The poor RMT's...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MStowastiqVahlshdeh

I see some crazy transactions in the auction house that look like gil delivery. It will be one item that is normally selling at an established price and all the sudden you see it going for an insanely high amount from the same retainer repeatedly. Also STF is posting regular reports on the amount of accounts banned/gil removed, at the lodestone. Most recent report was this week.

---

I've seen them use this method in FFXI too, over the past year.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MStowastiqVahlshdeh

I see some crazy transactions in the auction house that look like gil delivery. It will be one item that is normally selling at an established price and all the sudden you see it going for an insanely high amount from the same retainer repeatedly. Also STF is posting regular reports on the amount of accounts banned/gil removed, at the lodestone. Most recent report was this week.

---

This may also be someone transfering gil between their alts. One alt sells and the other alt buys for the amount to transfer.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mirage

Not nearly the same thing. You pay for cable, aka the service of bringing TV channels to your TV, not for the channels themselves. If you do pay specifically for certain TV channels, they usually do not show advertisements. Sort of like how you pay for internet access but still have to deal with advertisements on free news sites, but don't need to deal with advertisements on web pages or services you pay to use. FFXIV is one of those you pay for.

---

Fair enough. I knew it as a bit of a bad example. But it does illustrate a difference. On TV you get commercials, they are endorsements of the television stations you watch. This is how you get to watch these shows for the low cost of the cable subscription. They are legitimate commercials.

RMT's are not legitimate endorsements of an MMO. they are parasites that survived off the host MMO by siphoning legitimate sources of income out of the economy to turn around and sell it back to the consumers as a real life cost. None of this transfer of real money is seen by the MMO company. They do not get a cent. It in turn throws the in game balanced economy into turmoil because they have accounted for growth and decline from within their legitimate system.

I do understand what is going on with RMT's to some extent, while i'm no expert I do try to make light of some peoples posts. Like the "drug dealer" analogy I left on page two. The point of my OP was to show people that, yes, SE is doing something about RMT's. This situation is far more complex than any simple solution we think up on the forums and it is in Dev's best interest to solve it.

You can complain because you are a single person irritated by RMT's. Look at it from the MMO Developer's point of view. They have to mitigate the RMT activity (no small feat in itself), they have to deal with hacked accounts, they have to deal with 100's of thousands of customer complaints, they have to deal with not-so-nice suggestions on how to fix it, they have to deal with RMT's corrupting their economy, they have to deal with RMT's hacking and cheating in the game, and probably even more that I am not taking into account. You think RMT's annoy YOU?

And the MMO will get the brunt of the hate because OTHER people choose to hack, cheat, and do underhanded deals to make a profit off someone elses back. Where is the hate for the RMT? Can we start flooding their sites with this vitriol instead of adding to the Headache that the MMO devs already have with this unwanted situation?

They'll be back at it in a less than a day or two: hacking people's accounts is the usual method to earn gil. That and botting which is apparently hyper easy to do in this game.

Unless SE regulates gil themselves or some other proven method; we will never see RMTers go away.

Banning only slows them down a bit, they more than likely have piles and piles of CD keys kicking around. The RMTers I saw last night are now selling them....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sasakusaku

Banning only slows them down a bit, they more than likely have piles and piles of CD keys kicking around. The RMTers I saw last night are now selling CD keys....

---

Or that could of been a way they try to get you to look at their malware infested website to add keylogger into your PC and take over your account :p

There are still a ton of bots on Malboro. Now it's not simply ruining the market and taking the lions share of sales away from legit players, they are blatantly farming mobs openly. Anything related to weaving is a prime target, with most areas having at least 2 or 3 bots running full time, if not more. They warp right on top of the mobs nearly instantly, all over.

In the good days past in some MMO's if you saw someone farming, you could leave them alone, and farm your own stuff. It was relaxing. Now, it's a bit more pressured to tag things first. Bots and the RMT don't care who you are, they want their money, and they will ruin a game irregardless. This goes for those who buy RMT and snuff it off as harmless.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mirage

I've seen them use this method in FFXI too, over the past year.

---

It's an old method, and the reason Blizzard put a 1 hour delivery in game on market sales many years ago. This allowed Blizzard to catch transactions by methods unkonwn, though I'm sure it didn't stop the practice completely.

I will say though I never saw many bots in wow and generally whatever they did there, they found a way to do it right. FFXIV is infested, yet I sitll think Guild Wars II was worse. The market in GW2 tanked crazy fast, and you could literally find places where 25 bots were farming easily. At least the market on my FFXIV server has allowed me to make some gil and sell farmed stuff reasonably well.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shaddix

RMT is not illegal. Being against the ToS is not the same thing as being illegal by the law of the state.

And chinese RMT do not have other options, it isn't like they are Americans who actually have opportunities. If they don't play the whole time they are awake, they won't have a meal or a place to sleep at night. You need to educate yourself before saying things like this.

---

If stealing other people's accounts and compromising their personal information is what it takes for them to eat and sleep, screw them. I don't care if they starve.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Roez

FFXIV is infested, yet I sitll think Guild Wars II was worse.

---

To their credit, Anet has more or less eliminated botters and RMTers from the game. It was bad for sure but I have not actually seen a bot nor a gold spammer in GW2 in a loooong time. Maybe they hide better? I dunno. They still went to the effort to get rid of these leeches and by the looks of things actually succeed.

RMT gold prices going up, that means they're losing stock.

Bravo, SE! Burn the bastards out!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jennica

It's not that funny, these people live off of this and need money to eat and survive. I don't want them in game but I do feel bad that some of them may lose their livelihood.

---

I just had to.

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...ps393b1841.jpg

That's my own screenshot I took from the game last year when the Elementals were aggroing everyone in sight, including the RMT clones. We got the one RMT to talk. They were talking in Engrish (they were spelling out Chinese words using the English alphabet, which a lot of my LS friends dubbed "Engrish.") to one another. Another guy, the one who started questioning him, when I was there at the Node, got the main RMT person to talk to us in English.

It might surprise you that some of this gold/gil from these companies is actually supplied by 'legit' players. Had a bud that did this in that other game where he'd farm up gold, sell to RMTers, and then used that money to pay his sub. He made a mistake though and used his main account instead of a secondary one so ended up banned. However, he was back a few days later since his sales more than paid for another account. Also I knew a guild that used a particular exploit in that same game in a raid instance and they made a ton of RL money over a period of 3 months selling to RMTs. Not all are the stereo typical 'chinese' gold farmers and can easily be one of your friends and or guildmates...the whole naming chars as gibberish is a dodge.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pseudopsia

Some of them may be in jail already.

I recall this article that was written a few years ago: China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work

---

in response to the link: that is just messed up i feel sry for the guy. nothing against china (i love their culture and history) but it seems like all future and existing MMO companies/games should IP block china if 80% of RMT is housed there.

I don't understand the, "HAHAHAHA, take that, RMT!" threads. Banning them, confiscating their gil, etc doesn't "hurt" them emotionally. They don't take it personally, either. Those who don't like RMT's may get satisfaction over seeing them banned, but the reality is this: it's just a business to them, nothing personal, and certainly no emotional attachment for them like we do with our characters. They just steal more accounts, suck them dry for everything they can, and move on to make their money again. It's all business to them.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sasakusaku

To their credit, Anet has more or less eliminated botters and RMTers from the game. It was bad for sure but I have not actually seen a bot nor a gold spammer in GW2 in a loooong time. Maybe they hide better? I dunno. They still went to the effort to get rid of these leeches and by the looks of things actually succeed.

---

They "eliminated" partially by practically implementing "legal RMT". Which is worse cure than the actual disease.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nanga

I don't understand the, "HAHAHAHA, take that, RMT!" threads. Banning them, confiscating their gil, etc doesn't "hurt" them emotionally. They don't take it personally, either. Those who don't like RMT's may get satisfaction over seeing them banned, but the reality is this: it's just a business to them, nothing personal, and certainly no emotional attachment for them like we do with our characters. They just steal more accounts, suck them dry for everything they can, and move on to make their money again. It's all business to them.

---

Yep, organized crime is like that. Guess we should save up our deepest distain for those amongst us who traffic with them and thus make all the hacking, spamming, and game perverting activities economically viable.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nanga

I don't understand the, "HAHAHAHA, take that, RMT!" threads. Banning them, confiscating their gil, etc doesn't "hurt" them emotionally. They don't take it personally, either. Those who don't like RMT's may get satisfaction over seeing them banned, but the reality is this: it's just a business to them, nothing personal, and certainly no emotional attachment for them like we do with our characters. They just steal more accounts, suck them dry for everything they can, and move on to make their money again. It's all business to them.

---

In lineage 2 i trained tons of lireins to farmers, who then died and occasionally dropped some of their precious gear.
I'm just gonna tell you that they tought me plenty of chinese phrases after that.

I can't believe they actually have the gall to request "customers" to pre-order. Pathetic.

I wonder why the need you to trade an item in the gil trade, could they be using that item to hack your accounts? Doesn't each item have a unique code that is linked to each character...hmm

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Itachi

In lineage 2 i trained tons of lireins to farmers, who then died and occasionally dropped some of their precious gear.
I'm just gonna tell you that they tought me plenty of chinese phrases after that.

---

Yea but you were making it harder for them to do their slave labor esque farming job. They don't take getting banned, or getting messed with in game personally, but if you had some random guy walk into your job and purposefully attempt to obstruct it, you'd get frustrated about that. I know I killed plenty of farmers in wow. I don't remember that many in EQ, it was mostly people selling to each other back in those days.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DanteMog

I wonder why the need you to trade an item in the gil trade, could they be using that item to hack your accounts? Doesn't each item have a unique code that is linked to each character...hmm

---

It's harder for companies to track gold buyers when an actual item is traded for gold. There could have been someone who really wanted that vendor item for millions of gil and the moment Square bans them and finds it was actually a legitimite trade they take shit for it. Where as if someone just magically hands a player a large amount at the same time with nothing to trade for them it raises a large red flag for both players, at the same time that could just be friends or guildies trading gil, depending on amount of gil though 99% of the time this is not the case and it is a transaction between a buyer and seller.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hanabira

intellectual property laws.

---

Um, have you seen gil in game? All I see is a number. A number is not IP. You might claim the Allergan pieces as IP, but really, that's copyright. I do not see any IP in 1,2,3,4, etc.

Selling gil is a violation of the ToS, that is all and you can get your account banned. SE has that right as you have violated the agreement with them.

No one is guilty of anything if they do this, unless you live in Eorzea and then all bets are off. BTW, I haven't found the jail in Eorzea yet...

But they can lose the privilege of using SE's service.

I like playing with you all, so don't do it.

Smile,

Masha

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pellegri

It's harder for companies to track gold buyers when an actual item is traded for gold.

---

Makes sense, but in another mmo, the farmers were hacking peoples accounts some how after you traded to them they were able to get your information from the trade as each player has unique info in the trades, the item was a catalyst in that trade. not sure how they were doing it but they were. and trading got patched after. Ihope its not the same here in FF14.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DanteMog

Makes sense, but in another mmo, the farmers were hacking peoples accounts some how after you traded to them they were able to get your information from the trade as each player has unique info in the trades, the item was a catalyst in that trade. not sure how they were doing it but they were. and trading got patched after. Ihope its not the same here in FF14.

---

Hmm... Well, I hope anyone who knowingly trades with a gil seller gets hacked to the moon and back (and actually, RMT 'customers' are, I believe, also amongst their major hacking targets). But on the other hand, if there is a vulnerability in the game code I don't want anyone unknowingly trading with a disreputable person hacked, so I guess I feel torn.

RMT's would not exist if players didnt support them.

Some day the first litigation will come out of these issues. A lot of these gaming companies (mostly ftp ones) are taking a huge loss from this gold selling garbage. Well...the ones that aren't in on selling their own on the side anyway.