Why Was the Official Statement Ignored?

[LloydShade]

The current "crisis" about how SquareEnix dealt with the major surplus of gils in their economy, brought by cheating means, is getting annoying.

DISCLAIMER: I will try to keep speculations to a minimum (or at least make it obvious that it's speculation). This post was made after cumulative annoyance and the will to show that the current situation is just an overreaction mess. Please feel free to argue and bring counter-arguments.

Just as a reminder: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/f3bb7c4e6c562af552189b2dda8d1f1df953c121

Let me put in quotes an important section of the official statement:

- Date: Sep. 28, 2013
- Accounts receiving disciplinary action for RMT/illicit activities: 568 accounts
- Action Details: Termination/Temporary suspension from FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn
* Accounts of egregious violators will be terminated.

- Total Frozen Gil: Approximately 367,700 million Gil
* Gil of temporarily suspended accounts will be confiscated.

Included in the above are players who used/obtained gil, items, or actions through fraudulent means.

In bold are the most noteworthy elements. 568 accounts were temporary suspended. Some of them were permanently banned, others were returned to the game. In ALL cases, gils have been removed.

WARNING: ANALYSIS, WARNING: ANALYSIS, WARNING: ANALYSIS

SquareEnix already stated what they have done and why. In other words, about 600 accounts were involved in RMT activities. There is almost no distinctions possible between those that bought the RMT gils and those that received such gils (crafter/gatherers for instance). In both cases players have received illegal gils. In both cases, these players were free to spend it or keep it. In both cases, if the players were caught, their gils were removed (at the very least). The difference is if SquareEnix was able to bring evidences of the player actually buying gils from RMT (or being an RMT seller), these players were permanently banned.

To get even more basic: account temporary banned = gil deletion.

Why? Because it was the most efficient way to deal with the situation and not receive a temporary ban of more than 30 days for a proper investigation. It was stated early so it's not a surprise.

Why were the players left with some gil? Because SquareEnix wanted to show some kindness and it's almost as easy to bring gils down to a fraction of its total or to a straight 0.

To go beyond SquareEnix's methods, at most 568 accounts were temporary banned for further investigation. In these 568 accounts, a good deal of account were permanently banned for being directly involved in RMT activities. The rest benefited from RMT activities, but were not directly involved.

If SquareEnix actually wrote that statement, which was part of a community reassuring statement, that means that most of these 568 accounts were deleted (otherwise, they wouldn't have stated it or would have choose another wording format), so at a logical most 283 players (less than half) were temporary banned and their gils were removed, which is about 0% of the reported player base. If we spread these players on a per server ration (there are 61 servers), that's less than at most 5 players per server.

WARNNIG: RANT, WARNING: RANT, WARNING: RANT, WARNING: RANT

Therefore, 0% or at most a handful players per server are unhappy and the forums are at war against SquareEnix and for losing a virtual currency which has absolutely no real value and was brought to these very few players because of cheats and exploits... Seriously? I mean: is that for real?

All of the few affected players were left with all the tools they need to rebuild their fortune (they kept their characters, their levels and their items). Gil is almost useless at end level to get the best equipment (which is currently the endgame goal). As such, these players were stacking gils in prevision of the future with absolutely no idea of what could be coming or when.

In the end, what was lost is simply the idea of the possession of a fortune, because said fortune was worthless without any way to spend it. Considering we can at best hope major update 2.1 of the game will bring something to spend gils on and we don't know when it will get released, players still have quite a bit of time to restock their fortune to a crazy amount, which is still possible players still need/want to buy stuff from the markets. The only downside is that the market is now more fair to buyers with more competition for sellers, so there is no more an easy way to become rich super fast again.

The amount of people affected by losing their gils because of the recent purge is so small compared to the reported player base and the penalty inflicted is so "minor" that I can't even feel sympathy for the few of these "unlucky" players, let alone players that benefited from MMO-just-released exploits.


In conclusion, I strongly believe people are overreacting. They demand details from SquareEnix, but everything that a player need to know is in the official statement, which was fast enough to be delivered. The rest is personal and you don't divulge personal information online. End of story.


Note: I don't want to defend SquareEnix more than anyone else and I'm not a Final Fantasy fan (I'm not even considered a SquareEnix fan). Yet, I've seen what happens when a MMO starts listening to stupidity and it's not pretty. Right now, I feel this is by all mean stupidity at its best.

[10TailBeast]

Players had their Gil divided by 100. 10 million became 100,000 and so forth.

[Quesse]

Simple question then.

If a crafter (assuming they did not buy gil) had 10 million gil it seems the amount taken was 10mil divided by 100. So they were left with 100k gil.

But they made at least 300k of that from questing/leves/fates/etc.

So where did the other 200k go? These people didn't knowingly do anything wrong - why take their quest/leve gil too?

[Bibimbap]

Because despite this action, there are still people appealing on a personal level. These people say they are completely innocent, and they are waiting to see if anything else is done about it. This is the new response that we want to hear. Is S.E. going to do anything more than what you've posted, or is that the end of it?

[BlazeChronic]

*clap clap clap* for OP.

It's a case of SOL. You had dirty money. They took it. Game over, man. It's as black and white as that.

EDIT: In all honesty, if you were the server first of any DoL or DoH, a good chunk of your millions DID actually come from RMT funds, there is NO doubt about that. The market was hugely inflated with illegitimate money, and now it is less volatile. Will you make your 10 million again? Probably not, because you won't have a stranglehold on any specific market. But the way I see it, you were just a funnel to ill-gotten Gil in the first place. But being the smart traders you are, you will be rich again, its just the wealth will be more fairly distributed.

Instead of 1% of characters owning 90% of the money on any given server, 10% will own 80% of the money.

It was a risk you all took by deciding to plow a DoH/DoL class to cap in the first few days. I mean, come on, you can't sit there with a straight face and tell me you didn't know the Gil you were making was coming from people who bought Gil in the first place.

In the first three weeks, every second thread on these forums was "There's no way to make gil in this game!" and "Repairs cost too much, too many sinks, not enough fountains!" ....

And you were sitting there, with 10 million Gil, thinking it was all legit? SE didn't just decide to take all of your gil for poops and giggles. I'm pretty sure they mulled the decision over and decided it was the right course of action to take, you know, considering THEY ARE THE ONES WITH ALL OF THE DATA. ...........

[Ralemont]

*clap clap clap* for OP.

It's a case of SOL. You had dirty money. They took it. Game over, man. It's as black and white as that.

Except they didn't take the dirty money. If they had, the % taken from each player would not have been the same. Furthermore, gil loss would not have been limited to "players above total gil X."

Here is the process which leads to the result we have: SE has a general idea how much illegitimate gil has been generated, but they have no idea who is currently in possession of it. So they suspect that the richest players have a good chunk of it without doing any real investigation and divide all their gil amounts by a % that will net them around the same number of gil lost as they believed was generated by RMT.

[Orophin]

Yes, it affected a very small amount of players compared to the total population. A few of those have come forth to make their case that they were a victim of people buying their goods with fraudulent gil. I'm willing to believe that 3 or 4 out of the 568 care about this game and their characters enough to come to these forums to even post about it. The rest are willing to just say f it and quit the game or were actually guilty.

The issue isn't how many people it affected, it's how the situation was handled. If 568 out of a million accounts were flagged, I think they should have done further research on those accounts to see exactly why they had as much gil as they did. It's their damn job after all. Instead, they took the easy way out and did a blanket ban and divided their gil by 100, which left most people with less than what they earned just going through the main storyline.

[HiirNoivl]

The issue isn't how many people it affected, it's how the situation was handled. If 568 out of a million accounts were flagged, I think they should have done further research on those accounts to see exactly why they had as much gil as they did. It's their damn job after all. Instead, they took the easy way out and did a blanket ban and divided their gil by 100, which left most people with less than what they earned just going through the main storyline.

It doesn't matter. This wasn't done for them. It was done for the game.


For example, Yoshi P was not saying how much the housing was going to be. WE didn't know why they were so reticent. but then THIS happens. They're not releasing hints on the pricing because so much of the gil in the game was stolen and being RMT'ed. They wanted to base the price on the economy but so much of the economy was illegitimate they couldn't even manage the housing prices until it was taken care of. When the RMT problem gets to the point where they can't even plan for the future in the game, then lambs may have to die.

The situation was bad. Desperate times calls for measures to deal with the situation. This HAD to be dealt with before housing market hit and things would spiral out of control.

[Sadebreth]

In the end no one really knows why square did what they did except square themselves. It seems to be a select few people that they took their millions away from because there are some people that say they were not affected and still have their millions (I am not talking about anyone legacy servers either) without any taken away. Without seeing the query that Square used no one will know why and what circumstances they were looking for. If the people that got their gil taken away did something wrong and got caught by square, only square and that person will know why. They are not going to freely admit to anything to anyone on a game forum. Right now it is all speculation of information that will likely never see the light of day. Regardless of why square felt they needed to strip billions of gil from the game, it was done and if they were going to make an apology to anyone it would have been done by now.

[Nica]

Therefore, 0% or at most a handful players per server are unhappy and the forums are at war against SquareEnix and for losing a virtual currency which has absolutely no real value and was brought to these very few players because of cheats and exploits... Seriously? I mean: is that for real?

All of the few affected players were left with all the tools they need to rebuild their fortune (they kept their characters, their levels and their items).

I say we roll back your character progress completely for the lulz, after all you are just one player, which obviously doesn't matter, and you are still left eith everything you need to regain that which you lost!