PSA: Flaw Identified In Voidwatch Addon (Ban Risk)

I've been subbed for xiv but havent played in months...

Isnt about the $ cost but the time. Unique vpn, rank 3, lv75, even buying new codes is difficult at times(se store limits them by ip and payment method). New se accounts cant easily be made on a generic vpn either, iovation blocks most and wont send confirmation email. It isnt a ton of work, but its at least a few hours even with automation, which dwarves the actual dollar cost. This is all assuming I felt comfortable using a preexisting char to pop and kill the actual vw for the exploiter, which I probably wouldnt, and that raises the bar further.

Nobody is making massive gil off this, pulse cell demand is minimal and selling a lot would easily give you away as questionable. Not worth it to me. Some sellers might have been using it to get a little extra gil, but if not this, it'd be an extra account or another hour working or whatever. It isn't like medals, where people had a free ticket to print as much gil as they wanted and the only logical choice was to sell it, actively creating new sellers just by how strong it was.

https://ffxivcensus.com/ Attempts to detail how many active FFXIV players there are. SE widely reported how many FFXIV accounts that had been created, but I don’t believe they’ve ever stated how many of those accounts are either active subscriptions or even active players. I’d say it’s very likely that tens of thousands of players only log in once every 45 days so square doesn’t demolish their houses.

This Reddit post indicates that as of June there may have been as many as a million active players https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/c08v1n/final_fantasy_xiv_reaches_1_million_active/

The post also shares that those numbers are the most active subscribers the game has ever had.

FFXIV does well for itself overall, but to the best of my knowledge it has never been confirmed that it surpassed WoW’s active player base. It certainly is nowhere close to the total WoW accounts.

Latest Lucky Bancho Stats there are 943,000 active subscriptions as of July 29th, 2019

Results are based on scrapping the the Lodestone (FFXIV equivalent to the FFXI Linkshell Community) and looking for a specific minion / achievement that indicates a milestone for the current patch so it's fairly reliable.

WoW supposedly has 1.7m subscriptions as of October of 2018 but I have no idea how they came up with that value. There is a meme on XIV where XIV keeps inheriting WoW refugee due to the lackluster reception of the latest expansion.

Take into account active subscription =/= accounts made. There are many bots that run around on XIV which will inflate the "account made" value compared to "active subscription".

/random2cents

Yeah. Granted this is getting a little off topic, but when I woke up and posted the FFXIV numbers I was pretty lazy and on my cellphone in bed and didn't want to take the time to finish the rest of my post because grabbing links and ***from Safari is a pain in the ***.

As far as MMOs are concerned, FFXI is actually still in a pretty solid spot. I would be surprised if FFXI income is being diverted to funding FFXIV at this point. FFXIV is standing fine on its own, and Yoshi-P said even last year that the game is still running along fine: https://www.dualshockers.com/final-fantasy-xiv-interview-yoshida-soken/

I wasn't active at the time when Rhapsodies of Vana'Diel was new, but I remember that the discussion and PR line around that time was that the plan was to transition the game to life support where there would be no more updates to balance/content/etc. And that definitely hasn't happened - there's still changes being made. As someone who is in and out of the game, it's different now for me even from when I last tried to play 18 months or so ago.

Earlier in the thread, it was speculated that at any given time there are ~2400 or so active players on Asura, with other less populated servers maybe fielding 500 or so players active. Doing some fuzzy animal picture napkin math, that'd still account to a concurrent player count of around 10,0000 - 11,000 players, which isn't far behind the concurrent player count of say... Path of Exile.

FFXI likely has more than enough active players for SE to ban 1000 people for botting HMP and still be fine. And who are we kidding - most of the banned people just come back anyways. As I shared earlier in this thread though, it's probably not the best way to go about things, and maybe SE should make an effort to fix the design elements that encourage the botting. Make it easier for people to directly farm their pulse weapons, medals, plates, whatever the hell they want, and de-prioritize gil.

The anonymous nature of the internet tends to exaggerate people's attitudes. So this troll or whoever. If you saw them in real life. They probably wouldn't say the same things they say online.

Or maybe they are an *** in real life and there is no hope for them. I don't know.

When they ban people it is just to send a message. They aren't going to ban 1000 people.

Also the people they ban will be back up in cheating very quickly.

Rooks posted an educated guess at what ffxi looks like to se in $$ here

He estimates the ffxi population using the number of unique characters using the AH. then provides a worst case value that that number of characters would be worth to SE.

Fair enough, you bought up some points I had not thought about or didn't know (se store part). Some of them I had and just figured you had that automated too.

You know, I'm really sick of the "FFXI funds FFXIV" argument. FFXI's income is a drop in the bucket to FFXIV, which is plenty capable of supporting itself.

Aside from that, unless you have access to SE's internal budget documents and can see where income is actually being routed, you have not one iota of proof and it is 100% speculation based on what you want to believe. FFXIV doesn't need FFXI's money- there isn't any reason to do this whatsoever.

While it's probable to almost certain that the money that FFXI adds tr SE's coffers is used for various non-FFI-development related purposes, nobody making this argument can in any way prove *exactly* where every dollar of income on the game is going, and it could all be going just about anywhere- but FFXIV specifically is very unlikely at this point. Years ago before A Realm Reborn, yes, maybe. But not today.

Aside from that, the goal of any such game like this is to make a profit. And income - administrative expenses - salary of workers on the project = profit. Profit is what's left after the people working on the game (and related systems) are paid. SE can do whatever the hell they want with this money and there is nothing at all wrong with that, so I don't know why people keep bringing this up like it matters. Profit is specifically what *doesn't* go back into the game- Money that goes back into the game is not profit, it's an expenditure.

Go ahead and show me the budget sheet that shows where the net profits from FFXI are going. I'll wait.

You misunderstood. I mentioned it at some point in the previous thread but, a buttload of people found the dupe exploit LONG ago (the one involving lua, at least), but they chose not to exploit it because 1) they were under the assumption that it was actually monitored everywhere and/or 2) they simply do not want to go that far.

In fact, in a discussion about another addon over a year ago when I came back, I asked specifically if this function was possible and I was answered with 1), while 2) was on our mind the whole time so it was a given we wouldn't go that far from the beginning.

I personally believe that they should have come up with a bug bounty LONG ago.

But that's kind of beside the point. My point is that, bug bounty or no bug bounty, obscurity or not and so on, these people aren't willing to ever share their precious edge over others.
If I didn't know some of the posters from the previous thread from the side of someone who permabanned some of them at least twice, I wouldn't be so sure about what I'm saying.

Some people are HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE, they enjoy having an edge. They're the people that lick *** at work trying to get a raise or a promotion. They're people who simply, it's that simple, want to be above others. They don't need to flaunt it, or at least only rarely, knowing they are above get them off.
These people aren't willing to report exploits, period. They are the people I speak of.

Now, what SE is doing is indeed HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE and stupid and it gives the people I speak of a good excuse not to do so. But they wouldn't do it anyway, so while the excuse is very easy to pull for them, it's ***.

Last thread I offered to anonymously report the issue to the devs directly. The issue could have been raised with 0 backlash other than the destruction of those who did cheat. People aren't interested in solving issues, period. The proof is here and with this thread, the Windower team is pretty clearly in the same bag as those people when it comes to this specific point. There are other people than me who have contacts with devs at SE and who are part of the community nowadays, some of them are much closer to the exploits than I am (not hard). These people weren't contacted either.

TL;DR: while the obscurity bla bla from SE is indeed stupid and counter productive, let's stop with the *** that it is what is stopping people from putting an end to specific exploits. That's total hypocrisy.

Yeah, that link and all of those numbers (both the ones you're refuting and the ones you're suggesting to be accurate) are BS. Nobody but SE has accurate data and they aren't releasing it, so there's little point in discussing it.

SE doesn't release any actual data and there is no reliable way to gather it and make a claim unless you work within SE. Any and all numbers, from SE or otherwise, are largely made up. The best you can do is scan a server's zones and add up how many are in each and multiplying by the number of servers to get a VERY vague picture.

Absolutely.

People who mention subs or accounts in general are HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE. FFXIV's cash shop alone is enough of an argument, anything else is superfluous and lacks relevance in 2019 (also works for WoW).

Haven't touched 14 since like 1-2 monthes after it's first launch... Do they have loot boxes too at this point?

What issue are you referring too, the one from the OP of this thread? and it is unclear what "devs"(SE or Windower) you are referring to reporting it to directly?

What issues are people not interested in solving? Botting, RMT, exploits? its unclear if you refer to all or one in particular.

TBF reading their post makes it quite clear they mean official(SE) XI devs. I'd still like more information on what they meant with other things.

Nobody is saying it directly funds FFXIV, but take an educated guess. The game has long passed its point where it recovered the cost to make it. It has been pure profit for them since ROV finished because they literally put 0 effort into the game outside of the monthly updates which probably take very minimal hours. So where is the rest of the money going? Certainly not back into the game to create meaningful content or expansions. That announcement they have planned for TWO YEARS in the future, I can't imagine much is going to that either.

It is definitely a fact though that when FFXIV crashed and burned, they siphoned every bit of coin they could from any IP to repair that garbage to the barely passable that it is today.

Oh yeah well I'm always sick of the argument you can't say blank funds blank unless you can show physical dollars changing one hand to the other... that's unrealistic, impossible, and kind of dumb.

First off there wouldn't be record keeping of that detail

Second it's all just electronic going into pools unable to be differentiated under most circumstances

Third the reason why it's dumb is there is no difference between it going to some other project and "other" money going to this one vs "other" money going to other project and this to this project. All sources of net income go to all sources of net loss.

All that said pretty as long as more money is coming out of it than going in kind of hard to claim anything is really funding it other than itself and it's running a profit no?

Ugh, I created a fork of what I'm guessing is the 'contaminated' lua. Someone I know that used it woke up with 7 cells a few days back. I feel awful

I'm referring to the dupe exploit of the previous thread (medals etc.).
I'm referring to SE devs, since I'm referring to bringing up the issue to have it fixed with as few casualties as possible.

I was specifically referring to the exploit of the previous thread, the dupe one. But then, I was also referring to a couple pages where other exploits were briefly discussed and it was acknowledged that they were still available and people felt at peace that they could keep going at it.
People who've been permaban'd several times for exploiting/openly cheating.

They don't want anything solved, they just want to keep enjoying their edge.

They siphoned the employees, not the money.
The money came from Tencent. Your fantasies aren't facts.

Literally anyone can report an exploit with "0 backlash" to themselves to the STF if it is a known exploit, just go report it here:

https://support.na.square-enix.com/contacttop.php?id=20&la=1

Just scroll to the bottom of the page pick "other" and explain the exploit in detail, that is how we reported the one in the OP of this thread. Took me maybe 5 mins to find that link, wasn't that hard.

But this does nothing for reporting a well kept secret... which is what the bug program would address, BECAUSE it empowers "good" users to hunt exploits and report them. You cant look at some packets and be like "bet this can be exploited", basically all fixes SE makes to reported exploits are server side and we can not see how it is different from before or after the change. You have to test the interaction to see if it is flawed.

I mean this would NEVER be done but setting up a new "test server" and handing us(the whole XI community) the packet handler code would pretty much fix almost everything. I know pipe dreams...