My talk with a GM about gil sellers...Follow

Oh hey, check this one out.

Apparently the asshats aren't even answerable to the rules governing play that the rest of us have to abide by.

Anyone who farms Delkfutt's tower is familiar with Gometank.
For those that aren't, he's a level 60-something monk. He never, ever leaves Delkfutt's tower. He farms it all day long.

Well, I was in Delkfutt's today fighting Panzer dolls. There were two on me at the time, I was whacking one and then weapon-skilling the other; no one else was around, so I felt comfortable taking two. If there are other players around I fight one mob at a time.

Gometank runs in and claims the second doll. It isn't the first time he's run up and explicitly taken my mobs, or chased me around and claimed them from under me. So I said GET LOST, in /t.

Gometank proceeded to let the doll beat on me. I killed the first one, and Gometank just stood there with this doll beating on me.
I shook my head at him, cast Phalanx and Blaze Spikes. We stood there looking at each other. I was getting angrier and angrier; he /laughed several times at me.
I regenned and waited for the doll to beat its hate off. Panzer dolls aren't any huge deal after Phalanx, its usual hits were for 0; every now and then it would crit in the fifties though, so regen had to come out a couple times.
"GM," I said, pointed at the doll.
"You English?" he said.
I waited.
{I don't speak any english}, he said.
{That's interesting}, I said. "GM."
Finally the doll beat its hate off and went for Gometank. He ran behind me so it started on me again.
So I put a call though, not moving. When it registered I turned and took off, thinking I'd pull the doll out of his range and kill it. Didn't happen, he just chased me, and I stopped again in a hallway.
I waited. FINALLY the damn doll went yellow, and of course he Chi Blasted it. Got his hate back. So I turned around and ran off.

The GM contacted me and we had the standard conversation. "We'll look into this matter."

Two hours later Gometank was still there. MPK is a suspendable offense, isn't it?

...isn't it?

Now what I OUGHT to do is pull the same move on him, and see if they suspend me.

/fume

These increasing cases of MPK are starting to p' me off!!!

One of those bastards tries that crap, and I'm anywhere near you, send me a tell. I got your back.

Same goes for any of you suffering from aggressive MPKers.

Edited, Wed Nov 10 04:31:18 2004 by TheWanderingShadow

I've found a neat little way to annoy these guys, i've done it in Korroloka Tunnel to the "angel" farmers. i'm sure some of you are familiar with Fire, Ice, Light, and Rose.
LOCK-ON to your farmer and follow em EVERYWHERE they go in the area. /laugh, /slap, /fume /sigh . whatever. don't say anything directly, and don't respond to anything they say to you. all psychological }XD> Works even better with a few buddies. 2 or 3 ppl slapping and laughing at a gil farmer is kinda fun in its own right.
anyhow, I've snagged 2 morion worms from roseangel by pestering, makes me feel kinda fuzzy deep down.

____________

Aooaoo the galka that camps the guardian crawlers in Crawlers Nest is easy to rile up as well. I hear he is slow on the provoke after spawning the guardian crawler, and that it's easy to claim out from under him.

Someone in my LS witnessed 2 BLMs toying with him. He spawned it, one BLM stunned it, and the other Sleep II'd it. They just stood there, not killing it, resleeping it so he couldn't spawn it again. They did that for quite some time :D

You don't have to break the ToS and put your account at risk to get a little revenge. You just have to be creative in finding a rude but legal way to mess with them :P


On a side note, I can't see why the original poster called a GM to begin with. You can expect competition at *every* NM camp, gil seller or not. If everyone called a GM every time they felt discouraged that they couldn't claim an NM... well... I'm not surprised that the GMs don't take people very seriously.

Every time a GM gets a call from someone inside Giddeus they must shake their heads and wonder what makes people feel like they are entitled to get a monster signa. If you go to an NM spawn, you are going to face some competition. That doesn't necessarily make every single /anon person a gil seller, and it's not GM call worthy. It's just a game mechanic everyone has to get used to.

Edited, Wed Nov 10 08:34:35 2004 by Apocpink

It doesn't even matter if you have proof that they sell gil. I was in Oztroja about a month ago, along with half of Shanghai, and of course I lost the claim to Mee Deggi.

I sent Redcloud a tell asking if he is from China. He said yes. I then asked if he works for IGE. He said yes. I sent him a tell asking if he sells gil. He said "yes, America $$ for gil."

I had all of this in my chat log, so I immediately paged a GM. I got the typical "we're looking into it" deal. What's there to look into? Look at my damn chat log and you need not look any further, *********

They have the power and control to ban these people on the spot, but they just don't do it. They have the power to track the in-game transactions between the gil sellers and gil buyers.

It's already been stated many times. Gilsellers aren't going anywhere. Either SE doesn't care, or the GMs don't care, or both. Gilsellers are paying members, and not enough people leave this game solely because of gil sellers.

WOW, Sirrobin dont really wanna get involved as these threads are a dead horse or so I hear...



This is pretty uncalled for, this game is out in all of Asia and many chinese players play and they are legitimate, noy all chinese are gil sellers. I understand what you say about gil sellers but please stop naming nationalities. This "Chinese Gil Seller" crap has gotten to my last nerve. There are millions of threads about this popping everyday, please dont demonize a whole country (probably the biggest in the world) because of the actions of a bunch of **** hats, please spare us from rating you down.

Read it again Omniscient.

Missed it? There's one little word you passed up. Read carefully before you cop an attitude.

Edited, Wed Nov 10 11:41:18 2004 by seraphimhunter

...

Bare in mind that I have never bought gil, nor do I condone it.

Over the past few months, I have developed a source within the Jerry organization, who shall remain nameless, who filled me in on his company's activities. His statement, coupled with conversations from when I talked to SE, had made me realize some important facts about the operation of gil sellers and SE's reaction to them.

One:

To put it simply, SE DOES ban gil sellers accounts. The problem is that SE can only do it if they can catch the gil sellers doing the process of buying or selling for RW cash. That was from SE, backed up by the ToS, and is corraborated in the next point below.

Two:

When you buy gil, it comes from various accounts that are "throwaway", i.e., if they are discovered, then it is of no major concequence to be deleted. These accouts exist primarily to buy and sell the gil. This statement was backed by my source, who said recently that his account was deleted and banned by SE for gil buying and selling activities.

Three:

The "Jerry" clan does not do the actual buying or selling. Rather, their purpose is to gather gil through camping and selling NM drops, farming, logging, etc. The fact that they then send this gil that is made to character accounts that do the actual buying or selling is still legal. After all, it is a "gift", something not banned by ToS.

Four:

SE is aware of the gil selling problem.

***
To conclude, the "Jerry" clan is NOT breaking the ToS by their activities (except possible MPKing, something that I have not bothered to investigate myself), and as such, are not really able to be banned by SE.
...

Sucks, don't it?

lol

/em punches self in the nose.

Sorry seraph. I thought you were being a dousch. Please don't make FFXII your last SE game.. have you seen all the upcoming titles.. some are sweet!

FF3 is coming out on DS... crazy...

It's simple. Change the Terms Of Service to read that accounts connected to banned accounts can be investigated for improper conduct upon the banning of said account.

It's that simple. There's a packet trail. Square chooses not to follow it. There's a paper (billing) trail. Square chooses not to follow it.

Square's agreement also says that they have the ability to ban an account at any time for any reason. They could institute a check which monitors the item transfer system for large gil transfers (IE - >10K) and flags them for review. If it's found that a certain individual transferred a large amount of money to an account which was later banned, then you do a more in-depth investigation to determine if that account was part of the scheme.

Crikey. That's waaaay more in depth than SE will ever want to get with something like this.

The bottom line is they are in this business to make money, not to make people happy. If you're unhappy that there are gil sellers in this game, they won't care unless you and about a thousand of your buddies cancel your account because of it. THEN they might take the matter more seriously, because gil sellers have started to cost them revenue.

But conducting little in-game stings creates far more complications and uses up more resources than I'm sure they are willing to devote to this game, especially if it's not an issue that is costing them any money. All anyone ever does is sit around and complain about gil sellers, but at the end of the month you all open your wallets and pay your fees, and that's all they care about. Until the fees stop rolling in, this won't be an issue they'll address. It's a simple matter of cost-benefit analysis.

There is additional cost involved in "catching" gil sellers with little to no benefit. Sure they'd be making their players "happy," but in a shareholder meeting do you really think the CEO of SE is going to stand up and say "Well, we conducted a costly operation that lost us some revenues, but we made our player base more happy so it all works out >.>" Don't forget what drives SE. It's not your happiness, it's revenues and market share.

And tracing large gil transactions... define large. 10k may be large to you but that is small change to others. People who have been playing this game for a year or longer spend more than 10k whenever they want good food to eat when leveling. Every time I do a BCNM I send out WAY more than 10k to each person who participated, etc. It would be way too subjective and they would have to make the ToS about 200 pages longer than it is right now to define every little thing you could do to flag yourself as a gil seller.

Bottom line is: if it bothers you that much, quit. If a massive amount of people quit because of gil sellers, SE *might* think about looking into this issue. But if it doesn't bother you enough to make you quit, {Congratulations!}, you can keep playing and enjoying yourself, because that's what this game is all about isn't it?

*casts it'sjustagamera*

Edited, Wed Nov 10 13:23:17 2004 by Apocpink

Zariko, I owe you one. You rock :D

roflmfao....if I could have only seen that. :D

That's funny, I don't remember clashing with anyone on these boards.

In fact, I remember being one of the advocates of the now-dead "Stop the gil sellers" thread talking about sending out letters to gaming magazines. So if you want to paint me as a defender of gil sellers that's your prerogative. I know better.

I throw out a lot of business analyst fluff because SE is a business... if they start losing revenues and can tie the lost revenues to gil sellers they'll do something about it, because *gasps* they are in business to make money.

Until massive amounts of people start to quit *because* of gil sellers, what incentive does SE have to combat them? Just answer me that. SE isn't going to answer to anything but numbers. Massive amounts of people quitting because they have low morale due to being agitated by gil sellers will produce those numbers. So yes, there is a link. But they won't take action because some people are unhappy and don't do anything. They will take action because a *ton* of people are unhappy and they stop paying their money to SE.

True, if they can create revenues *and* make players happy in the process, that is advantageous. But until they start to see gil sellers as a *threat* to their company, they will dismiss it as unimportant.

"That's life, it sucks, get over it, and shut up."

That's a little extreme, but I do think that it's life, get over it. But I wouldn't have the gall to tell people posting opinions on forums to shut up. The point of forums is to *not* shut up :P

"All *you* do is complain about us."

Again, I don't remember doing this. Painting a you vs. us picture is tempting, but I'm merely making a point that companies have set goals and incentives, and in this case, combatting gil sellers isn't one of those goals.

I believe you were trying to make the point that SE has ways to trace where all this gil is going, and could in turn start banning gil seller accounts. I was trying to make the point that they have no incentive to do something like that.

Edited, Wed Nov 10 17:33:33 2004 by Apocpink