Almost 2 years ago, my real life friend Ayslain, was banned from FFXI. Technically it was early September 2006, but they got their first temp ban in August 2006, and are coming to visit me this weekend, so its an appropriate time for this.
To say this ban was fair and deserved would be an understatement.
Yep! The title says it all. Today i won a free trip (all expenses paid) to one Mordion Gaol! And let me tell you, the rumors of the land are grosely underexaggerated! There are ferris wheels there, bumper cars, hanging swings, the scrambler, tilt a whirl, the works all there! I had an excellent time until they forced me to logout! 🙂
So I was officially banned today until “midnight 8/9/06″… though i’m not exactly sure what that means. Does it mean 11:59pm on tuesday, or 11:59pm on Wednesday? What day do we consider midnight to be in the real world?
GM Luminious was my GM… and basically he seemed to only speak to me in a pre-determined statement setup by SE a while ago. Ironically, i could not take a screenshot of the log as I was in Gaol without windower loaded (when i realized i was zoning into Gaol randomly i quickly closed my FFXI thinking i could somehow evade them), but the reason for my banning was for the use of “illegal third party applications”. The terminology is very vague, so i’m not sure exactly how they fingered me in particular. The GM did not answer any of my questions (including the simple question of midnight EST?). The funny thing is, they are VERY CLEAR to you that you are not getting perma-banned throughout the whole process. I guess SE really doesn’t want to lose customers!
The GM character models themselves (which i’m sure everyone has seen at some point in screenshots) are pretty ugly (they are the executioner style where you can’t see their faces)… but one thing that screenshots don’t do ‘justice’ to them is that GMs have a weird “heat” effect that makes their character slightly blurry. It’s kind of like when you look down the road, or off of the hood of your car, on a really hot day and you can kind of see heat waves flowing up into the air. I don’t really see why they have that effect, as it just makes it annoying to look at them.
Anyway, i’ll see you all again on tuesday… wednesday… thursday… whatever day they meant for this to end! 🙂
And then the followup to the August 2006 temp-ban
First off, my guess is i was banned specifically for POS hacking while mining… which is probably the dumbest thing you can ever do.
See, i’ve used POS before… enough that i have even gotten that “You cannot enter the next zone” message 10,000 times b/c if you get to a zoneline earlier than physically possible you are not allowed to actually zone. You just get that weird message. GMs have never been auto-called on me b/c of that message… so i guess i assumed there wasn’t any auto-detection in place for POS at all.
I’m still not 100% sure how i got caught though. My guess is if you arrive at (and mine) points “too soon” the game will auto-call GM on you. But, i was also dragging mining points away from all of the mobs to safer areas to mine them… so they could’ve detected that my current x,y,z was not close enough to the mining point’s x,y,z to legitimately mine it.
All this being said… my first offense was actually a pretty big one (using hacks to make profit) and i STILL only got 3 day suspension. I am guessing all of this nonsense about windower and getting banned for using it (using /console instead of the console button) is probably just the excuse people cooked up to their friends when they got banned for something else and thus the rumors started. There is a screenshot somewhere online right after that last update on the 22nd of someone admitting to a GM that they had windower and that’s why they couldn’t use the warp taru and the GM didn’t care at all. Even if you shouted in cities that you used it i’m guessing they’d ban you for ‘spamming’ faster than banning you for windower. 🙂
My advice to you… hack away! Just don’t use it for profit, or they’ll detect you! 🙂
A month later, they were banned for flee hacking and pos hacking to complete the ninja AF quests faster.
About a year after this all came out, we finally got the list of things they had done:
Fish Botting
Flee Hacking (appearantly if you use flee hacking with the sky statue bind move you look like you are running, but not moving, on other’s screens). Was also used for dynamis pulls.
POS Hacking (for mining and also in sky to check if other NMs were up)
Moving targets to evade client side checks. Many green targetable objects handle proximity checks clientside, such as mining points. If you use a 3rd party tool, you can ‘pull’ the target to a safer spot.
Radar apps
An app which would leave a monster name on your screen if it ever appeared on your screen (useful for seeing if NMs came by while you were AFK).
Buying gil online. Although relatively speaking this was a small offense.
So, they are coming for a week long visit starting tomorrow. We’ll probably play some Warhammer as we’re both in the beta, maybe some WoW too. Lots of console games, although doubtful it will be mario kart. One of the two of us is way too good at all things mario kart related to the point where they are just frustrating to play against. And that person isn’t me.
I’ll also be on-and-off FF all week. Maybe I’ll have both of me on, but for a change, won’t actually be dual boxing. My friend is fairly experienced as a thf, blm, and whm. And still owes me 200K and a set of HQ fishing gear that someone was borrowing when they got banned… =P
-pyra