Tackling RMT: What creates buyers in the first place?

[Katt_Felista]

If i was an RMT seller and saw these badly designed house systems to get them, loot systems On HL/Savage / Ultimate content, was a run / house / nightclub owner / seller, i would just clap my knee and laugh to the bank over the many unnecessary manufactured frustrations put on player's shoulders in a final fantasy game of all places, of all places and games where PVE should be made fun and rewarding, to have one of the most unfair and stupid looting system for High end content raid gear. As they didn't change it for many years now. I do firmly believe, firmly believe that like many other mmo's in the west going through western publishers for the west part that we have, like in many many example by the past and revealed affairs / scandals that aaaaaallways, allways, allways end up being revealed by a CM or past GM, yes, allways revealed, but mostly after a games lifespan's end / quasi-death, that there was bonuses given to specific guilds / raiders through CM's and GM's, and there is allways, allways collusion for these type of affairs, given in the west as part of the "job" privileges / incentives / aid / access whatever it may be to promote the game, and make content seem more appealing.

You know what happened with a bunch of unused codes for items that are pretty rare nowadays to find, and also to supposedly cashback of "stolen" credit cards bought codes before they got destroyed by Employees that, them, were authorized by western publishers to use them, and players "friends" from specific discords of streamers that get backroom PR / marketting incentives, don't shy away from receiving these lost "codes" from employees and CM in the game :



This. is. exactly. how. This corruption, lazyness, access, ease of reach on everything permiates in the west. ALL the freaking TIME. All the time, it is privilege and muh "gifties" that end up creating layers and ladders of corrupted people from the top to bottom, letting go of codes, dripping little incentives and bonuses from the fountain to the droplet under, of this and that privilege, data access, leaks, top 3 to top 10 clearing guilds not naming their players but offeringtheir services on almost every god forsaken RMT gil andrun selling websites. And these communities, these CM's /GM's bathed in these system from mmo's to mmo's so much so they think all of this underground / under the surface subculture is normal an part of the job. You get that world 1st runs are always sponsored one way or another by the region's publisher's or at least one step removed publisher's substack and these previously famous raiders on other mmo's just don't do it exclusively for the lolz and giggles but there is money and promises of access this and sales that as incentives under the table right ? You aren't this gullible, it's especially true in the west.

Also the "we count on players not caring about changes to do whatever we want hue hue hue hue" mentality is exactly a prime example of that lazyness permiating into more corruption and "laissez faire" / letting go that just leads to more rmt too.

Some systems are just not solely designed unfair and seemingly outdated for the sake of being outdated, there is a whole sublayer of consideration on how frustrating can it be made to incentivize players to these third party solutions.

This is true, and talking about it enrages discord trolls, lazies and stalkers profiting from it, they really absolutely hate you for making the more unsuspecting masses understand how it works and how often these trolling / griefing tactics areused.

[Saraide]

snip

If one was to ignore all the usual conspiracy nonsense, this does sound like getting mad at a bakery giving away bread at the end of the day for free to friends&family of employees and being left out. Non of this proves your grand conspiracy though. Atleast it's a new talking point I guess.

[Liam_Harper]

Because we are presumably rational adults that have learned to control our actions and desires.

We don't need to reach gil cap. We don't need to set inflated prices for what we sell on the marketboard. We don't always need that latest glamour day one of release at any price when we could wait a month and the price will have dropped down to a fraction of the original as competition and supply on the marketboard increases. These are the things that lead to RMT.

The RMT buyers don't need gil or the items they buy with it. They're breaking ToS. Blaming players who simply enjoy a large currency number for personal satisfaction and not the players who are literally breaking the rules or the developers who are meant to enforce them, is silly.

As you said, the largest purchase is 50m. No one needs a gil cap, so the players buying RMT gil are chasing something they don't need. Who cares if someone is wealthier than you? Learn to control yourself. It doesn't matter if you can play 5hr or 40hr a week, you can earn enough gil to buy anything ingame. The means to make gil are available to every player.

Inflation is actually one of the causes of ppl becoming RMT- Buyers. The larger the number the larger the temptation of just taking a shortcut. Smaller price tags will feel more easily obtainable resulting in people actually playing the game to get it.

Currently we have massive deflation (in some cases items are 20-30 times cheaper) from HW or Stormblood compared to now, yet RMT buying and selling is absolutely rampant, so this is false.

Small price tags and bot competition mean players find it harder to make gil. Scraping pennies together from roulette, crafting and undercut wars for tiny amounts of gil per sale feel bad when you're aiming for a house or 10-50 million mount. That's where players get tempted to just skip the boring, unrewarding chores.

Bots are a SE created issue because they've demonstrated they have no power to detect player bots and will never scan your PC for them. They're practically "don't ask, don't tell". It feels bad to try and compete with that by playing by the rules when the rule breaker is rewarded. SE have been indirectly encouraging breaking ToS for a while now, you just benefit more at little risk.

[Jojoya]

The RMT buyers don't need gil or the items they buy with it. They're breaking ToS. Blaming players who simply enjoy a large currency number for personal satisfaction and not the players who are literally breaking the rules or the developers who are meant to enforce them, is silly.

As you said, the largest purchase is 50m. No one needs a gil cap, so the players buying RMT gil are chasing something they don't need. Who cares if someone is wealthier than you? Learn to control yourself. It doesn't matter if you can play 5hr or 40hr a week, you can earn enough gil to buy anything ingame. The means to make gil are available to every player.

Time is money. The player who is limited to 8 hours a week (which is how much the average player will play a MMO per surveys) is never going to be able to acquire the same amount of gil that the player who can play 80 hours a week can earn even if they do nothing but try to earn gil. Factor in time spent on other gameplay and that gap becomes even greater.

You say the buyers are chasing something they don't need. Well, so are the sellers on the marketboard. If there was any gil cost involved in what they're selling, it's usually trivial compared to the price they're asking.

Why tell one side to learn to control themselves and not the other?

[Reinha]

Sellers do control themselves, by not selling. If an item doesn't sell for the lowest price sellers find acceptable, then sellers will simply unlist it or not sell it in the first place. Both sides can refuse a trade they find unsatisfactory.

Time is money and sellers have no obligation to offer their time to provide items for other players. If the pay isn't worth their time, they won't sell the item which requires time to get. Buyers without enough Gil can spend their 8 hours a week farming the item for themselves.

[Amarande]

If one was to ignore all the usual conspiracy nonsense, this does sound like getting mad at a bakery giving away bread at the end of the day for free to friends&family of employees and being left out. Non of this proves your grand conspiracy though. Atleast it's a new talking point I guess.

Ah, but is it really nonsense?

Anyway it would be one thing if stuff was given away to friends & family of employees etc., even on a regular basis. That's common in business. The trouble is when it delevels the playing field to the point that people start to feel like being "down with the inner circle" grants so much more that not following along with this frankly rather pernicious trend leaves them feeling like they're only getting a "lite" experience by comparison. "You're not cool unless you have the Plus membership!"

Gaming has had a problem with it for many years, to be quite frank. Combine it with FFXIV's already chronic lack of choice when it comes to player community hangouts (ones active enough to be useful in a gameplay sense, anyways) and you have even more of a problem. Given that Discord is now rolling out the built-in ability to sponsor servers (not just nitro boost them) I'm not so sure the future looks so bright either.

In general I don't think Katt's theories are particularly baseless. They might perhaps turn out to be exaggerated, but sadly I've come to similar conclusions myself over time about much of it (including the "professional raiders manipulate the PUG environment to encourage players to purchase clears" matter, which seems to be a general disease in the hobby now as WoW suffers from symptoms of similar issues). At best the symptoms clearly exist, with the only question at hand being whether the disease is being correctly diagnosed.

It's left me with a really sour feeling about online gaming in general, a hobby I used to love quite a lot more in the past, before greed spread from the companies to the players (at least, combined with the Discord/SM issues, enough of them to create noticeable damage to the play experience). Frankly, truth be told, I'm really already almost at the point of just giving up on MP altogether and taking my (extensive) single player game collection and "going home" so to speak, and if it wasn't for the fact that even an introvert like me can only stand solitude for so long I probably would have ...

[Saraide]

Ah, but is it really nonsense?

Yes, it is nonsense. People just make dumb mistakes in PF (they do in statics aswell but that naturally isnt in public groups). There is no need for anyone to go in and sabotage groups. On top of that run sellers are small operations, they have better things to do. That's not where the big RMT money is made because you need actual people to do it instead of a legion of crafter, gatherer and eureka bots. If you have followed any of their threads, you'd know that katt is way beyond jumping at shadows and the proof presented has ranged from not understanding jokes to downright meaningless. The people in PF are often just not that good and if every group you are in sucks, then you might need to look for the common denominator. Not a lot of people will like to do that however so they are quick to blame someone else. When everything and everyone else is in on it in your eyes and only out to get you, then you might have just constructed a conspiracy theory in place of the far far more reasonable conclusion that people might just not be that good at the game. As a community we are already extremely unforgiving for mistakes in PF and I'm not excluding myself from that assessment either.

The particular hatred against content creators is especially strange. Many of them create guides specifically so that more people clear the content with as little problems as possible because the more players participate in a type of content, the more attention it can get. I completely understand not like xeno for example. But if you go down the parasocial fan to hatewatcher pipeline you have no grounds to stand on and are just desperatly searching for justification.

The accusation goes way beyond giving failed item codes to buddies, it goes as far as directly informing world first raiders of how to do mechanics and which exploits to use. When world first raiders specifically do not want that to be the case at all because that defeats the purpose of the race. A race that SE already wants as little as possible to do with because they dont want to disrupt a careful balance. In typical conspiracy theory fashion we are also flip flopping between 'SE is in on it as a whole and is purposefully creating exploits for run sellers' and 'this is purely western GMs passing on unintentional exploits to their buddies'. You cant have it both ways.

If you see evil lurking in every lobby then it really might just be better to take your leave. People clear stuff in PF all the time. It's just a gamble everytime you go in, as any single mistake at a bad time can be run ending. That's the nature of how the content is designed. Dont jump to assuming malice when incompetence is the more reasonable explanation.

[SugarPuff]

A lot of people have said it basically comes down to laziness and lack of patience, and I agree with that. I also think in many cases it's not so much that people are above cheating. They just don't want to spoil their long term enjoyment of the game by circumventing part of the gameplay, and from what I've seen those players tend to be big gil earners.

Some view that part as extraneous and only want to engage with the "real" game, but they still want to have stuff....and I think that creates a lot of RMT buyers. Not all who feel that way, of course. Some do have a personal code of honor, and/or fear of consequences, but I think a significant amount of players just aren't tempted to buy gil because they see finding a way to earn gil as a challenge and are proud of the methods they've devised.

[Amarande]

The people in PF are often just not that good and if every group you are in sucks, then you might need to look for the common denominator. Not a lot of people will like to do that however so they are quick to blame someone else. When everything and everyone else is in on it in your eyes and only out to get you, then you might have just constructed a conspiracy theory in place of the far far more reasonable conclusion that people might just not be that good at the game. As a community we are already extremely unforgiving for mistakes in PF and I'm not excluding myself from that assessment either.

Yeh, that's true, and the way that content has been designed lately has not been helping either (it really doesn't take that high a percentage of the PF base to have two left feet to make the whole endeavor iffy at best and too frustrating to be fun at worst, I did some math on this a while ago but got negative reactions from communities so there may have been something I missed).

The particular hatred against content creators is especially strange. Many of them create guides specifically so that more people clear the content with as little problems as possible because the more players participate in a type of content, the more attention it can get. I completely understand not like xeno for example. But if you go down the parasocial fan to hatewatcher pipeline you have no grounds to stand on and are just desperatly searching for justification.

Personally my thoughts on this have less to do with content creators themselves (apart from the whole phrase, "content creator." It has such a dry, capitalistic connotation compared to how creatives used to be described, as if it should be seen as job now rather than passion ...) and generally really seem an indictment of modern social media in general. Almost gone are classical discussion venues, nearly everything organizes it around some or other content creator's "channel" now (contrast, say, GameFAQs' format where guide writers were sometimes but not always active on the game's board, but in any case, the board was first and foremost about the game, whereas in modern SM it is increasingly a personal fandom group first and foremost. This also doubtless has negative effects on the industry as well, with how many customers are often there because of their favorite streamer, so if a publisher fails to retain the streamer's interest, it's a big deal!).

I miss the old school, not so crazy game culture. I don't know where you might find it anymore, or even if it's possible to run these days or if in fact platform trust and safety mindset has, in fact, already caused too much damage to hobby society to be reparable

The accusation goes way beyond giving failed item codes to buddies, it goes as far as directly informing world first raiders of how to do mechanics and which exploits to use. When world first raiders specifically do not want that to be the case at all because that defeats the purpose of the race. A race that SE already wants as little as possible to do with because they dont want to disrupt a careful balance.

That is likely over the top indeed. Neither SE nor even Blizzard seem inclined to engage in such conduct (SE on principle, Blizzard because half the time they don't even know what the Mythic mechanics balance is even supposed to be until the world first teams start attempting it and hit brick walls ... lol).

Though, to be fair, there is the inevitable Discord datamine during the hours before servers come up for a patch, which SE seems (apart from the post-TEA kerfuffle) to do very little to enforce against despite datamining being specifically proscribed under TOS. On the flip side with so much being server side, I'm not sure how useful that actually is to Savage prog, though.

Also objectively, a lot of the middle tier players (myself included) have felt for a while like they are actively being cut loose by the game, and that the duality of "super casual play with largely silent player interaction" and "hyperprofessional e-sports cadre" is, in fact, intended - and there's some evidence now that that's the case (especially, the hope that V&C dungeons were going to help fill these intermediate skill voids, and instead turned out to be just another Savage and semi-Ultimate for the big shots).

If you see evil lurking in every lobby then it really might just be better to take your leave. People clear stuff in PF all the time. It's just a gamble everytime you go in, as any single mistake at a bad time can be run ending. That's the nature of how the content is designed. Dont jump to assuming malice when incompetence is the more reasonable explanation.

Yeah, for me it's really more basically just frustration over the culture, and a seeming lack of options to get away from "the culture" compared to the olden days of gaming, without feeling like you have to give up the game altogether as well

[Kuroka]

However part of me wonders what ppl actually buy gil from RMT for in this game aside from wanting a large or medium housing plot as doing MSQ on a new character will generate enough gil to make a small obtainable unless spent foolishly or buying those golden mounts from NPC vendors. Are ppl actually just dumping it into stuff on the marketboard?

I did once interact more with big crafters... they were offered like 400mil for a full set of the new crafted stuff for hte whole static... even divided through 8, thats still a lot for something so... throwaway?