Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

Yeah, "solution" to the problem... I don't think that's possible. But the fact that into our third year now, with a whole expansion added, we still don't even have proper tools - heck, not even any hint of any of those being worked on... that is just sad. And everything's been suggested numerous times, in this thread, in several others: an invisible mode login, restricting tells to lists, filters (don't tell me there are filters, I have been seeing the url of the same time for as long as I can remember, without any "countermeasure" in it against filters), one-click report and blacklist... indeed, the very Support Center itself that we have in game is probably the single most cumbersome and clunky part of the entire game to use (also detailed numerous times)! And just...nothing. No word on anything. We got right-click blacklist after asking for it so many times, but that's it - and has anyone "up there" actually tried to empty a blacklist that was full? That too is a royal pain. Anyhow, since then, all that's going on is a weekly report of accounts banned, which is obviously way inadequate, as it changes nothing at all in the behaviour or number of bots I see and get messaged by - day after day I see a bot in the very same spot in Limsa, day after day it's reported, it disappears, and a little later another one appears; time and time again I see clone bot armies in the cities, doing the same thing they have been for months, the same way, with the same appearances and gears and nonsensical names......... So yes. At least we should have tools to make their presence more bearable and manageable. But we don't even have tools, after going strong for two years.

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Originally Posted by Malevicton

There's no such law to enforce.

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There's plenty of them, actually.

problem is, that it falls under jurisdiction of the county the company is located in. If it's located in China, it's perfectly legal to sell in game stuff for RL money. Extradition will not happen.

That's why the only companies that get successfully shut down are the American and Canadian ones. And yes, there's a lot of them that operated out of the US and Canada. Most of them operate out of China these days because it's legal.

Only thing SE can do is ban players participating.

/signed Iagainsti Killamanjiro (Zalera)

my Blacklist is always too full XD

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Originally Posted by Fyce

What are you talking about? RMT tells have been drastically reduced for a few months now.
Sure there are still some issues, but failing to see any improvements on the matter is just plain wrong.

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On Mateus, I am spammed by a dozen or more for every hour I play. I have seen no improvement; if anything, it has gotten worse.

you just need 1 single GM to log in and start banning those shouts/tells. Wow So hard to do. mindblowing huh?
now ask urself why they dont do that.

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

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Totally agreed. The devs won't do anything simply because it's not directly impacting. They have no intentions on caring about the long-term, only the short, when it comes to QoL. The fact that people aren't quitting simply because of RMT is enough reason for them to not bother. As tin-foil hat or ignorant as that sounds, it's how prioritization works in business. If something bad is happening and it does not impact anything noticeably, it gets backseat treatment to everything else that does. This includes new content, current bugs, etc. "They can endure it" is the general mentality. And, despite our dislike of the matter, it's true.

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Originally Posted by DarkB

you just need 1 single GM to log in and start banning those shouts/tells. Wow So hard to do. mindblowing huh?
now ask urself why they dont do that.

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1 GM? How many servers do we have? Can 1 GM really monitor tells 24/7 and get every single tell to ban em? In ALL the servers?
I'm on Gilgamesh, one of most populated servers in NA and I only get 1 or 2 tells per hour. Now I won't say that's the norm as some others may get more. That means tells are inconsistent depending on the player, probably based on a map script or something to locate players. Or simply they just tell whoever they see.
If that was the case that means you gotta have GM's in every map, banning every single tell staring at their monitor 24/7. To do something like that manually by hand using HR, ain't easy.

So yeah, it's 'wow hard' to do. Before you say even 1 GM will make a difference. No. It won't. Eventually people are gonna start coming back to cry more. ONLY 1GM!?

Now let that sink in for a moment...

People forget the core issue of RMT. The problem isn't the gil spammers, it's the players who buy them and continue to buy them. The problem is 2-way, the players themselves and the RMT business.

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Originally Posted by xXRaineXx

1 GM? How many servers do we have? Can 1 GM really monitor tells 24/7 and get every single tell to ban em? In ALL the servers?

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As the software stands now, it would take more than that, though I think you're underestimating how much one GM could do. They have access to more than we do as players. In particular, they have access to the chat server, so can see tells that are being sent to anyone and don't have to wait for a tell to be sent directly to them. Or even if they did just log in like a player does, monitor for an hour or two per shift, gathering the text of all the spam they get, and then update spam filters to block messages with that text from going to anybody, we'd see a big drop in the rate of spam that gets through.

If they'd add the reporting feature we've been asking for since the game came out, having just one person on 24/7 to handle those reports would probably be enough to handle the ongoing load, and that would get all of it. (They'd need extra help temporarily when the feature is first released, though. At that point they'd have a huge surge of reports getting rid of the current crop of spam bots. But that would slow to a trickle as soon as the RMT companies find their bots are being banned before they have time to become profitable.)

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Originally Posted by xXRaineXx

People forget the core issue of RMT. The problem isn't the gil spammers, it's the players who buy them and continue to buy them. The problem is 2-way, the players themselves and the RMT business.

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Both are issues, but I disagree as to which is the core issue. The spam is the part that's driving people away from the game, and making the game less social for those of us who stay in spite of it. Those are the biggest issues with RMT. There are effects on the in-game economy as well, but they're secondary.

On top of that, eliminating the spam would go a long way towards eliminating the RMT itself. (Not entirely, of course, but it would reduce it dramatically.) The whole reason RMT companies (or legitimate companies for that matter) advertise is because it brings them more customers. That means that without the RMT ads, there would be fewer customers buying their gil and less economic effect of RMT. Stopping the spam is probably the most effective way SE has available to limit the number of gil buyers. It would certainly be a lot more effective than trying to identify and track them down individually like they're doing now.

Personally I loathe the RMT messages, but ar they not a necessary evil? Personally I believe we kinda need them like the US needs illegal immigrant workers; they farm the mats we're too busy/lazy to farm. I like being able to look on the MB and buy a stack of Carbonized Matter super cheap among other things that would be super expensive if the only bids on the MB were actual players taking the time to farm this stuff to sell. I say monitor it on the other end; nail the ppl buying the gil. The RMT will keep trying to farm/sell their wares, and hopefully enough gil buyers get nailed so the RMT are unable to sell the gil, but they'll still try and we still get cheap mats we really don't want to farm/pay exuberant prices for.

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Originally Posted by Iagainsti

Personally I loathe the RMT messages, but ar they not a necessary evil? Personally I believe we kinda need them like the US needs illegal immigrant workers; they farm the mats we're too busy/lazy to farm. I like being able to look on the MB and buy a stack of Carbonized Matter super cheap among other things that would be super expensive if the only bids on the MB were actual players taking the time to farm this stuff to sell. I say monitor it on the other end; nail the ppl buying the gil. The RMT will keep trying to farm/sell their wares, and hopefully enough gil buyers get nailed so the RMT are unable to sell the gil, but they'll still try and we still get cheap mats we really don't want to farm/pay exuberant prices for.

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No, they are not a 'necessary' evil. I can see what you're trying to do in comparing it against illegal workers, but that doesn't quite work when you're dealing with virtual items and currency of near infinite reproducibility. You may like the 'nice, cheap' MB items but by flooding the market with tons of those really, really cheap mats (usually obtained through botting so no actual 'work' went into getting them) it devalues those materials and the markets for them, also taking money away from the people who are gathering them legitimately. This means that actual players end up with less of a percentage of the total currency in the market, but since the market has so much that currency is super inflated making it worth even less.

On top of that, when people turn around and buy the gil these RMTs have generated and then sink them back into the economy (the irony being they're probably buying the same items off the MB that produce the gil they will buy back later) it devalues the currency even further. In the end this is a vicious cycle that will break an economy. Illegal workers in the US are bad, but they can't access an infinite amount of items that they then can turn to exchange for a virtual currency then turn and resell that virtual currency back to people for... Oh wait, Bitcoin... Right then, we're screwed. >.>