Why Was the Official Statement Ignored?

[snugBubz]

-snip-

I do not see what's happening as an overreaction. It's justifiable. If I spent all my time on a crafting class from the get-go, just to be suspended and have most of my earnings taken away (which, by the way 99-90% of the earnings being RMT? Highly unlikely if you've been selling from items from EA-launch)? Of course SE deserves all the negativity they're getting! They obviously don't care about their players' time if they're investigating in this manner. It matters not that the wronged are a fraction of the playerbase.

Also: would be fine? Please explain. Because I don't see anything wrong with legitimately being market-savvy and saving your earnings.

[Divinemight]

Also: would be fine? Please explain. Because I don't see anything wrong with legitimately being market-savvy and saving your earnings.

Counterfiet currency is counterfeit. This is your memo: all gils invovled in RMT activites are counterfeit currency. In reality, any business receiving counterfeit currency is a loss they have to take.

[snugBubz]

Counterfiet currency is counterfeit. This is your memo: all gils invovled in RMT activites are counterfeit currency. In reality, any business receiving counterfeit currency is a loss they have to take.

Sure, take away the counterfeit. But it is highly unlikely that 99%-90% of the player's gil is counterfeit. That is the issue.

[WVUTrip]

Counterfiet currency is counterfeit. This is your memo: all gils invovled in RMT activites are counterfeit currency. In reality, any business receiving counterfeit currency is a loss they have to take.

Actually no it is not counterfeit. Counterfeit is fake money made to look like real money. RMT money is real money produced by the game. The RMT sites just set up bots to grind large stock piles of money or hack accounts to steal real Gil. In real life, you accept a loss because there are ways you can check if the money is counterfeit or not. In FFXIV you have no way to know if the Gil is produced by RMT or by a legit player. Also in real life there is insurance to protect you from things like this. Have not seen a Gil insurance salesman in FFXIV yet.


Oh and another thing. SE operates and manages the market boards in the game. They take a tax from you for the right to use the market boards. It is them who accepts the RMT money for an item then transfers this Gil to your retainer. This means it is there fault for accepting RMT Gil not the players. Just another reason this was such a horrible and heinous action by SE.

[EmiliM]

Counterfiet currency is counterfeit. This is your memo: all gils invovled in RMT activites are counterfeit currency. In reality, any business receiving counterfeit currency is a loss they have to take.

That's basically how I see it. It's not so much that the money taken away were "dirty", it's that they were "fake" money put into circulation by a faction engaged in (in a game sense) illegal money production. It doesn't matter how the money was generated, the rule of the land (SE's rules) dictates what is legit and what isn't.

In real life, businesses that unknowingly accepted counterfeit money had no real recourse and in most cases would simply have to write it off as a loss. Of course, even in the worst regions of the world, it's unlikely that the majority of the currency in circulation would be fake, and even if that was the case, no government would swoop in and confiscate and destroy 99% of cash taken from businesses chosen simply because they had over a certain level of assets and therefore arbitrarily deemed likely to have benefited from counterfeit money.

This kind of "solution" would be unthinkable in real life. The thing is, this isn't real life. SE is not a government, and players are not businesses. Yes, this is a case of the richest being punished simply for being rich and prominent, but consider the scale of the issue: 367.7 billion divided by ~50 servers = 7.35 billion per server, divided by about 5000 players on each server = 1.47 million gil per user. Considering your average player probably only has 1/10 of that, you could (roughly) argue that the vast majority of gil present in a server were generated by RMT. If this happened in real life, the economy would collapse in an instant. SE simply did what no government could do in real life in order to preserve an economy that could not be saved in any way in real life.

Ultimately, you can only blame SE and they can only sit there and take it. But as far as I can tell, this is a case of choosing the lesser evil so I'm pretty sure they expected flak no matter what they did. I wouldn't expect them to bend over backwards now for doing the only thing they could.

[WVUTrip]

The OP is seriously underestimating the value of virtual currency in games like this. You say it has no value outside of the game? Then Why do RMT sites exist?

What SE has done is basically admit they have no real method of identifying people using RMT so goin forward thy have a set a precedent to just take people's Gil if they had something purchased from them with RMT Gil. Man that sure makes me want to sell stuff on the MB. Hey lets all go level a DoL or DoH class to make Gil so SE can take it from us whenever they deem necessary. Yea that sounds fun.

The worst part about what SE did is install doubt into every player on how the game operates. In any game you play, you play with the assumption that money you make in in game will be there the next time you log in unless your hacked or are involved in unsactioned activities. But in FFXIV who knows? They will come take your Gil at anytime even if you have played the game 100% legit.

[Azurus]

Please do not confusion frustration and overreaction. Suspended players have all rights to be angered. Yet, the angered players are part of a very slim minority and the overwhelming majority of the players has been left intact even though SquareEnix missed people directly involved in RMT activities because of it. Hence the overreaction. That means SquareEnix managed to care enough in their customers to make sure most of them would be fine. Whatever they would have done, collateral damage was inevitable. Does SquareEnix deserve so much negativity because of a really restricted amount of individuals?

EDIT:


Regardless of how many angry players claim to have lost 99% of their gils, it still comes from an unreliable source and thus, can't be taken for granted. Otherwise, your argument becomes inconsistent. You are changing the subject and making personal attack against me.

So a man walks in to a room and slaughters 100 puppies, but he does not purge the entire world of puppies so therefore he must actually love puppies! Are people really this far up SE's @$$ with their noses?

[Nica]

Whatever they would have done, collateral damage was inevitable.

Says who? CCP managed to hunt down RMT buyers in Eve Online just fine, for the exact amount of RMT money the buyers bought, often times via much more complicated method of trading. All without resorting to the laughable robo-grenade method SE apparently employed, while being a much smaller company than SE.

Are you saying SE is just that inept?

Does SquareEnix deserve so much negativity because of a really restricted amount of individuals?

Absolutely. The way that a company treats its customers are not evaluated based on the number affected.

Would Chik-fil-A have garnered national outcry if the number of affected people were the standard to go by? If Walmart decided that it was going to randomly kick 500 customers out and take their money, do you think there shouldn't be any reaction because it's "so restricted"?

[ArcheustheWise]

Whatever they would have done, collateral damage was inevitable. .

No they just took the easy route out. Look i don't know how long you have been playing games bro, but this isnt the way to do it. I've played my share of mmos and seen them deal with stuff like this alot better.

Hell, i could make an easier plan that what they came up with in 5 mins. You give gms the ability to teleport around observe the botting or spamming and instantly ban them, monitor where resources from the teleporting bots and cut the head off there. Then if needs be you deal with the gil piles based upon the data gathered there.

You dont just take away the gil, the problem is still there.... you need to cut the head of how they are getting cash before you can do anything else.

[10TailBeast]

99% is not a fact. It has been reported by a few angry players on the forum and as such is not a trustworthy source.

Also, it was apparently 99% of the gils of the players (player which has been considered as related to RMT activities) and is not linked in any way to the market. This is just an arbitrary value. It could have been 0. Calculating exactly how much "fake" gils each account would have required a lot of manpower and time, which would have pushed the investigation time to weeks.

It wasn't just this forum for one, and every person that got their account back reported having their Gil divided by 100. That's pretty consistent. Also, heaven forbid SE actually put some effort into a real investigation when it's so much easier to just push a button and let some program do it, even though that would screw some players over. Who cares about them, though, right? I mean, they're just a minority, it's not like it will ever happen to you, right?

-SE is also a company that appears to not care how long it takes to do anything about something because bots reported teleport hacking 2 weeks to a month ago are still at it.