Gil Spam

[Granyala]

Things are a bit more complicated in that some markets just aren't competitive enough to bring down prices.

Ding, ding, ding, we have a WINNER!

Now Go ahead and ask WHY there isn't enough competition and you will see that this is something only SE can fix.

How?
Lower the grind associated with crafting. (More supply)
Combat the Gil sellers and punish buyers harshly. (Less people with way too much gil to burn)

Net result: Prices will fall.

But here is the kicker: THEY DON'T CARE. JP servers are fine, NA/EU... doubt they give many flying intercourses about us.
They don't even care enough to give us proper control of our chats (Whitelist, custom filters, ignore by level function etc etc)

Just for kicks though:

What is the price on Chocobo for a "Dhalmel leather" (Lv 54 leather)? On my Cerberus, they are 10-12K a pop depending on the day.

[Felmyst]

Im out of leve quest. Miner sucks too much to grind. Im done gathering till next week end.

[Kosmos992k]

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...727d2c611bdd78

As of Jan 7 only 2 account's been banned.

You forgot this bit...

Time Period: Dec. 24, 2015 to Jan. 6, 2016

・Accounts receiving disciplinary action for RMT advertising: 1564
・Accounts receiving disciplinary action for RMT/illicit activity: 9220
・Action Details: Permanent ban from FINAL FANTASY XIV

The 2 you mention are temp bans for players doing stupid things, the other 10784 PERMANENT bans are for RMT gil spammers, other RMT related accounts and egregious cheaters.

Lifetime RMT action statistics here.

They've permanently banned over 380,000 accounts due primarily to RMT related activity.

[Eisen-Zorn]

Are...are people actually saying that crafting/crafters cause people to buy gil?

No one causes anyone to buy gil, not crafters, nor people who put expensive items on the MB, nor the people who sell runs/clears.

People buying gil is the blame of one person and thats the person who is buying it because they are lazy. If instead of buying gil and working for what they want they decide to take the easy way. To try to blame anyone else is rather amusing.

When you have people selling items for millions of gil regardless of their functionality or worth, I can see how some might be tempted to go the easy route.

Still, it really amounts to people wanting something for the least amount of effort. I mean, I don't like having to spend 500k per item just to finish a relic quest, but that's why I leveled a gathering class and spend some time a week gathering ore and selling it to the people who don't want to go out and gather it themselves.

I hate RMT and the spam is getting on my nerves, but the inflated prices on the servers seem to be feeding in to it. I mean, I got a few RMT spams a night at the most before 3.15. However, after the relic quest started? I get them about every five minutes. My blacklist is getting ridiculously long.

[Ilitsa]

First it was people reselling houses that were greedy, now it's crafters, what's next guys? People that run dungeons? Gatherers? Crafters aren't greedy, you pay for their services, you don't like their prices, craft it yourself, or go to someone else. Seriously. This habit of calling anyone that makes more Gil than you "greedy" needs to stop.

[aesteval]

First it was people reselling houses that were greedy, now it's crafters, what's next guys? People that run dungeons? Gatherers? Crafters aren't greedy, you pay for their services, you don't like their prices, craft it yourself, or go to someone else. Seriously. This habit of calling anyone that makes more Gil than you "greedy" needs to stop.

Don't forget the people sending retainers out. :-p Retainers can bring back Kingly Whiskers and they're still obscenely expensive.

[Andrea]

When you have people selling items for millions of gil regardless of their functionality or worth, I can see how some might be tempted to go the easy route.

Using that logic though why bother having anything hard/long/expensive to get in the game at all.

First it was people selling runs that caused RMT to increase
Then people claimed it was people selling houses.
Now its crafters.

Thats like 70-80% of the game covered there, It honestly would not surprise me that people who gather a lot get blamed next.

Instead of us trying to put some of the blame on people who actually play the game why not put 100% of the blame on both Square and the people who are too lazy to do anything themselves anymore and just want to throw real life money at the screen to make it disappear.

[Granyala]

I hate RMT and the spam is getting on my nerves, but the inflated prices on the servers seem to be feeding in to it. I mean, I got a few RMT spams a night at the most before 3.15. However, after the relic quest started? I get them about every five minutes. My blacklist is getting ridiculously long.

Same here. RMT definitely picked up the slack since the relic quest.

It's a rather vicious cycle.
Inflated prices feed into people buying gil, people buying gil feed into increasing prices because they are willing to spend more.
Crafters/Gatherers just grin like Ferengi and collect the profits, no questions asked. Guilty of that myself. Also sold basic crap for prices where I wondered how people could afford them.

[Gunspec]

Honestly, the idea that SE wants RMT to continue for any reason at all is laughable at best.

It costs money to hire proper moderators to lock and ban RMT spammers as they commit their offenses. This is what MMOs like WoW, SWTOR, and ESO do to combat spammers, and those games have substantially less spam. I was playing ESO when they finally started having GMs actively shut down spammer accounts, and it went from FFXIV levels of spam to silence in a few days.

Alternatively, they can hire 3 people to slowly take action on a predictable schedule (that RMT plan their bot leveling around like clockwork), and still make your estimated 5% sales while spending far less than any other major MMO on fighting RMT. The result is a game full of spam.

Go check out the forums to other mmos. See if there are threads from players crying about spam. Then ask yourself "what are those games doing that FFXIV isn't?". Because that's the solution to the problem.

Consider for a moment that if I started advertising gil for cash deals on THESE VERY FORUMS, that I would be locked and banned in a matter of minutes. Not days or weeks. MINUTES. Now consider that this isn't happening in the game that these forums officially represent. THAT'S WEIRD.

[Kosmos992k]

Consider for a moment that if I started advertising gil for cash deals on THESE VERY FORUMS, that I would be locked and banned in a matter of minutes. Not days or weeks. MINUTES. Now consider that this isn't happening in the game that these forums officially represent. THAT'S WEIRD.

Is it? SE's practice on dealing with RMT in the past has been to allow bots to continue operating while they use their activity to trace the network of RMT accounts. That way they not only remove the spam bots and farm bots, but also the bankers, transfer accounts and command/control accounts. That's the reason those bots don't always die.

It's like people who get angry because such and such a spam bot hasn't been removed - because they can still see them in their black list. Except, permanently banned accounts are *not* deleted from the game and so will not say 'Deleted' in your black list. Why is that? Because it prevents RMT from re-using the same character names. This is pretty well known, but even so, you'll still see people on this forum every week complaining about RMT and pointing out that some spambot they reported six times 3 weeks ago is still on their blacklist. If farm bots are allowed to live longer, and the RMT group reactivates them using different command/control and banker accounts. SE can more quickly identify and remove those accounts.

RMT enforcement differs from game to game and operator to operator. It also differs based on the internal market conditions with each game. Comparisons with other games are not really like for like comparisons.

I am by no means saying that their approach is perfect, nor am I suggesting that more could not be done, for example, one-click/button spam reporting with automatic inclusion of the reported tell and user information, account based blacklist, not character based (this has other benefits, so should be a no brainer), regular expression filtering worth a damn, off-line log parsing to identify spambot accounts automatically. There are also innumerable suggestions about restricting tells/shouts/friends requests in some way (I don't favor these methods since the impact innocent players).

Stricter enforcement against players who participate in RMT, a visible indicator on the player search information to show that the parent account has been temp banned for cheating (including RMT activity) that goes away once the ban is served (would actually impose a lasting consequence on people that cheat. As an FC leader, I would immediately remove any FC member shown to have participated in RMT, it's already against our rules to participate in RMT or cheating of any kind. But it's kind of hard to catch someone who remains silent about it. A visible indicator on a suddenly absent player would enable me and other FC masters to take action - if they deem it appropriate.

That doesn't even include firing off legal action against the legal entities behind RMT in the real world (although this would be like fighting a Hydra while blindfolded), it might at least have a chilling effect on future RMT activity.

But the number one way to stop RMT activity is to stop players from buying crap from these people. While we are at it, let's stop calling it RMT or gil buying and call it what it is, cheating. The community has a part to play, if you know someone who buys gil, do you treat them with the scorn they deserve for contributing to the spamming of players?

I'm not saying SE is perfect, but let's at least give them the credit for what they do, and let's not push out any crazy theories or accusations, especially ones so easily debunked.

Same here. RMT definitely picked up the slack since the relic quest.

It's a rather vicious cycle.
Inflated prices feed into people buying gil, people buying gil feed into increasing prices because they are willing to spend more.
Crafters/Gatherers just grin like Ferengi and collect the profits, no questions asked. Guilty of that myself. Also sold basic crap for prices where I wondered how people could afford them.

Yep, and you'll see an uptick in permanent account bans for RMT advertising and illicit/RMT activity, as well as temp band against players who were found to have participated in illicit/RMT activity.