Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[tocsin]

additionally, http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/company/officer.html gives a list of all current board members. Based on the fact that the EU and Americas CEO, Phillip Rogers, uses an email that merely shortens his first name, as a nickname, it may be prudent that the other board members may do the same. blanket emailing said directors, to figure out which are real emails and which are not, may also be prudent.

We may need to be persistent. more persistent than the RMT spammers themselves, in order to get a response. but if we are, it may make this better.

Additionally, http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/company/group.html Gives addresses to each of the corporate headquarters. lets start mailing the people, too.

[Zabuza]

additionally, http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/company/officer.html gives a list of all current board members. Based on the fact that the EU and Americas CEO, Phillip Rogers, uses an email that merely shortens his first name, as a nickname, it may be prudent that the other board members may do the same. blanket emailing said directors, to figure out which are real emails and which are not, may also be prudent.

We may need to be persistent. more persistent than the RMT spammers themselves, in order to get a response. but if we are, it may make this better.

Hello, I write this letter and petition in hopes that it will get to Yoshida himself. I feel SE currently does not realize just how bad the RMT situation is on the NA/EU servers, being that the JP servers have been relatively spam free in comparison. On my server, Zalera, I often get a /tell from an RMT roughly once per minute, as well as friends requests from gilsellers and shouts in the cities. The imgur hyperlinks below will prove what I am saying is true.

http://imgur.com/qkNTxWQ
http://imgur.com/PuCI6oz
http://imgur.com/rb45o8h

I would not have sent this email were the situation on the NA servers not desperate. Players on many servers have resorted to shutting off their private communications channels so that RMTs cannot spam them. In an MMO, the most social genre of game there is, this is a very bad sign. I am concerned about the new players who will join. In an oversaturated market, new players will not put up with such spam the moment they begin to play this game. You as a company could be missing out on possibly millions of dollars from these new players who will likely not sub because of this very problem.

I do not expect SE to reveal the strategy they are going to use to deal with the RMTs, that would be tipping your hand. I do however, expect some sort of reassurance and acknowledgement of the problem, and that SE's current solutions to combating this problem are not enough. I realize it might be bad publicity or what not to admit your current measures have not been enough, but consider this; Had it not been for SE accepting they had made a mistake, we would not have this beautiful game called FF14: A Realm Reborn in the first place. The game itself was an amazing comeback from what was previously a massive failure. Back then, you all came out and admitted fault, and you strived to better the situation. You succeeded spectacularly. Please, follow this example once more, and make things bearable for your players once again. We are so very tired of being harassed every minute of our gametime by RMTs. Below are the signatures of all the players on the forums who feel the same as I do(approximately 200 gathered), and those are only the extreme minority of people who have visited the forums in this month's time.

(Obviously the signatures are down here.)

This is the email I will be sending.

[tocsin]

I would also print out like 50 copies of the petition itself, stick it in an envelope, and mail one a day to each of the SE corporate headquarters, addressed to the CEO of the respective division.

[Ophie-Mio]

Emailing the board of directors...borderline creepy AND insane. >_>
Like the board has anything at all to do with this game other than looking at expense reports.

[Kassiekane]

If they don't say or do something by Heavensward, I'm gonna be severely upset, and may have to consider unsubscribing.

[Starcade]

Retaliatory report filed. If I can't call him what he is, then I will get his stuff looked at by people who might do something about it.

[tocsin]

Retaliatory report filed. If I can't call him what he is, then I will get his stuff looked at by people who might do something about it.

Go ahead. matter of fact, I recommend anyone who thinks this same way to do the same. its not the first or even the third time I have talked to GM's, and im sure this wont be the last, either.

but, until then, please keep this thread clear of useless accusing, and on the topic of trying to get SE to notice that there is an actual issue going on.

Unfortunately we don't have five years, lol. More like 2 months. If this isn't fixed by Heavensward...I don't wanna think of how many new players will be turned off.

its just a literary reference. SE also isn't congress, and we have a petition with over 200 subscribers, not a single prison inmate begging for money, lol.

[Starcade]

Useless accusing? I called you exactly what you were. I'll keep the language out of it if I must, but to call you an RMT apologist is more than evident by your track record on this thread, and that makes you an enemy of players like me.

I saw what players like you did to the first SE MMO - made it a cheaters' paradise full of a bunch of fools who basically limit everyone else's ability to play the game by how much they get their butts kissed.

I'm not going to see that happen twice. The first one got me banned off the XI forums quite quickly. Took about three months.

[tocsin]

*eyeroll* /blist.

so, back on topic yet again, unless we have a better idea, ill be picking up some stamps today to send out this petition. I encourage others to do so as well. maybe flooding their corporate mailbox might at least get some heads to turn.

[Ophie-Mio]

but I feel like he doesn't actually know how bad the RMT thing is on NA servers. I wish I knew the proper way... the proper channels through which to make that happen. If their stance still remains the same after, then whatever, at least I tried. I mean, with the amount of replies and such I'm sure at least one of the devs has seen this, but does it go any further than that...

And in my opinion, I feel that everyone on the JP side knows that the NA/EU servers have it rough on the RMT side. They have had it rough since the time of XI... Even as Tiggy and few others have said, they know. Will we ever see anything done about it? Probably not. There probably will never be a visible change in how they do their proceedings. There weren't any changes made to XI and the RMT situation until the RMT destroyed the economy in that game...and I mean, inflation the way this game will never know.

It never changed except for that drastic situation back then...do I think it'll change now? No, not really. Are the RMT on the NA/EU servers an issue. Yeah, but not enough for them to lead a campaign against the RMT until the economy in the game is destroyed beyond all saving.
You can write emails to people completely unrelated to the issue but that will never work.

They know that there's this issue. Soap boxing this issue until you're an annoying voice on the corner won't change things. The economy in this game needs to crash before they do anything HUGE.

Honestly, its a pretty "old-time" tactic. Sending protest letters to the presidents of companies, over and over again until you receive a response, has been something done for decades, to force responses.

As you're doing in a way right now with this thread. As I've said before, sending protest letters for something like this is creepy and weird and it'll be seen as that to them most likely.

ever watch the movie "Shawshank Redemption"? remember how the main character kept writing congress for a grant for the prison library, and after 5 years of sending one letter every day, he finally got a response? that's how it works.

Yeah, he was also stuck in prison. Comparing that to this is a little out there. This is an MMO and our platform to speak with the developers are the forums. They have never spoken back about this matter ever except for the one time that I described above for XI. *shrugs*

The main problem is, Yoshida is seeming to be blowing off the NA playerbase, and focusing on promoting and selling his new expansion. He really doesn't seem to be paying attention.

As others have said, Yoshi is busy with the expansion. If you think the RMT problem for half the servers is so extreme to DELAY/STOP the expansion, then you're losing touch with the picture at large. Yoshi is not blowing off the NA/EU playerbase. He's busy being held tight to a rigorous schedule.
He also isn't blowing us off because once again, they have never made any announcements about anything RMT wise since XI. Ever. He's just going according to what they've always done.

if you have a better idea, feel free to share it. Posting on the forums isn't working anymore, as 545 posts and counting in this thread would indicate.

My idea is and has always been since the beginning of this thread before it became annoying soap box protests and threatening to email everybody, was to give my 2 cents and sit tight. I - along with ALL the other players - know that the expansion is priority 1 and that IF anything is to be done, it will be done then. These disgusting threats of emailing CEOs and the board of directors is so over the top that it's crazy. It's escalating an issue to the highest extreme.

It's honestly screaming at a parent when they are busy making dinner. Wait for dinner to be made before you email anyone and rant and rave about how you're being neglected.