...So they pretty much banned every one left who was still playing the game?

Lol, Yeah. THey Missed me though. I still play with the other 500k people they missed :(

I wonder how many of those banned for bypassing "game mechanics" were simply using windowers to avoid logging out of the game to check a game guide or chat applets.

Slow news day, eh?

"The termination of these accounts has led to the removal of approximately 45 billion gil from circulation."

45 Billion gil. And when they talk about bypassing game mechanics they are talking about the 3rd party warping tools people use not Windower.

These kind of actions are having a great impact on the economy. Where the RMT's (or gilsellers) had monopolies on some very in demand items, they're just not there anymore, making them much more affordable. SE seems to be on a mission this fall getting rid of these people.

OWNED!!!!!!!!

oh, yes and on the bypass game mechanics I remember there was something about a hack to reset the Theif ability Steal. People were going to bestmen zones and Stealing Gold bestcoins and resting the 5 minute timer back to zero.

Haven't played it in forever, but I'm curious is this has helped the game's economy to an appreciable degree.

I know where I played (on Asura), the economy was horrible because there was way too much gil in the system, way too many players buying and selling it, and not enough sinks to take the gil back out. But this is good to hear. Once a scroll of Phalanx got up to around half a million, I was pretty much done playing the game.

Well Phalanx is about 40-45k now, the economy is in pretty good shape compared to a year ago. In fact when this mass banning was announced Last week, a LS member went to IGE and discovered all servers were under going gil restocking, IGE had no gil to sell. It was pretty funny.

Does anyone know if they've gotten rid of the people denying access to NMs like Ulli?

For those not in the know, a recent tactic of gilsellers has been to give deny access to certain monster in the game which drop spawn items for other monsters which drop good items. They sell the spawn items, and thus profit without killing the hard monsters themselves. S-E has previously ruled that this is legal, much to the chagrin of people trying to camp these monsters in a fair manner.

Square Enix's JP division DOES consider Windower to be a third party mechanics-warping tool, they feel it sullies the game experience

Square Enix is waaaay too harsh about this, they've got to calm down
seriously, no-one else would be stupid enough to ban 11,500 accounts, that's about $150,000 a month that you're not getting, especially considering some of the pretty tame things they deem hacking

Now Console PSO, that was where you saw some manly hacking (especially after they began building AR codes for the GC version), and Sonic Team had no problem with it (unless you brought in certain unreleased Items)

You have to remember, Asura has one of the worst, most inflated economies in Final Fantasy XI... so while your scrolls may sell for 40-50k, ours went for 400-500k. And it was a sad state of affairs, especially when you can recall a time where it was even cheaper than they are on YOUR server.

Well the prices on most items have been decreasing for the most part. Alot of the rarer items are also alot cheaper. http://www.ffxiah.com has a rough graph of everything decreasing.

As for windower being a problem, just don't talk about it in game, and it's not an issue. It's 100% not detectable on the server-side, but if you tell a GM that you use the Windower then they'll count that as a strike against you since it's still a 3rd party program.

Good news all round. It's always good to see a company looking after the affairs of their games well after they've shipped it.

So does this mean the price of Gil on ebay will go up since they removed so much from the game? Or will it even out since there are fewer players?

This mass banning makes me more apt to sign up and play it because I know they don't like cheaters. I HATE cheaters, especially in a game like this. I'm glad they got banned.

"I wonder how many of those banned for bypassing "game mechanics" were simply using windowers to avoid logging out of the game to check a game guide or chat applets."

Good question. Hopefully none, but who knows? I know this is one of the things that contributed to my decision to ultimately stop playing FF11. I couldn't get any of the windowers to work properly and I refused to let a game monopolize my PC in the way that Square-Enix tries to mandate.

There was so much cheating going on with that game when I played. Fish Bots, Farming Bots, speed hacks... it was crazy. When I used to do HNM stuff, we had a couple people in my LS that would speed hack to get around faster (walking everywhere in that game sucked).

And World spawn bosses made me want to kill myself... "Oh, I just spent 4 hours waiting for a boss to respawn and another group got it... SWEET!"

/sigh

I'm happy I went to WoW, having much more fun with it.