Eorzea census: window into RMT botting practices

I saw this during the live letter stream, but now the data is on the lodestone homepage. Does anyone else find the "Top 15 items in existence" amusing? Maple logs, Jade, and Raw heliodor are the top three items, with 10 times the number farmed than the next most popular item.

Jade is used to create jadeite, which is used in less than a dozen recipes pre-3.0, and only a handful of ilevel 115 jewelry pieces. While practically useless for the general community, compared to other gathering materials, such as iron ore (incidentally not an item on the list), jade sells for 12 gil to vendors. That is over 25.8 billion gil farmed from Jade.

Now consider where Jade is located. Unlike most mining nodes, where the 4 gathering nodes are split on opposite sides of a valley wall, all of the Jade mining nodes are on the same side of the same wall. A botter who slips behind the wall could theoretically run a botting script to walk and farm out of sight, without the fear of being reported by human players. No teleportation hack would be required, so it would not risk detection as easily as other botters.

Now, I knew almost nothing of RMT farming practices before seeing this Census data. But from just a casual glance at the data, I can immediately sense that something is amiss. Yet with this data constantly available to them, they STILL can't figure out how to hurt the RMT? And furthermore, they dress up the data as a light hearted powerpoint document and share it with us to celebrate the anniversary.

I guess what I want to say is... when they find data on player behavior like this, I expect them to take action rather than presenting it to us like nothing is wrong.

Amen to that. I get the distinct feeling that they don't care as much though because they can say 'X registered' accounts, same as WoW does, instead of revealing actual sub numbers, for the same reason WoW does. It's sad they feel the need to lie to people.

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Originally Posted by Arashmin

Amen to that. I get the distinct feeling that they don't care as much though because they can say 'X registered' accounts, same as WoW does, instead of revealing actual sub numbers, for the same reason WoW does. It's sad they feel the need to lie to people.

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Its not sad nor did they lie to people, they clearly stated that its registered account.
If you open up a store, would you tell potential and paying customer that there are X amount to people come in daily but only about 1/10 of that X amount bought stuffs? Most likely not.

That's exactly my point; I wouldn't because it feels dishonest, and the only reason they do it here is that the other big MMOs all do it, so they don't want their numbers to seem low in comparison (nor do they want to reveal exactly how many subs they have for other financial reasons, but that's neither here nor there).

Lie is perhaps a stronger word that I should have used, but I do feel it's still not entirely honest, especially if it's conflated due to issues like these that are supposed to be along the lines of 'bannable offenses'

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Originally Posted by DawnSolaria

Its not sad nor did they lie to people, they clearly stated that its registered account.
If you open up a store, would you tell potential and paying customer that there are X amount to people come in daily but only about 1/10 of that X amount bought stuffs? Most likely not.

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I think what he means is that companies like SE and Blizzard flaunt the "registered accounts" figure when we know very well that a sizable number of accounts were either RMT farmers, or people who tried the game and left after a few days of play. It is a little irritating that they often only use the largest number (because it sounds good) when players like myself are genuinely curious as to how many actual subscribing players are in the world with us.

For a while, Blizzard was using the "10 million subscribers" claim, which was cool when you consider just how much of the population is playing the game with you. "X million accounts" doesn't have the same resonance with me, since we know a majority of those accounts aren't being used at any moment. I mean, even I have had more than one FFXIV account, and probably 3 or 4 FFXI accounts.

But yeah, back to the "Top 15 items" list... I find it weird that hippogryph skin is number 4 on the list, while hippogryph sinew is number 6. Whenever I farmed hippogryph skins for militia collars (easy GC seals and helped level my FC), I always received about twice the amount of sinew as I received skins. And when you consider that aldgoat, boar, and raptor skin don't appear on the list, despite being far more useful for a majority of the player population... I suspect now that those mysterious dungeon queuing black mages we always see in packs have been farming Amdapor Keep. The skin drop rate there is higher than normal, and those trash mobs would be easy to kill with 4 people spamming flare. It's one of the only places in the game where hippogryphs drop skins, the only other options being Mor Dhona (never seen a farmer there) and retainer ventures (only 10 a day, based on luck).

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Originally Posted by Arashmin

Amen to that. I get the distinct feeling that they don't care as much though because they can say 'X registered' accounts, same as WoW does, instead of revealing actual sub numbers, for the same reason WoW does. It's sad they feel the need to lie to people.

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Blizzard actually does release sub numbers in addition to total accounts registered. In fact they are among the few in the industry that do.

I have a feeling the crafting market (even from 1.0) is the true contributor to some of those statistics.

Personally I had a LOT of jade and misc. things ... because I used it to grind way back when and sent the left overs to my alt.
Heck, my FC has a running joke from 1.0 about making an entire airship out of Flax and Jade.

Most of the top items are the top because they items drop off of mobs everywhere. Bones Chips, Hippo items, animal skin, shrooms, potions. You just get SO much.

Maybe some of the jade is a holdover from 1.0, but I thought it seemed odd. I do a decent amount of mining and crafting and never have jade on hand because it's pretty worthless (though I did pick some up after 3,0, but still not much). A lot of the other items are really low level and it makes some sense that people have a bunch of that. Even hippo skins. Personally I have 198 from ventures and things (I began throwing them out/ selling them when my retainer had a full stack of HQ and NQ) because one of my retainers seems to love them. Still, with shards leading the market and a few oddball items you can certainly see the RMT influence.

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Originally Posted by Niqote

Personally I had a LOT of jade and misc. things ... because I used it to grind way back when and sent the left overs to my alt.
Heck, my FC has a running joke from 1.0 about making an entire airship out of Flax and Jade.

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I'll admit I had a couple hundred rolanberries back in the first month of 2.0, when I was leveling botanist. Gathering leves were not rewarding much xp before the patch that boosted them, and I didn't have a keen grasp on which high level plants were useful in large quantities. Rolanberries were giving me good xp, so I just kept gathering them while watching tv.

But that clearly isn't what is going on with the top 3 items here. Even assuming that all 5 million registered accounts were used by active players, and that every one of them was out there farming jade, each player would need to farm 431 jade for this statistic to make sense. Furthermore, the useful items such as iron ore, alumen, cotton balls, and even your example of flax, do not appear anywhere on the list. There is simply no legitimate reason why players have farmed 2 billion of this nearly worthless item, while far more useful items are not represented.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

Maybe some of the jade is a holdover from 1.0, but I thought it seemed odd. I do a decent amount of mining and crafting and never have jade on hand because it's pretty worthless (though I did pick some up after 3,0, but still not much). A lot of the other items are really low level and it makes some sense that people have a bunch of that. Even hippo skins. Personally I have 198 from ventures and things (I began throwing them out/ selling them when my retainer had a full stack of HQ and NQ) because one of my retainers seems to love them. Still, with shards leading the market and a few oddball items you can certainly see the RMT influence.

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Was jade more common in recipes back in 1.0? The only levequest that used it in 2.0 is for jade crooks. And while I personally have tried to farm lots of hippogryph skin for various reasons, the fact that both hippogryph skin AND sinew appears on the list indicates that they are in fact being killed directly, and not from retainers. Add to that the absence of hippogryph leather, black alumen, or any other reagents of that item level, and it just smells suspicious.

'Catching' RMT only in batches is part of the problem imho. How often do they do it? Every one month? Never really counted the interavals but it's enough time for the RMTs to amass gil, get those gil sold, and have those gil buyers spend money on legit items on the market. SE can remove the rmt and punish the gil buyers periodically but they can't remove tainted money once it goes past that. Remember the first few months after launch? Apparently legit crafters getting their gil taken away because their items were bought by gil buyers and the outrage in the forums and all that? Remember that guy who even wrote a non digital letter and really mailed it to Japan? Where's that now? The fact that it's not happening probably means that offenders get removed but already laundered money does not.

Like really, if I were the boss of these RMTs and realized that a company is only rounding up my goons one day of every month and they can run amok the rest of the month, my next thought would be, would I still make profit if I have to rebuy accounts for my soldiers every month? Looks like the answer is yes.

Also OP if you missed it, that amount of jade popped up during this year as last year jade was nowhere to be seen on the most popular items
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ea-Census-2014

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Originally Posted by Gardes

'Catching' RMT only in batches is part of the problem imho.

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Well, to be fair, RMT will exist in any game that is popular, regardless of how well the developers police it. It's one of those things that will keep bouncing back, no matter how they attack it.

BUT you're right about FFXIV being too easy for RMT companies to profit from. If SE was quick to target each problem as it appears, then the RMT would be forced to resort to less overt tactics, or they would be losing more accounts than they could afford. And less overt RMT would make a better environment for all of us players.

This census data is an indication of something sketchy, and rather than put it on a powerpoint presentation celebrating the game, maybe they should have taken a good look at WHO gathered millions of jade, dealt with them accordingly, and not shared this likely exploit with the world.

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Originally Posted by mp-please

Also OP if you missed it, that amount of jade popped up during this year as last year jade was nowhere to be seen on the most popular items
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ea-Census-2014

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Lol, now I'm wondering how the devil 6 billion maple logs were farmed up in only one year. I thought maple logs made SOME sense, what with it being the easiest low level carpentry thing botanists can grab. But that is 190 maple logs a second for one year. Given that one gathering strike takes about 2 seconds, and the distance between trees would add at least another 2 seconds per log, this would require no less than 760 people farming maple logs non-stop for a solid year with no breaks.

Can always look up how many RMT accounts got banned over the past 2 years and tally it up, roughly estimate how much money these RMTs already spent on buying accounts over and over. Probably don't have to count the sub fee since they already get 1 free month but I'm sure most of them lived longer than 1 month of free sub or have never gotten the ban hammer ever.

Then uh, how much USD buys 26 billion gil (from just jades)? There's obviously more gil source for rmt but I'm starting to think that the rmt accounts might actually rival or surpass the actual accounts, currently playing or otherwise.

I'm not saying this explains the number at all but it got me thinking. If I want to do the achievemnt for MIN/BOT of gathering 10.000HQ I want to do that where I have the highest & chance of getting HQ. I think the highest without any buffs is 15% which would mean I need to collect about 70.000, for example maple logs. The added benefit of this is that I could then use those to get the achievment for crafting 10.000 HQ carpenter recipies.

Obviously there are other concerns such as making gil while doing it but in terms of pure speed I would probably do items like these which could explain a fraction of it at least.