Einjerhar, Limbus, and Cheating

Well, today I started off with demanding rent from my avatars (Aka fighting them solo and getting the gil reward).  Shiva, Ramuh, and Garuda were, of course, more than happy to oblige.  The one really nice thing about being a SMN/SCH is that I don't even have to use my 2 hour ability, Astral Flow or even items to win.

Later, much later, that night, we did some Einjerhar.  We started late because I think we were waiting for people to show up, much to my annoyance.  We did a Wing III, which had some really tough waves.  First we fought clusters, followed by bombs, followed by a combo of FLAYERS (hate those things) and Manticores.  The boss was the hydra, and we had it down to 75%~ before we kicked out.  Still got 1920 ampoules out of it, so I'm pleased.  Wish we won so we can do more Odin, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

After a quick jog home, I joined my Limbus group later that night.  We were going to do Tenemos West, but that turned out to be occupied when we got there.  We ended up doing Tenemos North.  We won, and got the chip, and no one died, so it's a plus.  On the other hand, We ended up getting three(!) MNK pieces, which are completly useless to all but one person.  On the bright side, we also got one THF piece which helped someone out.  After that, I cut out for the night after using my moogle stuff.

Now something that has been bothering me is that a few days back, SE did a huge ban sweep, banning some 900 people, 550 of those were permanent bans while the rest got temporary 72 hour bans.  There were many reactions to this, from anger, to despair, to resignation.  Overall, there are three main reactions, "We cheated because SE was being unfair"(rationalization), "Yeah, what we did was against the rules, but banning for a first time offense is a bit harsh!" (bargaining), and "Yeah, we did wrong, and we got what we deserved." (acceptance).

For those who may not know, there was a bug that allowed an item in the treasure pool be duplicated to an entire alliance by letting the item appear in the treasure pool, and then disbanding the alliance.  The treasure pool would then appear for all three parties that were in the alliance as a whole, effectively tripling the treasure drop.

There are two main things wrong with this.  The first is the duplication of rewards being spread to all party members.  For example, instead of getting one Usukane piece, there are three for the alliance/party to take.  SE has, historically speaking, always banned duplicating items, and this is a clear exploit of the system.  Personally, I'm boggled with the idea that somehow, people do not see this as an exploit or even a bug.  I fail to see how any reasonable objective person would look at this, and say it's not an exploit or a bug.

Some of the other player's reaction have also hinged on some rationalization.  They will rationalize this by saying that since the drop rate is so low on the stuff (and believe me, it is low), that when and if something drops, it should be duplicated so people can get their stuff faster.  Blaming a weakness in the design as justification to use an exploit is to me as wrong as simply denying it.  It's like someone buying gil, justifying it by saying that it's near impossible to actually get money in this game.  Such rationalizations is still no excuse from breaking the rules, and certainly no excuse of escaping the consequences.

Finally, there is a third group, which say that what happened was wrong, but SE was too harsh when banning people.  My thought on this is that players have certain responsibilities when playing the game.  These responsibilities include not using exploits when found, and reporting them to SE.  Needless to say, nearly everyone that got banned failed, at least in some part, on the first one, and definately failed the second one.  When I think about it, I don't think the purpose of the bannings was to punish players at all, but to send a message and a warning to all players of FFXI.  First is that exploits should not be used (at least not frequently).  Second is that when exploits are being used, all players share the responsibility to communicate with SE on the exploit.  Needless to say, all players have failed in either one, or in the case of some, both, and a penalty needs to be made to send a message.  By banning people who might have used this once, SE made it clear that there is no gray area in this matter, and cheating once or allowing a cheat to happen will receive the same fate, banned from the game.

I with to close my statement with this: This is Square-Enix's game, and we just play in it.  SE has every right to cancel or ban accounts for ANY reason.  This may include banning all red hair mithra playing Palading on a Tuesday.  Stupid perhaps, but they would be well within their rights.  Having said this, everyone has a certain responsibility when playing this game.  For the devs, this includes ensuring a stable game that doesn't go down often, and producing new and exciting content to play with.

On the other hand, players also have a responisibilty to report any and all bugs and exploits that will appear.  For this reason, I think SE did what it did.  Not only was it an item duplication bug, but one that was really kept quiet for a long long time.  Since no one came forward with information, some people were banned for that, as well as duplicating items.