SE Banning players with large amounts of gil?

[Reika]

on some servers, you can farm 11 cokes (660k) in the same amount of time you'd take to farm heavy darklight armor. on those servers, profit margin for 2 star seems pretty low, because even though 11 cokes costs 660k, the HQ HDS armors which are an upgrade compared to the HDL armor, ends up costing something in the 1.2m range. you end up paying something around 450k markup for HQ and craft service, which isn't a big deal lol. if you do CM in full SB gear 14 times for those cokes, you will have more than 1m on your hands easily in materia and coke, and you can straight up purchase something better than darklight, for the same amount of effort as darklight.

if i was leveling a PLD/WAR fresh in a developed economy, i'd probably farm up the coke and commission an HQ craft and melds from a known crafter. however, in many cases, such as low pop or newer servers, these crafters may not take commissions if they're the only ones in the 2 star HQ market, and even then case i'd probably still save up and buy that piece of HQ 2 star gear, because it takes the same amount of effort for something that's better than darklight, once again.

its not unfeasible for a legit player to want to buy 2 star stuff at these prices in certain cases like this, and tbh, other crafters do buy this type of gear as well. you can't use your own personal opinion and assume it applies to everyone

Unless you are on my server, where HDS Armor/flanchards cant even sell for the price an ingot would sell for. And that is because no one bases the price of ingots off of making Havy Darksteel Armor/flanchards out of them, because that would be quite dumb considering every other piece that uses a darksteel ingot costs more grind to get over their darklight counterparts.

[Anderian]

The big picture is simple:

SE have banned many legit players in this RMT witch hunt, while I AM glad they are now doing something about RMT, this could have and should have been done/handled far better.

We have heard nothing official since the mass suspensions.

We have no idea how long this will last before we get our accounts back.

We have no viable means of contacting anyone from SE (EU phone is down, live chat is not active during the weekends, emails so far have gone un-answered).

How? How would they have handled this better? Just remove the RMT'd gil from every character, without investigation or warning? Because that's the only alternative, because as long as people who received RMT'd gil are allowed to remain active, more of that money enters circulation, where it's harder to track and ultimately remove from the game.

Now the fact that Square's customer service is... for a lack of better word, lacking, is a whole different topic of discussion.

[Spoolx]

They had to stop the Gil moving if their plan is to remove it, imagine how diluted the Gil gets the longer the account is active.

Example: player 1 has 10 million Gil and gives 1 million to 10 players who each in turn give 100k to 10 players who each in turn give 10k to 10 players etc etc etc... See how fast it can get out of hand?

That being said, we have o clue about the bannings because SE hasn't released anything official so what everyone is saying is strictly assumptions.

[scarebearz]

In my opinion the "investigations" of the richer characters in game should be investigated while their accounts are still active.

If the GM is confidant the player is an RMT'er, that account should be perma-banned.

Gil sellers did not suddenly pop up 2 days ago, investigations into possible gil sellers should have been happening from day 1, that way the game would not be in such a mess as it is now, due to goldsellers/buyers.

RMT is one of the reasons I generally chose to play on F2P games, as people can already "pay to win" there is much less demand for dodgy goldsellers.

Once again, I blame the people buying gil and creating the demand.

[Thotor]

Again, you are going in circles. Your little scenario assumes that some crafter buys those Coke at ridiculous prices, in order to sell the created item. And again, there's no scenario where this ends with only legit currency exchanging hands; if you are able to farm the materials yourself, you get a person from your FC t[...]

The facts that materials from tomestones sells like hotcake (since crafter were already sitting on millions with early relics sells) invalidates your assumption.
The number of crafter available for 2 star HQ is still very low. It is easier to sell components and buy the finished products (avoiding scams in the process as giving components to a crafter is always a risk)

[Anderian]

The facts that materials from tomestones sells like hotcake (since crafter were already sitting on millions with early relics sells) invalidates your assumption.
The number of crafter available for 2 star HQ is still very low. It is easier to sell components and buy the finished products (avoiding scams in the process as giving components to a crafter is always a risk)

This is seriously starting to feel like trying to explain astrophysics to a child. The number of two star crafters is anything but low, it's just that most (smart) crafters understand that there's no point in buying 600k worth of materials, when there are no players that could buy the resulting item (with non-RMT'd currency). Yes, the crafters have money to buy the materials, I already mentioned I am one of the very few people who have made legit millions and could buy the materials. The problem is that the end user, the ones I would be selling the item to, don't have that kind of money. If they did, they would more than likely be able to craft it themselves.

I'll summarize this for you: the people that are selling the philo materials are not the people who would buy the resulting equipment. There is simply no scenario where it would be smarter to first farm the tomestones, then turn them into crafting materials, then sell the said crafting materials, and then use the gained gil to buy equipment made of said materials. They are only marginally better than Darklight (after investing millions in materia for them) and they cost more.

[Candykiss]

And how many of these "crafter's" were using bots to get there.

[scarebearz]

And how many of these "crafter's" were using bots to get there.

It's insanely easy to level from 1-50 as a crafter if you've saved your leve's, why would we need to use some dodgy 3rd party programs?

Some may have done, but I bet most of the crafter's here complaining are legit.

[Nanga]

In my opinion the "investigations" of the richer characters in game should be investigated while their accounts are still active.

If the GM is confidant the player is an RMT'er, that account should be perma-banned.

Gil sellers did not suddenly pop up 2 days ago, investigations into possible gil sellers should have been happening from day 1, that way the game would not be in such a mess as it is now, due to goldsellers/buyers.

RMT is one of the reasons I generally chose to play on F2P games, as people can already "pay to win" there is much less demand for dodgy goldsellers.

Once again, I blame the people buying gil and creating the demand.

The problem with your "opinion" or "suggestion" is that the real RMT gurus look more like innocent, regular joe players than any of us. They've been doing this a long time, and know exactly how to avoid getting caught. They don't keep large amounts of coin on one account. They transfer coin around through hundreds, if not thousands, of micro transactions over as many different accounts. Their business looks more like regular player behavior than anything.

[scarebearz]

I didn't even realize until about 45GSM back in that first week that I could get such amazing rewards for HQ turn-ins on leves. Burned 45-50 in about an hour and a half.

I got lucky and was told by a FC member about HQ hand-ins when I was lvl 30 or so.

But did not find out about the 3x repeatable's until my 2nd craft.

The problem with your "opinion" or "suggestion" is that the real RMT gurus look more like innocent, regular joe players than any of us. They've been doing this a long time, and know exactly how to avoid getting caught. They don't keep large amounts of coin on one account. They transfer coin around through hundreds, if not thousands, of micro transactions over as many different accounts. Their business looks more like regular player behavior than anything.

I expect your quite right, the real issue is SE's support when the genuine players try and get their accounts back. If the support was anything like, they could look into my (and others) account and easily see if RMT has taken place or not, then un-suspend us.

As things are, we all just got suspended, cannot contact any useful support staff and are left to wait without any Official word on when we are likely to have our accounts back.