Exodus

Since using Windower violates the ToS, I'd be willing to bet it's about 99%. Is there a JP version of windower?

1. Probably. I still have mine from 2003 even though I don't use that account any longer. If they had SE accounts, which were introduced a month prior, then it's even easier.

2. Most, if not all, new players are returning players from previous eras based on the conversations/threads/etc I've seen. It's not unlikely that some of those banned would want to return or see their chars again. I think people feel a connection to their characters, especially those from the 75-cap era

I agree it's not a significant number. I also agree this won't happen and likely wouldn't impact subscription numbers that much, but I do wish they would, not just for me but for others I know who were banned due to abuse of the reporting system or for things that thousands of other players do. I've long felt their inconsistency in enforcement, lack of appeal process, and lack of accurate detection/dependance on reporting makes permabanning people for some of these offenses silly and unfair.

"Abuse of the reporting system" = everyone cheats, so it's OK that I cheat, and if people report me for cheating, it's an abuse? If thousands of people do it, it's not against the TOS now?

"lack of appeals process"? What is your appeal going to be? "I cheated, but I'm really sorry?" "I cheated, but so did the guy who reported me, so can I please have my character back?" "I cheated, but you can't prove it in a court of law" Are you going to ask them to see the radar gun that proves you cheated?

If your friends were banned for TOS violations I would challenge you/them to ask if they were breaking TOS. If they tell you they weren't breaking TOS I would take that with a GIGANTIC grain of salt.

It is also my understanding that everyone gets a suspension as a warning before they get a permaban. So someone cheated, got a warning for breaking TOS, then cheated again and got banned. Sorry, not very sympathetic. I've had friends banned as well and while I miss them, I don't feel like they were treated unjustly, and frankly plenty of my friends who cheat to this day acknowledge that they could be banned for it, and they recognize the risk.

Sorry, if you're going to break the TOS every single time you log in, you know it's against the TOS, you get a warning, and then you get banned, that's on you, that's not on SE or anyone who reported you (if they did). For the record, I've never submitted a report for using tools either, so I'm not advocating that people should report people, I'm just saying this is an awful lot of reaching.

So you think people who were banned 15 years ago will come back because its their "original character"? lol

People who want to play re-rolled. They either:
a-still play, which means they're already playing.
b-they quit, which means they seen post-Abyssea FFXI and dont care for it or dont have time for it. Unless you absolutely truly believe in sentimental attachment to pixels and "muh first FFXI char" is what they need to play FFXI again, this group isnt coming back.
c-they got banned again (possibly multiple times). This is the group that would likely come back if accounts were reinstated. And guess what would happened if they got unbanned? They'd be auto-banned within a week because they're idiots who cant help themselves but run at 100% speed and POS all around the map. This is literally the only way to get banned in the last decade (or item duping). We've all seen the XP/CP bots run 24/7/365. I've seen people spend 20 hours at apex camps, leave to do Dyna or Ody, then go back to the Apex camp for another 20 hours.

The perma ban forever always seemed harsh and unnecessary to me.

Warning > week > month > year and a year for every violation after would make more sense to me. Why completely void a paying customer forever?

Same with the official forums, I called DRG "***tier DPS" like 15 years ago and got banned. So I never get to post again? They gladly take my 20 bucks a month, but I can't post on their forums?

I guess you are tainted

So you mean to tell me a customer who has been caught cheating 5 times, you want to invite them back to play the game? You think maybe they learned their lesson this time? JFC. Maybe by the 7th time they'll not cheat? Or after their 6 year ban, they'll have learned their lesson.

They keep a lifetime record and lifetime ban, but you're free to pay $30 and start over and continue to play an endless amount of times.

What's the difference.

Lifetime bans, but allow infinite restarts. AND it comes with a free name change, race change and server transfer, if you want. Seems like just paying $30 to negate the ban is the same ***but more profitable.

"Negating the ban" means starting over from scratch, actually reversing the ban or turning them into suspensions would allow you to continue where you left off.

There's a not-insignificant amount of work to get a character up and running, from quests, missions, unlocks, leveling, not even considering voidstones and tons of other currencies which are time-gated, plus Dynamis and Omen progress and loads of other r/e gear to get, rare augs. Add on to that the liquid assets like gil and valuable materials, plus all the magian trials and other nonsense you've done, for an end-game character it's very significant to restart, especially if you want to get back to endgame-ready and aren't just making another gilseller bot to do ambu in ***tier gear.

Also: I've heard stories of people who botted Salvage and were banned with thousands of Linen purses, plus capped gil on multiple characters. I'm sure they'd love to have that back, just like the mafia would love to have their mountains of cash and drugs back. There's a reason we don't hand them back their illicit gains.

Inb4 "Oh now we're comparing video games to crimes again, it's just a game hurr durr". Seems like nobody's ever had a debate, discussion, or argument before.

Like I said. Very emotional. Yes - I would love to have everyone back. Even if they had an affair or had a mountain of drugs and cash. I would suggest you take the hint from SE's STFU and do as they suggest.

You seem to assume that everyone banned is banned because they did something wrong, that is just not the case. People have been abusing reports for years and getting innocent people banned, SE doesn't care and GMs barely investigate anything or don't have the ability to. This has been going on since I started in 2003.

"Abuse of the reporting system" = You made me mad, I report you for something you didn't do, and you get banned. Yes, this happens and there is no way to appeal it. GMs had a history of being inconsistent with checking what little logs they have and calling SE support is useless. They barely investigate anything and I know several characters that were banned and know for a fact they never used 3rd party tools, not even Windower. One of them was being sexually harassed by someone, who reported them and they were banned after rejecting this persons advances (I saw the tells, so they weren't making it up). This situation has played out multiple times over the years.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had a char banned years ago for using Flee, the JA, in town and someone reported me (I didn't even use Windower at that point). SE has little to no technical ability to detect cheating and even in the games busiest, they banned people for stupid ***. I mean hell, their entire mechanism for detecting fishing bots was to send the person a /tell, if they didn't reply fast enough then you got banned. They banned an entire linkshell for killing Bubbling Bernie too much. So let's not act like their ban enforcement has ever been consistent, effective, fair, or just, because it hasn't and there are plenty of people who haven't violated the ToS that were permabanned (and no, it's not always a temp ban first time through, it often is but not always). They also have a history of banning by association.

As for the rest, I again don't think it's reasonable to ban people for things that other people do in plain sight with no consequences. A friend of mine was banned a year or so ago for using EF in Bibiki Bay, surrounded by ML RMT bots doing the same thing that weren't banned and have been operating as bots for years in various areas. How is that reasonable?

100% chance your friend was banned for POSing to the locus mobs in Bibiki Bay, not for using a bot.

Bro the ***I did during the Abssya era.

The FFXI dopamine roller-coaster hits hard.

There are a lot of people under the impression 'X did Y and didn't get banned, so I can do Y and not get banned'. This is not how it works. SE's auto detection will 100% know if you:
-Use POS or speed tools, even once, over any meaningful distance.
-Use any tool that creates the same effect as a POS or speed tools(such as no interrupt lua, fast follow errors, etc..).
-Bot more hours than humanly possible [we have basically no way of knowing exactly what the detection threshold is here, just that it would be set in a way that normal players aren't accidentally triggering it when no-lifing]

They only ban a very small percentage of the people on the auto detection list each time they ban, so you're probably fine! But, if you keep doing it indefinitely, you're eventually going to get unlucky and get hit. This is effective enough against real players, because if you have a character with 4 mythics and 6000 hours of progress.. you'd be a moron to keep risking it until you get banned.

Is it fair? Kind of, if you look at it in the context of how it's executed. It might not feel like it at times, but you also probably aren't cataloguing every RMT in those parties to catch them when they do get replaced. It's the most practical solution for SE though, because we've created an environment where banning everyone who bots would [and I do not believe this to be an exaggeration] kill the game.

If people were getting banned for “mass false reports”, how come I wasnt banned in 2004? I was public enemy #1. I had enemies in my own LS (hey Flux, miss u bb). I had enemies on other servers lmao. There would have been millions of false reports against me.

nice chart but

+1 to what Thorny said, I think a lot of people think they're invincible or they've figured out the magic bullet to which programs you can/can't use without getting banned because they have a friend who uses XYZ and hasn't been banned, but I think this is a major misunderstanding between cause and effect. Even those who are banned never know what they were banned for because in almost every situation they use 5-25 different things which are against TOS, so how are they supposed to pinpoint it? Especially considering that bans aren't done directly after the infringing activity, and as mentioned aren't consistent.

I also agree with his and others' point that true 100% enforcement would kill the game, and I'm sure SE knows this. I'm also sure SE doesn't have human resources to be enforcing this stuff, so they probably take an automated or extremely minimally human-involved approach to choosing who to ban.

I don't agree that mass reporting people will get completely innocent people who've never installed Windower or any third party tool on their PC banned. I'm sure you believe that and I'm sure these people have gotten into an argument, been reported, and then been banned. I don't believe that they were logging in through the default client and using 0 tools and then got banned out of the blue. Maybe it happened, IDK I don't have their PC in front of me, but I'd bet you don't either and only have their word and your experience to speak to it. Are you 100% confident from playing with them that they never used an addon to sell items to an NPC, or to buy Acheron shields? How? Do you follow them around for 100% of their game time? Do they watch how long it takes them to use a home point to be 100% positive they've never used Superwarp? Do they stream their screen 100% of the time they play FFXI and you watch it for inconsistencies?

IDK, seems pretty hard from a third-party perspective to say that your friend who got banned was 100% clean and never used a single thing in their entire lives up until their ban. Maybe they use all-seeing-eye to do some assaults for a mythic. Did you live with this person?

I still have my original FFXI box with the instruction booklet along with the store receipt from when I bought it in December 2003. The registration codes are on the back panel. I also have every booklet from every expansion pack I physically purchased with it. I keep them in a mainlla folder in an out of the way storage place for memory's sake. The printouts for the codes from the expansions I purchased virtually are also in there. I'm sure I can't be the only one who has all the relevant documentation 20 years later.

Companies can do what they want...


They can ban who they want, when they want, with little respect for the defendant. I never heard of a full Ban ever being overturned. if you want to jeopardize your account with POS hacks, RMT and overnight bots that's on you

Theres a key difference between you and those people I am referring to: it's two letters, a hyphen, and a two digit number.

I actually posted that chart for the first time, a few years ago. Don't hurt yourself thinking too hard. I just made it for funsies.

LM-17? LM-31?