Gardening Ban Criteria?Follow

After reading of all the bannings of seemingly legit players for what appears to be merely gardening, I'm wondering if there is some similar criteria among those banned that SE used to determine who gets the axe and who doesn't.

My wife and I both garden wildgrass on 7 mules (used to be 15) and have done so for a long time. We have separate accounts but are on the same CC. We have not yet been banned. I'm going to post a list of questions and our answers. If those who garden in this fashion could post answers, maybe we can figure what criteria SE is using to ban folks.

Number of Mules? We have 7 each
Level of Mules? Ours are all at least level 5 (for the previous Bonanza)
Location? Our mules are scattered among the Cities.
Character race/Model? Again, ours are varied races and models.
Harvest sent or self sold? We send all our harvest results to a max fame main.
Mule names? Ours are fairly unique, none are even similar.
Banned? Not as yet.

If anyone thinks of additional questions that might help narrow this down, feel free to post them.

Thank you.

Maybe what has kept you safe is that you send all of the product to one character instead of having multiple characters cash in and send the gil to your main.

I'm guessing the ones that got caught up in the mass rmt gardening bannings were simply unlucky, chances are they looked at everyone with multiple gardening mules and the ones checking probably got lazy/slacked off and autobanned a few without checking up properly. Sounds about right to me anyway.

I spoke with a GM about this just now.

At first he asked me where I heard of these bans for gardening and NPC the goods. I told him Allakhazam.com

He seemed shocked by this and commented that gardening was part of the game and what you do with your harvest and what you grow is up to you.

He then asked me to wait while he checked on this. When he returned all he said was
"I wouldn't garden for a while"


Anyway I have 7 gardening mules. All different cities and no common names.
All are on 1 account with my main.

1 mule is lvl 75 1 is 41 the rest are 20.

So far I haven't been banned.


I just wonder if the bans have to do with multiple accounts and sending the items/gil to another account. So far it doesn't seem to matter what the crop is from what I have read.

I think this tell how difficult is to train scripts/filters that look for bad "keywords" i.e. a script say looking for specific texts that involve gardening and brogames tell.

I really hope this can be resolved soon. I am in favor of letting some RMT survive that the filter will not be overly sensitive and got someone else wrong. I am confident people got hit by mistake will get restored. I know people are angry, but this clearly is a honest/technical mistake. So I will urge people show patience about this before screaming "iQuit" or making extremely rude posts.

Edited, Jul 7th 2009 9:45am by scchan

I have 16 characters that garden.
All are scattered all over the place. 5 have whitegate opened up but none are stationed there. One tends to be in jeuno to check and sell at AH.
I have all races except galka which drives me nuts by how slow they seem to run. Mules need to run fast not like they are mired in sand! I have been leveling my mules, when I get free time, to 17 blm so they can warp back to mog.
I sell on the garden character then send money to whoever I feel like sending to.
My mules have a big variety of names.
Their job levels range from 5 to 42.
Several of my mules are leveling a craft to compliment annewandering's (my main) woodworking.
I garden randomly. This last time I didnt even NPC everything at once or send gil to one character.
For an RMT I am pretty poor lol. And I very seldom send gil out of my account. Occassionally I might send 50k to one of my kids who play but only if they are starting out. I am such a big money trader. Oh darn I forgot to collect real money for that. I guess I am a really rotten real money trader.

The gardening exploit might be why there is mass bannings but it is not why I was banned. I did not even know there was an exploit and I certainly never used one.

I cannot assume there is an exploit unless someone play whistle blower or SE actually came out to say what the exploit is.

The thing is.... the Salvage bans are only known to most people, and even to people who do Salvage often, until SE said what the exploit is. And there are like hundreds of people banned by it with not a single whistle blower.

I recall people that use the Salvage dupe to sell 35 items and some sellers make it require that person can only log in to the character and lot the item until the item is in the treasure pool.

Edited, Jul 7th 2009 10:33am by scchan

It seems to be people who were gardening out of a closed system, using wildgrass seeds to grow more seeds and crystals to feed them. The result was a self perpetuating system of junk that could be NPC'd with nothing more than a few minutes of effort a day.

Square doesn't mind gardening on a small scale, or from characters that were gardening using external sources for materials (haven't heard of any people banned who were going after gold nuggets or lightning ore yet, since those sorts of things required external ingredients.)

I expect a nerf of a few gardening recipes in the next update.

I expect to see some changes in growing times for certain seeds, or new rules put in place in controlling new characters to garden. I would continue to garden when I wanted to. There is no reason to cause an alarm to not to garden.

This is like Swine Flu. People are paranoid about it, it is all over the news... but is eh.... nothing more worse than just a simple flu. The misbanning, even it sucks, is far from terrible than it is actually perceived, and will get addressed in time.

I've read testimonials of at least one person who used only Saplings and Ice Crystals to grow Platinum Leaves and Ice Ore banned.

Fair enough Acturus, I will stop telling people they shouldn't insult me and the others who have been banned for nothing. But please, people, go somewhere else if you don't believe us because I don't need your negativity on top of this whole situation.