Banned for Gardening?

[kanican]

My Condolences

I normally would not make a post in reaction to FFXI news, but I felt that this was a good exception.

Banned for Gardening?
(Thread 1)
(Thread 2)
(Thread 3)
(Thread 4)

Recently, there was another wave of RMT bannings that focused on characters using a gardening NPC method of making gil.  In SE's attempt to ban RMT using this method (note:

Comments

rah

[anonymous]

As a person that went through the whole Salvage Banning thing and transitioning to WoW, all I can really say is I definitely agree with the whole "don't take the game or your characters too seriously." It's hard but you can blame SE for that, though you could easily blame yourself for letting it happen in the first place. What I mean by that is the game pretty much requires you to spend so much time to get all the awesome items that improve your character so much. It eventually doesn't even become a matter of you killing faster or you being able to withstand more damage but rather a matter of what is on your character and how people view you.

You, the player of that character in FFXI, become noticed and watched. People will envy you. People will be jealous of you. People will, for the most part, see you as that Mithra or Taru with all that gear. All that gear that took you so many months to get. "Oh damn, that PLD has a Defending Ring" or "Oh wow! He has an Excalibur AND an Aegis!"

In my power to become the best, I pretty much have been so absorbed in myself into trying to be the best. Kaeko was banned because he was simply curious. I was banned because I was in that quest for power and abused the system. Of course people may be asking "Why would you do that when you could potentially get banned?" Why do people bot HNMs? Why do people abuse certain exploits to harass other players and intentionally wipe other players? Why do people do all of this that is against the ToS? Quite frankly, if you have to ask that, you've never really been in that circle where you must "keep winning at any costs." I'm sure everyone in their life would have felt that at least once.

Going back on subject though: SE is a company that makes money from gamers that pay for their products/subscriptions. FFXI is such a huge hit that it doesn't matter if they end up inadvertently ban players for false positive things. It's bad business but they can easily replace the income you're putting in with another. You also have to figure how many players that got banned from the Salvage Bans are still playing the game at this very moment. I'm not one of them but certainly out of the 450 (iirc) perma bans, I'm sure there's a good number still playing.

As for seeking that "power and glory" in WoW... it comes in other ways rather than spending hours on end, trying to spawn an NM that gets botted all day. There were a few things that have been happening in WoW (Martin Fury and defeating the final boss of a raid under hardest conditions using an exploit) but as far as I know, except for one guy, no one was perma banned and stuff was fixed within a few hours.

- MogKnight