Exodus

I'm sorry to see you go Moonja. I've enjoyed reading your posts.

I know several people who transfer their mains to and from Asura during discount campaigns to sell their goods in a more active market. I also assume there are many others who have mules they swap during these campaigns; one outgoing with goods to sell and one incoming with gil or goods that are in short supply at home.

This means little, but worth noting.

Right now, every day is the new lowest the population has been in 202X

Gonna be 69k tomorrow


78,198 October 1st
77,575
76,118
74,646
73,311
72,500
71,814
71,394
70,960
70,278 October 10th

Other than going free to play - the next best thing they could do to stall this trend would be to unban all banned accounts or have some sort of amnesty and reinstation event. Unfortunately there are too many short sighted individuals that reeeeeee everytime I bring this up.

LOL what? The best thing they could do to fix the community is to unban all the cheaters? Interesting. Count this as my reeeee because that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Could really improve city populations if they let all the criminals out of the prisons too, think about it!

lmao. NOBODY cheats in 2023. Honk Honk!

Oh ok. As long as we know that some people are cheating, we might as well welcome back with open arms people that we know for a fact definitely cheated, and got caught doing so.

Completely unrelated: if you want to find someone to date, look for someone who was caught on camera cheating on their spouse, because since some part of the population cheats, it's not a bad thing, and we should encourage it by giving them a second chance.

If you want a babysitter, look for someone who's been convicted of abducting kids because screw it, we know some kids get abducted anyway, what's the difference?

Accounts historically weren't banned just for cheating - they were banned for breaking Terms of Service. Cheating is just your emotionally charged word you want to slap on the topic.

So many people were banned early on for simply taking advantage of SE's ***coding or for some very tame and innocuous violation of TOS. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/jr729d/does_anyone_remember_the_2009_salvage_mass_bans/

The situation today is so so so so much worse than it has ever been before but people walk around impervious because to take action unilaterally and without favor would be to close the game down over night.

Just spitballing, I'm willing to bet that 95% of people still playing are in some way shape or form breaking the ToS.

Lastly, a big gigantic LOL from me on equivocating criminals, kidnappers and infidelity to breaking SE's TOS on a video game hahahahaha.

Seems like a pretty clear-cut explanation to me, and *** all those people who exploited the code to duplicate drops.

Cheat can be defined by Merriam-Webster as: to violate rules dishonestly

I feel like maybe that qualifies somewhere in this scenario, I just can't place it...maybe I'm reading too much into the SE webpage labeled support.na.square-enix.com/rule.php, or the fact that they put the user agreement in the "Rules and Policies" subsection, but it feels like this might be a rule, that people violated dishonestly.

You're right that if they enforced the rules at this point, the game would collapse. Unfortunately they let it get out of control and entirely too many people cheat now. You may even be correct that it's north of 95% now, I'm not sure. What I think we disagree about though, is you want that to be 96, 97, or 99% by bringing back people who verifiably cheated, one way or another. I'd be happier if we stick with 95%, or if maybe some of these people reconsidered their self-justification and stopped cheating to bring that number down. I'll settle for not inviting back known cheaters for now though.

How can it be cheating when that's the behavior that was programmed to take place? What rule was violated when people disbanded their alliance and SE rewarded them for it lol?

How do you know that people that were banned would repeat the offense they were banned for?

You and others with your perspective are very emotional about this topic and it's to the detriment of everyone.

The clear priority for the games survival is reversing the declining trend in the player population.

The quote above was from the TOS. If there was an NPC which handed out free items and you could sell them back for gil, do you think it would be acceptable to get infinite gil on all your characters because you're just using the behavior that was programmed?

"YOU MAY NOT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF GAME SYSTEM BUGS AND EXPLOITS DURING GAMEPLAY"

This is the rule that was violated. Hope this helps clarify.

How do I know that people would repeat offend? I don't know for certain, but as I said in my examples above, I wouldn't hire a pedophile as a babysitter because while they might not reoffend, I'd rather not make an active decision to invite them into a child's life. I also wouldn't invite a convicted burglar to be a security guard for a jewelry shop, or date someone who cheated on their spouse, or invite someone who cheated in a chess match to play at a chess tournament, or...how many examples do you need?

I don't see where it could do much harm at this point, except general amnesty would also mean unbanning people who were banned for racism, sexism, verbal abuse, etc, of which there were plenty I can point out alone. Enticing these players to return would likely draw a crowd you don't really want back in the game and cause them to duplicate work in dealing with the mess they bring by having to ban them all over again. Despite SEs flaws in enforcing rules these days, they are pretty quick to deal with this now, at least the few times I reported it (this is the only thing I've ever reported players for). I doubt they have a mechanism to just unban people who were banned for specific reasons, so you open another bag of worms here.

That being said, these gameplay rules are not enforced consistently and across the board. They may ban some individual player for using EF in Bibiki Bay, meanwhile the same ML bots have been running for years now 3y away with no issues. This inconsistent enforcement and cycle of players starting over again (after being banned for the same thing the bots are doing) only benefits RMT at this phase of the game. I think the game would be better if they could balance around intended mechanics and enforce these rules, but they can't, so I don't think banning for things like EF or GS is really benefitting the player base. Also, every player in the game is going to have benefitted from their lax enforcement, whether you use them directly or not. All that together, I don't think unbanning most of these is going to change much unless they all of a sudden start aggressively enforcing rules, which they aren't.

They've also not exactly always been fair about it either. I had my strongest 75-cap character reported and banned for flee hacking in town except that I literally used the JA flee on THF and the GM didn't care to check. I know numerous other instances of false reports where people were banned and had no recourse, this late in the game I'm sure some of us would like to see those toons again.

I also would expect most banned accounts to be borderline useless. The economy is inflated beyond any point that it was during prior eras and they were considerably more aggressive in banning prior to a few years ago. Unbanning a ToAU era account isn't going to get you much and I'd anticipate most accounts to fall into that category.

This has a 0% chance of happening, but if they were able to do it for characters that weren't due to abusing other players, I think it'd be great for some of us who were unfairly banned in years past or even banned for stupid stuff like flee hacking or fishbots, even if it's just for the nostalgia fix.

Did you just seriously compare people who choose to "cheat" in an online Video Game to *checks notes* Child Predators?

I think you are in dire need of touching some grass, my dude.

Item duping = "very tame and innocuous violation of TOS"

You want to explain those quotes? Would you like to provide a reference for any of these behaviors not being cheating? I think it's 100% clear that all behavior described (except false positives like the flee anecdote above) are 100% cheating by any reasonable definition. Please, show me a definition of cheating that says you can break the rules to gain an advantage over your peers/competitors and it's not cheating, please. Is it not considered cheating because your friends do it too?

...in 2009, 14 years ago. There isn't a single useful piece of gear on any of those banned characters and it's not like whatever alex they have holds a candle to the amount the Salvage bots selling it do.

You should be really proud of yourself for how much you the programs you've downloaded have accomplished. For the record, I have no idea what you've accomplished, nor do you have any idea what I've accomplished, because this website doesn't list achievements. I guess you could say it lists some of mine, since Guildwork lists some REMA information, but that ***is insanely broken and outdated. I'm not interested in a *** measuring contest but did find it funny you don't have yours listed. You aren't proud of all the hard work you put into botting all your REMAs? You should list your page publicly so you can get all the accolades you deserve for downloading all those bots.


For the record, when I refer to cheating I'm referring to breaking rules, which I think is pretty commonly understood to be cheating. As illustrated above, SE has a rule on their website which states:

By my estimation, it doesn't say anything about the availability of cheats to other players, or about an uneven playing field. It doesn't say that you can use all the unauthorized software you want, as long as it's publicly available for all to use. Sounds like you might be coping, seething, and dilating too much. I'm sure there's some medication which could help with that.

Welcome to the year 2023. A dystopian future where a man named Maletaru has seized control of the criminal justice system and rules over the populace with an iron fist.

With his unparalleled powers of discretion and rationality he oversaw many injustices.

Once, a man was accused of kidnapping a small child while baby sitting. Maletaru sentenced him to a life sentence in Mordion Gaol.

Another time, a man accused his girlfriend of cheating on him. Maletaru sentenced the girlfriend to a life sentence in Mordion Gaol.

A third time, 3 party leaders in a video game disbanded their party and got extra pixels and points in the SQL database. Maletaru sentenced these 18 men and women to a life sentence in Mordion Gaol.

He was truly the wisest of us all.

you guys are arguing over a moot point. even if the banned accounts were restored, 99% of those ppl would have 0 interest in coming back.

I may not be clairvoyant, but if I had to guess, I'd say a couple people in this thread might have a banned account they want back. Wild guess though.

You don't get what you don't ask for. I don't care if I get my account back or not. I care that when I log on there are actually people to do things with. You boys are simps. Simps for SE and simple in the head.

Dude's so salty, it's all over his lips in his profile pic

Yes, yes I am very proud of being at the top of the pecking order when it comes for players people look for whenever they want ***done instead of losers like you who are commonly avoided like the goddamn plague.

Or maybe you should refrain from touching "grass"?

I have no idea what the numbers you think were, but only ~550 accounts were perma'd over it. I can guarantee that atleast half of those people banned made new accounts within 6 months, with the remaining people saying "*** it I was bored of this shitty dead game anyways".
But lets presume these 550 accounts get unbanned:
1-Do you really think these people banned nearly FIFTEEN years ago still have their login information documented anywhere?
2-What makes you think they want to play FFXI?

I just noticed someone posted links to bots. This thread's about to get AF/AC'd.

This guy is clearly trolling and you're feeding.

it's a thing of mine, don't kink shame ok!