RIP SPARKS!!!

Something like this would be great tbh. It would fix both problems in a way that doesn't hurt players who need rem or costumes as you said lol.

Might be. They could handle it just like ambuscade with a per item limit. SE loves to reuse ***. To my knowledge they don't have any hard caps on the amount of a currency you can spend in any given time frame.

It would be automated, and as Eguy pointed out, they will just activate characters early and set them aside.

They need to actively ban, all the time, they need IP bans to help slow down the flood, they need CC bans.

That is the only effective solution. The rest is a bandaid on an open sucking chest wound.

Perspective is important. We can assume it's about the BST armies, but nerfing crystal ROE's would be a better way to address those without impacting players.

I'd guess it's quite possible SE views players repeatedly capping/dumping sparks during every gain-xp as unwanted behavior. The competition for mobs and camps can certainly bring out the worst in folks.

any kind of gate, while short-term effective against new RMT accounts, would boil down to two things:

1. create a lower class of player who doesn't have sparks access yet, which RMT players can circumvent simply by setting those characters off in reserve until they have access. Meanwhile, returnees and new characters being played by actual gamers will be hampered the most by such a system.

2. this in turn results in a "money class" and a "poor class", actually encouraging MORE gilbuying, making the RMTs MORE real money as their supply shrinks, allowing them to sell at a higher per-unit price, as well as create a larger buying class.

As has been said, the only way to attack the RMT without directly hurting your real gamer players is to actively seek out those RMT accounts and ban. And keep doing it.

Problem there is there is ways around both ip and cc bans (ei vpn and paypal) so not going to do much there either

Yea, this will turn out to be a blessing to RMT. Less supply overall means greater demand, they won't slow down their rate to generate Gil, but their competitors (real players) will struggle to make Gil. Gil will become more valuable, and since it is continuously nerfed to make legit Gil in game, guess what they are more tempted to do? Buy Gil...

This is an aweful fix, the more people are talking about it the more *** up it turns out to be.

RMT will love this change, they will make better money.

Is there a possibility that this sparks change could have an indirect impact on the unity rankings?

sparks cap too high ==> nothing happens
sparks cap in the middle ==> RMT just make more characters to skirt the cap (and gil buying might actually get more popular)
sparks cap too low ==> entire economy changes (slowly)

I agree and disagree with this real players that need gil go out and farm ***or save us stuff. People buying gil aren't "real" players in my eyes anyway. As a real player in today's game I've never struggled to make gil. I don't even farm spark I hate the idea of it personally so people need to find ways to make gil outside of buying or be banned its simple. If spark farming was your only way of making gil then you were hurt even before the cap.(not you personally just people in general) Edit the only people I feel bad for in this change are new/retutning players but something has to be done end of the day to semi slow down everyone from using spark for money not just rmts.

It was only a matter of time before Gil generation from sparks/accolades got nerfed. It has happened to every good way of getting Gil from npcs in the past Saliva, Blood, Blinkers etc all nerfed.

The only real way to combat RMT is for SE to sell Gil and drive the RMT market into the dirt.

I don't think SE plans to reduce RMT, they just want to curb inflation.

There are tons of way for RMT to make money. They don't actually have to sell Gil generating from sparks. They sell services. JP bots, ambu bots, crafting bots, account bots, clears bots...etc.

Spark bots are like extras when they make their account bots.

This is going to impact everyone if it's a low cap.

All those people who buy job points and items, this was there main source of gil.

Also, with a weekly limit, it will be harder to ban afk bots as they wont be 24/7 in ceizak/yahse clearing mobs. Instead they will take turns. So how can you justify banning someone that just beat junk a couple hours per week?

You would be surprised how much of the Gil you possess was generated with Sparks. If your money making strategy had anything to do with selling loot to other players (not talking about mercing) just generally selling drops on the AH, this will impact you.

This will cause some deflation, so the buying power per Gil will go up, but it will still impact the bottom line. I personally don't actively farm spark/accolades either, but I do cash em out when they cap.

The main thing that is upsetting about this is that it doesn't do anything really to stop the behavior it is designed to prevent to begin with.

It's upsetting that they cannot learn from the past, and they ignore the very basic enforcement that is obvious as all hell. So, pretty sure SE is in the pocket of the RMT. This latest nerf feels very publicity stunt like, but in reality it's still helping RMT while hurting normal players.

Indeed its not extremelly hard to detect a suspicious transaction, like buying stone arrow for 500M gil. So, if they want to deal with RMT, instead of attacking their income source, they could just act with the action of transfering gil per se.

What's the current highest price selling fish? Asking for a friend

None of them, it was nerfed long ago.

doesn't matter 200 cap on how many fish you can fish up a day

Cap isn't what stopped fish bots, gil:hour did.

The two years I spent npcing mercanbiligi and dil agree.

Oh well, not like they haven't given people a million other avenues to easily make gil.

sure as hell didn't help

For what it's worth I rarely hit 200 per day doing hakuryu all that time fishbottin.

And nothing else that you could cap on was really worthwhile (holding liks and gugs to sell to other fishbots) and no one was buying 20 stacks of sushi-fish daily.

The average person isn’t botting sparks and the way I’m reading it sounds like only botters are the ones seemed to really fear this so that would just be another boon.

Dunno how many times it has been said, this will do nothing to botters. This will have an effect on real players.

It is a boon. No one likes my opinion about it but thats what it is.

You should not be farming gil for your entire play sessions. This will actively discourage that. PLAY THE GAME.

however, being that it's 7 years too late, there is already a culture of "have the best gear or *** you" so... that's going to have to shift back to nq is ok again. Which at this point may never happen.

No, it's a nerf; a fix is when something isn't working as intended and is quickly remedied.

A nerf is when something is working as originally intended, but then later is decided for some reason that they want to change it.

It does do something to botters. Just not a lot. It will cut to their bottom lines if they farm sparks.

Assuming SE doesn't make spark invalid, the sparks farmers are going to have to buy more characters to farm sparks. It doesn't cost a lot as 1 character is $1.

So if SE limit the sparks thing to 5mil spark a week then an account making 20mil spark will now need an extra 3 leveled mules for their troubles or $3 a month.

However, for average players? Not really. Unless SE hires an actual economist, they are just running in circles.

You're underestimating how quickly you can get something going enough to 1 shot easy mobs all day long. Also, basic accounts are in the market if they just want to skip that minute step.

You dont need a leveled and geared mule though.

POLID 1 = main char that does the killing. This account doesnt leave the area, its constantly botting and killing
POLID 2 to 18 = 16 chars each. Max out sparks on char 1, log out and log char 2 in. rinse repeat.