Square Enix has issued FFXIV bans for 5,000 players for RMT (Real Money Transactions). RMT is when a player/group offer a good and/or service in an MMO in exchange for real-world money, or vice-versa.
Apparently, 5,000 FFXIV players thought they would get away with it… well, they didn’t. Hence the title. Here’s what we know about the FFXIV bans…
Everyone who has played an MMO has seen it. You’re running around in a city or a highly-populated area, and then a character named Hbhrdcnbwd tries to sell you in-game currency for real money in a whisper. Or in a zone-wide chat, which is just as annoying.
Or maybe you’ve played World of Warcraft and seen a guild offer a run of the new Mythic level raid for some spondooli. All of those, a BIG no-no in MMO’s. While not illegal (at least in the U.S), RMT’s are pretty much universally against the license to which you agree when you play the game.
One of the worst parts is that a lot of these ‘you pay me money and I’ll sell you in-game gold’ offers are just bait for scammers to hack your account. It’s happened to me once, and it took a LONG time to get back to shanking boars in Elwynn Forest with the same account.
If you do the math, that’s almost $75,000 worth of a single month of subscription payments that have been banned. That’s how serious they take it. And to think, that probably doesn’t even scratch the surface.
FFXIV is a HUGELY profitable game, it’s one of the larger subscription-based MMO’s in the world. MMO’s that are tiny in comparison still have a money selling problem, just imagine how widespread it is in a game that scammers/gold farmers know is popular. We might see another wave of FFXIV bans in the future.
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