We had a member which attained Money Cap in our FC through auction house manipulation and a lot of crafting. Needless to say we had enough for housing. During the patch square takes it away to "Balance the Economy".
:mad:
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We had a member which attained Money Cap in our FC through auction house manipulation and a lot of crafting. Needless to say we had enough for housing. During the patch square takes it away to "Balance the Economy".
:mad:
Ye , smart market players may have had fun at beginning. Expecially legacy ones selling lv50 stuff and lv70 stuff as soon as they got mats on first days :rolleyes:
1 person didn't manipulate the AH or craft so much to attain gil cap that fast, not with so many restrictions with how many items you can hold/sell and such. You're looking at needing to sell thousands, possibly tens of thousands of items to do so.
So, how did he really get all that money? Think about it for a sec, and you'll see that there's a reason he lost it all.
Well, I guess that's one subtle way to imply RMT on his behalf.
LOl and foolish enough to make a thread like this >.>
Your friend did not obtain gil cap through AH manipulation and crafting. Not possible without either buying or selling with RMT'd gil. Hell, they even wrote on the Housing patch notes that if RMT gil is involved with your housing purchase, it will be confiscated.
Sorry, but even assuming the best about your friend and trusting he didn't buy gil, he put products up at ridiculous prices which only RMT funded characters could afford. It's his own fault.
You can't buy your way to the gil cap via RMTs; it would be tens of thousands of dollars.
I have no idea who in your FC could possibly have that much gil.
Because one of the ways RMT trades their gil is by putting items up for ridiculous amounts.
Please read the key word: RIDICULOUS I said that in my post you quoted too.
If you put up an item for 1 million+ gil, you're literally asking for it to be bought with RMT gil.
How can the Task Force notice if you have gil purchased from RMT? Is it flagged or something? I was wondering about that.
They attempt to algorithmically flag RMT accounts for suspicious activity, and RMTs alter tactics to dodge. It's your standard cat-and-mouse stuff, and that's why SE is not keen on providing details about the specific methods. Once SE have an RMT flagged, they can link to buyers through logs and remove buyer gil. Once you get a step beyond that and the gil has filtered back into the economy through gil-buyer purchases, it's hard to even justify trying to do anything with it. When I put something up on the market for 300k (composed of 200k worth of mats), I can't control who buys it.
The money has to be confiscated even if you got it legit selling through the market board at the price everybody else is selling, else the fight against RMT falls apart.
It's money laundering. RMT money could be fed through the MB first and only then distributed to gil buyers. There's no way for them to tell whether you are part of the money laundering ring or not. So the prudent thing is to confiscate any money that is tagged RMT. If they don't do that, laundered money becomes immune to the Task Force, effectively granting RMT vendors a free pass on everything.
That's the way I look at it anyway.
That is not what he was saying.
What he was saying is that they can't really do anything once the gil buyers have used the gil they bought.
If someone bought gil, and then used that to buy things on the market board (say, perfectly normally priced mats) that gil transfers to the person who put the item up for sale. You can't really take any gil from that person because they have nothing to do with it. Whether the item costs 10 gil or 10,000 or 100,000,000 doesn't really matter when it comes to this.
Gil buyers not only get their ill-gotten gil confiscated and endanger an FC's house (if they contributed to the company's housing fund), but they can also get perma-banned from the game.
So beware.
It sounds like that is exactly what is being done. They are not only taking the Gil from the person, but they are taking more Gil than what was involved in the purchase.
To illustrate an example:
Person A has 20,000 Gil on their person. Their retainer has 1 million Gil. They put up an item for auction for 200,000 Gil.
Person b bought Gil. Purchases the item, and later gets caught by the STF who then find they purchased person A's item.
From what I've heard on the forums, person A comes back to his retainer, only to find the retainer has 200,000 gil, maybe less, and then has to deal with se's support team for weeks on end.
Or is this not the case?
They...really don't. That's why when they flagged all those crafters a few months back, they just took an arbitrary amount of gil from them, instead of the exact amounts of RMT gil they had acquired (second hand, of course - they were not banned because they had not participated deliberately in any RMT activity). They did this while people who had bought items the crafters were still walking around with those items on.
It's likely that they do have logs, but they'll be more limited than people really expect. It's important to keep in mind just how many actions are taken by players on a server -- the data here is massive and is essentially something you can only analyze algorithmically (simply manipulating it so a GM can view it after the fact is a mess). The problem is that you have huge manpower requirements to manually chase down those attached to RMTs. If you just grabbed everyone associated with the account, then RMTs would buy random items just to get innocent players involved and gum up the works.
SE's actions with regard to these players may be similar to what they did with the FC housing prices on legacy servers. That early crafter ban wave was on anyone with a certain sum of gil on non-Legacy servers, and they all came back to reduced gil. The problem there was that RMTs were duping gil en masse and handing it out in piles. I suspect that the gil reduction was a targeted way to trim the total amount of gil in the economy after that exploit was patched. Rather than risk orphaning some players by taking portion of everyone's gil (and causing an uproar besides), SE went to the people with a ton of gil, assumed they could take the hit, and confiscated the gil. It's also a much easier PR sell to take from the fat cats than the average joes.
That would be the first I've heard of such a problem. Quite the opposite, SE has shown a propensity for blanket bans on players who have high gil stocks regardless of whether they were involved with anyone accused of RMT activity.
hard to make money now people could be selling one thing for 50k but decide to under you and sell it for 20k dont know what there thinking. some stuff the mats cost more then the end items.
This is why the housing thing is such a farce.
It was made abundantly clear a few weeks back (with the blanket bans) that having lots of money will flag you up for investigation; now, SE has basically come out and said that having lots of money is mandatory for certain parts of the game - yet it sounds like anybody who attains such vast sums of gil is still gonna be viewed suspiciously.
It's so backwards.
What's to stop them from arbitrarily banning random players for the lulz? The better question is what would make them want to address player gil. I think it's clear how they're playing their hand with the earlier blanket ban and the Legacy housing pricing. They could be aiming for the same thing here, but I'm still pretty fuzzy on OP's claim of anyone in his FC having nearly the gil cap. I don't think he even has a Builder of the Realm in his FC at all, and I'm pretty sure the many wealthy crafters I know haven't said a thing about gil being taken.
It rather appears that none of those crafters were actually investigated. They were blanket-banned and gil confiscated without any investigation, and requests for a proper investigation (which would exonerate the player) were denied. It remains my assessment that the bans were not so much about RMT activity but about clearing some of the gil that trickled up from the dupe.
There's really no point to a currency system in this game when you just continually get penalized and action taken against you for having money. Just get rid of gil altogether.
for people who believe they bought all the gil...have any of you used google to search for gil prices? I just did. I don't think anyone would EVER drop $960.77 for 30 million gil (thats the highest I've seen the amount you could buy after looking at 2 links). There's no way to justify that purchase. Unless you make 3K a week at your job and youre in the 6 figures catalog in wealth, its just not feasible imo. Also don;t you people remember when "innocent" players had 25 to 35 mil from crafting items and selling in the AH that got their money stripped for no reason at all? I have 1.1 mil to my name, which is dwindling down helping out friends and FC membes get better gear to run the newer instances easier, but still. The most I had was 2.2 million until I bought my girlfriend 2 vanya pieces. You CAN play the market and get the gil, you just have to invest the time and effort in all the farming.
They probably did that because those crafters were botting and possible RMT activities.
Person X creates a character and three days later has all crafts at 50. Give me a break. You could watch it on the forums and see the rampant botting in game. Then the crafters act like they were just innocent victims, because they didn't RMT... while they DID bot as fast as their little programs would let them.
I especially love the ones that the FC mates fed the bots materials, so they could run 24/7 and then posted congratulatory posts on the forums about the "achievement" of having the first 50 or first person with all 50s like a day or two after release.
Botting/Rotating Play Shifts/ or Meth. You choose which they did.
That always seemed to me to be more of market regulation than RMT stop gaping. Square wants to control the inflation of currency so the market doesn't tank or currency is worthless (removing currency from circulation is the best way to do it while maintaining stability. Flooding the market with currency would just crash the economy completely).
I think they removed all of that Gil as a way to keep MB prices lower (though with less currency, the fundamental price for the commodity is the same. Demand is demand). Makes sense, just sucks for the players who accumulated it all.
Imagine if one player with 100M Gil were to buy items at humongous prices. Inflation would triple overnight while only that player has the funds for purchase power essentially crashing the denomination. Or, that player buys ALL of a specific item and turns around and sells it at a massive premium (price fixing/monopolization) creating inflation that the market simply can't afford and crashes (no stabilization without upping currency values and inflating the denomination to near crash levels).
Again, I'm not saying it's fair what happened to those players and I do feel for them, but it was almost a necessary evil.