Dancing Salvage Bans.

Like Eyr said, the difference between 7 and 11K alex shouldn't be breaking your gil-flow. 500K a day is pretty minimal if you're actually trying to make gil.

Funny cuz when people were selling delve clears for 20 mil instead of 15 (and calling the person a cheap scrub who should quit life) with their 17 people and the one buyer, the difference per character accounts to a difference of 294120 gil. But yeah, you know, thats even less than the 500k you're calling pretty minimal, but I guess that 300k really matters then right? I guess it only matters when that gil is potentially coming out of your pocket, not others.

I've never really felt like other people cheating has cheapened my accomplishments in game. On a personal level, I kinda feel like if I had cheated in similar ways to obtain my mythics, then my accomplishments would have been cheapened. I'm kind of at the point where I don't really care what people are doing in the game, as long as they're not directly *** with me.

A good majority of the people I know on Odin that were abusing the heck out of ASE/Salvage II were/are shitty players anyways and no amount of r/e/m's are going to make them better. (So if anything I just find it amusing). I also notice they tend to get bored with the game quicker and end up letting their subs lapse.

Afaik, the only thing that was patched via Salvage were the MB2 bosses. Was mostly just curious if this sudden rash of bans were from people who thought it was still a good idea to be respawning floors, or if the JP community was complaining enough to make them go back and do more bans to people who were farming the heck out of MB2's last year.

Cheating in video games. I liken it to Using PEDs/Steroids in bodybuilding/sports. I know of others who do it, some of whom i could call my peers. Personally, its not for me. Some would argue that if you're not going all out, you're missing out on your efforts. But me not using those drugs do not in any way diminish my progress, although others are lightyears ahead of me. Their choice to use products that will give them that edge doesn't make me weaker, it just makes them really stronger. But at the end of the day, I'm not competing against them, so it doesn't affect me.

Don't really get bothered by players who can farm Mythics in a matter of days, can bot ***left and right, etc either. It's just a way to look neat and cool in front of your peers. Your character may be much better than mine, but it doesn't mean mine is weak, either.

Its just not what I really care to do. I don't have anything against the user, though. It's just not for me. And their use doesn't affect me, so whatever. If it catches up with them eventually, that's on them. If not, enjoy it.

Until the bots that players use start to severely affect me in a negative way, I probably will not care at all. And if it does affect me so negatively that I am bothered by it, I can just choose to not play anymore. Simple as that.

This should get a thread on its own. Since time memorial, the first thing people did was try to cheat. Part of it was because older video games were really hard, but I don't know.

All I know that there is a large portion of players that think it's their birthright to cheat in video games.

Actually ... historically "cheating" devices were used by players to deal with design defects in a video game. Older video games often had "that one boss" that was freakishly hard via cheap mechanics. Maybe the scrolling caused enemies to appear too fast for the player to deal with, or the camera angle made a particular set of jumps nigh-impossible to do. The bounding rules of a particular fight made it purely luck based if you were able to avoid a game-ending attack. Little things like this is why kids would use Game Genie / Shark codes. They didn't run them all the time because the game would then become extremely boring, you only wanted to use them for specific situations to get over something the play testers missed. An XP / money cheat would be used to avoid having to grind for hours for a particular boss fight, then turned off afterwards. Do extremely repetitive press's of the "A" button for hours is not entertaining, yet some games would have a section of poor growth vs difficulty where the character playing through the game wasn't as strong as the fight required due to inadequate play testing beforehand.

Strangely enough, we do the exact same thing here in FFXI. Windower and all it's addons were developed as ways to enhance gameplay and modernize the UI to be in line with play experiences of other MMO's.

Not supporting the salvage alex stuff, just mentioning that video game "cheating" was originally done as a form of post-release game patching.

LOLwut?!

I just logged out to pay the sub, and got this, literally was online, did some VW, /shutdown, went to pay and:

Online manners, what the ***? My mule doesn't even communicate or do ANYTHING other than craft, and farm.


That account did 3 things today, roll for bcnms, voidwatch, logout. Zero interactions of any kind. Zero words typed. Zero players checked. How the *** are they going to say I did something "impolite?" and ban for it? With zero warning? With zero interactions? On a mule account?

likely you angered someone i already proved you can get lm-11 without ever performing an action in game lol

Apparently they really are banning without any *** notification whatsoever.

Not even going to pretend I'm not guilty, but to just suspend like that with zero interaction, just accuse, because I said so?


An investigation of what, ***? From midnight to 3am we did Voidwatch. That's it, then I logged out.

that is correct lol i got a character warped and temp banned within 30 minutes of cration without ever performing an action other than running to the ramp of vomp hill to await her execution

Well they said you violated something right below your screenshot.

What notification were you expecting? That's an email, seems good enough to me. If you were hoping for an in-game interaction, you just said yourself you weren't online when they suspended you.

I was expecting the usual, having been banned before. GM interaction, he takes you to jail, calls you a *** idiot, tells you what you were accused of, bans you.

Not you log out, and get banned via email. while logging out. at 3am.

believe he means in-game notification

Well he wasn't in-game when he got suspended, he just said that, did he not? They're not going to wait for you to login in order to tell you.

If you were banned for "online manners" I would assume that someone reported you.


You clearly have reason to believe that the ban was justified. The only issue here is that you didn't get told about it in game? When you weren't online?

I went to the Square page to pay for the mule, saw I couldn't pay, the account was "not available" so I logged the mule out, since it was going to get disconnected.

They sent the email before all of that. I just didn't look for it.

this is just the new method of temp banning people for when there is no legitimate reason

Must've been a pretty tight time window for all those things considering you got that email 34 minutes ago.

He is saying that he didn't do anything on that account, that it was an auto-ban by their automated ban program. They have done this before, mass banning on people who did nothing wrong. Some people were abusing gardening so they programmed their auto-banner program to ban any non-JP player who gardened more then a certain amount per week (yes your clients country is stored on their server as part of your character data). It nuked the RMT who were doing it but also nuked a sh!t ton of legitimate players. The sheer number that is going out and the circumstances surrounding it seem to indicate they are using their auto-ban program with parameters surrounding time of login, country of client (can't have JP's reporting to HQ in Japanese) and specific activities. His mule, being a mule, most likely had only logged in at certain times for doing crafting and not being a JP they nuked it the moment a STFU (not a GM) report was filed by someone who didn't like him.

I happen to know people who will sit there all day long and file STFU reports on everyone they don't like on the off chance of getting them banned.

But...?

Your not thinking. There was nobody reading his logs, looking through his record or doing any sort of "investigation". It's 100% automated, their program received a STFU report, checked his criteria against an "auto-ban" list and since it hit positive over a certain percentage it was automatically nuked. A form letter was automatically generated and sent out to him, probably using sendmail.

But that's not what he said. He simply said:


Which means he has reason to believe he's guilty. He didn't specify an account or anything for that statement. It seems the complaint is more so towards he didn't get a tell in game.

Gonna leave it at that though, because apparently this thread is dangerous with sharks that are making up a LOT of assumptions on how SE is handling things, assuming the worst. Yeah I know about the example situation Anjisnu said, but still, this is a little ridiculous. You might be wrong, you might be right, but either way, the negativity and level of assumptions being made is too much for me.

I mean, I'm not going to say I don't break the TOS, we literally all do. The mule account logs in with windower. So I can't say I'm not guilty.

But I can say that without some kind of interaction, there's no ability to say any wrong doing was done. You can't (they can) just say you're guilty without even contacting me.

That's a really shitty business model. Not surprised. I AM however surprised that main is untouched, yet a mule is banned.

I'm very successful at what I do and if I was the person being asked to handle this large volume of reports with management being under pressure to "do something", this is exactly how I do would go about doing it in a cost effective manor. They don't care about non-japanese speaking customers, they have never cared about non-japanese speaking customers and they never will care about non-japanese speaking customers. You have no line of communications with the company and your only voice is someone under their employment who only speaks to them at a weekly meeting upon which they are only given a very small allotment of time. It is unlikely that any amount of issues from non-japanese customers will ever reach the ear of management. And since I (the theoretical engineer assigned to solve this problem) don't care about the companies long term cash flow, simply silencing and automatically removing anyone that might be a problem is a low effort, cost effective solution. That way I (again the theoretical engineer) can get back to doing the rest of my work on my already overloaded schedule.

Welcome to a crash course in corporate IT management.

Reading over bg and talking to some random people it looks like that has been the norm for this set of bans (and some recent previous ones too). No GM interaction, no jail, just a DC to a LM-xx. Looks like they might finally be hitting people who are massively/blatantly farming JP (or possibly others who are Reive botting). While I don't agree with SE's methods, if they were to scrutinize peoples' playtimes, it's pretty obvious it's not humanely possible the amount of time some people are "farming". Common sense would dictate they were botting, but it is pretty lame they're not at least trying to verify people are actually there or not before handing out bans. Maybe now that JP and reive botting has become so commonplace, enough people have been stfing/gming to the point where they feel like they need to do something about it.

That being said, anyone who's into this kinda stuff might wanna cool it for a bit.

Lemme guess...

Your mule is a crafter. Was all the crafts your mule did by manual imput? Or did you just ran a bot to craft overnight?

/lastsynth hadn't updated a craft bot for almost 2 years

But it was a long script
/lastsynth
Wait
/lastsynth
...

Or you actually hit a macro button to /lastsynth?

Irrelevant~ whether the wait is automated or manual, it's unprovable. But that's beside the point. If you're accused of botting, cheating, "being mean" someone has to at least verify truth.

This is no longer the case. And that's ***.