Carl Arbogast

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  • in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11614
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
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    they didn’t expect the game to recover so well after the flop that FFXIV 1.0 was.

    1.0 was not a flop, I was there the all time, every single day, there was plenty of players having fun, it was fantastic to have all continents playing together, JP EU America Oceania, it was so exotic, and beat XI scores.

    It has its flaws, like every single games of this genre at their release.

    SE made a shit tons of money selling the game.
    They managed to made pseudo gaming journalists and self proclaimed internet games experts to believe whatever they wanted to believe after their super serious 4 hours test while never going back to actually facts checking.

    SE didn’t bother contradicting them, which was super weird from the point of view of all players actually playing and enjoying the game (we were like WTF), but rather SE brushed, caressed and pet all those pseudo journalists and self proclaimed game experts by never gainsaying them, which proved to be the right strategy for what they had in plan next.

    Truth is, Tanaka was a visionary, he built a high graphical quality game, prepared it for the decade coming by having high polygon count, high res model and textures, a real open world with no loading screens, not even to enter cities, not even inside the cities, using brand new modern techniques where datas were streamed from hard drive while you were passing in specific areas without you noticing anything, giving you an unimaginable sense of immersion, it was a whole world, not a collection of zones, everything was truly connected, not cheated with spacial ellipses.

    All tier 3 Cut Scenes were entirely made from Motion Captures, not crappy emotes, and they had all a cinematographer making inspired and talented framing, camera movements and editing. (the scenes you see with mocap in 2.x, were made from stealing mocap of 1.0 scenes that had nothing to do with the 2.0 ones)

    Uematsu music was the best of his long FF career, it was his fucking return, first time he made all musics since FFIX, a master piece, Soken himself knows more than anyone else how far he is from his master.

    Tanaka had boundaries everywhere for the lore, the story, the gear, the races, the genders, etc. because he knew that boundaries force you to work with them, inside them, to make something consistent and believable, and that too much freedom always lead to non sense, disconnected things, immersion break.

    Tanaka, unlike Yoshida, knew how much all of this was important. Tanaka was an artist making work of art, Yoshida is a former WoW player working for a greedy company.

    The truth is Tanaka wanted to skip the PS3, knowing how much PS2 limited them in XI, which was the right choice, but the greedy old CEO of SE pushed him to make a PS3 client, which was impossible with the high quality choices he made, and that CEO also pushed him to release the game way sooner than planned, to counter the WoW expansion, forcing Tanaka to rush lots of stuff, to repeat places, etc.

    So, today, when Yoshida enjoys making fun of Tanaka team and their super high polygon count for a flower pot, and at the very same time you don’t get a week without having someone on Reddit making a topic about how the current FFXIV lacks polygons, textures, AA, etc. in truth who should laugh at who?

    Yoshida has no cinema and literature culture, he doesn’t know the potential of his game in that regards, Tanaka knew.

    SE always expected to succeed with ARR, because they had already so many 1.0 players backing them up, they could not fail it, they were good again at makeing people think whatever they wanted to think, putting them on their side rather than fighting them with undisclosed important numbers, which proved to be a smart strategy in the long term.

    Truth is, when pseudo gaming journalists and self proclaimed gamers experts little scamps get together, they’re worse than a sewing circle.
    They don’t make any investigations, they don’t spend time testing, for almost 2 decades people thought FFXI was a flop, while it was the FF that brought back to SE the most money, more than FFVII, more than any FF, you only had to buy SE shares and attend a shareholder assembly to learn it.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Carl Arbogast Carl Arbogast.
    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11570
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
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    Yoshida repeated several times through the past 6 years their attempts and progress in negotiations with Microsoft, and during interviews in the last Japan Fan Fest, he said again they were making progress, and he revealed as well their will to release a Switch version, and a Google shitty streaming Stadia version.

    Speaking to GameSpot from the Square Enix Japan offices today in Shinjuku, game director Naoki Yoshida said versions of the game are possible for Xbox and Nintendo systems. In fact, he said discussions with Microsoft and Nintendo, as well as Google, are currently underway.

    As he’s said in previous interviews, Yoshida stressed with GameSpot that FINAL FANTASY XIV needs to support cross-play to have its playerbases united and offer the best experience. That’s currently possible on PS4 and PC, but not with other systems, which has presumably kept the game off Xbox and Nintendo systems so far. However, now that Sony, as well as Nintendo, is beginning to allow cross-play with competing platforms for games like Fortnite and Rocket League, it seems more likely than ever that FINAL FANTASY XIV comes to new platforms.

    […]

    “So we are talking with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Google, of course; we cannot say anything at the moment because we are still in negotiations, but once we have details we can make an announcement; we can bring the news to everyone. We are currently negotiating will all those platforms.”

    Source

    But I don’t take those news as good ones, the game lacks both graphical quality and artistic direction, adding low end hardware clients will continue to prevent the PC version to get any better.
    No graphical/physics/netcode improvements were made for 4.0, none will be made for 5.0, last time they talked about improving quality they said maybe for 6.0 in 2021, but their workflows for creating assets, to my opinion, are really unprofessional, and nowhere near what they should have been for a game meant to last over a decade, quite the opposite.

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11547
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
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    I’m not sure what do you call “alarm”

    Pretty much what you described, either loud sound from the bot, or custom WAV files played by the bot, or custom Windows Text To Speech triggered by the bot.

    Right now you can filter a bit the sounds coming from the game, remove the music, the sfx from you and other players (battle sound, crafting sound, gathering sound, etc.) and keep your FC, LS, whisper sounds high, but this filter will still produce annoying useless game system sound.
    What would be great, is disabling completely game sound, and rely on Miqobot alerts.

    Right now you can also remove in-game sounds, and rely on the notorious ACT (Advanced Combat Tracker), that all of us raiders use to parse fights, upload parses to FFlogs, and use for custom mechanics sound alerts.
    It has a custom trigger feature, that you can use to parse the logs and trigger WAV files or TTS alert. The problem is, this system won’t work easily from some important things, emotes, /say. Because it’s just made to parse text, while Miqobot is aware of metadata beyond that and can differentiate all sort of stuff.

    Since most of Miqobot users always keep an eye on the game, it never has been a high priority feature to implement, and is part of the GUI/QoL planned update that is still far away from now.

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11542
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
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    1+

    Most probably every Miqobot user gains from ability to put their chars on unattended farm somewhere in godforgotten world corner while they sleep, without worrying about inet troubles.

    People here don’t do that, this is what get you a ban. There used to be “godforgotten world corner” in 1.x, it’s all gone since 2.0, since they replace the open world with tiny zones with borders and loading screens, and since they got rid of level 99 monsters.

    To me the only downside of a disconnection is too lose your logs history. I keep an ear on the game by filtering the most important sounds (whispers, FC, LS, etc.), so I can intervene when it’s required, but there’s some stuff that doesn’t make sound and are challenging to build alerts for through ACT (emote, /say), and therefore every now and then I like to maximise the game, maximise the logs, and have a quick look at what happened since last time, and intervene if required.

    When you get a disconnection, you lose the history logs (there are still somewhere on your hard drive, but the files are nowhere near easy to go through), and it’s like having a memory black out, you have no idea what happened before, it’s kinda scary, especially for accounts that worth more than 20k $.

    There’s features I requested about that, but they’re all part of a special milestone in the bot, redoing its GUI and QoL, and this will only happen when major features are all already well implemented enough. We’re getting there, the crafting solver was a major thing, then the Scenario Engine was a major one too, and now the Combat features are ongoing, but there’s the expansion in the middle.

    What I requested is a log alert system, triggering alarm for what you choose, emotes, /say, etc. and as well as replicating the important logs in Miqobot window (with the ability to maximise that window), so that when you get a disconnection, you can still read what happened before (did someone waved at you and you didn’t answered, etc.).

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11498
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
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    Also, you’re not forced on picking a server in EU, you can go to any Datacenter regardless of your Square Enix Account region (a EU player with a EU account can play on NA).
    You can go to NA, JP or EU, you have the complete freedom to go anywhere, and have characters on different Datacenters across different continents.

    A ping below 200ms is required for end game fights, but you don’t want to play end game fights anyway, so even 330 ms on JP server is fine for you.

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11497
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
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    And yes there is a trial version for XIV.

    And also to answer another of your question/doubt regarding the popularity of the game, it worth knowing that it is available on PC, PS4, and Mac. ALL, play together on the same servers regardless of their platform.

    They’re working on a Nintendo Switch version as well as an Xbox version (it takes time for Xbox because they want the same thing as with PlayStation, true cross-platform and not being force to pay for online playing on top of the monthly fee).

    And they’ll release a new client on PS5.

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11496
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    1+

    Here is the relevant part of the official web site:

    https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/

    The client booter is 100 MB, final game once done downloaded is 37 GB.

    The client is also available on Steam. Miqobot works with both, and with all 4 languages.

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11495
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
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    0

    Well……. this sucks major @$$ – what else could I say? Devs are morons copying this market behavior from WoW rather than from EVE

    Try to find someone selling a Legacy account. Google it.

    As a 1.0 player for example I’m on a Legacy account, I pay a cheaper monthly fee, 7.99/month, and I have for this price 40 characters instead of 8, and I can have 8 characters per servers.

    With 7 retainers, only one main char, and 7 mules char at lvl 1, I can list 1120 prices at the same time on the same server, by having all the mules in my Free Company to transfer the items and gils.

    This allow to list what sells when you have enough knowledge of the game, stack of 3 leveling kit fish, or 4 for some leves, stack of 15 potions, expensive ingot with high profit one by one, stack of 3 HQ meals for turn-in leveling, etc. etc.

    Those always sell faster than any giant stacks or random small stacks, because it matches exactly what the player is being asked by the game.

    Check your prices only one time a day since it’s what you are looking for.
    Since you won’t play the market, as in adjusting prices every 10 min on reset Tuesday at prime time raid, you’ll get undercut a lot, but having 1120 item/stack on sale at all time on everything relevant could maybe compensate not playing the market.

    As for the World Visit feature, don’t worry it’ll be there in a couple of weeks, and it’s only the beginning, they plan to go beyond that, it’s a step of something they started already years ago and to which they continuously added features.
    It started with a Datacenter wide duty finder, then a Datacenter party finder, then cross-world private parties/alliance, cross-world Linkshells, and now World Visit.

    For the market, World Visit relies on one big thing, a third party web site created by a notorious skilled XIV 1.0 player: https://mogboard.com

    It uses phone app to scan market, it was down for weeks recently because SE banned the accounts scanning. That 1.0 player put it back, but if it happens again, he won’t retry and give up.
    As of now it isn’t really useful, only to see the discrepancies of prices between servers.

    If it stays alive when World Visit launches, players will get used to it, and instead of checking price on the Market Board, they’ll check where is the cheaper price on this web site, and teleport there to buy their thing.
    They’ll always be lazy player, or sometimes when travelling there it isn’t worth the price difference, but it’ll definitely start a new wide undercutting war with dozens of competitors instead of 10 times less.

    This will be a priceless tool for you, as you can have the all picture of all markets in one click.

    If the web site end up shutting down cause the British player can’t keep it alive after getting his scan accounts banned again, then World Visit won’t really influence the Market, because no player will travel 10 times to check 10 Market Board, unless what they’re looking for is for example what I sell, 40M rare minions, here they better check every single server, it worth spending 5 min to save 15M.

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11475
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    2+

    Now you tell me that everything is actually fun in FFXIV, gathering included + simple grinding brings no useful stuff at all! This makes me sit down and ponder: why the heck would you need bot, then? %) Players should probably cover all demand with their legit supply, just gathering for fun!

    This is where you failed to understand many things. People here, actually play the game, because they’re passionate about the game, same thing for the developers of Miqobot.

    You’re so focused on wanting to make real money out of it, that you thought we were there for the same reason, since the creation of this bot 3 years ago, I think you’re the 1st one mentioning you’re here to make real money.

    You were so surprised to not find answers to your RMT questions in the FAQ, this should have hinted you, FFXIV is a singular MMORPG, so are its botters. It’s not the usual Yet Another MMO, it’s apart, I’m not even joking.

    Our main focus with this bot are not even making gils, we use it for countless of other reasons.

    You might not understand it very well, Lyfox the best contributor of this community tried to explain it to you, but actually combining Miqobot and FFXIV create a new strategic and management game on top of the main game, making it better, richer, and more fun.

    Creating your own grid, your own scenarios, that match your own very specific needs, is quite fun, and monitoring the results is quite enjoyable.

    FFXIV has so many content, and some of them have great untradable/unmarketable/unique rewards, locked behind some long grinds, and RNG, because japanese love RNG, they were raised with Patchinko.

    Miqobot remove those grinds, but long grinds doesn’t mean the content is not fun, it means it’s too long, and more importantly, there’s too many content, more than one person can handle without spending his life on it. So Miqobot takes over when you feel you don’t have enough time.

    The game has its own giant Casino full of games within a game (racing, platformers, cards, RTS, board games, etc.).
    There’s so many places like this where real money or gils won’t be able to get you anything, and those places contained some of the most wanted rewards.

    The game has so many achievements, there’s plenty of leaderboards web sites, getting in the Top 100 of all world combined is a major contest among achievements hunters, no way you can make it without Miqobot, or lose your life.

    That’s why we use a bot.

    Though, why would a botting toon in L2 need, say, weapon +16? Heck, +5 is more than enough (or even +4)! There is just no much point to invest in your RMT toon, because sooner or later it gets banned anyway – even if bot is not discoverable, finally they ban you just for RMT. And I sincerely hope it works like this in FFXIV, too… as I don’t feel like investing months into account doomed to ban.

    We tried to warn you, Gathering and Crafting in FFXIV end-game requires the BiS gear set, and almost the best melding (even if Miqobot algorithms are state of the art and required the equivalent of an engineering thesis for their creation, I’m not joking, it still needs good gear if you want to get High Quality reliably)(and the recipes are also locked to you if you don’t pass a very high threshold of stats).
    But almost the best melding still means what Arc said, anywhere between millions to tens of millions, 3 times per 2 years.

    It depends on your luck (RNG), and your own stock of Materia, especially if unlike some of us you don’t own a Free Company with a house to get a workshop, with 4 airships and 4 submarines on which you have the total control of their destinations and their loot (both submarine and airships take truckload of mats since it’s supposed to be built by an entire guild)(and leveling them and unlocking all zones take several month, several month because they need several real life days to travel to their destinations, and cause RNG), because those actually bring lots of materia, but lots because it was designed to feed an entire guild, and some of us use all of it for their own.

    Materia is a big barrier, it’s really investing a lot.

    You need to also be aware that at each expansion, they change crafting and gathering, new actions, new mechanics, new content, and while Miqobot breaks every patches, due to memory layouts changing and other stuff, and while its dev usually take from a couple of hours to a couple of days to fix the bot, for a new expansion, it will break beyond repair.

    The bot will need to be rebuilt to take every new stuff into account. And for crafting, adding new actions can literally mean exploding the possibilities to the point the bot would need hours and peta octet of RAM to store the solution, that’s what happened 2 years ago, and the dev had to re-imagine their algorithms to bypass those limitations, and this can take weeks or month.

    But last time, to avoid such a downtime, they updated the bot in 2 phases, I understand they don’t really like to do that because they’re perfectionist and like to deliver only the best product, but nonetheless in a first phase they managed to fix the bot within a couple of weeks releasing a version still working with the old algorithms, and therefore not optimised at all, and with some feature not working, not able to do end-game, but still able to do basic stuff, so we can have something to use while waiting for the real version in a second phase.

    That’s likely what is planned as well for next July, but it’s impossible to guess in advance how much the game will change, and how much the bot would have to be rebuilt, especially for crafting, as its algorithm are really a true solver, calculating billions of possibilities based on your recipe and stats, discarding useless path, and picking the best action to use based on what the RNG will do to your craft.

    But if you plan to level up to the new cap (80) and exploit the market as soon as possible, you better take into account you might have no bot for several days, then a half working bot for several weeks/month, and then again the best product on the market. That’s unavoidable.

    Just too bad these players are split into THAT small realms 🙁 I’d find a way to cover demand of thousands of players with a single bot, but what can I do if most of these players are in other worlds?…

    First, the worlds are not that small, for real, especially high populated ones.
    And secondly, did you ever read what I wrote about the World Visit feature that will release before next expansion? It allows all players from a Datacenter, to travel freely to any world of the Datacenter, to check their market and buy stuff.
    Buying is allowed, but selling directly there is not allowed, and trading with someone there is not allowed.
    This means you get 10 times more potential customers than before, a all Datacenter. Sure they need to check prices of all worlds on a third party web site, and then to travel to the world they want before buying, but it’s still 10 times more players.

    Now that’s really not much. I mean, in terms of RMT! so no offense to you personally. Even if we assume that 1mil = $1 (for simplicity), $32 per month is nothing – even crap WoW bot brings some $43 monthly (per window). I really really hope that a professional botter should make way more – otherwise this is really not the game I’m looking for.

    You read in diagonal, I quoted my gils income to show you an example of what you can get by not trying, I’m not trying to get gils, and I got 400M last year, some from the bot, some by playing the game, and I spent close to 150M a year to buy loot tied to pure RNG.
    That really was to show you, what someone can expect when you don’t care and don’t try, 400M a year. Like I explained, this come from crafting extra of what I craft for myself, if I need 1000 potions for Ultimate raiding, I’ll craft 2000 and sell the extra, if I need a BiS body at an even patch launch, I’ll craft 3 and sell 2, if I need 8 turn in items for leveling, I’ll craft them in double, etc.

    So really, I’m not trying, I just craft extra of what I need for myself, that and playing all the game where I get plenty of rare stuff I can sell, net me 400M last year. I don’t know what came from the bot and what not, I only took notes of global amounts.

    Now you what you aim is quite something else, the more you want, the harder it gets.

    You would want 1000 $ a month on average, which is 1.3 billion gils a month, which is 45M a day, that’s a lot, not impossible, but to the point most of us here know it would require resources you don’t have yet, some of those resources will take month to get, and we know it will require likely more human hours and micro-managing the market than what you might think, it’s not magic.

    Did I get that right: so right now prices are in the deep @$$ because of this “hole” and because of major patch incoming, but as soon as it comes out, prices (and thus profits) rocket-jump for months?

    It’s not that simple. Right now you can still make millions, you can always make millions, I’m making millions right now, but not out of craft, out of end-game tradable loot from Baldesion Arsenal, and logos from Eureka.

    When expansions or patches come out, there’s a gigantic peak yes, but it doesn’t last month, it last a bit, and from there it starts to fluctuate immensely every day, for the good or the worse, the game have so many content, all locked behind stages, that this dictates what flood the market suddenly (because a peak of player reached a stage), or what is in need, or what became trash because the average iLevel players reached got too high, etc.
    It’s complex and alive, so many variables, require a very good knowledge of the game and its past long history.

    I like to disagree with Carl on those 14 million players.

    You missed my point Arc, what I was showing is the growth, it doesn’t really matter what those 14 Millions represent, what matters is that this number was 4 Millions in 2015, and became 14 Millions 3 years later.
    This show the growth speed of the game, which is impressive, and tells a lot about its health and future.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Carl Arbogast Carl Arbogast.
    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11457
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    2+

    So, I take it as there ARE some places/materials to grind for a decent profit, actually?

    This might be where so far we failed to explain how exactly FFXIV works.

    In this game, every content and features are gated, locked behind something. And every interesting loot/materials/items are locked behind weekly lock out, reset, cool down, timers, etc.
    This is how the game controls carefully the injection of what is interesting.
    For example, when a Savage Raid patch comes out, like I explained previously, what will be on demand during a small window are raiding crafted gears.
    The materials required will ALWAYS include several items gated behind 2/3 external currencies, and those currencies all have a maximum you can stock per characters, and only a specific quantity per week and per players of those currencies are easy to get, beyond that it’s quite long, even for a bot, and lots come from playing Discipline of War and Magic.
    It makes it difficult for one person to actually get enough to mass produce the items on demand, whether they’re the final items, or pre-crafted ones (because like you pointed out already, quite often the highest profit/hour is not on the final item).
    This is made so that the wealth get divided more fairly between players, rather than one botter owning the market.
    This doesn’t mean a well prepared botter can’t win a lot, it just makes it harder and less profitable than it could be without those protections, and there’s plenty of little subtleties like that, like plenty, for real.

    Though, gathering is just… running in circles and, well, gathering basic materials. It is NO FUN; I bet there are not that many players who would do it for hours on daily basis. So, why would I need to craft at all?

    In FFXIV, gathering is fun and super popular, because just like crafting, it has its entire game in a game, lore, prices, etc.

    What you are describing, Gathering as in running in circle, this does exist, but every materials from there worth barely nothing, and are available in large quantity for cheap in the market, can be bought for cheap at NPCs, can be farmed by legal in-game bots (your retainers that you also need to level up and gear up for that purpose, they are also the reason why farming mobs for loot materials worth nothing, it’s because those legal in-game bots will do it for you), are also brought up by Airships, Submarines, gardens, etc.
    So yes, regular players don’t do that “gathering in circle” for days, not fun, barely worth something most of the time.

    But lots of them do the other part of gathering, which is more fun, and consist of farming Unspoiled, Legendaries and Ephemerals. Those nodes spawn one or 2 times per 74min, are available only for a couple of min, require some specific rotations, super good gear well melded, and are less mind-numbing, because you go somewhere, spend a minute there, then you teleport somewhere else for the same thing, and so and so on.
    So there’s competition there, lots of competition from regular players, and prices of mats are kept low because of that.
    Again, it doesn’t mean you can’t make profit out of that, we’re just trying to warn it could be less than you would imagine.

    And Miqobot is the perfect bot for this, with its scenario feature, if played smartly, you can blend with other players, act like a real players and only do it for an hour, take a break, have the bot go somewhere else do a different activity, and go back to gathering later, so that you just look like a casual and doesn’t raise suspicion among people seeing you there all the time.

    It was noted above already, IIRC… what’s the problem with it? I mean, if this game holds an absolute record of 24 hours to complete main plotline, then probably I’ll manage it in some 36 hours with every new account once I learn the game. That’s some… 3 days rl? Per account? Can’t say I’m scared 🙂

    Be careful, like I said everything in the game is gated behind something, so not only you would have to do what you described, but way more, tons of stuff to unlock again, leveling every jobs all over gain, farming again all your specialist recipe books, gearing up again and melding, the melding cost quite a lot when you went down to 0.

    No one explained it I think already, but à la FFVII, you need to meld materia into each piece of gear you have in order to reach the stats thresholds allowing you to craft end-game recipes, and allowing you (well, allowing Miqobot) to craft High Quality items, and to gather end-game mats.
    Those materia are a huge part of the market itself, especially for Gatherers and Crafters, their price sky rocket often, and you need tons of them because of one thing that rules in FFXIV: RNG.

    You need to meld 4 to 5 materia per piece of gear, the 1st and sometimes second one have 100% rate of success, then it falls from ~17% to ~7% rate of success.
    This means you’ll blow hundreds of pricey materia, millions of gils if you didn’t stock enough or start with nothing.
    You need to redo all this 3 times per expansions, when a new set gets available in a new patch. It cost a lot.
    Not saying it to discourage you, no, just so you know what to expect, there’s plenty of things cutting down profits, this is a big one to consider regarding a ban.

    Now probably one of the most important questions pops up: is there a way to check official info – number of players per world (to choose really populated one)?

    FFXIV is a very popular game, full of players, healthy, very greedy, well alive, and bringing a mountain of cash to Square Enix, FFXI used to be the game that brought them the most money, FFXIV exploded those records.

    It always been hard to guess numbers, especially because players come and go between patches, because of the monthly fee, lots of players wait to have 2 full patches to do before paying for a month, it’s not because of the lack of content, they’re just trying to save a few box.

    So when you see those unofficial census trying to figure out how many active players there is by just looking at how many cleared the current final main story quest, it’s quite inaccurate. Especially because for that, they rely on people having their achievements public, and they’re not by default.
    And sometimes, they rely on mount/minion (those are always public), but only rare few ending quest of the main story quest reward you with one. And there’s always at all time, so many new players slowly doing the Main Story Quest, and far away from reaching the end, considering the amount of stuff to go through before getting there.

    That being said, here is a relevant official information, in 2015 before Heavensward Expansion, Square Enix claimed 4 Millions registered players (not playing at the same time, and this is not the number of characters, this one is over a billion).
    In 2018, 3 years later, they announced reaching 14 millions of registered players (+250%), and that the current expansion, Stormblood, was their biggest growth launch.
    To me, those officials numbers reflect better what I see myself in the game.

    Now what you need to know, picking a low populated server, directly pointed by the game, would usually result in higher prices for everything.
    But, this come to an end in a couple of month, where they’ll introduce the World Visit feature, where one can visit any world of their Datacenter (by then there will be 8 Datacenters, as they are creating 2 new one right now, for the next expansion), and will be able to buy stuff from the market board of the World they visit (no trading of course, no selling), which will quick equalize the prices, and act as an even bigger undercutting machine.

    Lots of people here tried hard to explain to you how the market board works, there’s really no buy orders, it really fluctuates a lot (there’s many notorious Reddit trolls who enjoy crashing markets for weeks just to make a post out of it), it fluctuates all the time, it really takes a good knowledge of the game (meaning actually playing all content of the game, every little and obscure ones like submarines loot, workshop housing) to figure out what will sell and when, and it really takes a lot of market board playing to get significant profit out of it, and this means lots of real human hours, not bot hours.

    It’s no mistake if pretty much everyone here tried to say it with one way or another.

    You can still think that we might then just not be good at it, it’s fair, maybe we’re not, most of us get out of the bot more gils than we need, so we’re not trying very hard I suppose, Lyfox like to watch his billions grows, myself, I stopped to care when I reached one billion because you can not display more and it gives a nice touch to my vid and streams, any extra beyond that is to buy minions, mounts and orchestrion rolls from lucky players (the cost for this is high, from 15M to 50M per patches, exactly what I get from both Miqobot and the game without trying (meaning crafting surplus of what I wanted for myself and selling it), 8M/week average, can be 3M/week for month, and 50M/week for specific content).

    Oh, and there is also a related question: how much time have passed since the last addon / left until the next one?

    FFXIV 1.0: 2010
    FFXIV 2.0: 2013
    FFXIV 3.0: 2015
    FFXIV 4.0 : July 2017 [launches of expansions are always in July every 2 years] [1st part of Savage raid]
    [every even patch is a savage raid patch, patch are release every 3 month, new savage raid is then every 6 month]

    4.1 October 2017
    4.2 January 2018 [Second part of raid Savage]
    4.3 May 2018
    4.4 September 2018 [Third and final part of raid Savage]
    4.5 January 2019

    6 month hole with still mini patches (where we are now)

    FFXIV 5.0: July 2019
    FFXIV 6.0: July 2021

    The pattern is always the same, it never misses, it’s the part entirely predictable.

    in reply to: Newcomer's questions #11428
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    5+

    I’m sure you’re a veteran RMT, and know your stuff, but since you’re seeking informations about this game, to evaluate whether or not it would be profitable enough for you, here’s some helpful informations.

    So, I think you’re missing a lot of important points about how FFXIV works, and I think chances are you might end up disappointed if real money is your goal.

    First, let me tells you that I bot in this game since its creation in 2010, so 9 years of botting, well 8 years because between 1.x and 2.0 during a all year the servers were closed.
    I went through 3 different bots, and I only bot to get rid of the awful grinds that plague the game literally everywhere.
    I never did it solely to get ingame currency, gils, but in the process I made 2 billions, and spent 1 (only to buy other players luck for RNG casual loot, minions, mounts, orchestrion rolls, avoiding me long useless farms).

    A genuine players, botting smartly, meaning monitoring the bot at all time while doing something else, working or playing another game, ready to intervene immediately when the situation requires, won’t get banned, as long as they know the game very well, and as long as they are smart, they can always stay under the radar. But this requires really a good knowledge of the game, and a super clean bot like Miqobot.

    This game was made so that it doesn’t create a lot of gils, there’s is plenty of gils sink everywhere to avoid inflation, and devs monitors carefully the amount of total gils in circulation to constantly adapt the gils created.
    You can not transfer gils to another server easily, transferring a char cost real money, and the amount of gils you can take with you is ridiculously low.
    For example, a single char, at end-game, can currently only “create” 100k gils a day out of daily leves allowance (30min craft from the bot, 30min gathering from the bot).

    Usually gils sellers take their gils from 2 sources, they have their own bots, very crappy dirty bots that use injections into the game to teleport characters below the floors for example. And despite trying to be as much discreet as possible, players can easily spot them, as what they do in loop, is doing main story quest with armies of fresh characters in parties of 4, all dressed up the same way, with dumb names, following each other from NPC to NPC, and running dungeons together to avoid being paired with real players that would spot them immediately.
    The main story quest gives very little gils, take a huge amount of time to clear, and to avoid extra real money cost, those bots stop before the 1st expansion. So to be profitable, you need armies of characters doing that constantly.
    Those characters get banned all the time, them and the RMT ones advertising RMT web sites.
    The second source of gils for those gils sellers, is extra gils some players sell directly to them. This is not very widespread, as RMT will buy players gils for such a low price, in order to re-sell them for more.

    I don’t know if your goal is to sell them your gils, or if you want to sell yours directly to players, but if you want to sell to RMT, don’t count on 1.5$/M, divide that, and if you want to compete with them, you’re gonna need your web store, an army of accounts and characters on all servers, an army of RMT advertisers, and viable way to re-create new accounts constantly.
    When you get a character banned for this, it’s your all service account that is banned (all your characters), and soon your entire SE account, so you’ll have to create new account with new money payment all the time. And unless you’re like those RMT factories, likely using stolen credit card to constantly create new accounts, you’re in a lot troubles.
    If you plan to sell yours directly to players, that’s not gonna be easy, any in-game advertisement you’ll make will end up in a ban of your entire account, and players buying gils prefer usually to rely on notorious RMT with a web store, as a guarantee they won’t get scammed.

    This bot isn’t made (yet) to do what the RMT bot does, running MSQ with several char on its own to slowly collect very small amount of gils.
    The dev(s) of this bot planned to release some day a feature that run a char through the MSQ, but it could take years before it’s ready, as the community put emphasizes on other different features they really want before that. And even then, it might end up being something closer to a dailies farming.

    The dev(s) of this bot are really fair, as in, they don’t create tools to cheat, but rather to remove from the player the burden of the grinds, and also to help them to learn some fights and jobs faster by assisting them with the bot, therefore for example, they disabled their bot to be used in PvP, as they don’t want to give players unfair advantages when it involves playing against other humans.
    They also take measures to not draw too much attention from regular players of FFXIV, or from Square Enix, so they are careful with the kind of tools they create, they want to keep a fair balance where their customers/community, the other regular players and Square Enix can all cohabit together and have something to win out of it.

    So if you want to win your gils from other players, rather than from NPC (MSQ, daily leves, etc.), crafting is the way to go, but you’ll need all your crafters at max level, and all your gatherers at max level, and all of them with end-game gear set fully melded with expensive materias.
    All of them, because that’s how the game works, you can’t really create something if you don’t use all of them, as there’s tons of pre-craft that requires all of them, for a single final item. And relying on buying what you’re missing from the Market Board will make your final profit null.
    But more importantly, you might need all this, on 3 different characters, as the game created in the second expansion a protection against that.

    Let me explain:
    1. What you need to know, is that crafting used to get an end-game crafter lots of gils, close to 3-5M a single piece of gear, but nowadays it’s more like less than 1M a piece of gear.
    2. Making gils through crafting fluctuate a lot during the 2 years life of an expansion.
    The huge opportunities are small windows after certain patches. For example after all even patches (3 per expansions, one every 6 month during 2 years: x.0, x.2; x.4) there’s new raid gear craftable, raiders will buy that for a lots of money, but only during roughly 3-4 weeks, because beyond that they’ll already have won better gear directly from the raid.
    New raid food and potions will sell high the first two month, then the prices will decrease a lot beyond that, as most raiders will be done.
    3. It used to be long and hard to craft, but nowadays, it’s possible for regular players well geared to craft through macros that are published publicly on Reddit. It’s not really practical, really cumbersome, but you would be surprised how widespread it is used.
    This bot went completely beyond, making everything crafting completely easy and fully automaded.
    Since both regular players using macros, and this bot users are widespread, the competition between crafters and gatherers never been that high.
    4. The competition being high, and the way the market board works, lead to prices getting constantly undercut, so much, that all prices are very low, there’s more supply than demand. You make gils, but less than it used to be, 3-5 times less.
    5. If you want to sell a lot of different items, you’ll need to pay extra real money per month to hire extra retainers.
    6. You can’t make buy orders, you can’t set your prices to automatically adjust.
    7. There’s an ingame tax on everything you sell, it’s yet again another way to remove gils from the game (there’s plenty like this one, teleportation cost a lot, you need to repair your gear constantly and it cost too, etc.).
    8. To make subsequent gils out of all this, require to play with the market a lot, and it requires a lot of time and attention, to the point the ratio of your time spent and that, and the final real money, can easily be below a paid hour of a real job, but then again, depends on the country and dedication.

    All this to now explain the protection the game made against all that. Since the second expansion, the new important recipes of a fresh new patch, are locked behind a Specialist crafter, and you can only have 3 Specialists per characters, so only 3 of your 8 crafters jobs can be Specialist. You can switch between Specialist, but it cost an item (that the bot can help you to farm) and there’s a long cool down.
    So in order to massively craft the new gear or housing items of a new patch, you need 3 char with all crafters geared and melded, and you might want to have them on different accounts, as you can’t easily transfer items between the same char of one service account, because you can’t make them friends, and you can’t log with them at the same time, so you’ll need to create a Free Company (equivalent to a guild) to use its chest to transfer items. Really unpractical when used constantly for that purpose.

    So all in all, Square Enix made this to slow down and reduce what a single player can do without starting to become annoying. It doesn’t stop determined people, it just made it less profitable and more annoying.

    So income from crafting fluctuates a lot( right now we’re in the empty 5 month period before an expansion where the opportunities to make gils are the lowest), the competition is high, the undercutting is a plague pulling prices so low because to many casual players can craft end-game stuff now, and they just want small and fast profit.

    But since you talked about dedicating quite some time into this, there’s other ways to directly make real money.
    Last expansion they started to release a new level of raid difficulty, Ultimate, and so far only 0.03% of players managed to win those 2 Ultimate fights, making their loot the most wanted weapons and titles.
    I have an end-game static dedicated to end-game raids, and we cleared both fights. Since then, I get some whispers of some players asking if we would sell the fight to them, as all important loot in this game are untradable and unsellable.
    Since my static is absolutely against selling content, and not interested by money at all, we never sold anything, but the prices those players were proposing were all around 1000 $ for one weapon.
    There’s statics of players dedicated to clear those content among the firsts, to be the 1st to sell 3-4 fights like this per week.
    They can advertise freely this in the game, as long as they don’t mention doing it for real money, as selling content for gils is allowed. But they smartly give their Discord contact, and all is then set up outside the game, where the game lose its jurisdiction, as they can’t use proof outside of the game.

    Of course, when it comes to sell content like Ultimate, everyone knows it’s gonna include something illegal, because those content are so hard, that you can’t clear them with 7/8 players, meaning one player will have to control the buyer account, which is illegal.

    So those statics make quite a lot of cash, 1300 $ at the release, later on it’s more like 500 $, divided by 8 players.

    But it’s really, really fucking hard, requires a lot of work and dedication. It took my static 20 hours a week during 2-3 month to get the clear, 160-200 hours of training to get a clear. It requires BiS gear of course, and some resources the bot provide (gathering and crafting tons of food and potions).
    It requires lots of skills, complete knowledge of all jobs, tons of patience, and the proper mindset, as most statics breaks up during the process, because of how challenging it is on the overall moral.
    And it requires 7 other people, ready to dedicate serious and time into this, and ready to farm and sell it later. As getting one clear is something, being able to get other clears is still extremely hard, and can take several days of attempts before succeeding one more time.
    Since you never played the game, since you have no history parses to show, it could take quite a long time before a static like this dare to recruit you, but it’s not impossible.

    What I’m saying is, selling Ultimate content is a tiny market, the profit are huge, the cash is direct, there’s some smart competition, and to enter that game is the most challenging thing of FFXIV, because it requires the highest gaming skills and the highest social skills, but at least you know it exists.
    It’s still possible to sell lower difficulty content, but it’s usually in gils, not real money, the competition is way bigger, and the profits are way lower, and the prices drop quickly.

    Something to be aware of is that Square Enix never mentioned yet if they will do Ultimate content in the next expansion (they announced so far pretty much every major things, but not any Ultimate), as it is a content that takes them some resources to build, and it’s only cleared in the end by 0.03% of players, it’s not 1%, not 0.1%, it’s 0.03%, so barely no one.
    I don’t think they’ll abandon making Ultimate, as it made them quite a lot of advertising (streaming only ever been that high for this game when it was the Ultimate races), maybe they’ll change their system or adjust the difficulty, or they didn’t announced them yet because they didn’t picked yet the next encounter and plan to release it later than 5.1 without changing the difficulty at all.

    Hopefully I gave you some useful information, this bot is work of art, but making enough gils in this game to turn them into real money profit is not as easy or profitable as one could think in my opinion.

    in reply to: [Beta] Combat #11279
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    0

    They confirmed again that every Shadowbringers dungeons will be playable with the new Trust system, so likely all dungeons built with the Trust system in mind, unlike Squadron Dungeons, and they emphasised that the A.I. will be quite smart, which means Miqobot should really works superbly with the Trust system once implemented.

    in reply to: Is there a way to bot longer than 90 mins? #11163
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    0

    Yeah, but put 44min or 40 to be safe.

    You can attach your grid to an Aetherite, make the char change job, make it repair before starting, make it select a fisher preset, make it select a bait, and then when you specify waypoints, you can insert there which grid to use.

    For example :

    teleport(Onokoro)
    changeJob(FSH)
    repair()
    selectFishPreset(my-red-scrips-fsh-preset)
    changeBait(Tête dansante)
    goToWaypoint(15, my-fsh-grid)
    startFishing(44)
    goToWaypoint(14, my-fsh-grid)
    startFishing(44)
    return()
    in reply to: Is there a way to bot longer than 90 mins? #11153
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    1+

    FFXIV servers track the time you spend fishing in one spot, and will prevent you to continue to fish there if you stay longer than around 45min, you’ll get from the game the message that fishes got suspicious and won’t bite any more, forcing you to move to another spot.

    And if you keep reaching that limit in the same area, you’ll have to go fish one time in a new area to reset that timer.

    That’s why Miqobot prevent you to enter numbers that will for sure trigger that FFXIV protection.

    You can create scenarios where you will fish for 40m in one spot, and then make your character to move to another spot and continue to fish, avoiding completely the game protection.
    You can really create very elaborated scenarios for fishing, it’s very handy.

    in reply to: Gagana Egg Scenario #11061
    Carl Arbogast
    Carl Arbogast
    Participant
    1+

    You can send any DoW/DoM lvl 61 retainers to get you 10 eggs per hour, if they have good gear they’ll bring back plenty of HQ.
    This is why they’re so cheap on the Market Board (so often below 100 gils a pop).
    Retainers are bringing me back eggs faster than I craft food with Miqobot, you should not need anything else but Market Board or Retainers to get some.

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