Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Morbid]

Lol I like how they promise you won't get spammed from them after buying. That means they know that it is fiercely annoying to get spammed; It's almost like saying.

"Hey my friend! Getting spammed is not fun to existence, BUY our gil and we will add you to the do not contact list. BUY NAU GET LESS SPAM!"

Yea no worries about getting spammed we'll eventually just hack your account and get it back.

It's a slap in the face to SE as the gil sellers are directly refuting the "efforts" of Square Enix to stop them. Complete with a picture of a smiling LaLa gilbot waving "screw you" SE....

That is kind of funny to see..

[Niwashi]

Have you seen ******'s new ads? ... today they just went all out with this:

While I understand your point about wanting to show how unconcerned the gil sellers try to sound, reposting an extensive RMT ad complete with their name, is still posting an RMT ad. I'm a little surprised I saw your post before the forum moderators got to it. You may want to clean that up and replace it with just a quote or description of what sort of claims they're trying to make. (At least be sure it excludes any references to the site.)

[Elmeron]

"Buying gil is perfectly safe! No worries! We're happy to sell it to you, and if we all keep it on the down low, nothing bad will happen to us or you! Have fun!"

._.

The sad part is the ending of the letter is pretty much true... Outside of crafting (which not everyone enjoys, I've always hated crafting in every MMORPG I've played) and doing soul bonding for materia for hours and hours (an activity that is so mindless and boring that I only do it when drinking), there is really no way to make gil, unless you can manage to find a group that is willing to spam a dungeon where a large amount of mobs can be pulled in one spot (not sure about others, but on my world parties usually want to faceroll through dungeons as fast as, possible so it's not always easy finding a group that wants to spam a dungeon for gil purposes).

I am constantly losing gil unless I do one of the three because quest rewards really don't offer enough gil.

[Aerowaffle]

The sad part is the ending of the letter is pretty much true... Outside of crafting (which not everyone enjoys, I've always hated crafting in every MMORPG I've played) and doing soul bonding for materia for hours and hours (an activity that is so mindless and boring that I only do it when drinking), there is really no way to make gil, unless you can manage to find a group that is willing to spam a dungeon where a large amount of mobs can be pulled in one spot (not sure about others, but on my world parties usually want to faceroll through dungeons as fast as, possible so it's not always easy finding a group that wants to spam a dungeon for gil purposes).

I am constantly losing gil unless I do one of the three because quest rewards really don't offer enough gil.

What are you spending the gil on? The only necessary thing I can think of is teleporting, which the challenge log and duty roulette easily cover any reasonable amount of teleports.

Having (and spending) gil is pretty much a commodity. The things you buy with it is either to save time (buying materia, rather than trying to soul bind it on your own), or for commodities (house, glamour gear, etc).

[tocsin]

This is frankly starting to go from mere indifference to actual trolling on SE's part. The letters from the producer came out, and despite RMT being on every single page of the questions, it was still not addressed. I now view this as SE literally trolling the community, purposely leaving the RMT up just to spite us.

I cancelled my pre-order today, and I encourage others to do so. SE clearly no longer deserves our money, and I feel dirty even paying my subscription to them.

[Niwashi]

What are you spending the gil on? The only necessary thing I can think of is teleporting, which the challenge log and duty roulette easily cover any reasonable amount of teleports.

Even teleport money is rarely necessary. I have my free teleport location set to Limsa, my Return point set to Gridania, and the Gold Saucer offers free travel from either of those to Ul'dah. When I want to go someplace, I'll nearly always port for free to the nearest of the three main cities and then travel on foot (well, my chocobo's or unicorn's feet at any rate) from there. Paid teleports are only for when you're in a real hurry.

My house is the only major gil expenditure I've had directly from the game. Everything else I've spent gil on was either fluff or stuff I could have made myself but was just feeling too lazy to do so.

[Velhart]

I wonder if this is why what little effort SE is putting towards combating RMT is so single-mindedly focused on the economic effects of it. They're ignoring the far more direct and pervasive harassment almost entirely.

I don't remember SE taking any drastic action towards RMT in FFXI besides making desirable items no long available to sell. A lot of items becoming Rare/Ex. RMT was still around, but it died down due to the game's dying popularity and not much to benefit money wise from it anymore. A lot of times when a game is not profitable, you will rarely see RMT or they work purely in the background. So I have never seen SE take any actual dramatic steps on fixing the RMT situation.

These three people who are the Special Task Force may be really good at their job, but I can't imagine only three people being able to control the worst RMT I have seen since WoW, and WoW's team against RMT spam is pretty big. Won't pretend to understand what is going on in the background, but they should really start taking more I would say -preventative- measures as opposed to cleaning house whenever too much get in there.

[Morbid]

This is frankly starting to go from mere indifference to actual trolling on SE's part. The letters from the producer came out, and despite RMT being on every single page of the questions, it was still not addressed. I now view this as SE literally trolling the community, purposely leaving the RMT up just to spite us.

I cancelled my pre-order today, and I encourage others to do so. SE clearly no longer deserves our money, and I feel dirty even paying my subscription to them.

Although it sucks you decided to cancel your preorder I do understand. I tend to stay away from preordering all together now just for the fact of how gaming has become in general. The RMT spam has not made me consider NOT getting the expansion or maintaining my subscription but it definitely keeps me from any additional (optional) subscription items.

And that possibly is one reason why SE seems so lackluster to handle this RMT situation. Players are still playing, it would honestly take a mass exodus for Square to take this seriously as it deserves and sadly your one cancellation does nil to Square Enixs' bottom line.

[Rizon]

I do not know why people continue to respond to this post when we all know that there is no chance in hell of ever getting any acknowledgement from SE. It's too negative and puts SE in a bad light. The only things that get noticed by the Devs/Management are the Polyanna posts that make them look good.

[Niwashi]

And that possibly is one reason why SE seems so lackluster to handle this RMT situation. Players are still playing, it would honestly take a mass exodus for Square to take this seriously as it deserves and sadly your one cancellation does nil to Square Enixs' bottom line.

One cancellation won't mean much to them, but we've heard about quite a few new players who tried out the game and were turned off from it due to the RMT spam.

Of course, there's no good way to measure how many purchases and subscriptions SE could otherwise have gotten but didn't. But consider that the ones we hear of are only the tiny few who (1) try the game at the urging of a friend, or at least have a friend who plays it (2) realize it's the RMT that makes the game "not fun" rather than just deciding it's not fun (as not everyone puts much thought into the reasons behind why they do or don't like something) (3) explains to their friend that it's the RMT keeping them from continuing the game (4) their friend is someone who actually comes to these forums (5) their friend decides to post about the fact that they wouldn't get the game due to RMT and (6) that post is in this or another thread that you or I have actually read (as I doubt any of us can keep up with most of what gets posted).

Only the minuscule percentage of lost potential that comes from players who meet all of those (mostly rare) conditions turn into cases where we'll actually see something along the lines of "my friend was going to get this game, but as soon as he saw all the RMT spam he decided it's not worth putting up with that, so now he won't." Yet I've seen variations on that statement expressed quite a few times from different people. Extrapolating from several cases being such a tiny proportion of the issue, it's pretty clear that SE is already losing tens of thousands of purchases and subscriptions. That's most certainly hitting their bottom line whether they'll acknowledge that fact or not.

Existing players have more invested in the game than new people just checking it out for the first time. So there aren't likely to be nearly as many players who will quit or (as in Tocsin's case) cancel an order due to the RMT situation as there are new players who choose not to get this game for that reason.

But consider the people who resort to staying in /busy status most of the time they're online. Or even players who just have a less social environment due to all the other people who are doing so. An MMO that doesn't have much social interaction is less engaging than one that does. So, even though the game aspects may be good, they're not as drawn into it as they might have been. So some days they just don't feel as much like playing. This gradually shifts into most days and they drift away, logging in less and less often until they decide it's not worth subscribing to a game they rarely play. This pattern happens to nearly all players in all games eventually, so people rarely give much thought to why it's happening sooner rather than later. But either constant harassment or social isolation to avoid that harassment are both factors that lead to time spent in-game being less fun. And that can speed up the drifting away pattern even in players who don't actually decide that that's why they're leaving.

So, yes, rage-quits over this issue or canceled purchases in protest to it are going to be quite rare, but between new players deciding not to get this game and existing players leaving the game sooner, SE is certainly losing money over this.