RIP SPARKS!!!

After playing the game as long as I have I’ve noticed most of these attempts never work. It’s just not that hard to make a new character and spam to 99.

At what point would it become unprofitable for RMTs to just throw more accounts at it? Whatever that is, I hope SE is smart enough to set it there, even if it means we're restricted to 25k sparks per week or something insanely low.

For regular people... there are plenty of other ways to farm gil in this game. It might require a few more brain cells and maybe a bit more of a challenge, but in the end, this nerf just removes the lowest hanging fruit. Plenty of others available to pick.

If you catch them quick enough, and can manage to nuke the 'bank' characters soon enough that they can't get their product to market. They will give up. But yea that would require effort on their part, and continued efforts, not just once every 2-3 years ban a few token accounts and call it good.

They need to enforce their own rules.

Pretty much. Got a pile of 1$ mules, i can just even logout and bring new char to start collecting (if i want).

Adding one more 1$ mule per account is even less work than using just one char and stopping to dump.

There is no point where free money is not profitable.

You would have to ban accounts literally daily to make the juice not worth the squeeze.

At which point you just start selling accounts.

Nuke the ***out of them, put a 45 day hold on new characters from buying NPC able items. Would be a much more effective change.

They half implement that 45 day wait.

yeah there's definitely no additional overhead here and they aren't making it harder on botters.

ffxiah the forum on intellectuals.

someone like eiryl is not capable of botting a character switch. sounds like a whole lot of mad easy farm gain-xp users

Talking about 1-15 dollars a month being an additional sort of burdensome over head, on an account generating even just a thousand dollars a month, is not a deterrent, for real man, think ***through just a little.

Too bad the cap isn't account wide, that would help deter it a bit, but I don't think anything is account wide except for online contest submissions.

Sparks is there to help new/returning players get to 99 tho.

Low-cap + more active banning seems the way to go.

Could also gate sparks behind some super tedious tutorial quest line, time being money and all.

That would help a bit. If they gonna keep spawning new characters at the very least make them pay the full premium to do it.

Rmt's have found ways since the start of the game to generate gil. If you believe this will have any real effect on the rmt you are out of your ever loving mind the world will keep turning.

I am not saying a 45 day hold on getting or using Sparks, just a hold on buying the NPCable stuff. But you are right there is a ton of gear that can be NPCed that is also useful for a new player. My only caveat would be, for a legit player, is 45 days too much to wait? There are plenty of things that can be done and need to be done during that time aside from making billions of Gil right away.

I think it is less painful to new characters than having an entire source of Gil nerfed, but all the while not stopping the activity of the people the nerf was designed to slow down or stop to begin with.

This punishes regular players, this does figuratively nothing to stop the behavior. And SE has to know this already.

Putting a hold on npcing just means making accounts in advance then deactivating for two months.

Fair point.

Thank you :) I know its insane lol but I come from HNM days so I awesome the worse in people lol

All they need to do is remove gain money, crystals and 500

That would severely cripple bots. With no harm to players.

At the end of the day though what's this solving lets say they ban all the rmts this doesn't fix the inflation on items because people still aren't farming them like they should anyway. Gotta say rmts haven't hurt me or get noticed much by me as much in so long that I just don't see the point in you guys trying to figure out a way to fix it. Banning rmts ain't gonna fix plate prices or beitisu prices they don't buy or farm them so idk. And yes I get it stops people from buying gil which is good but does stop real players from price fixing and botting AH. EDIT also i feel like if anything more of these players are gonna buy gil now because they lose out of the cap spark like the rmts do

Well we won't know what the cap is till the 10th so, until then we have no idea how much of an issue this will end up being.

Make it 45 real days of playtime, so you'll have to see Gksdhfhsdfhkkhjkhsdjkfk & Co logged in for a month and a half straight first, just chilling there behind walls. lol

i can tell you aren't capable of complex thought but i'll lay it out for you..

1. there are only so many hours in a day(24)
2. only so many accounts on a POL ID can take advantage during a gain time window with the added complexity of logging in/out to switch characters. you could make automation for this but it would be insanely clunky as nothing within windower is built to handle this switch, this would require more hands on attention which lowers the time/reward relationship
3. assuming someone like eiryl creates 17 accounts and he has 10 currently that's $170 a month. there is not demand for $1000 per mont per character and that is 3bil/month per character which would require a weekly cap of 7.5m sparks unless my math is off. theres no way it will be that high. it's likely to be 100k-500k per character which results in $13/month profit per character on the low end and $60 on the high
4. bans result in a startup time that is 17x longer. new start ups in general result in a time that is 17x longer.

this is very cut and dry to understand, any deterrent in general is a deterrent, obviously no solution is perfect and there will always be RMT but shitting on this solution is a pretty idiotic way to approach things.

I wouldn't say idiotic because most of seen stuff like that still not work. Again none of this will hurt rmts that much in the long run anyway so. Rmts havent always been farming spark to survive I know people forget that.

Except they don't ban, and his 170$ ain't ***compared to the thousands of dollars he is making, but hey if you assume everyone is dumb then I guess you won't be able to see past how smart you are.

Personal attacks are not required by the way to sound smart.

Also, subscriptions are not stopping RMT. It doesn't to ***to their bottom line, even if YOU think 170 is super expensive. It's not, it's not even for a small business owner. It's chump the *** change to these people.

RMT is a multi billion dollar industry. If subscriptions were a problem for them, RMT wouldn't exist.

Take your accounting PHD and throw it in the garbage, it's not doing you much good.

impressive way to dispute literally nothing i posted, though to be fair i probably edited in some after you did post

Yeah, before they were fish botting, and before that they were Cruor botting. They can just go back to that! Oh wait, they can't, because SE fixed them to be not worth the time/effort.

But seriously, people keep saying most of the times SE does something it doesn't work, but do people have examples? If 100b is injected into the economy a month from sparks but it goes down to 10b is that not a huge win?

I almost feel released from duty.

That reduction isn't going to happen, the RMT will just make more characters. This does nothing.

This ain’t a scene, it’s a goddamn arms race.

I never said the things they've done didn't work what I'm saying is the gil non rmt players have been doing just like the rmts have been doing will hurt players also. Everyone is just worried about rmts doing this when players are farming the same thing. What if people just didn't buy gil? Se needs to ban gilbuyers as much as they need to ban rmt bots. Rmts will always find a new way. The ways you listed got fixed and what happen the rmts found a new way. Now they slow spark down and just like you and others find a way they will also. Its gonna keep happening til they go back to banning rmts and gilbuyers sadly.

It'd likely depend on how they implement the cap. Could be they mean you can spend X amount of sparks total in a week on whatever you want. Alternatively, it could be an effective cap based on per-item purchase limits, which would allow people to go wild buying REMs tales or something, while limiting them to ~125k if buying one of every 1-98 gear/weapon. The latter would also make more sense for Accolades, since who really needs more than a stack of costume items a week? ;)

Either way, it could be gated without a special quest - limit breaks for gear categories, or RoV KIs for an overall cap for instance.