The kind of feedback that Square Enix listens to

[Vyrerus]

FFXI is the one that went into maintenance mode, not XIV. How silly lol.

Damn, ya'll taking this Beastmaster back to 2011......
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/t...l=1#post212737

Heh, you're taking me back to 2009.

In FFXI there were the infamous Salvage Bans.

In an event called Salvage, as well as a couple of other events that used the same drop system, there was an exploit where if you split your alliance after drops came off a mob, but before anyone rolled on them, you could duplicate the drops by the amount of parties you had (so one drop becomes three).

The exploit was run from close the time of Salvage's inception in mid 2006 until it was fixed in LATE 2008. Then, in early 2009, SE banned around 1000 player accounts, over half of them permanently. All known banned accounts were NA. And almost all of the permanently banned ones were NA players who'd achieved a lot in the game (Maat's Cap, Relics, even a few ill gotten Mythics). This actually destabilized a lot of endgame linkshells on NA servers, because a lot of these folks were linkshell leaders or at the very least, officers.

Of course, a lot of the folks who got banned were complete shitbag people who did a lot more cheating than just the one exploit, but it was weird that we never got any of the JP numbers or heard about any strife with those infamous bans from the JP community.

And you'd think that we would, because among the NA bans, there were actually people who either unwittingly encountered the exploit, either by being a group doing it without being told it was happening, or by stumbling onto it while joking around with the alliance system (in general, if you claim an NM in XI, and then break party, you keep the mob and the party loses out on chances for drops, last second party breaks just as a mob died were sometimes done to cuck people out of drops). Some accounts banned only ever tried Salvage once, and just happened to stumble into the exploit per the aforementioned ways.

Some claim that we didn't hear from JP banned accounts, due to their culture respecting privacy/them not wanting to be shamed. Meanwhile on 2chan ざまーみろ！or ざまーみやがれ！

So there's a case to be made that perhaps the bans were done to put JP players back ahead of the NA players in terms of achievements. At the time, the player with the most achievements was NA, had six or seven relics, a lot of HQ HNM gear, and was continuing to outpace the top JP player. And he got annihilated in the ban heh, while the JP one did not.