Why not to do well in the game

[Naraku_Diabolos]

How can the Task Force notice if you have gil purchased from RMT? Is it flagged or something? I was wondering about that.

[Kaedan94]

How can the Task Force notice if you have gil purchased from RMT? Is it flagged or something? I was wondering about that.

They have logs. They track where every gil came from and determine whether the source was from RMT or not. They do not give more details because that would tip off RMT to their methods.

[LiadansWhisper]

They have logs. They track where every gil came from and determine whether the source was from RMT or not. They do not give more details because that would tip off RMT to their methods.

They...really don't. That's why when they flagged all those crafters a few months back, they just took an arbitrary amount of gil from them, instead of the exact amounts of RMT gil they had acquired (second hand, of course - they were not banned because they had not participated deliberately in any RMT activity). They did this while people who had bought items the crafters were still walking around with those items on.

[Marishi-Ten]

They...really don't. That's why when they flagged all those crafters a few months back, they just took an arbitrary amount of gil from them, instead of the exact amounts of RMT gil they had acquired (second hand, of course - they were not banned because they had not participated deliberately in any RMT activity). They did this while people who had bought items the crafters were still walking around with those items on.

That always seemed to me to be more of market regulation than RMT stop gaping. Square wants to control the inflation of currency so the market doesn't tank or currency is worthless (removing currency from circulation is the best way to do it while maintaining stability. Flooding the market with currency would just crash the economy completely).

I think they removed all of that Gil as a way to keep MB prices lower (though with less currency, the fundamental price for the commodity is the same. Demand is demand). Makes sense, just sucks for the players who accumulated it all.

Imagine if one player with 100M Gil were to buy items at humongous prices. Inflation would triple overnight while only that player has the funds for purchase power essentially crashing the denomination. Or, that player buys ALL of a specific item and turns around and sells it at a massive premium (price fixing/monopolization) creating inflation that the market simply can't afford and crashes (no stabilization without upping currency values and inflating the denomination to near crash levels).

Again, I'm not saying it's fair what happened to those players and I do feel for them, but it was almost a necessary evil.

[Gamemako]

How can the Task Force notice if you have gil purchased from RMT? Is it flagged or something? I was wondering about that.

They attempt to algorithmically flag RMT accounts for suspicious activity, and RMTs alter tactics to dodge. It's your standard cat-and-mouse stuff, and that's why SE is not keen on providing details about the specific methods. Once SE have an RMT flagged, they can link to buyers through logs and remove buyer gil. Once you get a step beyond that and the gil has filtered back into the economy through gil-buyer purchases, it's hard to even justify trying to do anything with it. When I put something up on the market for 300k (composed of 200k worth of mats), I can't control who buys it.

[Kallera]

They attempt to algorithmically flag RMT accounts for suspicious activity, and RMTs alter tactics to dodge. It's your standard cat-and-mouse stuff, and that's why SE is not keen on providing details about the specific methods. Once SE have an RMT flagged, they can link to buyers through logs and remove buyer gil. Once you get a step beyond that and the gil has filtered back into the economy through gil-buyer purchases, it's hard to even justify trying to do anything with it. When I put something up on the market for 300k (composed of 200k worth of mats), I can't control who buys it.

I don't remember "putting item up at the auction house for high prices." Being something that is against the terms of service.

[Alice_89th]

I don't remember "putting item up at the auction house for high prices." Being something that is against the terms of service.

That is not what he was saying.

What he was saying is that they can't really do anything once the gil buyers have used the gil they bought.

If someone bought gil, and then used that to buy things on the market board (say, perfectly normally priced mats) that gil transfers to the person who put the item up for sale. You can't really take any gil from that person because they have nothing to do with it. Whether the item costs 10 gil or 10,000 or 100,000,000 doesn't really matter when it comes to this.

[Kallera]

That is not what he was saying.

What he was saying is that they can't really do anything once the gil buyers have used the gil they bought.
....

It sounds like that is exactly what is being done. They are not only taking the Gil from the person, but they are taking more Gil than what was involved in the purchase.

To illustrate an example:

Person A has 20,000 Gil on their person. Their retainer has 1 million Gil. They put up an item for auction for 200,000 Gil.

Person b bought Gil. Purchases the item, and later gets caught by the STF who then find they purchased person A's item.

From what I've heard on the forums, person A comes back to his retainer, only to find the retainer has 200,000 gil, maybe less, and then has to deal with se's support team for weeks on end.


Or is this not the case?

[Gamemako]

They...really don't.

It's likely that they do have logs, but they'll be more limited than people really expect. It's important to keep in mind just how many actions are taken by players on a server -- the data here is massive and is essentially something you can only analyze algorithmically (simply manipulating it so a GM can view it after the fact is a mess). The problem is that you have huge manpower requirements to manually chase down those attached to RMTs. If you just grabbed everyone associated with the account, then RMTs would buy random items just to get innocent players involved and gum up the works.

SE's actions with regard to these players may be similar to what they did with the FC housing prices on legacy servers. That early crafter ban wave was on anyone with a certain sum of gil on non-Legacy servers, and they all came back to reduced gil. The problem there was that RMTs were duping gil en masse and handing it out in piles. I suspect that the gil reduction was a targeted way to trim the total amount of gil in the economy after that exploit was patched. Rather than risk orphaning some players by taking portion of everyone's gil (and causing an uproar besides), SE went to the people with a ton of gil, assumed they could take the hit, and confiscated the gil. It's also a much easier PR sell to take from the fat cats than the average joes.

It sounds like that is exactly what is being done.

That would be the first I've heard of such a problem. Quite the opposite, SE has shown a propensity for blanket bans on players who have high gil stocks regardless of whether they were involved with anyone accused of RMT activity.

[Kallera]

That would be the first I've heard of such a problem. Quite the opposite, SE has shown a propensity for blanket bans on players who have high gil stocks regardless of whether they were involved with anyone accused of RMT activity.

So what is to prevent SE from looking at a fc's savings for an FC, trumping up the charges of an accusation, and robbing the whole FC's savings' blind?