Dev Tracker - Discussion

It varies I guess, I've had a few orders auto cancel because I didn't want them anymore and they didn't ban me. That was during COVID when they only had the option for ridiculous shipping price. That aside, they have the best prices and I buy from them regularly. The NA based places like bigbadtoystore regularly increase the price on merch from Japan. They had the XI stuff too and it was more expensive than amiami. Just better to wait for it to go up there or hobbygenkai, but they usually make you pay upfront unless it says "pay later"

I love the crab plushy but now I want a Rarab plush to commemorate all the people killed by foot kick.

I want wind-up Chigoes.

https://www.amiami.com/eng/search/list/?s_originaltitle_id=3389&pagecnt=1

Cheaper than Squeenix.

The shipping gonna be like 20~25 dollars but you can bundle them all together since majority are coming out in JAN.

I'm pretty sure my 4 year old is going to avoid the crab plushy and kracken club my face off instead. Pretty excited.

lul

If they actually do it, it will be the biggest banpocalypse yet.

that would be exiciting

Never wanted to look into EF and really don't want to now. The anchor'd 6 stacks stand out like a sore thumb.

But maybe they'll get me for all those Shinryu runs that I didn't get anything out of. On the plus side, I won't have to pay a monthly sub anymore.

All those extremely obvious douchebag parties where they stand on each other and pull with chakrams do indeed stick out. No one could ever confuse that for real play. Literally only the absolute stupidest players fight things by pulling, especially with throwing items. It does happen, I've seen morons in the wild doing it but it's extremely rare.

And the fact that they've just blatantly ignored it for years means they're everywhere now.

I don't even think it's a case of ignorance. I think it's moreso they don't have the resources available to deal with it. If everything related to cheating, RMT etc. is indeed going through one small team, they are either ridiculously overwhelmed or unable to do anything about it. It'd probably be automation which would provide some level of hope at this point, for example the disconnections from speedhacking. I'm sure that is recorded their side somehow.

It is not an issue of resources. That is absolute horse ***.

It's a lack of willingness to lose subs and thereby showing how few people actually play.

I'd disagree there because the majority of the accounts doing this would just make new ones anyways since the payoff is more lucrative than the cost of a new account, time to gear account, so on, but, I see where you're coming from and it's a fair point.

How can they be overwhelmed?

If that's their job, even one person could make huge inroads on the bots just by warping around vanadiel and the hot spots are known. Most servers are barren anyways. Its not like ffxi is that big or that populated.

Every single bot could be found and warped to mordion in one work day. It is not difficult in the slightest. And it requires almost zero input, zero investigation and almost zero effort.

Any reason they have or will give is excuses for reasons of greed. It would be extremely bad for shareholders to see square ban such a massive percentage of "playerbase".

Yeah I don't think it has much to do with them losing subs, because the people who primarily RMT just remake accounts anyways. They get paid regardless, and RMT find new ways to make money in the game, especially if it's their RL source of income. Banning them won't put a huge dent into SE's pockets.

They've described the challenge of handling RMT as a cat and mouse game before, so maybe they realize that most of their efforts are futile in the end because they have to keep thinking of new ways to de-incentivize RMT, but that takes time. Also, most methods implemented to the game to combat RMT would indirectly hurt players, so it's a balancing act. I agree though, blatant cheating is so obvious, how can they not take action?

I think they should try to get more creative with punishments instead of flat bans, like institute new Gaol prison sentences, where if you go to GM Jail, you are forced to do mindless tasks to retrieve your gear, similar to Salvage Pathos. Or, restrict in-game mechanics (like full encumbrance on bots that are found to be cheating, or disable magic casting for 2 hours). Instead of outright banning them, force them to play handicapped in some way for a predetermined period of time. Chances are, bots that aren't manned will end up dying, and hurting their business in the long run, so they won't be so brazen about their botting in the open. Bots probably won't care; they will delete the account and start over. But actual players who have something to lose would be more cautious about botting or cheating, so much that it would discourage them from even doing it, else risk a lot of time. Banning players gives them a way out. Locking their characters in some vegetative state is a lot more creative and punitive.

It's not the 100% all the time only bots that I'm talking about. Yeah, I'll make new accounts when they ban mine, so will the rest.

It's the normies botting their cp every night. Because they've gotten emboldened by lack of bans that I'm talking about. They won't make new accounts. Then the full time bots have less part time bots to sell gil to. And it all collapses.

There's the onlybots, and then "players who are botting".

New accounts aren't endless, especially when most of the chinese RMT shouting to sell aeonic/jp/ml are using idris in their endeavors. They are able to do that because they are not getting banned frequently. If you lose your account after a week of botting master levels, you've basically eliminated master level sales because you can't replace an idris account every week, and even replacing a decent enough melee on a weekly basis would be a huge problem.

Yes, banned RMT will 'just make a new account', but that will limit them to things like sparks botting that have a low barrier to entry. You can very easily eliminate most of the visible RMT activity around endgame camps by just checking the camps once a day and nuking anyone who's been active for 12hr+. The only logical conclusion is that the playerbase would rather have these services available, and SE recognizes that they're not going to gain anything by banning the RMT providing them.

RMT may be against the terms of service, but that does not mean it's costing SE subs. Their goal isn't to provide the most fair playing field, it's to get the most subscription money. A significant amount of players use and enjoy having these services available, so SE is willing to turn the other cheek to an extent.

Being able to bot your job/mastery points with 3 characters also gives normal players an incentive to play 3 accounts. If you start banning consistantly for doing these things, you will probably end up with a bunch of players deactivating additional accounts. Where's the value proposition change? It's a huge risk to try to clamp down on all botting in hopes that it'll be replaced by a more interactive ecosystem. It could just as easily cripple the game's population even more.

If you're referring to master levels it will absolutely not be a community thing until they either introduce camps that give better EP per kill or start stacking bonuses to EP gained like they did with capacity points back when job points were released. The sheer amount of grind to get from ML40 to ML50 is such that I'd rather not do it at all, tbh, if my only option for doing so is manual grind with camps and rates we have available now.

I actually don't mind EXPing in some forms, depending on the group. I actually enjoyed AOE parties until they kind of nerfed it. Even CJ parties were unique until they removed that as well. Idk, everything they've done with Master Levels has been geared towards just making the grind so absurd. I haven't even touched MLs since they added Locus to Crawler's Nest, and I don't see myself joining any groups anytime soon for Master Levels because it takes way too long. Would rather get residual MLs just doing adhoc tasks here and there. Damned those few extra stats from upper ML cap. I'll get them when they come.

My friend said after 2 days of botting he got 1 mil xp..

Lmao........

Well, the RMT are gonna make a killing off of ML40-50 from those who can't wait and need those stats nowww. What's it at now, 200m still?

I mean, ML is just a luxury atm. There is no need for it other to make clearing content a little easier. Not like there is equipment that requires it (yet).

I feel bad for the soloists

Not only is this the biggest ffxi xp grind that ever existed that requires it for each job, with no double xp buffs or rings (cor roll i know) but they took out the best solo trust in the game with the same update...

The sad truth about RMT...


"A delicate game of cat and mouse" is a much more PC response than "stop buying gil and there won't be so many people trying to sell you gil".

it is so weird to me that people acknowledge the system is shitty and then criticize the people who refuse to willingly submit to its fake rules

like, if you were all saying the ML grind was actually cool and good, no notes...well, that would be insane but i'd understand the disdain for bots. as it is, we're talking about people who don't want to play a part of the game that isn't fun. that's just a healthy attitude towards a hobby!