Did Square-Enix do the right thing?
The Square-Enix bahnammer recently came down onto the Final Fantasy XI community, permanently banning 550 non-RMT accounts that were involved in performing an exploit that has occurred over a two year time period -- an exploit that some say SE was aware of, but never took steps to correct.
The exploit in question was only available to linkshells involved several endgame activities. The basic premise was finish the activity and then before the item drops from a treasure chest or monster the alliance of parties would break into their separate groups. For you Warcraft players, a raid would cease to be a raid and break down to the parties involved. Then each of the 3 parties in the alliance would get a copy of whatever items would drop. So, instead of 1 set of loot, you would grab 3 sets of loot -- including some items that could be sold for millions on the auction house.
Square-Enix's solution was patch the glitch in November and apply a variety of bans, warnings, and account suspensions seemingly haphazardly after a few months of investigation. Some of the community is up in arms over the bannings, but others are saying that it's not such a big deal when it only happened to a small fraction of the community.
Either way, what has been highlighted is how far some people will go to cheat the system when dealing with a game that even the MMO community could call "sadistic design." Do you agree with what Square-Enix has done with their community regarding this situation?
