Slashdot Mirror
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."
It doesn't actually mention gil sellers, but its pretty well accepted that monopolizing NM spawns is mostly done by gil sellers.
You do realize you're talking gibberish, right?
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.
In the game, there are unique monsters that drop rare and expensive items, called Notrious Monsters (NM's). In FFXI, only the party that initiated the attack against the monster can engage it in combat, so there will literally be 50 people surrounding the area where it appears, and as soon as it does it becomes a race to see who can claim it first.
The problem then becomes that the drop goes from being kind of rare to EXTREMELY RARE, and the price goes through the roof.
Honestly though, unless the items are being used to sell Gil (in game money) I can't say I frown on it. If people are that organized and they want to affect the economy to make a better position for themselves in the game, I say go for it. As a player, I know that there are plenty of ways to sidestep the problem, and it only becomes important to people who are transfixed by the items that they cant get.
It's a big game. Do something else!
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Who is this Gill Sellers guy and why does he have to be struck?
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
So, they create a game with static spawn spots. These monsters give valuable rewards for fighting them. Players learn about the spawn spots. They capitalize on it. It soon turns into a game of who can strike the monster first.
I don't see what the problem is. They created the rules, and this is a logical progression. Why don't they remove the static spawning from the game, or make it random, or make these monsters tougher, or stop handing out rewards for camping?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
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)
Why don't they remove the static spawning from the game, or make it random, or make these monsters tougher, or stop handing out rewards for camping?
When it comes to NM(Notorious Monster) spawns in FFXI, there are two type of spawns. Timed spawns and lottery pops.
With timed spawns, once the NM is defeated, it cannot appear again until a set amount of time (Such as real life 1 hour for most of them).
The other type of spawn, lottery pops, are tied into the spawning rate of regular monsters. For every monster of a specific type that spawns in the zone, there is a very slim chance that it will be a NM.
Here's an example. In one of the areas of the game, there are a bunch of windmills with giant sheep roaming around them. This area is also home to a NM called "Stray Mary", which happens to be a lottery pop. Now if I wanted to hunt down Mary (which is an actual quest in the game, btw), I would have to go there and hunt down every sheep I can find until one of the respawned sheep spawns as Stray Mary.
As for drops, it's also kind of random as well. With Stray Mary above, she normaly drops some high quality milk that sells pretty good. If you're really lucky, she'll also drop a highly desired bard horn as well (which is the kind of item the Gil farmers/sellers are looking to monopolize as well).
da da da da, duh, duh, da duh daaahhh...
At least for the legit players, anyway.
(Yes I know, it sounds horrible as text. Sue me.)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Then I guess the auctioneers have no chance to survive make their time.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
. . . I'm struck thinking about the kayakers and other boaters outside of the Giants' baseball stadium waiting for Bonds' home run balls to rain riches from the sky. Is this what these Gil Sellers are like?
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.
It's the "It's just a game" mentality. When something is just a game, there are no consequences. Your actiond don't hurt anybody, and there are no hard feelings, nothing to be guilty about. It's pretty easy to be exceedingly cruel to a few pixels on the screen, even if you have a hard time bringing yourself to ask for an exchange when your new shirt ends up being the wrong size. The issues arise when those pixels on the screen are connected to a real person at the other end, some people treat them no differently than they would an NPC.
Why don't they just play City of Heroes?
Ignore all the pettiness and boring parts of all those fantasy RPGs and just have fun. No uber items to collect, no spawns worth camping... Anyone can have a good character and all they have to do is play normally and advance their character.
No, no, no. The guy was Pewter Fellers the famous typing error.
Am I the only one who has absolutely no idea what a Gil seller is?
Sigs are for the weak.
I needed those 50 Monster Signas! Sure you can only equip one at a time and I don't have any jobs that can actually use it, but thats why I had to sell them on the Auction House. Of course that generated more gil than I could hold so I had to sell it in real life. :P
On a serious note - I played FFXI for almost 2 years. I had 2 jobs leveled that needed a Monster Signa (fancy staff for Bards and Beastmasters). 6 months I camped the monster that dropped it and didn't get it once because there was constantly campers there running bots. Eventually it became apparent the only way I could obtain this item would be to either farm a low level area and ruin the game for someone lower level than I, or pay real money to get the gil I decided it was time to go.
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.
X