RMT Bots Have Won...

Sadly we have reached a point in this game where it's almost impossible to form a legit ML party, the amount of XP required for 50 is so insanely high people have resorted to afking and buying from RMT, to the people who say "Why don't you just shout for a party yourself?" just don't nseem to understand there is NOONE that will reply. If you're lucky maybe you can form a legit party after shouting for 1~2 hours. Most of population won't even reply to tells because AFK in a bot party for days on end.

The devs needs to take a very agressive stance on this is it's not even hidden anymore, it's all out in the open with XP camps overrun with AFK botters. The game IS dying because of this! I find myself only logging in now for an hour or 2 a day just for my sortie runs with LS, other than that I find it hard to interact with players when we should all have a common goal to XP, instead there is noone.

We could just have the devs log in and take a look at the XP camps themselves, try sending people a /tell and if no reply send them to a temporary jail, this will curb the people wanting buying from them.

What is the point in adding monthly updates when we arent solving the REAL problems infesting this amazing game that I have been playing since launch?

I mean, you're like 2 years late. Yeah, they full blown stopped giving a ***. No one should be grinding 30 million exp. They knew bots would be used.
They counted on it.

They let the autodetection roulette pop 50 accounts a month, say it was 1000 to keep you anxious and just count the money. RMT aren't a problem, they're paying subs. They only count as a problem if you force square to admit it.

I saw you shouting a lot earlier today Cloudius and was almost tempted, I had *almost* fun in the first 20 ML levels, not so much but still bearable up to ML 30, everything past that is beyond insane in terms of effort/time/reward.

And I have 14 jobs past ML30. Three around ML45 actually.



If I can further elaborate, I see these main issues with ML atm

1) The grind (especially past 40, but arguably past 30) is way too high, and it's made even worse by the following points
2) There are not enough (good) camps yet
3) The punishments currently active (having someone higher ML than you and the reducing ep/kill as you raise your ML up) are way too frustrating and create a very bad synergy with point 1


They are, very slowly, working on 2) and the situation is getting better and better and that's good.
They need to do something about 1) and 3).
I think small tweaks would be enough, they don't need to jump from one side to the opposite one.

Eh...RMT suck and *** botting, but I think the issue runs deeper than just RMT.

EXPing in this game is not fun, especially not on the mobs we have, since they're so ball-numbingly easy. It's insanely boring, mindless, and repetitive.

Add on to that the fact that ML are not important or necessary for basically any content in the game. People have cleared V25 NMs with lower than 10 ML on their jobs. There is little, if any, content in the game that requires ML

Then, of course, when people do want ML, they mostly just bot it. Why would someone spend their actual game time doing ML when they're going to be ML when they set up their AFK bot? There's much more productive and fun stuff to do during that time, they're going to do one of those activities.

I think RMT are the least of the problem, and probably 95% of the bots you're seeing are people's own personal bots, and not an RMT. Maybe Asura is different from smaller servers, but we have like...1 RMT group, and then 50 groups of people using their own bot to get ML, or sitting afk in the party of a friend, who is using their own bot to get ML. It's not really a transactional thing, at least on Carbuncle.

The problem is it's boring and unproductive, not that RMTs offer it as a service. The vast majority of people who have ML got them by doing content, botting by themselves, or sitting AFK in a party with a friend who is botting.

Doing ML for more than 1-2 hours is absolute madness/torture.

Yes, we have

Blah emojis didnt show up
You Dont Need ML 50
(Clap emoji between every word)


Also this topic seems to come up every month.

I think you really hit the mark there =/

With that said, there's a lot of RMT for sure but I think it would be quite far from reality to blame it all on them and using them as the scapegoat for everything that doesn't work.


I agree and disagree with what you said here. I think there's a lot of truth in this sentence of yours, but I don't think it's the whole picture.
First of all what is or isn't fun is highly subjective.
Then there's the thing I was talking about before. Something might be even fun for you, but not if the amount of effort/reward is this skewed, at that point you feel so demoralized you don't even want to bother with it.

Last but not least I can see a clear difference (at least on Asura) using Job Points farm as an example.
JPs weren't different than ML, were they? Much, much, much better Effort/Reward but it's basically the same thing and even JPs were quite the grind especially when you didn't have all the bonuses unlocked.
Yet... there were a lot and I mean a lot of shouts for JP parties on Asura. And I mean "regular" parties. There were mercs offering afk services for JPs but they were in the minority and it was still quite easy to assemble a party for JPs.
Yet... how often do you see that happening now? Quite rare, if ever.
I think this should tell something to us.
About the fact that merc services for CPs/EPs are not to be considered as the only thing to blame, 'cause they're clearly not, then again I'm not sure we can claim they played no part at all in the current situation.
They clearly had a role imho. Maybe not a primary one, but definitely not an irrelevant one either.

This, but also: if you're EP'ing 8 DDs you need 8 BRDs. Eventually everyone you know is going to have ML45 BRD and not want to go on BRD anymore.

But really it all boils down to ML aren't that great, they take forever, and they're boring. I get that boring is subjective, but if you have fun hitting a single macro against a target who poses no threat to you for 6 hours straight I think you need to re-evaluate your life.

you don't really *need* a brd to have functional ML, you can use a higher acc tp set and sushi to cover acc and there are tons of ways to do haste.. rdm and dnc is close enough(capped if mostly DWers), geo using indihaste and frailty if not using magic ws, a setup with 1-2 people making a SC and 2-3 MBers killing the mob, etc..

as long as you have a decent skillchain, your killspeed isn't about how much DPS you do on spreadsheet, it's the average time to execute that skillchain.. and there are a lot of ways to keep that time down without insane amounts of buffs

(none of this changes anything in this thread, just pointing out that the people who really want to ML by hand probably should consider setups that don't have all 3 of GEO COR BRD)

My guy
U been here long enough to know if its not 500k EP/hr, its garbage. BRD COR GEO RDM DD DD or bust.

cor is kind of irreplacable, but i guarantee you can do comparable speed with a party that doesn't have BRD or doesn't have GEO if you put a little thought into it

Homie missed the sarcasm

I think ML rewards are quite great actually.

Only that there is only so much to do with play time during day.

My case for example, i had already compromised 1h30 in my life for the daily sortie and seg farm.

Add the natural entrophy of that (prepping, moving, etc), then we can say I have 2h already compromised daily.

There are the non-daily tasks, like grinding some specific gear, doing ambuscade, doing dina div, doing some Omen, doing some UNM, some spark.

Also consider I end my work at 18h, clear of post work tasks 19h, and need to go to sleep 22h. You can see there is not enough time.

Now back to ML: if we are talking about vanilla parties, you can add a solid 30m~1h just to gather peeps and go to camp. At this point point, you are already giving up some of your daily tasks.

And this could be potentially a fluke: maybe you gathered so bad party you find that you could be doing better with one mule, or only with trusts. But you had to fit a 4 DDs party, 1 BRD 1 trust healer.

That could be possibly to bear if the improvements of this could be noticeable. Like, suppose Im cp-ing: I spent 2h but damn, Im walking with 100~500JP.

But no! its so slow you spent your entire day of play time only to earn 1/10 of your TNL 30, maybe.

Then you conclude to never do this again.

The people buying/botting are the only ones who care about maxxing their MLs, because the folks succeeding at content understand that while they help, they are far from necessary beyond maybe ML30.

I won't deny the big benefits early on for mages in getting extra base stats and skill, and I won't deny how important hitting certain tiers of ML can change the playstyle of jobs in very positive ways. But I am saying that no one needs ML50 to clear v25 Odyssey fights or Aminon, or even the newest Master Trials.

Its the horizon, not the destination. Something always there, always slightly out of reach...and if you ever could reach the horizon, all that you would find is disappointment.

Grinding MLs is mind numbingly boring past 20 or 30 and it doesn't really provide much mastery of your job smashing weak enemies over and over again, after a certain point the reward doesn't really scale with the effort either (aside from the few jobs that get something good at 45). I think during 75-cap it was more engaging because the enemies/areas actually posed a threat and more coordination was required.

I know it's been said a dozen times, but I wish they would have awarded more EP/MLs for completing or doing content. It might encourage more diverse job configurations for things like Sortie and Odyssey while providing more meaningful mastery of the job. I did most of my MLs on PLD in Sheol C and the amount of time it took me just to reach 40 was absurd (admittedly the EP return isn't bad below 30), imagine spreading that across a few jobs, some of which aren't really welcome in that type of content, and it takes an unreasonable amount of time. If they want to keep people logging in doing daily stuff, giving impactful EP returns on DI, Omen, Odyssey, and Sortie might make those feel more rewarding and keep people engaged with actually interesting content. They could keep the current system for the 10 people who actually want to do it.

Putting the tinfoil hat on for a moment, if there actually is automated detection of botting based on some engagement time threshold, it's possible the later MLs are also acting as some sort of honeypot. I doubt it was their only goal, but Fujito has said in the past he wanted to do more to address this type of activity, so in part it could make detection more effective than it was before MLs. I struggle to think they set it so far out there solely for this purpose, though, and it probably has more to do with a perpetually dangling carrot especially considering how many seem to evade actually being banned.

Grinding MLs has a few major problems:

1.) Exponential TNL. ML1-42 is 33% of the total EP from 1-50.
2.) Diminishing returns: You have to Level Sync with someone lower than you, or else you get 350-400 EP/kill by ML40.
3.) COR is irreplaceable with a whopping +20% EP from Corsair's roll.
4.) Most camps are awful in terms of gimmicks / kill speed or other battle advantages.

SE could improve EP by fixing the above, but also improve with non-battle offerings, like EP rings, new RoE, Escort quests, etc. Shoot, I'd even take a "jobs-of-the-day EP bonus."

Job Points also had a way higher reward frequency than ML. 20-30 Minutes spent JPing usually yielded enough for 1 JP upgrade, even when playing solo; you made progress.

Farming Omen for swarts yields around 28 job points near the end. I think a sortie run barely covers the ep loss of one death.

People here saying it get's a drag around ML30 but that's from a solid to perfect party setup perspective. Going solo it already becomes a drag at ML ~7-10 and absolutely unbearable at ML 15.

That's corporate speak. He could have ment anything from adding more camps so bots would interfer less with regular players to the EP scaling at ML30+ which can only be understood as a exclusive reward for the average bot enjoyer.

Maletaru already said it: ML are not *required* for any part of FFXI. Certain breaks, like ML5, absolutely give helpful options/abilities to different jobs (ex. gaining access to Stona while /SCH). Certain breaks absolutely help lower gear requirements due to having higher maximum skill (ex. Geomancers able to max out CMP and add DT gear rather than needing skill+), etc. But frankly, anyone running around at ML50 is a bit suspect to me. I don't expect that type of player to actually know their job (before anyone cries at me, obviously some exceptions exist). I feel like you can legitimately judge people on:

• Master level

• Job Point Stars over their head - on or off

• Lockstyle is basic/boring or is there any attempt at creativity - I would literally rate swimsuit lockstyles above someone in full Erilaz or Nyame

I know that's a goofy and judgemental list. But in my experience if I ignore or don't consider those things, I'm usually joining a party that's not great.

Jokes on you. I lockstyle Erilaz, and Arbatel, and Lethargy for Sortie F check requirements now!

I'll take the botted ML50 vs the main job ML10 all day every day.

There is literally no excuse to not be atleast ML20. A shitty group doing 50k/hr can hit ML20 in 16 hours. A decent group doing 100k/hr can do that in 8 hours. If someone, at this stage, cant make that minor commitment and effort to get to ML20, they're probably lazy af about other things as well.

Not wanting to disagree with you, we're saying pretty much the same things after all.
But 3.) sorta is a consequence of 1 and 2.
It's because those are that bad, that suddenly a 20% boost becomes irreplaceable.
If 1 and 2 weren't that bad, then 3 would still be useful but not really "mandatory", if you get what I mean.

Its actually higher.

Presuming playing mostly safe (stopping on 6) with Barataria Ring, that's already +28 (13 + 10 from ring + 5 from cor). Playing more aggressively (saving fold/snakeye for Cor Roll only, therefor only staying on 5, 10 or 11) with Regal Neck nets you 39%, 36% or 43%. Maxed Roastam would be an extra 2% on each roll. Thats not even factoring Crooked Cards.

Its a huge bonus, and pointwatch reports much higher EP/hr doing Cor Roll over any other DD roll.

Pretty sure RMT cut SE in some of the winnings at this point. Theyre probably allowed to do their RMT activities if they let SE wet their beaks a little.

SE's actions and inactions only encourage RMT. I mean, it's plausible.

It's not 2003 anymore, the game is not grinding XP. It's everything else.

No one's doing (legitimate) ML parties past ML30-ish cause they have respect for their own time and want to do actual content not grind XP for hours on end and get nowhere.

/RUN at 45. That's it. That's the only excuse you have to go that high. And you better be lowmaning stuff with that because no one needs PLD/RUN in a 6 man.

If anything ML50 just makes the game easier, which is really not ideal when there won't be *more* anytime soon.

Why are you not level syncing to the lowest ML?


My 2 gil: SE needs to add ML spots that are much better EP than the current spots and make them extremely hard\dangerous to bot (I know but the average EF user is the target here).

aren't you the no cheating guy & ban everyone guy?

My brain on a job that's ML50

If thats what you got from the thread where your buddy linked all the bots, you're dumber than Eiryl.