whatever on many things but not this, this is blatant app abuse to repop easy to kill bosses to make vast amounts of gil and make all the best, most "broken" items in the game in a matter of weeks.

Cheating is cheating. I don't care if you jaywalk or rob a bank, you've still done the wrong thing.

Right but if you were working on R/M/E, mythic specifically, this does affect you. These guys were obtaining 30k alexandrite in 10 days, where as we are slaving away at getting barely 150 a run and the competing to buy the currency with funds we get from dynamis etc. It's just disheartening and makes me feel like quiting when something I've been working on for years can be obtained just like that through illegitimate means. O and this will definitely have an effect on the economy. How will having BILLIONS of gil PER HACKER not affect the economy in any way? There were a lot of people that did this. Some even managed to walk away with almost 15 mythics. It's just bullshit.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

Cheating is cheating. I don't care if you jaywalk or rob a bank, you've still done the wrong thing.

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Only people that would make that argument are people that abused this exploit or have friends that did, it's a way to play down blatant cheating they did.

As I say, what you're saying is as stupid as a bank robber trying to get off by saying the jury jaywalked so can't judge him. Whole other level.

I did not abuse this exploit nor did any of my friends. I do however have a friend who broke her leg and had to appear in court from jaywalking. I don't really have an opinion on if cheating is good or bad, I'm simply saying that you can't say that one form of cheating doesn't hurt anyone and isn't bad while the other form of cheating is bad. I work in science and any form of a lie is a lie... I don't care if you think your hunch is right and you're just tweaking the data to make it more plausible and it really doesn't matter if you are right and that lie would speed up the entire field.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

I did not abuse this exploit nor did any of my friends. I do however have a friend who broke her leg and had to appear in court from jaywalking. I don't really have an opinion on if cheating is good or bad, I'm simply saying that you can't say that one form of cheating doesn't hurt anyone and isn't bad while the other form of cheating is bad. I work in science and any form of a lie is a lie... I don't care if you think your hunch is right and you're just tweaking the data to make it more plausible and it really doesn't matter if you are right and that lie would speed up the entire field.

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Stop trying to derail the topic with Windower discussion, please. If you'd like to make another thread about how all players who use Windower should be banned, then by all means, go ahead. This thread is about the Salvage exploit.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

Cheating is cheating. I don't care if you jaywalk or rob a bank, you've still done the wrong thing.

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But what if it is vanilla windower that just does the same thing as SEs official windowed mode except is less resource intensive? Is it really cheating if there is no in game advantage gained? Then what about the other advantages that windower addons have that SE is adding/has added to the game? It's clear that SE approves of a lot of the things the windower team has developed so would those really still be cheating just because you used a different version of it?

According to the definition of cheat no it wouldn't

I thought I'd pop in and offer my 2c, and maybe give some people a different point of view.

Before I start, as a disclaimer, I have never even once used any of the 3rd party stuff (no Alex dupe, no unlimited tags, no ase, etc) in the acquisition of my mythics. (I have four).

Also, before I start, if they were going to ban every windower user they would be well within their rights, as it is a violation of the ToS. However, trying to compare windower use with duping hundreds of thousands of alex (and the other things people did along with it) isn't something you can do. It's like apples and oranges. They just plain aren't comparable, and you just sound silly. So just stop.

I'm going to go on a limb and say that either:
A) SE really doesn't care, or they are worried about the repercussions of banning a large amount of people... and don't try to say that there wouldn't be repercussions. I have a good idea of who did and didn't do this on Odin (just a note, I don't care and am not going to or trying to point fingers, so don't ask!), and it's pretty safe to say that it'd cripple the leadership of a couple linkshells. I can't say if those linkshells would recover or not. I'm certain that others would have quit if their friends had been perma'd. I am not trying to justify it or say it was or wasn't deserved, but I can understand why they might be worried about losing subs. They really are at a point in the game where a large mass banning of hardcore, endgame players would negatively effect the game.

B) They don't have/keep salvage logs (or logs in general) at all or for longer than a week or two. This fits with the knowledge I have with the bannings that only the people that did it very recently were banned. I know of more people that got off without even a 3 day ban than ones that got a ban. Hell, I know people that only did it once or twice that got a 3 day ban and people that made multiple mythics with it and didn't even get hit. Maybe they felt since they couldn't fairly hit everyone, they would just give a 3 day to the people they could. I'll admit I'm slightly ignorant about how se operates, so take this with a grain of salt.

I'm not going to try and say if the bans were or weren't deserved (although I honestly just don't care, as it doesn't affect me in the least), but I will say if anything comes out of this I hope it forces the dev team to at least look at the alexandrite situation (and possibly other things like the time on assault tags) because of the lengths people are going to to circumvent it. There's been times in the past where the alex situation has been incredibly terrible and finishing a mythic was an expensive game of 24/7 bazaar watching. I've vouched for this before, but adding a different, more reliable means of obtaining alexandrite would help a lot.

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Originally Posted by Calipso

I thought I'd pop in and offer my 2c, and maybe give some people a different point of view.
A) SE really doesn't care, or they are worried about the repercussions of banning a large amount of people... and don't try to say that there wouldn't be repercussions. I have a good idea of who did and didn't do this on Odin (just a note, I don't care and am not going to or trying to point fingers, so don't ask!), and it's pretty safe to say that it'd cripple the leadership of a couple linkshells.

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Cripple the leadership of a couple of linkshells? That hardly counts as a repercussion. My world view is a little too wide to see that as even a blip on the radar, and my world view shouldn't be nearly as wide as SE's.

Btw, i dont think its windower who suported the exploiting.

I was browsing in google some words throwed when someone goes to windower forum to ask about cupper and cure bots, and its easy to find the actual page that leave in front page the "services": cupper, stun bots, cure bots, fish bots. All those being developed in that site. Idk in deep about that, but seems like a similar program to windower, but that doesnt care with rules.

So, i meant, if you gonna throw windower name, could as well throw the actual names that in fact allow all this mess.

No I never said that windower enabled people to use other programs. My objection was to the statement that rampant cheating was ruining the game from a player who was likely cheating themselves (which is why I said cheating is cheating). This exploit was severe and as I said earlier, I would support rollbacks for it. I do not support permabans as the OP demanded because I do not trust SE to hand them out fairly.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

I think I play a very different game than you guys. I play with a group of friends and have had help making most of what you just listed. I have had to pay for very little aside from food and hq rings. I rarely join shout groups even though I actually have the jobs they are looking for because playing with people I don't know is a gamble. I also don't think this is the gil generating exploit you should be concerned about destroying the economy (at least they fixed haks).

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Again you're not looking at the big picture. Ppl can farm alex 30x faster than you means they make gil 30x faster than you. Therefore they can easily afford more expensive food/rings. If we follow the supply and demand economy rule, the food/rings price will increase because they have 30x more money than you.

It doesn't matter if you don't play with others and your entire LS gave you free alex/plates/currency(I highly doubt that though), as long as you're part of the economy it'd affect you negatively in the long run.

Cool, so if I rob a bank, when you catch me the bank doesn't get any money back, I don't go to jail, and I get to keep all the ill- gotten booty. Good to know. Sooooo what is the point of having rules again?

Time to go start cheating, there's no reason to not do so, now!

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Originally Posted by dasva

But what if it is vanilla windower that just does the same thing as SEs official windowed mode except is less resource intensive? Is it really cheating if there is no in game advantage gained? Then what about the other advantages that windower addons have that SE is adding/has added to the game? It's clear that SE approves of a lot of the things the windower team has developed so would those really still be cheating just because you used a different version of it?

According to the definition of cheat no it wouldn't

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There are some things vanilla FFXI can't do AFAIK.

1) Shitty macro, Gear Set system is nearly unusable so I still use 2 click macro for many sets that requires fast swapping.

2) Dual box, you need 2 PC or 1 PC 1 console if you need to play multiple character without windower. Personally I can't afford 2 PC and I don't have a console version, so I can't dual box. That means I can't farm plasm/gil as fast as dual box players.

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Originally Posted by Louispv

Cool, so if I rob a bank, when you catch me the bank doesn't get any money back, I don't go to jail, and I get to keep all the ill- gotten booty. Good to know. Sooooo what is the point of having rules again?

Time to go start cheating, there's no reason to not do so, now!

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If you go by SE's response then your "punishment" for robbing a bank would be not being allowed in that bank for 3 days.

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Originally Posted by Louispv

Time to go start cheating, there's no reason to not do so, now!

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I feel I would lose a lot of self-respect and honour if I started cheating. That's a good enough reason for me.


I agree with your post though, about how its wrong that they get away with this perfidious brigandry. Cheating a system devalues the system itself, it makes the system less attractive to other users who do not cheat. One should only cheat a system that one wishes to devalue and cause harm to, because that is the inevitable corrosive effect that cheating has on all systems.

if nobody quit over this(and by the looks of this thread, none of the outspoken people have), they gained a net amount of subs vs permabanning

SE is a business, they don't care that you're offended as long as you keep paying

want them to listen, stage a 'mass' 10 day deactivation with all 15 people who are gravely affronted by this injustice

It's funny to see the people that abused these things and got a laughable punishment now using those same tools in other areas.

They don't even try to hide it, I've watched them using them brazenly. The sad part is, I don't even bother reporting them now because nothing will happen anyway.

I'm not really offended. There are lowlife untrustworthy people in the real world, and in the online world too. Including online games. I don't walk around the real world being offended or staging 'protests' just because there are some people out there who don't know right from wrong. I just get on with my life, which is what I do in FFXI despite all the cheats.

I play FFXI because I'm a big fan of FF games dating back two decades, other people cheating in XI doesn't change my respect for Square or the FF series, so why would I protest? But this being a forum, with a thread about cheating, I'm a chatty person and sometimes like to post stuff on forums lol. My feelings are that cheating is sleazy and if a system is infested with cheats then that lowers the market value of that system in the eyes of normal people who like to play fair.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

Cheating is cheating. I don't care if you jaywalk or rob a bank, you've still done the wrong thing.

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Agreed.

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Originally Posted by Pixela

Only people that would make that argument are people that abused this exploit or have friends that did, it's a way to play down blatant cheating they did.

As I say, what you're saying is as stupid as a bank robber trying to get off by saying the jury jaywalked so can't judge him. Whole other level.

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When I first brought up Windower, my point was what Hoshi said: "Cheating is cheating." They should obviously have (very) different punishments, but they are both against the ToS and SE CAN ban both types of offenders if they wanted to. The big difference here compared to the RL example is that SE doesn't have a set punishment for a given offense (at least that I've seen). But in the RL situation there are punishment guidelines.

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Originally Posted by dasva

But what if it is vanilla windower that just does the same thing as SEs official windowed mode except is less resource intensive? Is it really cheating if there is no in game advantage gained? Then what about the other advantages that windower addons have that SE is adding/has added to the game? It's clear that SE approves of a lot of the things the windower team has developed so would those really still be cheating just because you used a different version of it?

According to the definition of cheat no it wouldn't

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http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cheating?s=t

"to violate rules or regulations:"

The rule being no use of 3rd party programs. By using Windower you are violating that rule, therefore cheating. Doesn't matter what the extent is that you use it.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi

Furthermore the biggest thing that is keeping the average player out of a pickup group is not the lack of a mythic weapon, it's the fact that the group needs X job and you don't have it. Most times I see shouts, they are only looking for R/E brd, R rng, R/E pld, and some sort of mage (a stunner or a healer). Regardless of if you had a mythic DD you would not be invited to join that shout.

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Agreed. I wish they'd revitalize Voidwatch since that was one event where every job was welcome. I feel sorry for all the BLMs that are only wanted for Skirmish these days.

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Originally Posted by Safiyyah

[B]While there are a few rare/ex pieces that each job needs, you still need substantial amounts of gil for the following non-mythic items, just for starters:

AF1/AF2 119 gear
Skirmish augment items +2
Empyrean weapon, last 3 stages
Relic weapon, entirely
New HQ stat rings
HQ food

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-Some of the mats for AF upgrades are expensive, but you're also making money to buy them from the drops from the SKC20 BCs when you get papers.

-You only have to buy a lot of these if you want the highest tier augments. Plus you can get these easily by doing Skirmish.

-If you're using these to upgrade anything other than Harp past 90 then you're wasting your time/money. Plus it's only the last 2 stages (Plates and Cinders/Dross). I do think that the requirement needs to be adjusted now that VW isn't nearly as popular anymore.

-Relic Weapons can be farmed in 3 months (likely less now) by going to Dynamis daily. 0 gil required here unless you want to speed it up.

-No one is going to turn you away from a party/event because you don't have HQ Rings.

-NQ food works just fine. Most HQ food offers minimal benefits over the NQ.

EDIT: Yes having gil speeds all those things up, there's no denying that.

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Originally Posted by MarkovChain

All this for probably mythics that are are not yagrush !

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Says the guy that Afterglowed Spharai. lol

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Originally Posted by Pixela

It's funny to see the people that abused these things and got a laughable punishment now using those same tools in other areas.

They don't even try to hide it, I've watched them using them brazenly. The sad part is, I don't even bother reporting them now because nothing will happen anyway.

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This was my biggest concern about the offenders only getting the 3-day suspension. :(

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Originally Posted by Comeatmebro

if nobody quit over this(and by the looks of this thread, none of the outspoken people have), they gained a net amount of subs vs permabanning

SE is a business, they don't care that you're offended as long as you keep paying

want them to listen, stage a 'mass' 10 day deactivation with all 15 people who are gravely affronted by this injustice

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By your logic they shouldn't ban RMT ever, since RMT often create 10+ or 100+ accounts, but there aren't many ppl that would really rage quit over RMT.

Thus SE should let RMT exist because it's extra sub with RMT in game.

In reality, SE did ban RMT. So I don't think they make choice to ban account based on short term profit.

you're crazy if you think this had anywhere near the impact of a 100-char rmt operation

a rmt with 100 hak-bots(pre-nerfs) is throwing 150-200m/day into the economy and drastically lowering the value of people's saved gil, as well as short term nuking the availability of anything buyable.. banning them increases the stability and longevity of the ingame economy

the result of this exploit is just some gil getting funneled around.. the amount of gil in the economy remains unchanged and the amount of alex in the economy will reset over the next couple weeks because once turned in it's gone and lost forever

someone picking up the game today is no worse off than they would have been if this hadn't ever happened, you can't say the same of mass rmt