Accounts banned for real money transactions and other illicit activites.

Earlier this week Square Enix announced that over six thousand accounts have been banned from their recently released MMO, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. In addition, almost six hundred more accounts have received temporary suspensions. In addition over 367 billion Gil has been temporarily frozen as a result of these investigations/bans.

The bulk of these bans was related to the spamming of messages for sites offering real money transactions (i.e. the purchase of in-game currency or items for real world funds). The remaining accounts that received disciplinary action were for various illicit activity. That vague description is essentially a catch-all for players cheating the system in one way or another with in-game exploits or third party applications that allow players to do things that shouldn't be possible in the game (e.g. traveling at high speed, warping to specific coordinates, automating your character, etc.). Players who witness future examples of cheating or discover any confirmed cheats are urged not to use this information or spread it to other players. Any information related to game exploits should be reported in-game by going to [System Menu] -> [Support Desk] -> [Contact Us] -> [Report Cheating].

Personally I'm ecstatic that they're finally doing something about this. Aside from the whole "cheaters shouldn't prosper" idea, the main reason I had to make a separate filtered chat window in-game was to cut out all of the gold spam I've seen in general chat in every zone. Even that only partially works with all of the gold tells I've gotten over the last month. Hopefully with these bans I'll also see fewer Miners and Botanists teleporting from node to node. Sure there's not really as much competition as there would be in something like World of Warcraft, but it's still obnoxious to hike all the way to the next node and see them already wrapping up.

Michael "Ragar" Branham