Friday, June 5, 2009

The RMT continue to overrun the place, I see...

Got a nap in the evening after doing errands for the roommate, and decided to try to get on for a little late-night FFXI before I went back to bed.

All-Worlds Emergency Maintenance.  Two-hour full-game shutdown.

That's unusual, especially for Japanese prime-time.

But, now that we're back up, here's the reason:

"An issue where gil could be obtained using an improper method has been resolved."

Essentially, RMT created this All-Worlds Maintenance.

And, here's the kicker:  This isn't the first RMT-led Update this week!!  This is, in fact, the second such update (the June 1 one had other things too, but another issue of improper gil was addressed) in five days.

And I would bet any amount of money that, within about 20 minutes of the restart, I have just witnessed three characters whom I believe will be involved in RMT (3 level 1 warriors in the Bastok Mines, who will go nameless until they do involve themselves in RMT, which I expect won't be long).

Face it:  There is ONE solution -- ONE SOLUTION -- and I've said it and others have too.

Get the trial accounts off the main servers and on their own damn server.  They get an automatic push to the main server once they start paying.

3 comments:

ixthyse said...

Complete agreement on the trial-specific servers. What's more is if they did it they could make the servers have an incredibly light footprint, they wouldn't even need to include expansion or high level zones, just the original game pre RotZ.

The other thing they could do which would sort of solve the gil issues is make them unable to send/receive items to/from players in DB, and initiate trades in general until they're paying.

And lastly, I don't think the first maint was to solve a different improper gil problem, I think it was the same problem and they simply failed to fix it the first time around.

Starcade said...

My understanding is that an issue with the improper acquisition of gil was one of the matters addressed in the June 1 update -- and that an issue with the improper acquisition of gil was the cause of the entire game going down for two hours.

One of the things I have seen with the latest (even more expansive) swath of RMT bullshit is that the cost for a million gil is now down from about $48 4 months ago (when I started seeing this bullshit hardcore and began reporting it to the STF) to about $25 or so now.

This probably means that RMT have gained several improper sources of achieving significant amounts of gil.

====

As for a trial-specific server (you probably would not need more than one):

I think you could just keep it to the original game without any real loss of generality. I think including more than that is not proper at all -- it's a trial situation.

I think it's like what they do with WoW -- I can't see that that's not a separate server situation either.

Fact is, save that, I can't see how they can allow people to participate in the game at all and stop RMT from doing what it has been doing.

ixthyse said...

In WoW trial players are allowed to send whispers but not participate in the auction or delivery systems, and are limited to a maximum number of whispers per day. I know this because I was one for a couple months before my head exploded, 3 haematomas and a colonoscopy later I was back playing FFXI.