SE Anti-farming Now?

SE attacking RMTs isn't much different from how real life law enforcement agencies go after illegal drug dealing or prostitution. Arrest buyers to drive down demand or arrest distributors to eliminate the supply? Obviously there's no surefire way to do either, but SE seems to be trying both at once. We can all complain about how they're screwing it up one way or another or we can be happy that they're at least trying something.

In the end it may be some outside influence that resolves the situation, such as the Chinese government taxing the RMTs so heavily that they decide it isn't worth it to continue :P

It's harder now to make gil, than it was back in 2004.
Atleast in my opinion.

this is very true. BCNM's are gimped. I use to make money off of ODS. they gimped drop rates hard. farmign is horrible. previously statd in thread so i don't need to reiterate it. we all know what's going on. but SE is in control of the ball game so we have to clench our teeth, bear it and see what other stuff they have in store. a lot of ppl had good points on this thread from both opposing views. we all know that the drop rates steadily decreased over time for the "good stuff." the treasure chest thing doesn't give anythign good so far worth while. someone mentioned about putting stuff on AH etc etc but in reality the wait time and losing out on gil is not worth it. its selfish to say "oh yeah you sell your junk that i can buy cheap so i can get richer" isnt fair to the farmer. comparing real life farming to the game i don't think is fair only because this is supposed to be fantasy and not reality. the game is controlled by the programmers. i dont knwo why everyone acts like they can't do anything. they can do whatever they want to this game. what i mean by this is if they wanted to rthey could make mog's into a behemoth without DAT swapping if they wanted but there would be problems alongside that. we all need to give SE a chance to figure out what they need to do (even though its taken them this long)
but in the meantime they need to think about better ways of making gil. its a fast random post so if it doesnt make sense whatever

i think that SE is gonna make it so hard to make gil that more and more people will start thinking about buying gil from RMTs. Prices are dropping on some items, but stuff like Skystrider is 1 mil still, on my server anyway. So i think SE is just making the RMT problem worse trying to make it better.

totally agreed on that. Ive always thought that from day one but never said anything about it.

The problem is my opinion is that SE likes to procrastinate. What I mean by this is that they seem to only address issues when the problem gets so bad that they are forced to.

In the past they never really addressed issues as they came up, and the only attempts they did do were just temporary fixes that would not have any true resolution. I guess just enough to say they were doing something and please the masses?

They never really had much reason to put a lot of effort into dealing with RMT I guess. As more and more competition arises added to the aging of the game itself, I think they are really just trying to keep up with the rest. FFXI as far as I'm aware has one of the worst problems with RMT. It's no where near where it use to be but it's still there. It's harder to ban since the gilfarmers generally try to keep under ToS collecting it.

I was mainly against their gimping farming b/c, to me at least, it only seems like a temporary fix. It won't have any lasting affect as far as I can see. But as I've said before it appears they are finally realizing this is an issue they need to try to permanently fix.

There are only a couple ways I can foresee them fixing this problem for good.
1) Either make it almost impossible to buy gil and get away with it. Maybe this auto-ban program can do that Idk, I doubt it will get everyone though. If worst came to worst I suppose they could make all large transactions only possible when a GM is involved. Though that would probably cause users frustration and cost them a lot in customer service from complaints and the GMs themselves.
2) Sell gil themselves. Make buying gil from them legal would potentially run RMT out of business. Who is going to buy from RMT and risk banning when they can get gil from SE and not have any risk? They probably would benefit more from that though. They get all the money and can set the price to whatever they want, as long as they keep up on banning anyone involved in RMT transactions.

If anyone else has any ideas, please share. I'd be curious as to what people can come up with or other's views on this.

SE should sell their own gil. i think i read somewhere of another game doing something similar. but he SE would get a whole lot more revenue and maybe ffxi better with all that extra money they make.

I've always had this theory for the longest that SE was behind the gilselling sites. I've said it before and i'll say it again you have to nip the bud at the source. Find a better way to use gil and the current auction house system.
Take for instance WoW. The system isn't so dependent on gil. If you want your own gear just do the quests. they give you substantial exp and money. Enough to hold your own. No one is pressured to skim and cheat others because everyone has the chance to EARN their stuff not ust buy their way to everythign. You could be a complete noob on FF and if you know the right ppl and friends you can BUY your way to everything. It almsot seems like the same ppl against what we(ppl like Yaku and i) have to say are too lazy irl possibly and get everythign they want, have lots of money to buy gil and just play the game or have some advantage via skimming ppl, finding loopholes themself and using it and gaining on everyone else. thats the same elitist view in the wold today.
We all are not going to agree on the same thing but we have to be realistic and instead of going on a tangent from the problem itself and put out a solution and maybe let SE know. We are the player base and we experience the game better than them (the programmers). SE is trying hard I understand that but like yaku said they ALWAYS have procrastinated until the problem is a festering soar that needs medical attention instead of just a band aid.
One guy in this thread had a good point as well about the reason why SE did the farming gimp where if they take away the gil then the gilsellers will have to be forced to stop because there is no other way to do so. But what people aren't seeing is that almost every option to do things and earn gil is being taken away. You know the natural human reaction when you corner a person or take away everythign they have? Rebellion, Revolution, and then Restitution. Thats the way of life.

Point of my post: Make drops adundant, make gil abundant, make many things abundant to the point where gil wont matter anymore and ppl aren't tempted to buy gil because they're being HELD BACK. GIL IS THE MAIN PROBLEM HERE. that is the only thign that needs to be revamped. Everyone wants to progress in this game and not have to farm 90% of their career on this game to get only 10% of things done. And for all those ppl that are being pessimistic and just going off topic and LOLing about the situation i hop SE takes whatever or gimps whatver is making you rich or whatever and then we'lll see how fast you come back to this thread and change your mind.

Oh yeah and to the person that was like "yeah stop whingin about farming" when everyone is so fed upand not farming YOUR items to put on AH anymore and you have to spend 90% of your time to get those items then take your own advice when you start crying about it. The AH is already in a decline and you can already see no one wants to sell anythign anymore because its barely worth it. Time = Money and very soon a lot of ppl (like myself) will realize that there are other games that you can ACTUALLY HAVE FUN in again. Don't get me wrong i love FF seriously but the money issue has alwyas been a problem with me and im getting tired of it. Haven't used the AH in a long time. unless i have to or im LAZY.

Well, I have to say I personally do not believe SE is in anyway behind the RMT actions. Perhaps some GMs in the past independently aided RMT, but it just wouldn't make sense for SE to as a whole. The problem with SE being behind it would be that eventually they would have been caught, and then would be facing legal actions when they could just easily sell it themselves w/o any legal hassles. And I don't think they would spend so much on anti-RMT actions like they do now if they were the ones behind it. I don't condone buying gil even if it was from SE legally though.

Why hasn't SE ever sold gil or maded gil and/or items abundant? Well I think the answer to that is simple: endgamers/re-play value. One of the problems with games like WoW and others like it is that once you get to the end of the game there is no real challenge to getting the stuff you want. SE purposely makes getting many items hard so that players get a sense of accomplishment and keep playing. FFXI targets a different audience than games like WoW do. FFXI is meant despite their pre-msg when logging in, to be almost like another life and take all your free time to get anything done. While games like WoW are meant for more casual players with less emphasis on endgame. Games like WoW do have time consuming aspects but overall FFXI is just a much more time drain(aka more monthly fees). If you add in the ability to buy gil or make sought after items more easily attained I think it would pretty much ruin how the game is played.

How many people really still have fun in FFXI after they get 75 in a job or 2? I don't really know many myself. It's more of a sense of accomplishment that I think we strive to achieve than fun anymore. Their goal is to keep us addicted by having something to desire and obtain or accomplish and personally they have me hooked D<.

But back to the topic of this thread. I guess SE wasn't so much anti-farming as they were just plain lazy. They inadvertently harmed many, many people in an attempt to stop the current wave of RMT. They fought it kinda like how we fight viruses, find something to kill the current strain and wait for it to evolve and then fight taht strain, rinse, repeat. Perhaps the npc'd items were a loophole, we will never really know. It's not like SE will ever tell us anything, they won't even explain how most of the game mechanics work lol. So I guess we are all at the mercy of the RMT-PWNER V1.337 until SE makes their next move.

yeah, i don't even bother with the AH anymore, only if I'm selling a old piece of equipment. i go farm something, put it up and days later it gets sent back to me, i check the price list to see that its been lowered by a lot. I tried farming tiger fangs after i got tired of the AH, too many people doing that now.
Also, i think if SE busts RMTs selling gil, they should give out the gil to random people somehow. So the gil is still in the economy.

Well a couple things.

I feel your pain on the ah always seeming to be against you. I seem to have really bad luck on that when it comes to reselling gear lol.

Now for the farming, I'm not sure if your problem is getting the fangs and having too much competition to be worth while. Which you could just go to a higher/lower level camp of that type, such as going from Batallia to the Glacier. Or if your problem is selling them, many items like fangs can be turned in for a repeatable quest, fangs for example are 2,100 gil per 3 in a S.Sandy quest. Also you could do level a craft to use the those hides and sell them as leather for more than what hides bring in usually.

When it comes to the dispersing gil to random people, I'm highly opposed. Sure it would be great to win a random lottery so to say when a RMT group gets banned but that would just lead to an inevitable inflation. Your gil you have if you didn't win the lotto would just become worth increasing less, leaving you in worse shape than now. Countries burn/destroy RL currency as new currency is made to avoid increasing the already natural inflation. When a lot of people get a lot of gil/items for nothing it hurts what we have now really. I mean take the mog bonanza for example, B.hides and the like were destroyed for a long time. And that was only a 1 event thing, imagine what it would be like if they had done mogbonanza every week.

Would hate to see SE make it legal to buy gil off them for RL cash. Imo would destroy the current in-game economy as it is players that dictate prices on the AH and if gil gets flodded into game buy gil buying item prices would rise and gil value would decrease.

Lets face it we pay £120 a year to play this game at least and not everyone will be in a position to start paying X amount for gil on top just to keep up with people buying mass amounts.

I would like to see more "easier" ways of making gil though im resorting to garrison recently because im out of BCNM seals (which i've yet to win anything decent at yet -.-) and im put off farming its not my thing.

I agree with Xeno... more events with big gil hand outs or sumthing would be good...

Edit: lol yeah inflation forgot about that XD

Can somebody make these walls-o-text go down to a summary (not bothering with spellcheck on this one) for me please?

Wall-o-text makes my eyes hurt ><.

Edit: Bothered with the spellcheck, meh

I know they're trying to hamper the RMT's but mistletoe and bloods were a large source of my income. :(

One thing to also keep in mind when the game first launch the the high level was lvl 50, not lvl 75. So effectivly farming Beast blood was not something players were doing back then. So maybe SE didnt think much about the selling price of that item to NPCs at the time of launch.

Its just a thought.

O.o wow another Necro bump today lol

>.>

I know some people still bitter about this >.<

Almost every THF is bitter about this. The Sanctuary of Zi'tah was like THF Central. You want to meet every THF in Vanadiel? go there. Also when this update took effect, the Goblin Robbers stopped dropping Goblin Mail/Helm. This inmensly pissed me off. Now my Smithing Stuck at 30something because now I have nowhere to easily farm these.

fyi the gob robbers haven't stopped dropping mail/helms its just that the drop rate is so wack it seems that way.

"So, how can SE tackle this persistant camping of the same spot by RMT other than the way they have handled it?"

Sell it themselves.

No more RMT and the prices for farming / Crafting would adjust to the new influx of gil.

Necro Bump Detected! [92 days between previous and next post]

>_< I thought this message meant make a new Thread. so I did that too lol

Where do I start:

1. They don't do it every week, so that entire point is moot.

2. the percentages of gil being "added" are as next to nothing as makes no odds. Especially when you consider that it's player gil that is used for pay outs. Kinda like how Lottery works in the states, and various other places on Earth. I know you guys were discussing RMT gil being dispursed. I'm talking about Mog Bonanza here! :P

3. As for the craftable items they gave away. Nobody said you had to sell it right away. I think a fair chunk of players knew ahead of time that prices would get slaughtered... supply... *say it with me* ... and demand. Beautiful.. isn't it? :) Demand got pwned by Supply, and thus.. the price drops... why is this topice still even being discussed.... In time, the price returned to normal. No, the simple fact is that it's free gil, and everyone wants some. Don't act like you're somehow above all that.. because you and I both know you're not.

4. Crafting isn't "broken". If you can't find a way to make gil off of a craft then I don't know what to tell you. I do.

5. Oh, and lastly.. it takes a lot more than "burning currency to replace it with new stuff" to fix an ecconomy. In fact, if you're just replacing new with old, you're not really doing much of anything. If I trade you a shiny new 2009 penny, for a less-than-shiny 1987 penny.. I didn't really gain much.. did I?