Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Aerowaffle]

The question is, do they actually do anything actively to bother you? or is it just the elitist "if you arent playing the game my way, its cheating and i hate you" attitude that a lot of the players in this game have?

What? This is not a matter of "playing the game my way", it is cheating. All players are expected to advance through the game, gil buyers are getting more gil through a third-party that SE bans for. Leveling bot are advancing their character using a third-party program that SE bans you for. If this were a single-player game, whether or not someone cheats wouldn't matter, they are only competing against themselves.

But this is an MMO. Everyone is expected to play by the same rules.

Now my question to you, do you only disagree with things that directly negatively effect your own gameplay? If so, that's an extremely selfish self-centered attitude.

[tocsin]

What? This is not a matter of "playing the game my way", it is cheating. All players are expected to advance through the game, gil buyers are getting more gil through a third-party that SE bans for. Leveling bot are advancing their character using a third-party program that SE bans you for. If this were a single-player game, whether or not someone cheats wouldn't matter, they are only competing against themselves.

Is this supposed to be a joke? Botting is cheating no matter how you look at it, and knowing that has nothing whatsoever to do with elitism. It is against the rules, and when people cheat in games, it's rather normal for many who play the game the way it's intended to take offense at it.

Glad that finally got a reaction. This thread was starting to go stagnant, and I was trying to stir the pot a bit to keep this on the front page a little more often. I had a feeling bringing out the word "elitist" would grab a reaction

However, Considering I keep my tells turned off, and often forget that the system even exists, spamming doesn't bother me much. and, other than being the blessed people undercutting on the shard market and keeping my profits alive, I don't even ever see an RMT bot.

Consider this. SE releases an anti-cheat program and eliminates all bots. Most endgame non-botting gatherers (read 80% of gatherers) would need shards to be priced at least at 400 gil or better per shard, to make them more profitable than mining or harvesting any other item. now, look at a lvl 19 iron hoplon (shield). in order to craft that you need a total of 9 shards. that means, that at minimum cost assuming you gathered all mats except shards, this item would already have a minimum value of 3600 gil. adding the cost of materials, and you have an even 4000 gil. Tell me if any lvl 19 new player, without RMT or veteran help, has earned 4000 gil themselves to spend on a single shield. These numbers do nothing but rise as levels go higher.

Like it or not, RMT is the only thing keeping crafting alive in this game.

[Orspeth]

Glad that finally got a reaction. This thread was starting to go stagnant, and I was trying to stir the pot a bit to keep this on the front page a little more often. I had a feeling bringing out the word "elitist" would grab a reaction<snip>

Like it or not, RMT is the only thing keeping crafting alive in this game.

I don't care what it does to prices. Ban the cheaters and botters - they are nothing but filth and scum. Give me a fair and honest market or give me none at all.

[tocsin]

I don't care what it does to prices. Ban the cheaters and botters - they are nothing but filth and scum. Give me a fair and honest market or give me none at all.

Quite agreed. I'm just saying, that unless SE changes the entire crafting system to not use shards, "Honest market or none at all" would quickly go to "Not at all", rather than "honest", mainly because the crafting system as currently composed is, honestly, broken.

[Kuwaitum]

Most endgame non-botting gatherers (read 80% of gatherers) would need shards to be priced at least at 400 gil or better per shard, to make them more profitable than mining or harvesting any other item. (.......) Like it or not, RMT is the only thing keeping crafting alive in this game.

IMO, the market will suffer but eventually will reach equilibrium point, as for the pricing it is mainly controlled by the demand and supply. For me as a crafter and gatherer I put a value of time for me to gather, personally I don’t gather any mats if their enlisted MB price is less than 300 gil/per piece.

If I had more time to play my least list price would have been lower, its gil generation per hour of play.

Now speak of BOTs/RMTs & Players using Gathering bot programs. Their time value is Zero. Every mat and every shard gathered consumed 0 of their time. So they are gaining gil from nothing, like selling air.

RMTs keep the game alive, TRUE, but RMTs are not free gil-shard trading company. They are cycling out gil-shards in-game to extract real money. So for them to continue the gil-shard trade for the mentioned crafting issue, real money MUST be used.. thus promoting buying Gil for real Money. (Bizarre).

On Server:Faerie, latest average price for shards is 67-74 gil. As mentioned above BOTs consume 0 real person’s time so you are profiting regardless of what price you are selling. In September-December 2013, shard prices on Faerie were 4-17 gil per shard. Why did the prices went x5 time more?! Other than RMTs already control the MB. After all you need more gil to buy 10K shards for 70gil that when it was 7gil. Any normal gatherer cannot supply what a non-real-person x100 can gather, so there is no way honest gatherers can crush, in addition doubtfully gatherers also want to maximise profit.. so its less likely to crush them by lowering their price, even so their stock will be sold and RMT's will be top list again.

Again, tell me why someone would buy 10K shards again? Oh, to level up ASAP? This game is designed to last for years.. you’ll have time to level up. As for your humble example of the shield which needs 9 shards.. 9 shards need 30 seconds to gather at a stonethrow distance of any state city gate.
Many new players go solo now, knowing that he/she can go unpunished, buys gil to get whatever he/she needs off MB. When prices hop high, he/she will try to blend into a group “FC” so he can get some discount or help.. promoting the FC involvement which what this game is about multi-player.

If a system in game is broken, I read MB is broken, Crafting is broken, Gathering is retarded. Any case it was.. if we want to fix it, we fix it in the right way.. We should not fix something by corrupting another.

[tocsin]

IMO, the market will suffer but eventually will reach equilibrium point, as for the pricing it is mainly controlled by the demand and supply. For me as a crafter and gatherer I put a value of time for me to gather, personally I don’t gather any mats if their enlisted MB price is less than 300 gil/per piece..

Same here, I wont even put something up on the marketboard for under 500 gil apiece. not worth my sell slots.

Now speak of BOTs/RMTs & Players using Gathering bot programs. Their time value is Zero. Every mat and every shard gathered consumed 0 of their time. So they are gaining gil from nothing, like selling air..

Actually, Bots and Player bot programs don't exactly have a time value of zero. Even with the best teleporting bots, there still is a limited amount of shards that a bot can gather in an hour. doing a small google search (and not even clicking the links), most gathering bots can only gather a maximum of 600-700 items per hour. that's 16,800 max per day of paid subscription. its a lot larger amount than any normal player has, but its a far cry from zero time value.

Again, tell me why someone would buy 10K shards again? Oh, to level up ASAP? This game is designed to last for years.. you’ll have time to level up. As for your humble example of the shield which needs 9 shards.. 9 shards need 30 seconds to gather at a stonethrow distance of any state city gate.

9 shards, yes, those can be gathered at a city gate. now, consider this. When I am crafting materials to create mastercraft desynth tools, I use 21 shards per synth. and it takes 52 seconds to run the in-game macro to synth them. so, allowing 8 seconds to finish synth, repress the synth button, and resynth it, that's 21 shards per minute. and I do this for 3-4 hours at a time. for a single session, I might use 5-6 thousand shards. For my normal gathering speed of ~300 per hour, that's 18-20 hours of gathering. I simply don't have time to spend 18 hours gathering shards on top of 4 hours of crafting, in order to make an honest 500knet profit.

[Kuwaitum]

Actually, Bots and Player bot programs don't exactly have a time value of zero. Even with the best teleporting bots, there still is a limited amount of shards that a bot can gather in an hour. doing a small google search (and not even clicking the links), most gathering bots can only gather a maximum of 600-700 items per hour. that's 16,800 max per day of paid subscription. its a lot larger amount than any normal player has, but its a far cry from zero time value..

Again, i repeat. Zero value. a non-zero value is a value that consumes a real person's time. in which case both a real person and a BOT user are paying the exact same subscription.

16K shards a day. Set the BOT and go out for a whole day. Work, shop, hang with friends, and go to the movies. For the Cry, a person gathers on his own all day, and the other lives the fullest day knowing that he will have his 16K shards ready to use. Now that's fair, isn't it?

Another thing, why aren't RMTs/BOTs selling shards as they used to in Sep-Dec 2013, ie. in range of 20 gil a shard?

[tocsin]

Again, i repeat. Zero value. a non-zero value is a value that consumes a real person's time. in which case both a real person and a BOT user are paying the exact same subscription.

16K shards a day. Set the BOT and go out for a whole day. Work, shop, hang with friends, and go to the movies. For the Cry, a person gathers on his own all day, and the other lives the fullest day knowing that he will have his 16K shards ready to use. Now that's fair, isn't it?

Another thing, why aren't RMTs/BOTs selling shards as they used to in Sep-Dec 2013, ie. in range of 20 gil a shard?

Not saying that its fair, just making the point that it isn't at zero value.

Not everyone who bots does so completely AFK. otherwise, you would see a bunch of broken bots. many people use bots in order to do the same thing they would be doing normally, but for a longer period of time at a faster pace.

I knew someone in the fc I was in a few months ago who did that. he was actually there, and was one of the primary gatherers for the FC, but had to resort to botting, just because his in-game workload (dealing with requests for materials) became more than he could handle on his own. he would still watch it go, and type in chat and enjoy his multiplayer experience, he just let the program handle his boring tasks for him.

then, even botting couldn't keep up the requests, and he inevitably fell behind and lost a bunch of gil in delivery guarantees and bankrupted his character. Goes to show that even bots have limits.

Personally, this thread is about RMT. I care about hindering and blockading RMT at every corner. Player run bots aren't even on my radar of things I have issues with. Bigger fish to fry.

[Zabuza]

Does anyone know why RMTs send you friends requests? I usually don't even get one accompanied by a /tell, just randomly(pretty much always from some variation of "gg" and "sellgil". What can RMTs possibly get out of this besides harassing you?

[Niwashi]

Most endgame non-botting gatherers (read 80% of gatherers) would need shards to be priced at least at 400 gil or better per shard, to make them more profitable than mining or harvesting any other item.

I think you may be ignoring what makes shards so profitable. It's not the amount you make per shard. It's the fact that you can sell lots of them without flooding the market so nobody buys any more. When I was trying to earn enough gil for a house, I started gathering and making a number of items I thought would sell well and which were going for pretty good prices, but I quickly found the market wouldn't support any of them for long. I ended up switching to just gathering and selling shards and crystals. They didn't initially sell for as much individually, but unlike anything else I tried, they would keep selling consistently (and often pretty quickly), which made them the best money maker overall. (Plus the fact that they can be put up in lots of 200 or 500, or even more, rather than being limited to 99 per lot, made it possible to sell more of them than I could anything else.) These, of course, are the same reasons a lot of RMT bots gather shards, but they apply just the same to legitimate players.

Now, shard prices would fluctuate a lot if RMT suddenly disappeared, and would likely end up higher than now by the time it found a new equilibrium. But I doubt it would be all that much higher. As the prices start to go up a bit, a lot of players would find it worthwhile to gather and sell them (as it already is for many of us), plus a lot more crafters finding it worthwhile to gather their own rather than buying them. After all, shards don't cost anything at all unless you want them to. They're a level 1 item, so you don't even have to have leveled a gathering class beyond just unlocking it. Having a completely free alternative is going to put a cap on how high prices would rise.