Post Valentines Day Massacre

No wonder you are in a bad mood you are stuck on some server I never heard of.

It's true, it's dark and lonely here.

Is it really this hard to put 2 and 2 together and realize the amount of public plugins, bots, and hacks is what resulted in everyone multiboxing and refusing to group up?

I didn't say it was hard to put together, what im trying to say is taking it back apart isnt that simple

Lol Valefor should be one of the smallest server in FFXI, and they managed that after being merged?

I think a lot of it also has to do with the community growing up. We all have limited playtimes now due to RL demands. I send a friend a tell and they're afk; someone sends me a tell and i'm afk.

People forgets how much time it requires to actually get all of that tbh. Beads farming, NM farming for empyreans, etc. It would take months unless you would really pay for everything and let people farm for you when you afk. Still i havent seen people willing to farm pre abyssea nms for empyreans and they take a long time because of random pop mechanic. Realistically you would need a week per empyrean probably. Thats all assuming you buy gils, which is stupid in the first place, because who would realistically whale few k of $ to buy rema. 1% of players? If you dont buy gils it would take years to go back to what you had.

Well good news! They're weirdly having a discount campaign at the end of the month in a week.... This is especially weird because they usually have one every May...

Ban a bunch of people, then offer them a reduced ticket back in.... the perfect scheme!

So you create the 3rd party tools and then call everyone that uses them stupid? You're an epic moron.

They have a terms of service. Either you enforce it or you don't. I'm over them trying to have it both ways.

If only half of your alliance of bots gets banned****

Yeah a "week" is a stretch but I'm not particularly focused on that finite period of time. Just stressing how incredibly easy it is to get right back up to speed in a relatively short time. It would not take a person "years" doing it the second time around. Especially if they are using multiple accounts. (BTW, multi-boxing is just roundabout RMT, just done officially, so whether someone buys 500M or uses 6 characters to farm that up in a few hours is ultimately the same thing).

If we're being honest, most of the people getting "banned" come from very good LSs with friends who will probably help them out along the way. So they are not starting from scratch like a brand new player would be. They know how to cut corners and save time, whereas the first time around, you were ignorant of how to get things done expeditiously. If they have a friend or char with capped gil, they are straight. Do you know there were people hit from Dupegate who funnelled a TON of gil/mats/Su5s/necks to friends or stashed on other chars and nothing ever happened to them? They pick right back up where they left off. Gil is not an issue for most endgame players. Stuff like bead farming can be done via scripts, 1k capped every 10~ min? you would be done in a few hours at most. Again, still not a huge deterrent.

It's the stuff like missions/quests/trials will obviously take longer. Getting the weapons back is probably not a deterrent at all for someone who has the means. It's everything else that makes people say "not worth all of that over again".

I do find it kinda funny they ban people then offer discount campaign. (to get the banned people back) It's almost like they do it on purpose.

Can we talk about how to make 500m in a few hours? I wanna get in on that lol.

TO be fair, neither Kujata (Kjata per FFVII's awesome translation) or Valefor are popular recurring avatars at all. I miss all of my friends from Kujata (then Valefor), but I have my trusts now and treat this game as a single player game with an auction house and chat that never ever is interesting.

You don't need fifteen different REMA's on ten different jobs to play the game. And it's OK to, you know, take a break and do other things instead of playing FFXI all the time. I'm more than happy to log in and spend a bit of time chatting with my social, and then run a few scheduled events a week and be done with it. I just enjoy playing my character, and no matter what content I do it's a satisfying experience because the time and effort I've spent building up my character over the years has resulted in something wortwhile.

Yes the community has grown older, but that shouldn't force you to feel like you need to cheat to progress. When I started playing FFXI I felt compelled to put in as much time as I could to "get my money's worth" out of the game because I was just out of high school and that monthly subscription was a lot of money to me. Now that monthly subscription is pocket change so I don't feel like I've lost much if I turn in early for the night. If you feel like getting more stuff is important enough to risk cheating to do it, then you have only yourself to blame if you get banned for it.

It's an exaggeration but mercing woc/kirin would definitely get you close/there.

Idiots out here paying 30m for damn near 100% drop telos earrings and 50m for belts. + 12 leeches is 60m for a 20 minute fight (with buffs and mmm)

I'm being a little loose with the tongue to illustrate a point: you can make a large amount of Gil very fast if you have multiple characters. The key is having multiple accounts and the add-ons to save as much time as possible.

I can agree with that, and thats kind of the point i hit, i don't think the game holds enough for me to stay without having a way to farm gil passivly, and if i hate doing it activly enough to not bother, then maybe its time to hang it up, and this thread kind of helped me see that.

Absolutely... and that was my use case. I wasn't rampantly farming with 24 accounts selling sparks and making billions of gil. On the day I was picked up, I absolutely POS hacked around Ro'Maeve because I was farming Illumink for our LS's Aeonic run that evening. I only had about 20 minutes between meetings where I could fire up the game, killed all the ones in the southern part of Ro'Maeve, and warped behind moon gate to hit 3 more, because I know legacy respawn timers on normal mobs is usually 10-15 minutes.

Yes, I would occasionally overnight JP farm to assist newer LS members with mastering new jobs... Haven't really done it heavily for my own in a while.

I also used the CRAFT lua because I was working on a shield, and working on S4 craftmanship, I did 4000 chocobo fletching synths. I was there and managing the script, because I didn't have the inventory space for that many clusters/feathers at at time.

I absolutely cannot and will deny any of those things, or use of the tools. My playtime is generally limited, and I want to support folks in the LS.

I understand the comments on the end of the first page regarding bot farming, RMT, etc. But the reality is that it's not black and white. These types of actions are not the same as folks that duplicated thousands of kindred medals, instantly sold them off, transferred money, etc. However, because I got my wrist slapped 11 years ago due to testing out the salvage exploit, never even walking away with any additional armor piece out of it, just a few cells to test if it could be done... I'm now permabanned.


I'm all for more widespread enforcement, but the current two strike policy is so antiquated for times before the prevalence and availability of stronger coding tools that enable enhancements to games. Back when it was established, from what I've heard, it was a subscription and paywall to get claim bots back pre-ToAU days.

I haven't played any MMO in the last 5 years where there hasn't been some sort of hyper-available third party tool that would do parsing, limited automation, or packet interpretation.

I'd rather see more enforcement, but also tiers and more strikes that phase out over time to recognize reform/growth/etc... but clearly my opinion clearly doesn't matter.

You only need as much gil as what whatever you set your priorities to requires. If your goal is to get 20 different REMA's to rank 15 in under two months then yes, you're going to need a massive stash of it. If all you want is to keep a couple already current jobs geared up the requirements are far less stringent. I make more than I need just from selling off my monthly mars orb allotment and running vagary and dynamis a few times a week. I've completely finished gearing up a few chosen jobs and I'm happy sticking with just them. You can only play one job at a time so having 10 different REMA DD's comes with a lot of redundancy and overlap. Sure it's useful for versatility, but it's not necessary to function in this era of FFXI. It's all about perspective, and for me the time I spent building up my character is more valuable than any gains I could get from using risky apps.

Checked my email, I seem to be safe (for now). While I'm glad that they're getting more strict about cheating, it's already way too late for most veterans that play the game. Most people that I know play the game have cheated in some capacity or another, and if what I'm reading in this thread is true, the LM-31s are already cocked and ready to go; it's just a random, undetermined amount of time before the trigger gets pulled.

So, thanks for everything! I'll play while I still can, of course. <3

it's very unlikely they keep their lists moving forward, if you stop cheating you're probably good

someone gets it

If I had to place bets:
The banning isn't from botting or pos hack or superwarps.
The banning is from RMT activities whereby people are buying dirty money. RMT banks are stocked with gil from medal duping that can't be moved. SE doesn't want to collapse the economy by banning RMT banks (considering it has been proven ineffective) so they just track where the money goes and ban the account that receives the dirty money.

Wishful thinking.

"In addition, you may not take advantage of game system bugs and exploits during gameplay."

They still salty.

Just finished my unsubs, bonus thats like... enough money for a new game every month !

"Yeah we might be ***, but it's your fault if we are".

I absolutely do not believe they are banning for gilbuying. Not one bit. Especially not from the medal/dupegate. Because nothing happened to people buying and selling those duped medals in bazaars/AH afterwards. Nobody was banned for buying illegitimate Su5/Necks. Nobody was banned for moving billions of gil onto sock accounts. The vast majority of gilbuyers are scrubs overpaying for ***. There are not large numbers of veteran players buying gil as much as there are large numbers of veteran players using apps or exploits.

It's a ridiculous concept hardly worth entertaining. Everyone banned is using the same few things, and SE has never targeted gil buyers in the history of the game.

If you use speed, warp, or afk bot, you are in the ban lottery. If you do not want to be in the ban lottery, stop doing those things. Simple.

"vets" buy just as much as new people. Just for different reasons. but yeah no one has ever informed me that they were banned or suspended, any amount of time after a purchase.

It really is as simple as luck based banning. There's nothing you can't get away with... until your number gets pulled. Not putting your number in the hat is the only way to be certain you will win.

This is my bet.
If you do something, you go in the pool, get reported you go in the pool, if you get drawn, you lose. It's a big pool though. and how many numbers get drawn? random.

Is that a good or effective system? Not especially.