Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Rizon]

Everyone of you can spout your concerns and remedies all you want, but until you take the one person responsible for the current state of RMTs within this game to task then you are wasting your breath. I am talking about Naoki Yoshida. This situation has been festering since Jan 2011 when Yoshida-san made the conscious decision to ignore the RMT problem completely in ver 1.0. Instead of keeping track of known RMT and Bots so that he could remove them at a later date Yoshida-san implemented cosmetic changes to the game that had absolutely no effect on the RMT other then to encourage them to continue their practices unabated. Some of these changes were:

1. The partial Gil wipe which had little or no effect on the RMT caches of Gil
2. The restricting of Legacy players to a few servers and allowing the old RMTs/Bots on to these servers
3. Designing the game that made legitimate Gil making venture near impossible for the average player without hindering the Bots/Rmt.

Since the release of 2.0 (ARR) Yoshida-san has completely ignored the RMT problem. I suspect the reason for this is he does not have a clue as to how to combat it so he figures if he hides his head in the sand then it is not there. You will take note that Letters From the Producer have become less frequent as time goes by. Used to be that Yoshida-san would use those to address issues concerning the game. Not any more. Examine the game. What you see now and what is planned for the future is the product of a gifted Technocrat, not a Visionary. Naoki Yoshida is not a Visionay. The problem with RMTs is beyond his scope. SE needs to remove this problem and assign it to someone better versed in how to handle it allowing Yoshida-san to concentrqate on what he is exceptionally good at. Game development.

As I have stated before Yoshida-san needs to reconnect with his subscribers. The best place for this is the Forums with regularly scheduled post in the form of Letters from the Producer. These letter need to address issue raised by subscribers that affect the game. The Live Letter are perfect for what they do now which is to allow the Dev team to advertise the game. I would also recommend that the Community Reps spend a certain portion of their working days on the servers in their areas of responsibility talking to the player base to find out the concerns of the players and pass them on to the Devs. As for the RMT problem SE needs to swallow its pride and talk to other companies that have had success with RMTs to learn what works and see if it can be implemented in this game.

I know that this post will offend a number people that hold Yoshida-san in the same high regard that I do. For that I am sorry but if you are honest with yourselves you see that a lot of what I am saying is true and the Majority of you will try to pressure Yoshida-san to acknowledge the problems and work to correct them. This is the only way this game can reach its true potential and be what we all know it can be.

[Chibilidawg]

Snip

Don't forget their refusal to tweak the Shard Economy which' helping RMT to thrive!

[Zabuza]

Everyone of you can spout your concerns and remedies all you want, but until you take the one person responsible for the current state of RMTs within this game to task then you are wasting your breath. I am talking about Naoki Yoshida. This situation has been festering since Jan 2011 when Yoshida-san made the conscious decision to ignore the RMT problem completely in ver 1.0. Instead of keeping track of known RMT and Bots so that he could remove them at a later date Yoshida-san implemented cosmetic changes to the game that had absolutely no effect on the RMT other then to encourage them to continue their practices unabated. Some of these changes were:

1. The partial Gil wipe which had little or no effect on the RMT caches of Gil
2. The restricting of Legacy players to a few servers and allowing the old RMTs/Bots on to these servers
3. Designing the game that made legitimate Gil making venture near impossible for the average player without hindering the Bots/Rmt.

Already have tried to get this to Yoshida's attention. Not an easy task for sure. Who knows, he might have even seen it already. I know he replied to his birthday thread on these forums.

[Rizon]

Already have tried to get this to Yoshida's attention. Not an easy task for sure. Who knows, he might have even seen it already. I know he replied to his birthday thread on these forums.

Unfortunately if he continues to ignore these problems then this game will be looking to shut down the servers instead of celebrating another new expansion next year

[SummerSkye]

On-topic: what're some plausible suggestions of things SE could do to reduce the RMT spam while keeping player chat options generally open? I've made my suggestions in a recent post.

Up the "task force" to have a team on each server. SE has the money. Some older MMOs had GMs that were simply players that played the game anyway, that the company selected and "promoted" to in-game GM's. Then give us the ability, when we see a swarm of Black Mages like in the screencaps above spamming, or see bots out in the field cheating and warping around, to report them in real time to these in-game GM's. They could then immediately round them up, boot them offline, and ban them. If this was happening relentlessly on each server, using three 8 hour shifts...it would no longer be a comfortable place for RMT (or the people that buy gil).