SE, Please fix this FC exploit

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Originally Posted by Astralos

I can empathize with you, as we had our gil stolen in the Free Company I was previously in. The GMs gave us contradictory information and then refused to do anything.

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I really hope that they've changed their stance on this since then, and that you get your money back.

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There should really be more attention on the topic if this is a problem that still exists. This is a blatant, oversight that can be abused by RMTs and assholes, and it's not even difficult to fix. Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?

This is unacceptable.

Just wanted to keep people informed that this exploit still exists. I just tried it today with my own characters.

I made a new rank called "3rd" and gave it promotion/demotion permissions. It is in the 3rd position of hierarchy.
I then changed my alt "Chariots Chariots" to 3rd, and my other alt, Kibbles Katze, to a rank below 3rd, Star Onion.
From there I logged onto Chariots Chariots and was able to promote Kibbles Katze to Onion Knight, which is the 2nd in command position. (You can't promote to master).

http://imageshack.com/a/img838/113/ikj9.jpg

I'm leader of my FC and I actually didn't know that people could promote above their rank. Then again we are a medium sized fc of ca 120 people, only me and my officers have promotion privileges. And only I have access to the money in our chest and only me and the officers have full access to the 3rd tab in which we store rare mats. I was thankful to the heavens about patch 2.1 which introduced the "deposit only" permission and the chest log. Before that, me and the officers had full access. But 1 Officer turned out to be a douche, went behind my back, stole 200.000 before leaving the fc with a bunch of others from our core. Those were housing donations he and a another quitter had given but donations are bloody donations. If you take it out without saying, it's theft. I'm hoping for more options to make taking out crystals more limited, like a maximum of 100 per day or such. That would be helpful.

Wow. SE still has done nothing about this? :mad:

I knew about this issue but... wow, it really sucks that this happened to you.
I really hope that they make it so that you cannot promote above your current rank.
And I certainly hope they do something about your situation.
"Working as intended" is a copout and they know it. -_-

I wasn't aware of this issue until tonight. I recently moved to Balmung to join my friends in the FC they're part of and also made new friends. My FC leader is aware of the exploit and his officers with promote privileges used the exploit for more benign purposes. FC leader was at work. So one of his officers promoted another officer to a rank with access to withdrawals in order to purchase the house.

Until this gets fixed, I'd suggest the only rank able to promote needs to be the one right after Master.

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Originally Posted by Amelia_Pond_Behemoth

I wasn't aware of this issue until tonight. I recently moved to Balmung to join my friends in the FC they're part of and also made new friends. My FC leader is aware of the exploit and his officers with promote privileges used the exploit for more benign purposes. FC leader was at work. So one of his officers promoted another officer to a rank with access to withdrawals in order to purchase the house.

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And that right there is how all our gil was stolen... =/

I really HATE RMT, and the people who feed them!

I just shared this information with the other officers of my FC to hopefully prevent a disaster happening to us as well. Since I wasn't aware of this myself.

I apologize that this happened to you. But whether or not this is resolved, I think you really helped out a lot of other FC's by spreading awareness...so I thank you.

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Originally Posted by LalaRu

Until this gets fixed, I'd suggest the only rank able to promote needs to be the one right after Master.

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Be careful of the "master swapping" bug as well.

SE has historically been REALLY bad with hierarchy. XI's linkshell design was the worst - only one leader and if he disappeared, you'd have to recreate the shell.

I had noticed that I have the ability to demote my boss in the FC - yea this is a TERRIBLE design. I thought when SE copied the guild format from other games they would actually copy it in a way that made sense. Not so much. This is something that needs to be PRIORITIZED.

They have said the reasons they have this kind of stuff is to protect the FC if the leaders all quit without putting someone else in charge, but it never occurred to them that people would abuse it. This is pretty much BS, because if you look at many of the limitations they put in for RMTs, it's clear they don't just trust the playerbase. This was something they simply overlooked and goes to show how rushed and half assed put together this game was, and so far they either don't know how to get around their own programming to fix it, or it just isn't a big enough priority for them.

Wasn't aware of this... got hit by it recently.. SE doesn't seem to care or won't do anything about it. GMs are left powerless, and devs don't even seem to want to acknowledge it. These are the offered solutions:

a) Hope 35 days pass without the person logging in.
b) Hope they don't steal/sell everything.
c) Hope they give control of your FC, house, and chest back... worth potentially hundreds of millions of gil.

If someone were to do the stuff from b) SE won't do a damn thing to them. According to GMs, they have no power to change what the development team views as "FC politics."

Sorry for the double post. 1000 characters is pretty slim.

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Originally Posted by LalaRu

Until this gets fixed, I'd suggest the only rank able to promote needs to be the one right after Master.

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I'd advise against this. This is exactly how my company got in the predicament we're in now. I kept promotion priviliges to rank 1 to totally prevent all possible abuse and then got caught by the rank swap bug ^.

The only way to be safe is to make a mule or two, set them to rank 2/3, and give them promotion priviliges. Handle ALL promotions via the mules, or at least through a trusted officer. Never ever ever let rank 1 promote/demote people as there's just no way to be sure you won't wind up bugging them to lead of the FC.

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Originally Posted by Bayohne

However, even with that said, we understand the request for adjustments and the team will be looking carefully into how best to move forward.

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Bayohne, what is the status on this? I am honestly rather disappointed nothing has been done about the rank privileges by now. I don't know of any player who thinks the ability to promote above their own rank is a good idea, and it leads to huge abuse potential. Please make this FC QoL adjustment so FCs don't have to be so incredibly stringent in their ranking/privileges, just to guard from this 'potential' of abuse.

If the devs are worried about stunting *legitimate* practices, then please give the FC leader the option to turn off this ability per rank. I.E., FC Leader can set Co-Leader to current unrestricted promotion privileges, but also set Officers to promotion privileges up to their rank only. More options and customization just makes everyone happy, by letting us choose our structure.

Starting to feel pretty toxic about the situation. Feels like they're too embarassed to admit how screwed up the FC rank UI programming actually is.

Unfortunately I wasn't aware of this particular nature about the Promotion/Demotion authorization and our FC was just ripped off of 15 million gil tonight. Why hasn't this been fixed? Or why hasn't there at least been a lot more detail regarding the functionality of this authorization in game? No other game would allow a player to promote themselves to a rank higher than their current rank.

Right now I'm at a loss of what to do to get the gil back that we worked hard to earn. The GM in game responded that they can't assist with the problem and all they could do was suggest I create a feedback post on these forums.

Its difficult to...
have any respect for people giving such "official responses"

Honestly, the system is flawed, many core systems in ffxiv are backwater and in desperate need of SIMPLE updates.

This is one such example. There is no reason someone should be allowed to promote to a higher rank than they are or even to equal rank, this is basic guild system stuff - this is the only game I know where this stupid situation can occur.

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Limiting the use of the ability to promote could have negative implications for users that are using the feature legitimately (for example, if a leader has left, and a new one needs to be appointed)

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This is a real joke. If that is what this 'feature' of the promote function was for, then whoever thought it up should be reassigned.
In any other game, again, basic guild stuff - the leader cannot leave without assigning a new leader - giving up his position and being allowed to leave.

How hard is this to understand?

Come on, stop wasting people's time with poor excuses of blatant flaws in the system.

Squenix needs to get this through their heads and also create a proper GM system that is both accessible and actually helpful.

Blizzard did this.
Issue with items? Resolved!
Let yourself get hacked? Restoration is done.
Lost entire guild bank to untrustworthy member? All items restored and the thief is punished (with undisclosed info of course - all items are most likely retrived, any gold made from selling, removed and possible suspension to permanent ban depending on track record)

Man this is terrible! I really hope you get at LEAST your gil back. This is reason I think FC leaders need to come together and form a list of people like this, make it impossible for them to move around on that server and have to either quit or move to another server. this whole defending these people that SE does is ridiculous.

Haven't promoted/demoted anyone though I have the priviledge to do so, but our fc have changed leaders at least 3 times and got all member ranks changed many many times by current leader. As far as I know all changes were made exactly as intended with members getting exact rank and privileges as our leader wanted them to be. Also fc is kind of based on trust to each other - if you don't know each other that well then:
1) do not keep more than 1 000 000 in fc chest.
2) give promotion/demotion rights only to members that you are 100% sure that they can be trusted and/or are not plain dumb. Try to keep the number of members with privilege to promote/demote as low as possible

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Originally Posted by Sunarie

Just to be clear... I just checked this in my FC. I can promote people up to the rank under FC master. I cannot demote the master, nor can I promote someone to master. So this DOES NOT fix an instance where the master goes missing but does not actually leave the guild. The only instance I can think of it fixing is if someone physically leaves an FC without first appointing someone. I can't test if leaving is actually possible without first doing that because I'm not the Master.

Why not just make the FC leader promote someone new before leaving?

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It's not possible to leave without first appointing someone else as GM. I tried that with an alt char.

Bringing attention to this again.

It is absolutely unacceptable if this issue still continues to be unresolved and the GMs are still unable to do anything about it due to "company policies."

In DOFUS you aren't able to promote anyone to a rank above yours or change the rank of anyone above your rank, but in DOFUS you're also allowed to give each player their own set of privileges, it's not handled by rank.



Allowing promotions to ranks above yours is a silly bug. You got scammed and I don't support getting your items back but the bug should be fixed.

How does crap like this even make it past the "quality control?"

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Originally Posted by Fated

How does crap like this even make it past the "quality control?"

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We have quality control in this game?

I'm shocked this still hasn't been fixed... Right now the only safe option for all the FC out there is to have the master be the only one with promote/demote privileges. SE this should be a simple fix to make it so you can't promote people above your own rank. There is no excuse for this, especially as now there is a system in place where after 35 days of inactivity, the FC leadership is passed to the next person in line (so an FC is never truly "lost" if someone randomly quits the game).

This still needs to be addressed. My FC just ran into this issue as well. We did a company-wide restructuring because of guild bank abuse and removed access to all ranks below High Council. The members who are tagged High Council are the four leaders under the Guild Master and the Quartermaster(coGM) and two weeks ago one of the High Council members decided to promote a regular member to High Council so that she now can access the guild bank.

It's caused our leader to take promotion access away from everyone, and now the entire burden is on her to assign each rank, where before the leadership team was able to manage membership as needed without her online.

It's a big problem that needs to be dealt with and not just ignored. There is no reason whatsoever a member should be able to promote to peer status or ESPECIALLY above his\her rank in the hierarchy. SE, Please address this. We don't want to seem tyrannical in our free companies but you are making it hard to manage one without leaving ourselves open to exploitation.

SE please figure this stuff out already. You really lose credibility as a company when you let simple things like this go on for so long. This should have been a hotfix from 2.0, not an outstanding issue in 2.35+. Please figure it out. If you really think there is a playerbase that enjoys your current system, then make it an *OPTION* for the FC leader to select. Simple.

This is really embarrassing for a 2014 game.

I think the issue is that ranks are customizable rather than ordered. If you have "officer in charge of activity A", "officer in charge of activity B", and "officer in charge of activity C", you can customize their individual titles and privileges, but there isn't any inherit order making one of those more important than the other two. You've got multiple ranks with different names and perhaps different privileges to go along with their individual responsibilities, but they're all on the same level. It seems like the entire ranking system in XIV is an extension of that.

Anyone you give promotion/demotion privileges to is assumed to be responsible for setting other players' ranks, irrespective of where those are, because "where those are" is meaningless. There aren't really ranks that are "above" or "below" any others, just ranks that have different sets of privileges. The real problem is that this fact isn't obvious. The ranks appear to be ordered, but their number is simply where to display them in the list rather than an actual higher-ranking / lower-ranking order.

I do think something needs to be done about this problem. But it would likely require first making the rank level itself more customizable than it currently is. Once you can specify which ranks share the same level as opposed to those that are genuinely higher or lower, then they'd be able to add a rule that you can promote/demote only between ranks lower than or equal to your own.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

I do think something needs to be done about this problem. But it would likely require first making the rank level itself more customizable than it currently is. Once you can specify which ranks share the same level as opposed to those that are genuinely higher or lower, then they'd be able to add a rule that you can promote/demote only between ranks lower than or equal to your own.

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How about, as a slightly altered solution, it could be set up that you cannot give someone permissions (whether by promotion or altering a rank's permissions) that you yourself do not possess?

Back before SE implemented activity logs for the FC chest our FC had all of it's gil stolen by a member. It wasn't an RMT - just a selfish thief. However SE's take on it was "you gave them access to the chest, and gave him the right to access the gil. You shouldn't have trusted him."

So I know first hand how this type of thing sucks.

I agree that you shouldn't be able to promote above your own rank - that would be the same as allowing someone to promote themselves.. (though if you can promote above your own rank, you probably CAN promote yourself.. I should try that.. )

However I don't think it's unreasonable to restrict promotion to a very small trustworthy group of people. It's not like you have to go changing peoples ranks on a daily basis. (I should also qualify that our FC is relatively small (<100) and for the most part we all know each other pretty well. So in fairness, if you have a very large FC, it might be different. )

This issue has been open for at least 1.5 years.
Can a Dev. or rep pls give status as to what's going on with the fix for this FC rank setting?

Thank you.

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Originally Posted by Kimikryo

In FFXI you had no "Guildbank"

And read, not they where swallowed, they swallowed. They gave one of the newcommers a Rank 3 within their rank structure with his own rights, he somehow was able to promote someone to have full access to everything.

I know from WoW. If you were able to invite and promote, you were not able to promote someone over your own rank and you were not able to demote people with rank above your own.

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As a guild leader in WoW, I can also set specific ranks to REQUIRE an authentication token as well. Either the software or keyfob will do, but if you don't have one you cannot be promoted to that rank, and if you remove it, you get auto demoted to the first rank that doesn't require it. In my case, it's the scrub member you can't do anything with the bank rank. My officers all required authenticators.

Only rank you couldn't do that for was Guild Master, but again, I had to hand that over manually, no one could promote to it.

imho, this is entirely the OP's (or the FC master's) mistake. Why, did you give a guy you don't know so much power over your FC? regardless of the current FC role mechanic, giving roles should be reserved to the people you trust and deserve them.

i hope SE will give back your gils, but if it is me, sorry i won't, you lots are too careless to take care of your own. i won't change a system that will benefit a lot more (to be able to replace an AWOL FC master/leader) than to handhold careless people take care of their stuff.

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Originally Posted by NatSilverguard

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Did you even read the thread? In every MMO other than FFXIV the rank to promote someone above your own rank is an impossibility, how was the OP to expect that it was possible and to be robbed of 10million gil? Also I'm pretty sure you can't promote someone to FC master even with this system, you have to wait the 30(?) days of them being offline.

Regardless of all that, this thread is like a year old. The OP has probably made that gil back and infinitely more (if they're even still playing).

basically, there are only 2 ranks, master and everything else

theres no other ranking, you just have the option to give "everything else" some different names with individual rights but in the end its always on par with every other "everything else" which got the same rights

Threw in 15MIL on a house at 3.0 was robbed, but we put a bitch in charge and she stole it. whoever owns the house has the leverage. I admit it, i was robbed because we allowed her to have the power to do that.Master IS ALL.

Seriously if you give promotion/demotion to anyone as a rank ability you are asking for chaos.

Wow... 1.5 years and this is still a thing. Their design decisions are really questionable.

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Originally Posted by AnimaS

Seriously if you give promotion/demotion to anyone as a rank ability you are asking for chaos.

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In other games the rules usually are that you can promote someone up to the rank below yours.

In FF14 you can promote people to a rank above your own.

That is usually considered an exploit. Imagine if your supervisor at work could promote you to be his boss, does that seem right to you?