Regarding Congestion Prevention - active subs get login priority. Who is that?

[wereotter]

They do, unfortunately.

The only ones that don't are the gibberish-named /say spammers.

The shout spammers and gil farmers are using subbed accounts.

Doesn't Square shut those accounts down? Or do they just delete the characters? I had assumed that they wouldn't have characters to log in as when or soon after the expansion launches.... (I'm legitimately asking)

[Endeleon]

Doesn't Square shut those accounts down? Or do they just delete the characters? I had assumed that they wouldn't have characters to log in as when or soon after the expansion launches.... (I'm legitimately asking)

They do shut them down. A lot of people don't realize they are subbed through illegitimate means, through stolen credit cards. This means that oft said thing where people say "Square won't shut them down because they make so much money from it!" is total horse dung because not only do SE not make money off them, they lose money because they are charged fines by the credit card companies. They ban often, it's just you can't stop chinese bot farms with credit cards taken from spam lists.

[Mingqin]

They do shut them down. A lot of people don't realize they are subbed through illegitimate means, through stolen credit cards. This means that oft said thing where people say "Square won't shut them down because they make so much money from it!" is total horse dung because not only do SE not make money off them, they lose money because they are charged fines by the credit card companies. They ban often, it's just you can't stop chinese bot farms with credit cards taken from spam lists.

Well, technically you can stop the gil farmers very easily, it'd be great profits for SE but probably a mixed reception from the community.

You do that by introducing something that Wildstar and WoW did that let's you buy game time with gil, essentially gil buying sanctioned and sold by SE, for those who haven't played WoW. When Blizzard released the WoW token it basically killed gold sellers over night, you'll still have the boosting crowd but that's no where near as annoying as bots.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Well, technically you can stop the gil farmers very easily, it'd be great profits for SE but probably a mixed reception from the community.

You do that by introducing something that Wildstar and WoW did that let's you buy game time with gil, essentially gil buying sanctioned and sold by SE, for those who haven't played WoW. When Blizzard released the WoW token it basically killed gold sellers over night, you'll still have the boosting crowd but that's no where near as annoying as bots.

There are other routes to it as well besides that which make it far more difficult or much less profitable to run RMT and other illegal activities. It would probably take a bit of work on the back end for them to implement it now but using those options essentially creates a scenario for the RMT's of being a complete pain to keep going as it results in far more work being done and far more expenses being made to keep up.

Gil Tokens in mogstation would indeed be a mixed reaction. Some would be for it. However others not due to potential further inflation of marketboard prices due to the game not having enough things for players to spend large amounts of gil on and various other reasons.

As for the active subs get login priority. To me that sounds like people with a paid sub have priority over free trials and the free time limited return campaign if it hasn't ended yet.

Or people with a JP button get priority by pushing it. ;P (Running joke from my FFXI server)