PSA: Purchasing a Personal Room can result in being unable to leave a Free Company

[Arrelaine]

I've seen the screenshots, they most certainly did. I mean I don't know how you can convey 'our FC leader is holding our rooms hostage and demanding housing items before she releases us from the FC' as any more malevolent or more harassing. Not to mention they have access to chat logs (which is why you give them a timeframe for when things happen) so they absolutely knew what was going on. Most GMs don't accept screenshots because they can be altered, they look at their own chat logs.

[Nephera]

It's be on YOU to provide the GMs of Malevolent Intent and/or Harassment.

I personally don't even want to know how many BS reports are filled with zero grounds to file them.

Proof trumps hear say just like IRL.

there's multiple accounts of the gms failing to help in this situation, it seems unlikely that all of them failed to explain the problem properly.

Particularly when it is not very difficult to explain.

also bear in mind they're alledgedly not supposed to take player screenshots as evidence (could a CM clarify this?)

[Norna]

As far as I know GMs are supposed to go by in-game chat logs. I know that S-E wont take action on cheating even if the cheater records it and puts it on YouTube, because it is a second-hand source (this is why you can only get into trouble for parsing if you mention it in-game, for example).

But even so, this should be considered harassment on a pretty bad level since not only is the FC leader keeping the characters hostage, but they also are keeping the money (this is a B2P, P2P with a cash shop game. Lets say that one of those characters is new, only brought Sleipnir, one month of sub, and the expansion. That's about 76€ being held hostage from one member alone, however it is more likely that most of the characters held hostage have had more than 200€ invested in them, just in pure money) and time (want to catch up and run Raids and Diadem? Not only do you have to abandon the Cash Shop items, Limited Items such as Lightning hairstyle and so on, but you now also must spend at least a month running the ARR/Hw questline to level your new character. Oh, and of course, level any side-class for cross class skills and those gathering and crafting classes to participate in the economy. Oh, and level your new retainers as well...) the members invested in said characters hostage. Keep in mind that we have Fantasia and Renaming Services in a game in which we can make many characters across the servers precisely because we don't want to have to do all that crap each time we change our minds.

[ExKage]

As far as I know they will only investigate through in-game chat logs since they can actually access those. They just need world/location/time/time zone.

Screenshots of chat logs can be doctored. Changing the text color of /echo you can pretty much pretend to be anyone sending tells when it's just that.

I'm bummed by the lack of communication there is over this. Some acknowledgement would be nice as this is terrifying for a casual player. Thinking of all the FC dramas I've heard of and even had to experience, I'm glad that none of this happened to me. I'd have gotten quite frustrated, as I'm sure those who have (and may even will) experienced it felt.

[Niwashi]

Screenshots of chat logs can be doctored.

Screenshots can still be a useful way of saying "this is the conversation I'm talking about" but then the GMs will still need to look up their official version of it. Quoting a message or two of the conversation in the description section of your report accomplishes the same thing. They'll need to look it up for themselves from their own copy of the chat system, but that's easier when they know what to look for.

But back to the main topic, the GMs really should have taken action on this. That FC leader holding members against their will and demanding payment for letting them go should be banned from the game. And the FC leadership should be taken from them and given to whomever is next in line for it. That much the GMs can and should do. Then the devs need to fix the problem so no other scumbag leaders can repeat the offence.

[Norna]

*Kicks thread back to first page*

Btw, anyone else in big FCs noticing that members are demolishing rooms left and right regardless whether or not the FC shows any troublesome signs? It seems that with leaving this exploit in the game instead of rolling out a hotfix (just remove the ability to lock out FC members from the house from the permissions tab! The coding can remain until there's time for a better fix, but remove the ticky box and reset all to FCs permissions to "allowed"), players are now avoiding the band-aid on the personal housing fiasco as well.

[Shofie]

Btw, anyone else in big FCs noticing that members are demolishing rooms left and right regardless whether or not the FC shows any troublesome signs?

I haven't seen that personally, but honestly it does not surprise me in the slightest. 300k isn't that much money to raise, if you decide you want to re-buy the room later after the issue is (hopefully) fixed.

If I weren't my FC's leader (I didn't 100% know and trust my GL), I'd probably demolish my room just as a safety precaution, so I can see it. :/

[Norna]

Well, it could also be people preparing to move to the EU data center or smaller FCs, but it certainly feels like I've seen the "[name] demolished room #" notification more often this past week or so than I usually do. Of course, that could be confirmation bias as well, and I'm simply noting the notifications more since seeing this thread...

I hope this gets fixed soon because I doubt only one FC will be affected through the life of the game, if they intend to support it for the next 6 years or so. And I hope that those affected will get better customer support, because it is incredibly frustrating to get canned replies ignoring your initial problem (reminds me of the time my laptop wouldn't turn on a few years ago; "have you tried restarting?" "no, because it's impossible" "try restarting first and get back to us later!" insert another phone queue).

[Shofie]

There's already a thread on reddit discussing the exact same issue and it happened nearly a year ago, and nothing was done then, either.

More awareness needs to be raised so this can hopefully get dealt with before it becomes a serious problem for a lot of folks. Hopefully no one else gets impacted, but I doubt it.

[Lurial]

This will probably happen again in the future if it doesn't get fixed. The cases we know of now were made known of because of social media - but I can imagine there have been other cases where they weren't posted on a place like reddit or tumblr to catch more wide-spread attention.