Please close Asura

[Alphie]

I cannot comment on the economic part of things, but I would like to address the other points the OP and others have brought up in this thread.

Asura does not need any new characters. Just close Asura. As a bonus, make anyone that gets banned also have to move servers.

Asura is flooded with accounts that utilize gil farming bots. It's by far the issue that needs to be addressed on Asura.

Honestrly I think the game is way better on any other server at this point. It was a mistake to get people to pile on asura.

It is not a nice place to be for genuine players, especially players who played FFXI in the hay day. The community is dead and any kind of challenges have been taken out the game because people creating 'fake parties' by multi-boxing are selling everything and anything (Job points, treasure, EXP, clears, you name it). Give FFXI the justice it deserves and rid of this culture of toxicity.

So, just by going with the first few comments here, there seems to be an issue with gil/RMT bots and "mercs" which are players who box multiple accounts at one time (boxxing is a term I am more familiar with from EverQuest).

1. If there is to be a decision to close down Asura, then there needs to be a decision to possibly merge servers to raise up the populations. There have been complaints on how the others servers are "dead" compared to Asura. EverQuest and other MMOs have done server merging in the past, and it can help to some degree.

2. In regards to gil farming bots. This is an issue that plagues many MMOs, FF14 included. There needs to be; a. An easy way to report said bots, b. A good system to find and remove them.

Both are things FF14 still struggles with. Because they can ban thousands of bots (which they have) and they are back in droves the next day. This is all on SE's side of things. FF14 has a small Special Task Force that deals with botters etc, so who knows how big it is here (or if they have one).

3. I'm not sure if it was SE's or the playerbase's decision to "pile on Asura" but I can tell you that for myself and my husband, when we were looking for a place to come to after 11 or so years, many guides and posts we found online said "Asura was the place to go for population/activity". And for the times we are active, Asura fits the best.

4. Multi-boxing has been around since the original EverQuest days, though back then it was much harder to do. Now, with better software and hardware to use, any Joe-Schmoe can buy multiple accounts, a few key pads on the cheap on E-Bay, and slap a few macros together with possibly a 3rd-party program to use it with. This is nothing new at all, and still goes on in tons of MMOs to this day.

5. On the point of the community is "dead" and challenges are "taken out", when Trusts were placed int he game, that is pretty much where a lot of it possibly happened. Think about it, no reason to wait long queues to get flesh and blood people. Just slap a few NPC Trusts on and BAM quest is done. So that is less the player's creating the issue than SE creating it.

6. Much of the issue is found int he /yell channel, so I just turned mine off, got a friendly LS on Asura, and had zero issues from there. Now granted, the /yell is used for everything here (blame the poor UI choices for chat) so that can be a pain, sure, but sometimes one has to decisde what is the "lesser of two evils" so to speak.

So what can be done about these first few points? Here are my suggestions.

1. Close down Asura to all new players and transfers.
2. Possibly look into merging some of the very low population servers.
3. Look into creating a few "Preferred" servers. These servers would welcome new players and transferrs, possibly giving newly created players bonus exp to a certian level (FF14 has a Road to 70 buff on certian servers).
4. Create a better way to report gil spammers/bots. I've always been a fan of the good old "right click to report as well as blacklist" combination after picking the correct selection from a r-click menu.
5. Players need to realize that multi-boxing is part of MMOs now. Heck, EverQuest tried to curb it by making a special "no-boxing" server and that did next to nothing to stop people from doing it. /shrug

Players need to find what is best for them. Figure out your playtimes and how the server you are on or want to go on works with that. That is the ultimate descision, is it not?

[Sirmarki]

4. Multi-boxing has been around since the original EverQuest days, though back then it was much harder to do. Now, with better software and hardware to use, any Joe-Schmoe can buy multiple accounts, a few key pads on the cheap on E-Bay, and slap a few macros together with possibly a 3rd-party program to use it with. This is nothing new at all, and still goes on in tons of MMOs to this day.

It has been around, but it was more underground. Now it is just overkill on Asura. I understand people like to play with themselves using 5 other characters, just don't sell everything under the sun.
FFXI can't be run in multiple instances on the same machine - It would require 3rd party software (unless said person is sitting around 5 physical PC's). That, at the very least breaks the terms of service, and for a reason.

[Alphie]

It has been around, but it was more underground. Now it is just overkill on Asura. I understand people like to play with themselves using 5 other characters, just don't sell everything under the sun.
FFXI can't be run in multiple instances on the same machine - It would require 3rd party software (unless said person is sitting around 5 physical PC's). That, at the very least breaks the terms of service, and for a reason.

Yup, and like I said, it's easy to get around it. Laptops are hella cheap in many places, so you don't need to jump all crazy to get what you want. So no extra software needed.

EQ's new server was to stop people from using the same pc/3rd party software from doing boxing, and I kid you not, there wer pictures of players who bought 6 laptops and keypads, hooked them up with a long pole to press the same button along with macros, and BAM, got a 6 man party right there.

If a player wants to do it, it can be done.

As for the selling thing, heh, this here is nothing. EQ had people training each other (forcing a mob to attack others by pulling said mob and feigning death so the mob attaks the intended victim in range) just to kill a mob for Efreeti Boots and sell at exuberant prices in channels. Why? Because players know what items sell and what other players are looking for! And it's the same thing here.

Unless SE makes those wanted items useless, it will continue. But then, of course, another item will be chosen and the circle continues.