Square-Enix cracks down on gardeners, sends out bans

How stupid. None of this violated any part of Square's TOS. Are they hiring Darkfall's GMs or something?

Yes, I'm very serious actually. I've played the game on and off since 2005 and NEVER received an RMT message (Marcson @ Phoenix server).

Something tells me that I will be receiving one tomorrow though... LOL! :)

What a good way to turn gamers away from the company.

Good job Square.

Worrying about e-plants when you make more money from it.

Most of the ppl commenting here don't even play FFXI.

I'm sure some innocent ppl got banned, but the majority of the ppl banned were RMT. It's like real life, innocent ppl do go to prison, but most the ppl in there are guilty as hell.

SE is the best company by far at cleaning up the gil sellers, and keeping the economy stable. It got out of hand in 2005, but they got it under control. Unlike Blizzard, who set prices for new mounts, etc, to reflect the inflation brought on by the RMTs. I played wow at launch, and was off and on for a few years. The economy in WoW now is out of control, and imo, Blizzard doesn't do enough to get it back under control.

All mmo companies should learn from what SE does. Sure, some good get caught in the bad, but it's better than just leaving all the bad in.

It's easy to say that "the majority of the people banned were RMT". That may be true. But it doesn't excuse the banning of players, like a very good friend of mine who was banned, who have built up their character for almost six years and never once done anything even remotely resembling RMT. Just one person wrongly banned in this manner is one too many. And there are dozens if not hundreds.

The simple fix to this problem is simply to prevent gardening on trial accounts. Problem solved. Legitimate players have been gardening for years, but it's not cost-effective for RMT organizations to open real accounts for this purpose.

Even more troublesome is the degree to which Square/Enix's Special Task Force acts as police, judge, jury, executioner, and reporter in all of this. The banned players have next to no recourse to correct the wrongs. They can file an appeal, which simply goes up to the same people that did the banning in the first place, which makes it conveniently easy for them to brush these false positives under the rug.

Anyone who even considers getting FFXIV is a fool. Even if it's the best MMORPG ever made (which it won't be), when you are banned after 6 years of building a character for absolutely no reason whatsoever, you will wish you'd picked something else.

I am one of the people who were banned in this garden ban. My one account has 16 characters who garden occasionally. Unfortunately a harvest came on the 1st of July.
I have played the game for about 5 years. All of my characters are level 5 and up. My main has 3 level 75's which is the maximum in this game.
About one week ago I finally finished my CoPs missions. In dynamis I finished up my dancer relic gear 5/5 and am now working on my thief relic gear, 2/5 at present. FFXI has an event called Moggle Bonanza where each character is allowed to purchase 10 marbles if they are level 5 and above. These marble have numbers. Numbers are drawn in a lottery. I was lucky and won 2 rank 3 prizes which resulted in about 1.4 million gil. NIce but not enormous. I sponsered our dyanamis Bastok for 500k which I sent by delivery to a dynamis leader and in return received all wootz ores from it that night. 8 that night. Nice but not a really good night at all. Still that was about 1.5 milion gils as well, leaving me with about 2.5 million of which I spent about 500k leveling alchemy and goldsmitihing crafts.
The point of this is that these things apparently flagged the bot and now I am banned.
Any real life person would recognize that I was not rmt. Unfortunately there apparently was no real person reviewing the bans.
SE customer service being what it is makes it questionable whether my account will ever be unbanned.
Ironically I am very anti RMT as all my friends online know.
Hope this helps you to understand what has occurred with the game. I love the game and am quite distressed about this whole thing. Perhaps SE will take a minute and unban us. It wouldnt take any longer.

This seems like using dynamite to kill an ant. Little bit of an over reaction on SE's part, but then that's par for the course with them.

They made the Final Fantasy series. You can't expect them to do anything right.

Doesn't seem like a big deal compared to January LM-17 bannings. The two big NA sites one for advance players, the other for (how to put it kindly) "up and coming" players have very mixed reviews on this one. Now some members have come on to BG hoping to get their support or get some type of "reaction" I guess, but all they have gotten has been mixed reaction in terms of lol 15 mules to "learn to find a real way to make money." I have seen a lot whining on BG but the many seem indifferent (not all but some) while on allakhazam it seems to have hit the fan. January ban was far more entertaining for duping various items.

Keep the entertainment coming SE

That's nothing special. Whenever you enter into a contract with anyone, you are liable to get that contract terminated at anytime. They can ever change the contract. It's not fair, but that's how life works.

What is interesting is that the charged the people for the entire month of July and banned on the 3rd day of that month.

Whether they are in the right to ban or not - they still decided on getting the full months subscription before inacting their accounts.

They have also only allowed "banning complaints" to be processed which have still not been adjudicated yet. From experience once it goes through and they do decide they have banned the player incorrectly they will not refund for lost days...however FFXI are pretty stuborn and getting them to admit they are wrong will be a fete in itself.

It takes waaaay too long to make gil in this game even with a gardening empire, i had like 4 toons to garden with highish alchemy amoung other crafts and was still constantly broke; watching a stream of fellow players level past me with all the best items, no wonder so many scumbags buy gil; it actually is more economical use of your time to buy gil to enable you to play the game at a decent level; but i just spent my time feeling like i was being sodomised; sometimes id wake up in my chair at night with the glow of the screen screaming no Jaggedy eared jack noooo i want your shiny charm wwhyy whhy wont you give it to me!!!.... shame cause there are lots of things about ffxi i really liked but everyone seemed to try their best to suck the fun out of; they should make a game where you just watch your screen for hours showing off your cool gears to fellow screen watchers but like you get your gear by pressing a button every 2 hours unless of course someone presses it before you then you have to wait another 2 hours until finally you realise youve lost your job and have been living off condiments for the past 74 hours and you cant destiguish between being awake and sleep you just lie on your bathroom floor cluching your jar of dijon mustard wondering why the fire crystals not working (maybe your not high enough skill yet). thats the true mmorpg experiance (im tired and hungry so ignore any grammatical and spelling mistakes)