Why Was the Official Statement Ignored?

[LloydShade]

OP says that the players who were suspended and had the majority of their gil taken away are overreacting because they were left with their tools. Just make your fortune again guys! Stop overreacting. Gil doesn't even matter at end game!

[...]SE's response is basically this, "We don't care about our customers' time." And these players should be upset.

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:

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.

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.

[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.

[Divinemight]

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.

Official statement: all currency invovled in RMT are counterfeit.....
That is the rule of this vitrual gaming world set by its creator, the S/E

[WVUTrip]

Official statement: all currency invovled in RMT are counterfeit.....
That is the rule of this vitrual gaming world set by its creator, the S/E

If it was duped then thy are correct and it was counterfeit. The rest of my statement still stands though.

[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.

[BlazeChronic]

snip

This post, along with the math included, makes alot of sense in explaining the situation.

Of course it sucks for those affected, but it needed to be done.

[funkin]

In real life ...

I don't want to go too far into this, so I'll keep it short. Real life isn't the same as this game. One key difference that makes your comparison ineffective: in the real world, businesses have the option to protect themselves with insurance. I'm not even going to get into details like choosing who they sell to, the ability to do background and credit checks, etc.. It's just not the same as real life. Similar, but different.

Edit for a quick, real-world example of how real life business is different than FF14: The company I own doesn't accept work from individuals. We only accept work from established companies, we have direct relationships and interactions with all customers, etc.. We do this because we once took work from an individual who made the job serious hell, and we lost money as a result. Now we won't ever encounter that again because we changed how we accept work. If this was possible in-game, I'd be more willing to take responsibility for who purchased some of my 100s of sales.