Apparent bots

[Merle]

Too many times. The number of bans gets meaningless when you see the same group of bots you reported farming in the same spot for multiple consecutive weeks.

I agree and it kinda annoyes me, but.. told be truth, those bots are the "bait" to reach the true gill-sellers/buyers

[joshsecret]

note to self... make/sell tht bow!!

[Shirai]

note to self... make/sell tht bow!!

Not worth it, to be fair.

[Akujin]

There is a group of farming WHM/BLM bots on my server which has been here since january. They even have an FC. They were reported countless times, and yet....

Thing is, you have to look at it like this. What are they farming, are they doing so in a consistent fashion, as in non stop grinding, repetitive/robotic like methods. Is there anything going through the chat log, even if it's scripted, to appear like normal player banter?

I made a report a month or so ago regarding a group I suspected was farming Dulahans and Bats in Proud Creek. Same type of thing, group of BLMs/WHMs wearing mixmatch gear, usually Mage aligned body sets, with crafting accessories. The reason they were farming those particular mobs, I discovered (I was doing an Atma book for the Dullahans), is that each mob was dropping about 180-220 gil a pop. You have a full party, that's about 1760 gil a kill, so a thousand kills (a long time, yes) would net 1.7m gil, quite easily, especially with how abundant and how quickly those mobs respawned.

Next day, decided to have myself a look see. Killed one of each mob, no gil at all, not even a reduced amount. They removed the gil drop completely. What happened to the people in the report? No clue, maybe it was innocent, perhaps not. I doubt I'll ever find out as I didn't write the names to a permanent list. But just food for thought, consider the circumstances surrounding a group of people you suspect for RMT behavior. What are they doing exactly, because SE cannot justify banning people just because they lack fashion sense. lol

[zeroumus]

who cares, not like this game has an economy anyway

[Akujin]

Oh it has an economy, granted, a lot of people are really stupid with money and it shows with how they undercut/sell things below their NPC vendor price (the latter I personally love cashing in on).

If people truly wanted to 'fix' the economy, everything that gets sold on the wards would be sold for vendor price (or just a little higher to compensate for tax). The only purpose of that would be to get their items out into the hands of other people who may not have the same opportunity to craft/farm items. But, selling it at the lowest possible price, without losing money beyond vendor NPC price due to the tax system, would ensure that things were kept so low that the surplus of gil needed from RMT farmers would become obsolete, because doing a few dungeon runs, or leves, or FATEs could net you enough gil to buy things easily.

It wont ever happen though, because people want more gil, for housing, mostly. And because housing started (and is still) pretty pricey, the economy remains the way it is. The poor remain poor, the rich get richer.

[BreathlessTao]

When SE bans accounts they do not delete the characters attached to those accounts.

Any particular reason for that, I wonder? Because it doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense... They happily cite server issues when asked about, for example, inventory expansion, but then they continue to store characters of perma-banned accounts? Sounds kinda illogical to me?

[joshsecret]

Not worth it, to be fair.

get that money b4 they get banned!

[Shirai]

Any particular reason for that, I wonder? Because it doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense... They happily cite server issues when asked about, for example, inventory expansion, but then they continue to store characters of perma-banned accounts? Sounds kinda illogical to me?

By deleting those accounts or characters they also delete data they might need in the future in case a SE wants to pursue legal charges against a company/party, or vice versa.

As a side effect, they can't make new characters with that name to harass you with. Making it safe to remove them from the list forever.

Apart from that, character data is merely that, game data.
And data isn't the issue when they talk about the issues you mention, it's server load, the traffic that takes place between the client (you) and the servers.

[Dgsoil]

If people truly wanted to 'fix' the economy, everything that gets sold on the wards would be sold for vendor price (or just a little higher to compensate for tax). The only purpose of that would be to get their items out into the hands of other people who may not have the same opportunity to craft/farm items. But, selling it at the lowest possible price, without losing money beyond vendor NPC price due to the tax system, would ensure that things were kept so low that the surplus of gil needed from RMT farmers would become obsolete, because doing a few dungeon runs, or leves, or FATEs could net you enough gil to buy things easily.

That wouldn't cover the cost of the materials in items bought for the craft, and if you aren't at least making a small profit, and everything is going a loss, you'd have to farm everything for yourself and never buy the items off the ward in the first place.

Material A = sells for 150 G at vendor, sells for 155 G on board. Material B = sells for 20 G at vendor, sells for 25 G on board.
Item X crafted from Material A and B sells for 160 G at vendor, 165 G on market boards. 10 Gil loss each time you sold Item X. Obviously this doesn't seem to be a big deal, but it's still fairly stupid in the long run, not to mention that isn't even estimating the cost of shards/crystals/clusters.
(All math was made up by poster. Though I have seen this on multiple items in game already, because some people "cant maths." And even worse, I constantly see items selling for less than it can be sold at the vendor for, which I promptly buy up and get off the boards.)