The History of Final Fantasy XI/2009

==2009==
In 2009, no offline Final Fantasy XI festivals were held anywhere in the world. Wings of the Goddess continued to receive storyline updates, and we were introduced to the Northland Shadowreign areas. All three new Add-on Scenarios were released in 2009 starting in April.
The player population started to decline this year. This affected veteran and new players alike. The main reasons for this were: 
*The constant RMT battle. This continued to force Square Enix to change the way the game has been for so long regarding drops and gil. We started to see more “EX” gear
*No new end game content to keep veteran players interested.
*Salvage bans quite possibly could have led to a decline in new player population. The bad press attention might have pushed new players away.
**A lot of new players may have realized that nearly everything in the game took far too long to accomplish; they didn’t always result in a reward that justified the effort put in.
*More discussion about “Rapture” was throughout the game and message boards. Many people figured FFXI would stop being supported, so the thought was “What is the point of the time investment?”
*Lack of news and future announcements during the second half of the year. Focus for Square Enix switched to FFXIV.
*World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Litch King was released on November 13th, 2008. Players may have looked towards a new game for entertainment instead of the monotonous content that Final Fantasy XI had to offer at this time. WoW's all time high subscriber count reached 12 million players in 2010.
Jan. 1st, 2009 	    Happy New Year 2009 	    Happy New Year 2009 	
Jan. 1st, 2009 	As with previous new year’s event, 2009 was no different. A buffalo family (Felific Buffalo and Ranchers) roamed areas outside of the three nations from January 1st thru January 13th.
The event this year had BB Ranch Milk as a common reward when trading items to the Buffalo family. Rarely, souvineer "bottle caps" could be obtained: Lycopodium Cap, Korrigan Cap, and Mandragora Cap. If players traded all three of these to Macchi Gazlitah in Ru'Lude Gardens, a Buffalo Milk Case was obtained. Players did not fully understand her shop at first, and this could someimes be purchased from her too. She was also sometimes sold Buffalo Meat for around 15k, which was a good source of income for some players to farm and sell for 50k on the Auction House. This caused the price to crash for quite some time. 
Many players tried to obtain the New Year's Gift from the Buffalo family in hopes of obtaining the Battledore, but it was a very low chance. Some were lucky enough though.
Macchi Gazlitah opened shop and started selling wares on January 1st. It was rumored that this shop was only meant to be temporary for the New Year's event, but it still exists today. More items have been added to her wares since she opened, so she now permanent.	 	
Jan. 22nd, 2009	    The Great Salvage Banhammer 	    The Great Salvage Banhammer 	
Jan. 22nd, 2009	The most shocking and unexpected wave of bans that ever happened in Final Fantasy XI took place on January 22nd, 2009. Some players who exploited duping practices in instanced zones were banned either permanently or temporarily.
The exploit occured by splitting an alliance after defeating a monster and obtaining a drop. The treasure obtained remained in the pool instead of being lost as it normally would. This allowed the item(s) including Alexandrite, Cells, and even Rare/ex armor to be duplicated two additional times. 
Approximately 550 accounts who were found guilty of duplicating items in instanced zones such as Salvage, Assault, and the Sandworm Doomvoid BCNM were delivered a permanent ban, while 400 others received a temporary ban. These numbers were not nearly as high as the monthly Special Task Force results, but nearly all of of them were popular and well known players. Almost all endgame linkshells on every world were somehow affected by at least one significant player being banned. Among these players was Minidragon from Bismarck. He was quite possibly one of the first North American Maat's Cap on any world, but was for sure the first on Bismarck. All of his jobs at the time were 75. He had all of the best items including Defending Ring, Armada Hauberk, Dusk Gloves +1, and he had six relics which was unheard of. He was quoted to have spent 1 billion gil on his first relic. He was known to many as "The Ultimate FFXI Player" at the time. His FFXI AH profile can be found here.
North American/European perspective
Immediately after the bannings, the various FFXI communities exploded with heated arguments and debates on both sides of the Banhammer. Some cried out against the severity and inconsistency of the punishments while the rest deemed it an appropriate and fair recourse. Players compared Square Enix's management to WoW, saying how there were very little permabans in WoW compared to SE's harsh judgement. Blizzard would instead strip a player of all proceeds from such glitches instead of outright ban/temp ban them. Those lucky enough to only receive a temp ban did not have their armor removed, which really caught everybody by surprise. Players who were affected felt as if they were treated the same as RMT who were actually destroying the game. 
Many wanted an answer as to why players were treated inconsistently in this banning. Some players who went on only one Salvage run were given a permanent ban, when they might not have even know what was going on or that the dupe even happened. At the same time some leaders, who were the instigators of the dupe, were only given temporary bans. Justice was not delt fairly, and this is where much of the controversy originated from.
What made the whole situation worse is that this glitch was not been fixed until an emergency maintenance in November 2008, around two years after its discovery. That means that people who knew of this were able to keep it "on the down low" for at least a quarter of the game's life. Many player's argument was "How could you allow hundreds of endgame linkshells to exploit what was clearly a very significant glitch; but only begin to act after two years of exploitation?". 
The FFXI parody website Bannable Offenses (AKA GM Dave) left a post about the bans which stated that staff at the Square Enix offices in California were surprised at this decision. This made players assume that it must have came from Japan. Speaking of GM Dave, it was confirmed later on that GM Dave was not actually a real GM. In actuality, he was a player who was spoofing his identity and posting on the blog for humorous reactions. It did work, however. Players believed the stories due to how authentic they seemed to be.
The BlueGartr community was greatly affected. This included significant players who provided a lot of knowledge of game mechanics to the community, including a player who shared the final stages of completing a Mythic Weapon. Many players disliked BG as a whole as it was regarded as the "Elitist Community". BG was blamed for "hiding this information" from Square Enix, but it was confirmed that the problem was reported to SE before discussion threads were deleted. 
Japanese perspective
The following perspective is a digest post made by Elmer the Pointy that was on jpbutton.com
The majority of 2chan posts on this day consisted of ざまーみろ！(zama miro!) or ざまーみやがれ！ (zama miyagare!) shortened to ざまー！. All of these mean the same thing… “In your face!” Literally, though, this meant “Look at the situation” or “How do you like them apples?”. Does this mean the Japanese community did not cheat? Not exactly. There were only 2chan and private blogs that Japanese players flocked to. Counter arguments to situations, while rare, were simply lost to the popular threads. Were Japanese players banned? Who knows, as they did not come forward and admit that they were. Even if they did, the anonymity of 2chan and other blog sites left no way for us to identify them like the English websites. It was seen that they were checking out the BG forum ban list thread to see names of those who were banned.
In the end, there wasn’t much in the way of “juicy gossip” as the NA community. It’s counter to their high valuation of personal privacy, and really, who would volunteer to jump in and be roasted with a response?	News sites throughout the internet covered this story. A lot of bad publicity against Square Enix was spread throughout the gaming community, and some say this began the gradual decline of the population of Final Fantasy XI. Who would want to play a game if the creator's policy was that "We can ban you for any reason"?
Kotaku's news report
<youtube width=450px>gLwCJ0qqoGk</youtube>
Perhaps the most amusing part of this whole situation was the sense of invulnerability that the exploiters felt.
Below are a few quotes from players who frequented the BG Forums. Many of these players were banned.
 lol. the people who should/deserved to know, knew. 
 Those that didn't, didn't. It's as simple as that.
 It was kept quiet so to keep the high and mighty 
 people who deemed this sort of behaviour as 
 "inappropriate" from reporting it in mass scale and 
 ruining it for those of us who enjoyed gaining our
 just rewards. Do Salvage 4-7 times a week for a 
 year, complete a whopping piss poor 2-3 pieces and 
 then come back with your Q.Q'ing.
 It's just as if not more likely that a JP spilled 
 the beans. Ah well, at least I got an Ares's 
 Flanchard for my 37 DRK. 
 The "process" used in game mechanics with ZERO hacks
 or forced cheats (i.e. pos hacking takes game data 
 on your computer, changes it and sends false data 
 packets back to SE. This is illegal as it is doing 
 something outside of the game.) As such they're not 
 gonna ban anyone because no one "cheated" in the 
 black and white sense of the word.
 Go cry me a river, we had 100 salvage pieces completed 
 by LS intern groups before we found out about it. If 
 you had any friends that would trust you, you might have
 known about it before it got fixed ;)
 Look at my jobs and my Salvage gear, do you really 
 think this fix hits me as hard as you want to?	
February 2009 	    Final Fantasy XI Original Stickies – Square Enix Members Contest	    Final Fantasy XI Original Stickies – Square Enix Members Contest	
February 2009 	This notepad set was part of a Square Enix Members Christmas Promotion. Players had to enter for a drawing via their Square Enix Member account. This notepad set was given out to 100 random winners who participated in the contest.
The top of the letter says:
“Square Enix Members
Final Fantasy XI Christmas Gift Campaign
Thank you for your Application.”	
Image from finalfantasy7110.com 	
Feb. 2nd, 2009 	    Pandemonium Warden Defeated... two weeks later? 	    Pandemonium Warden Defeated... two weeks later? 	
Feb. 2nd, 2009 	A notice was posted that Pandemonium Warden was defeated, which linked to an Allakazham article.
To everyone's amazement, this news was at least two weeks old. A thread already posted on the BG Forums back in January. Flashbacks to the long delay of the salvage bans	 	
Feb. 6th, 2009 	    Valentione's Day 2009 	    Valentione's Day 2009 	
Feb. 6th, 2009 	The yearly Valentione's Day event was run in 2009 from February 6th thru February 15th.
There were no new additions to the event this year.	 	
Feb. 20th, 2009	    The Doll Festival 2009 	    The Doll Festival 2009 	
Feb. 20th, 2009	The Doll Festival ran in 2009 from February 20th thru March 3rd.
No new items were added this year, but the Festival Dolls and Bonbori were now randomly obtained from event Moogles in town instead of delivered to players.	 	
Feb. 23rd, 2009	    FFXI Original Blog tools downloadable 	    FFXI Original Blog tools downloadable 	
Feb. 23rd, 2009	Announced only to Japanese players, official blog tools were made downloadable. These tools were intented to use on players online adventuring blogs, and placed a widget of sorts on the sidebar for visitors to play FFXI themed music while reading a blog.
Adventuring blogs were much more popular in Japan rather than North America and Europe. Instead, Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter started kicking off at this time.	 	
Mar. 10th, 2009	    Security Token Announced 	    Security Token Announced 	
Mar. 10th, 2009	On March 10th, Square Enix announced the release of the Security Token. Like some announcements, this came out of nowhere and was a surprise to most players. The price and an in-game incentive were announced at a later date. Luckily, tokens were not region specific. Players with other region accounts did not have to worry for once.
On March 31st, details regarding the Mog Satchel storage were announced, as well as an order date of April 7th. The Square Enix Account system was also first introduced on April 7th. In its early stages, it was not a requirement to use a Square Enix account in conjunction to Playonline. For a few more years, it was only used to register a Square Enix token to a Playonline Account. Players saw it as doing nothing but making the Playonline system more convoluted. Many players couldn’t login after linking the two, as it was now required to add that information to Playonline before logging in.
All of the Premier Sites were given tokens to give away to visitors. Various contests were held on these sites.	
Storage Space Controversy
Not many players were in favor of additional account security and the purchase of a token to obtain precious storage space. With the Add-on scenarios also being charged for, players felt like 2009 was a large money grab by Square Enix. Keep in mind that at this time the United States economy was still on the tail end of the recession.
Too little, too late
Unfortunately for some, this token came too late. Many accounts have been compromised prior to this. The biggest blame was corrupt iframes on popular fan websites. Many players used the Firefox browser with the NoScript add-on to prevent possible malicious ads. In addition to this, it was important to keep your Flash plugin up-to-date to avoid a known exploit at the time. Youtube was becoming very popular in 2009, so Flash was a new thing to a lot of people. It wasn't known that you needed to keep the plugin updated, so it was easy for hackers to take advantage of this.
Before this announcement, Blizzard Entertainment had already released a token just like this for World of Warcraft. Regardless of Square Enix’s track record of failing with their software releases, the token released and worked well. Sure, the new Square Enix Account system made Playonline even more convoluted. 
Alas, nothing is perfect though. Players soon found out that entering the wrong token generated password still kicks off whoever was online on the account. This was not a huge issue, but still annoying nonetheless. It did give players a warning to change their Playonline passwords, rather than unauthorized access occurring.	
Mar. 10th, 2009	
{| class="notice metadata plainlinks" style="background: #feba71; border: 3px dashed #FF911A; border-collapse: separate; border-radius: 15px; text-align:center; line-height:20px; max-width:90%; height: 80%;"	
{| class="notice metadata plainlinks" style="background: #feba71; border: 3px dashed #FF911A; border-collapse: separate; border-radius: 15px; text-align:center; line-height:20px; max-width:90%; height: 80%;"	The following is a quote from Kazuyoshi Mochizuki discussing popularizing Security Tokens with Mog Satchels.This quote was publicized on the "WE ARE VANA'DIEL" official commemorative website in 2021.
"Back in the day, the concept of using security tokens to improve account security wasn’t commonplace, and it was difficult to convey their importance to the masses. The topic of account security seemed foreign and irrelevant to many people, and our efforts to spread the word about the potential risks were met with indifference. And unlike today, making an announcement on a live broadcast or periodically sending out news announcements wasn’t an option, so we had to think of an additional benefit in addition to securing an account.
I was glad we were able to smoothly proceed with the proposal of Mog Satchels, but on the other hand, we only had physical tokens and I remember struggling to keep up with the demand for them. It’s been over a decade since, and I’m sure the battery has run dry for many of the tokens from the original batch. Nowadays, our one-time passwords are now compatible with authenticators from Google and Microsoft, so if you haven’t added one to your account yet, I plead with you to do so!"
-Kazuyoshi Mochizuki, Lead Community Planner