TOS clarification

[Starcade]

PS Starcade: you quoted Rambus but put my name on it.

Handled and corrected. Danke.

First off, thanks for the support guys. I hope this topic sees a GM response within a week or so.

I'm waiting for an unofficial response from the people who enforce the rules, because I think a lot of what I'm asking about is ass-covering stuff that the legal team put in in the first place. There's no point in waiting for the legal team to be consulted, because they'd just tell the GMs that they can't say anything that might undermine the TOS in the future. If I make it obvious that any GM response isn't legally binding, maybe I can get a response.

Thing is, I don't want an UNOFFICIAL response.

I want a fully official response, because I've been considering questioning whether the implicit allowance of a lot of this baloney constitutes a legally fraudulent act (a full nullification of the Terms as a binding limitation on conduct of play) by Square-Enix.

(One of the reasons I'd gladly wait for them to consult Legal on it.)

You see, much of this stuff is an ownership question, not unlike when Square-Enix went Legal on some bootleg Final Fantasy people (I believe they were gunblades or somesuch, if my memory serves...). In fact, if some sort of implicit "value" were put on some of the items, I could see players be held to the standard of theft laws for improper conduct leading to the acquisition of major items.

If they refuse to enforce the rules because it would damage the future of the game, what game is there a future to?

Also, Khale, it's a little less clear than that. I know several people who lost accounts to the gardening bans. People were growing chocobo stuff and NPCing it for a moderate amount of constant income. SE banned everyone doing that. It was meant to combat RMT, but there was no warning and no check for high level characters associated with the account and plenty of legitimate players that just wanted their 50k/crop got hit as well. It isn't like you look at 50k/crop profit and go, "Oh man, that's obviously an exploit. Look at how many mithkabobs I can buy with that!" For reference, plenty of people have done this with Ice ore forever. A byproduct of Ice ore is platinum leaves, which NPC for over 1k each. That's why Ice ores are so cheap.

Blame RMT for not being able to have good things. It's my position (and was when they announced it at VanaFest 2010) that there was so much RMT out there that it was the only reason that there was the illusion of enough players to justify 32 servers (and now, basically the same with 24).

They made it clear that there was so much RMT that there were automatic-ban means of dealing with RMT (the RMT PWNER v. 1.337), and they wanted to make sure that people got nowhere near where they could be touched.