@Milk Speaking about this game, I think it's already out of control: if some items are being sold for what an average user playing 3 characters earns with ~166 weeks of weeklies without spending a single meseta, then there is something wrong with the game's economy and those playing the market (willfully catering to gold buyers).

While I generally would agree with you that those that bought low priced items do not deserve to be permanently banned, in this case SEGA has warned several times to not do it.

I understand that not everyone reads the forum/website/twitter, but the warning regarding what was going on with shop (with a link to the website) was also presented in game, so SEGA did all they could to reach players.

Bear in mind that people lie all the time too. I remember when I was playing Archeage, botters organized themselves on a forum with all sorts of excuses (it was my brother/sister, I got hacked and such) for their appeals.

With all that in mind, you should realize that it is hard for someone reviewing your account to understand the real intentions and going through each and every appeal is time consuming, so I guess SEGA decided to perma ban everyone and call it a day.

At this point I don't think it will solve the real problem (inflation), I can only hope that they will handle NGS better.

@condor

(Pardon the long reply) Oh yes 100% the market is out of control. SEGA suggested ship 4 for newcomers and we arrived in a ship with a broken economy. An outfit you could get for under 10m on ship 1 or 3(I play alts there) sells for 80-100m on ship 4. The revival actually made things a little better. All these new players at least have access to prices they can earn and I’m hopeful this cuts down on some of that desperation they probably feel.

I’m part of the problem, too, and I own that. It didn’t occur to me before that I was affecting the market in an ugly way. People will only sell for what people will pay, and I paid it to an extent. I had a price limit, I didn’t own Shooting Star before because like hell I’m paying 500m for that, sometimes I would walk away but I’ve paid for things before that had no business being that high so the market kept climbing higher and higher. This in turn created panic, people felt like they couldn’t catch up. For example, I paid for Amalti hair when it was 45m, when I went to buy a second one for account the price had jumped to120m, within weeks, an old item like that. The revival scratch now has that hair for under 10m on my ship, a price that is fair and obtainable for everyone simply doing their dailies.

Fixing the market will elimate a lot of RMT but unfortunately it will always exist, someone will look at that 10m that takes little effort to earn and go “fuck that, I can pay fifty cents instead”

I don’t necessarily blame SEGA for their drastic action, I just don’t find it ideal and feel companies should be open to appeals if they have the manpower to do so, unfortunately they don’t.

But because they don’t, I have no guarantees of protection. Yes people lie, no one is ever guilty. I still feel there’s that 1% out there that lost everything for a misunderstanding, a shop that didn’t even look suspicious.

I’ve been burned before in the past. A sham of a game was losing its playerbase so they shut down half the servers deleting everyone’s characters and stuff with no head’s up to anybody. Hundreds of dollars wasted and nothing to show for it. I know SEGA isn’t corrupt like that but are they really going to have my back either if I’m that 1%? Can’t risk it, not if I can’t even appeal it.

@condor said in Why are y'all surprised you got banned?:

With all that in mind, you should realize that it is hard for someone reviewing your account to understand the real intentions and going through each and every appeal is time consuming, so I guess SEGA decided to perma ban everyone and call it a day.

Sure it's hard, but shouldn't that also be part of the job? If the evidence against someone is circumstantial it seems like the better move to not permaban the potentially innocent player, rather than to just go scorched earth and chalk the mistakes up as collateral damage.

Most online games have "we can disable your account at any point for whatever reason we want" in their ToS in some form just to cover themselves, but that doesn't mean a company should be defended for permabanning people just because they didn't want to put forth the work.

But also, this all hinges on whether or not "all I did was buy from player shops" is actually the truth, for the people who say it is. While I realize that the specifics of what got exploiters banned should be kept secret so that they can't circumvent it, when it comes to something that's potentially a completely innocent behavior like buying from a player shop, yeah I do think SEGA should say something about it to raise awareness. But with how little feedback we've actually got from SEGA about mostly anything, I doubt we'll hear anything about this either (which is honestly the detached treatment that makes me believe it's actually plausible they'd do something like first-strike permabans for buying from bot player shops vs just item deletion).

(Also note that I'm not bashing whichever low-level SEGA employees had to carry out the investigations here, but SEGA's PSO2 Global treatment as a whole. I know the GMs here say they pass along the concerns on the boards, but they probably also lack the authority to make formal statements like this so their hands are tied, like whoever carried out the bans was probably just working on orders from not having sufficient staff to be more thorough or something)

@Akonyl

You worded it more eloquently than I could but yes this 1000%!

This is what I mean by “unprofessional”, I understand they don’t have the hands but calling it a day just isn’t right. It leaves players with a feeling of uncertainty and discomfort.

I wonder if players, who get their ban overturned, could post it in forums. Sega probably has a non-disclosure agreement too, to protect themselves.

@Milk said in Why are y'all surprised you got banned?:

@ApollosAmour

I understand your point a bit better. I’ve luckily not run into any ERPers on this game but it’s been a big problem in others. I had to lock my house on ffxiv because people were ERPing in it. anyways, those platforms may be better but for some reason they like this game. People are impatient and want what they want now, be it cosmetics or fancy gear, it’s unfortunately never going to change.

Even games that allow you to outright buy their currency in game still have gold spam and people pay it because they don’t like the official company’s conversion rate. They want 100m for a nickel. I’m really not sure what the company can do to be honest.

What does ERPing mean? And why did you have to lock your room?

@RainGnyu

Erotic Role Play, people were having lewd scenarios in my house, in my hot tub.

@Milk said in Why are y'all surprised you got banned?:

@RainGnyu

Erotic Role Play, people were having lewd scenarios in my house, in my hot tub.

Ooo so sorry you had to tell me now! On the real!

@RainGnyu

Haha it’s fine. I was lucky to get a really nice house in the game, certain properties are worth a lot and if you decorate it nice then it attracts players. I didn’t have a problem with guests but not those kinds of guests. My neighbors helped me yell at them.

I enjoy going to people rooms and looking around. I should not be surprised but always am! People will always find away to remove the adolescent nostalgia from the online game.

@SuperND420 Makes me wonder if any of them even know anything, for one why would you need to buy meseta? hell theres an NPC dedicated for giving quest that gives lots of it, man I miss TACO days

@gnepyon13 said in Why are y'all surprised you got banned?:

@SuperND420 Makes me wonder if any of them even know anything, for one why would you need to buy meseta? hell theres an NPC dedicated for giving quest that gives lots of it, man I miss TACO days

I assume basically all of them know that the weeklies + the daily quests exist. What makes RMT tempting in games isn't that people don't know you can make a bunch of money in-game if you put forth the effort, it's just that the things you do to make that money are oftentimes boring or time-consuming, and spending IRL money ends up as less of a commitment if you're given the option.

If I did all of today's dailies, it'd get me 500-800k meseta (according to the pso2fleet discord bot), and probably take half an hour or something. Alternatively, I've seen bots advertising meseta at a rate that would get me 10 million for the equivalent of 2 minutes of work at my IRL job. If there was a legal+official way to get meseta at that rate, yeah I would do it. A lot of people probably would, and it's the subset of those people who think they can get away with it/don't care that it's against ToS/don't realize it'll probably get their credit card info stolen/etc that end up buying meseta from bots.

@Akonyl that's the thing isn't, this kids don't know how to enjoy the game, what I hate more than anything is that their action if not controlled can crash the in game economy, and... I honestly don't want to go back to the days when I have to play on the JP server Ship 2, I love my time there, but nothing beats having our own server, god knows it felt like we were pirates Hijacking a ship owned by the japanese with how we non japanese players basically owned ship 2

Many of the issues concerning communications is due to the fact that PSO2 Global is ultimately managed two different teams; Sega of Japan and ESTsoft.

ESTsoft is the company the GMs work for, the one who handle social media, livestreams, English announcements, etc. That said, like many people correctly guessed here, they have very little power on lots of things since ultimately its Sega of Japan who runs the game's servers, pushes out updates, creates and implements content and carries out investigations on many matters; hence the reason JP and Global BOTH had their player shops close at the same time as the exploits had begun to appear on the Japanese version as well (also, the team managing the Global version is the SAME team that manages the JP version).

Now mind you, ESTsoft's responsibility is also to communicate with Sega of Japan on many matters but, like the GMs have stated multiple times, there's no guarantee that suggestions or appeals will be accepted by them.

The game's age and programming also plays a huge role too. We don't know the specifics on what tools the Japanese team have available to them and all that mind you, but the best of putting things is.. under-the-hood, PSO2 is more of a badly programmed single player game with multiplayer support when you consider the way in which nearly 80% of the game runs client-side! On JP, a few hackers could actually make themselves GMs and teleport players all over the place and summon bosses to the lobby and so on. As such things like restoring lost items, seeing in-game item purchase history and so on may very well be things which the game's server simply wasn't programmed to keep track of and the game may very well not have been programmed to deal with bots all that well. The only reason PSO2 wasn't hacked back in the day was due its obscurity outside of Japan; the Global release had in a sense made the game a bit more mainstream and in turn... a bigger target for those with other motives.

Taking all that into account.... I feel there's very little that can be done. At the very least, with New Genesis around the corner there's a small chance some of the issues PSO2's code had might be dealt with but I really wouldn't count on it...

I am glad New Genesis economy will be resetted and be a completely new thing.