Tackling RMT: What creates buyers in the first place?

[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.

[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