Members of the Final Fantasy XI community have raised complaints after rule-abiding subscribers were apparently banned for engaging in the most heinous of in-game crimes: gardening.
A thread on the Allakhazam forums raised a red flag for members of the community, when one FFXI player found he was unable to log on. Upon contacting a representative, he found that his account had been banned for engaging in RMT activities - selling in-game money and objects for real-world cash.
The only problem was that the player hadn't been doing any such thing. The poster - and other FFXI members who also found themselves banned - had apparently fallen prey to automated tools developed for Square-Enix's Special Task Force (STF) to help them catch gold farmers and gold sellers. Gardening is used by many players in Final Fantasy XI to help earn money, since it is a profession with no level or skill requirement; the only limitation is that each individual character may only have ten flower pots at once.
To circumvent this, players would have alternate low-level characters (or "mules") with whom they would garden, sell the grown plants to NPCs for profit, and then forward all the money on to their main character. This cash flow apparently set off red flags in the automated STF tools, labeling gardening enthusiasts as potential gold farmers, and banning them accordingly.
Most of the bans will probably be overturned - if not, then there are more serious problems at play than automated software - but let this be a lesson to Square-Enix and other MMOG operators: Automated tools aren't always perfect. If they were perfect, then they would have already evolved into SkyNet and enslaved us all.
The GM's are really slacking* and the gil sellers are really bold since I started playing again a couple weeks ago. They (Gil sellers) send a tell right in game and the GM's are too flooded to respond so they want you to use the POL out-of-game email system, which is asking a bit much. I'm playing their game for a fee, I'm not going to pay to alt-tab out, interrupt my gameplay (farming, party, whatever I'm doing) and be moderator for them too. I'm sure my merit party will be very understanding that we all have to leave the game to send an email to the GMs whenever we get some copy-paste of a gilseller ad from a stolen account.
I wonder how much transfer of money activates the system exactly? There is a 1 million cap on the mail gold system but if you are gardening for white ore that sells on the auction house for 140k a pop and you have several mules gardening, you can make your money all at once once the saplings "bloom" and that could trigger the system.
Its odd though because I though that was one of the ways you are "supposed" to earn money to get your high level items.
*probably not slacking so much as exausted and downsized and burning out
The money systems in MMOs are getting out of control. It would be really interesting to study this on an economic scale, could provide an interesting insight on a microeconomic scale.
Why exactly should gardening be allowed, surely each character should be in effect a seperate 'game', and therefore should not be able to trade items? In a single player game you wouldn't expect to be able to trade items like this, why should it be any different here?
xmetatr0nx: The money systems in MMOs are getting out of control. It would be really interesting to study this on an economic scale, could provide an interesting insight on a microeconomic scale.
Yeah I've played on and off since 2004, and I've seen the prices of items fluctuate directly as a result of the gil seller vs the GM moderating activity. More gil selling, prices go up, more GM activity prices crash. I'm guessing this is due to the gil sellers that specialize in crafting, that they want to get their craft of specialty up to maximum level as soon as possible so they are willing to buy materials at the auction house for more, which creates a supply-and-demand bottleneck.
(For example; I remember when I was starting out clothcrafting in 2004 and how hard it was to get cotton to level on (I did not know a the time about harvesting or taking it from mandragoras with a thief job). It would be so frusterating as a level 30 white mage to get through the level stage where cotton was required, so buying cotton was very expensive.)
But it seems surprizing to me that they don't have a tagging system in place with the automated system that can trace the origins of gold. It shouldn't be too hard to notice that gold is coming from the sale of ore grown by a character attached to the same account. Strange.
Yeah I've played on and off since 2004, and I've seen the prices of items fluctuate directly as a result of the gil seller vs the GM moderating activity. More gil selling, prices go up, more GM activity prices crash. I'm guessing this is due to the gil sellers that specialize in crafting, that they want to get their craft of specialty up to maximum level as soon as possible so they are willing to buy materials at the auction house for more, which creates a supply-and-demand bottleneck.
(For example; I remember when I was starting out clothcrafting in 2004 and how hard it was to get cotton to level on (I did not know a the time about harvesting or taking it from mandragoras with a thief job). It would be so frusterating as a level 30 white mage to get through the level stage where cotton was required, so buying cotton was very expensive.)
But it seems surprizing to me that they don't have a tagging system in place with the automated system that can trace the origins of gold. It shouldn't be too hard to notice that gold is coming from the sale of ore grown by a character attached to the same account. Strange.
Thats actually quite interesting, it almost reminds me of the supply and demand dance of the drug trade. One could build quite an itneresting model from all that data. Makes me wonder if they realize what they created.
Yeah I've played on and off since 2004, and I've seen the prices of items fluctuate directly as a result of the gil seller vs the GM moderating activity. More gil selling, prices go up, more GM activity prices crash. I'm guessing this is due to the gil sellers that specialize in crafting, that they want to get their craft of specialty up to maximum level as soon as possible so they are willing to buy materials at the auction house for more, which creates a supply-and-demand bottleneck.
(For example; I remember when I was starting out clothcrafting in 2004 and how hard it was to get cotton to level on (I did not know a the time about harvesting or taking it from mandragoras with a thief job). It would be so frusterating as a level 30 white mage to get through the level stage where cotton was required, so buying cotton was very expensive.)
But it seems surprizing to me that they don't have a tagging system in place with the automated system that can trace the origins of gold. It shouldn't be too hard to notice that gold is coming from the sale of ore grown by a character attached to the same account. Strange.
Thats actually quite interesting, it almost reminds me of the supply and demand dance of the drug trade. One could build quite an itneresting model from all that data. Makes me wonder if they realize what they created.
cainstwin: Why exactly should gardening be allowed, surely each character should be in effect a seperate 'game', and therefore should not be able to trade items? In a single player game you wouldn't expect to be able to trade items like this, why should it be any different here?
Because a MMOG is not a single-player game, honestly. It boils down to that.
You guys need to let this Skynet thing go. Machines are our freinds. They're not going to rise up and overthrow humanity then render them into protien soup to feed their organic batteries.
Square-Enix Bans Players for Gardening in FFXI
Members of the Final Fantasy XI community have raised complaints after rule-abiding subscribers were apparently banned for engaging in the most heinous of in-game crimes: gardening.
A thread on the Allakhazam forums raised a red flag for members of the community, when one FFXI player found he was unable to log on. Upon contacting a representative, he found that his account had been banned for engaging in RMT activities - selling in-game money and objects for real-world cash.
The only problem was that the player hadn't been doing any such thing. The poster - and other FFXI members who also found themselves banned - had apparently fallen prey to automated tools developed for Square-Enix's Special Task Force (STF) to help them catch gold farmers and gold sellers. Gardening is used by many players in Final Fantasy XI to help earn money, since it is a profession with no level or skill requirement; the only limitation is that each individual character may only have ten flower pots at once.
To circumvent this, players would have alternate low-level characters (or "mules") with whom they would garden, sell the grown plants to NPCs for profit, and then forward all the money on to their main character. This cash flow apparently set off red flags in the automated STF tools, labeling gardening enthusiasts as potential gold farmers, and banning them accordingly.
Most of the bans will probably be overturned - if not, then there are more serious problems at play than automated software - but let this be a lesson to Square-Enix and other MMOG operators: Automated tools aren't always perfect. If they were perfect, then they would have already evolved into SkyNet and enslaved us all.
(Petfoodalpha)
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