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Square-Enix Bans Over 800 FFXI Accounts
wpoitras writes "It appears that Square-Enix is striking back at Gil Sellers in Final Fantasy Online. After what appeared to be an unscheduled server outtage, many players were kicked from the game. It doesn't actually mention gil sellers, but its pretty well accepted that monopolizing NM spawns is mostly done by gil sellers."
Wow, finaly a MMO company is blaming the players for caming static spawns rather than blaming themselves for having those spawns.
And even worse, they wrote into their TOS that you can not camp any spawns or they can cancel your account.
Static Spawn = Spawn Camping = Spawn Greifing.
It's nice to see a MMO company actually fight back.
Of course, FFXI is very well designed for this sort of behavior in the first place.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I have some friends playing FFXI now. They told me on Phoenix server, the IGE employees are still doing business as usual. It seems Square only banned those gil sellers who are very, very aggressive.
Banning 800 out of 32 servers make you wonder how many gil sellers are actually out there. Keep in mind that Square never said explicitly that how many out of the 800 are linked to gil selling activities. Players who have repeating records for MPK or using grief tactics are banning candidates as well.
Kudo to Square-Enix PR department. Well done.
if thats all it was, yes I would agree. But it's not just someone with a map of spawn points campin out for a few hours. It's about people camping these spawns specifically to sell back to make a profit. Which is in violation of the TOS. And not just for a few hours, try 24/7 for weeks on end. I'm sorry but that is not normal play. They have people that take "shifts" on these accounts to ensure they get it.
yes ffxi could be designed better in this respect, but it doesn't give them any right to break the TOS.
it's rather hard to explain to someone that hasn't played an MMO, but the negative ramifications of "gil selling" is pretty big.
Am I the only one who has absolutely no idea what a Gil seller is?
Sigs are for the weak.
How difficult would it be to mark some servers as "approved for IGE economy 'enhancements'" and some servers where such activity will get you banned. The MMOG company can take IGE up on its offer to share a portion of the proceeds, and sign a contract that heavily penalizes IGE (or any other group) that violates server agreements. And if no one wants to play on the servers offering the "enhancements" well then scrap it and tell IGE to get lost. But the people who don't like it don't have to play with it and the people who do will have a "safe haven" to do it in. /crazy I know give everyone what they want.
I see alot of confusion above, and rationalazation from those not familiar with what the big deal is.
Firstly, They banned the PlayOnline accounts, not the characters. Which means, potentially they banned 25600 characters, with each POL account having the max of 32 characters per account. So its possible that in doing this they removed a signifigant amount of money from some of the servers. That is to say, if they got the POL account that had the character with all of the gil-sellers money (unlikely), its gone. As the prices on IGE are the same, I'm guessing they didn't manage this.
Secondly, the gil sellers monopolized the drops using hacks and exploits. Everytime SE fixed an exploit or tried to circumvent it,another aspect of the game ended up suffering. See: Fishing botters. Everytime they tried to comprimise, the method of operation has changed. I do not believe that a 'fix the problem' is entirely nessecary, the people who play the game for fun are not the ones actively cheating.
On the point of the static spawn zones - the monsters in question do not spawn staticly at cordinates XX:YY. They can spawn anywhere in on a square of the map, covering a pretty substantial distance. Gil Sellers got around this by haveing 2, 3, or 6 camping depending on the number of spawns.
The problem is that when competing with a Gil-Seller, you'd see them use an ability or cast a spell on the monster before it would load on your screen. I saw one where the monster spawned DEAD. They where not doing this becuase they where better, they did this through using hacks and bots. When a monster is 'claimed', no one else can attack it. In essence, if the monster wins you get your shot, if the player wins too bad.
SE could not fix the way this worked without changing the fundamental way that claiming monsters worked, which in turn would affect the way the entire game played.
It was not written into the TOS that camping a mob is bad. Its no where in there actually that you cannot camp monsters. As other have stated though, many of the gil sellers took extreme actions on ensure that they where the only ones who got the items. They not only made it a hassle to try for these, they made it dangerous.
Solutions mentioned:
Put level limits on areas.
This is not possible on the level where the problem actually is. There are many areas in which the monsters span a 20-30+ level range.
They do have special level restricted areas for parties go to in order to fight for rare treasure drops. The gil sellers to my knowledge left these alone, and even if they had tried its not possible to interfer with other parties as they fight in these.
Simply limit the distance a mob will pursue a target
This is done to an extent. If you get far enough of a mob so that it cannot see you it gives up. If you leave an area it gives up. If you are a much higher level and stop so it can catch up, it will follow you until you do one of the previous two mentioned activities. The mobs in some cases are slower than the player, and can be outrun. The mobs that people have to worry about, and train on others, can keep up.
Fix the modified DLL issue.
Nothing more I can say. That needs to be addressed. The fact that it hasn't been fixed suggests that there may be technical limitations (Affect the PS2 version perhaps).
On my server they banned many of the major sellers, lots of the AH prices have stared to flux. SE has done a very good thing.
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