Two Ominous Storm Clouds Over Vana'diel Two Days Before VanaFest

1) Did some research while I was STF'ing the YouTube motherfucker last night, and found something quite disturbing.

If you check the STF page on the Official Site, you'll find:

• From April to September of 2011, the STF was only banning somewhere in the neighborhood of 600-800 accounts a month.  
• October-December of 2011, it went to about 1,000/month.
• And for the currently-noted part of 2012, it's now up to 1,400/month.

Given my experience n Leviathan since my return and other research on the subject, I can conclude the following:

Square-Enix is now banning for STF-level misconduct the equivalent of the baseline playing population (online at a given time) of an entire server every month.

Now, this isn't the first time this happened.  Hell, it was happening several times over from the start of the STF until April of 2010.

But with the dropping population size over the last two years, could so many of the remaining players be RMT and the like now that it doesn't matter WHAT Square-Enix announces at VanaFest in 48 hours?

Something to think about...

2) And then there's the Golden Gobbiebag...  Someone made reference on one of the forums (forget if Official or BluCheater) as to that one of the laws, reading from what Square-Enix was doing, that S-E was running afoul of Canada's law which requires any contest of wide berth to have a "question of skill" attached (usually a small math problem).

Problem I have with that is:  Would that law basically be telling Square-Enix that, despite their disclaimers, their items DO have REAL value under the law?

There's several ramifications of that!

and I guess a side thought on #1 as I think about it at the end here:

The conversion of the CoP Dynamis areas to the NeoDynamis format took place on Sept.19-20, 2011.  A marked increase in the number of banned accounts almost immediately has followed.

Could we, soon, be witnessing a nerfing of weakness targetting in Neo-Dynamis, especially what benefits mine (and most soloers) setups?  (The BST/DNC setup which allows one to run through with Job Abilities!)