Square Enix takes real money trading (RMT) for in-game items in Final Fantasy XIV pretty seriously, as their weekly posts about ban waves show. But allegedly, some of FFXIV’s top players are facing RMT bans for legitimate in-game trades.
On Nov. 9, a post by Gimp_tv indicated he’d been banned from FFXIV for at least three days. A repost by Sindalf Sindalf explained the situation, saying: “During prog one of our crafters got flagged trading gil to the people handing us gold certs. SE really needs to do better when it comes to marking players for RMT since there are plenty of legitimate uses showing up as a false positive.”
Gimp_tv and Sindalf are associated with the Mental Stillness static, who were the first NA players to clear Another Aloalo Island (Savage). During progression, Mental Stillness had been trading for Ornate Diadochos chest pieces. Due to the rarity and difficulty of obtaining the pieces, large amounts of gil had to change hands.
Depending on the world and availability, the Ornate Diadochos gear currently sells on the marketboard for between 10 million and 50 million gil. As a result, Gimp_tv was potentially trading multiple instances of eight-figure gil amounts to several players, seemingly flagging an RMT ban.
However, in reply to his initial post, Gimp_tv makes allusions to a “joke tweet” that caused the ban. Potentially due to his association with Mental Stillness, Gimp_tv may have found himself reported for RMT in-game. This would have then alerted the system to large amounts of gil being transferred between accounts, hypothetically causing the ban. This explanation, however, is speculation.
The Ornate Diadochos chest pieces are best-in-slot (BiS) in many cases, especially for world-first progression. This is because of the high base stats, and five Materia slots, allowing for five +36 Materia Xs to be melded to the gear. Additionally, these armor pieces are exceedingly rare, as they are obtained by exchanging Khloe’s Gold Certificate of Commendation, which are a reward for getting three lines in Wondrous Tales.
In multiple games, race for world first (RWF) teams go to extraordinary lengths to prepare and gear their characters for the raids. In FFXIV a RWF static needs hundreds of millions of gil to gear themselves for progression. Even legitimate ways of earning that gil are so drastically intensive they could spark allegations of foul play. Under the circumstances, trading a few million gil for some exceptionally rare items, doesn’t seem like it should warrant a ban without a deeper investigation.
Compare this to something like World of Warcraft, whose newest Mythic raid, Amirdrassil, releases next week. Guilds spend thousands of dollars preparing for RWF, much of it on WoW’s official RMT method, the WoW Token. The WoW Token has an in-game gold value, and is often traded to players during RWF prog in exchange for their raid lockouts, gear, consumables, and other in-game costs. Echo CEO and raid leader, Scripe, once stated that his guild spent €35,000 worth of gold on a single WoW RWF. Based on WoW Token prices, that would put the amount spent on a single WoW RWF at over one billion gold. It’s highly unlikely Mental Stillness’ war chest for their RWF is quite so deep, making the alleged RMT even less likely.
While waiting out his three-day ban, Gimp_tv has switched to WoW. He is reportedly appealing his ban.
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