They have forsaken us. the spammers will win

There is 4 bots standing at Momodi's desk at The Quicksand in Ul'dah that have now been there 2 days with their heads continuously bobbing as they spam shout non-stop.
These bots have been reported repeatedly, yet they are still there happily making shout unusable unless you blacklist.

I bet if you start shouting profanity in spam chat a GM would show up. They know gil seller are there they just see paid subs so they want do anything. Played 4 hrs today leveling leather and the same 5 or so people spammed non stop the whole time with no consequence I had now resorted to a heavily filtered chat log that hides /shout /yell and /tell. Its ridiculous. RMT and Spam both violate ToS those accounts should have been banned after the first report.

its possible they just dont have enough gms atm

Accounts are getting suspended and banned over this. Just look at all the threads popping up with people complaining their account was suspended after being taken over by gil spammers. People need to do more to secure themselves.

There are free software tokens out there, but people ain't got time for that.

Hey, calm down. This is a real problem but stop and think. Two per city per world? You do realize they would need to have 6 per world, for like, 50 worlds? At least 3 shifts to manage timezones and weekends. 900 GM's? To manage gold sellers? That is just.. Over the top that is larger than most games entire staff. No. What they need is to be able to feed shout/yell from all worlds to a much smaller subset who don't have to be logged into a specific server, to see the problems going on there. Chances are if they don't have such a thing they are working on it. But they are also swamped..

If you have 10 people in this special task force. And you get 1 report for every 100 people an hour, and you have 300K people concurrently, that is upwards of 300 tickets to go through every hour per person. And everyone has to be reviewed to be sure it is legitimate before you just ban someone. And it could be worse if more than 1 in 100 people are reporting..

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Originally Posted by ZohnoReecho

There are free software tokens out there, but people ain't got time for that.

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I fear you are more correct than anyone here. Too many people feel they do not have time for a free software security token then get hacked and say its everyone else's fault that their account was suspended. That is what is going on on the MMORPG.com forums today someone is complaining that their account was hacked and they didnt use the security token, but blames SE for their account being suspended and for having to wait hours on the phone to get a hold of support. Its people like this that cause more problems than the spammers because spamming wouldnt be a problem if people used the security token.

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Originally Posted by Rivienne

Hey, calm down. This is a real problem but stop and think. Two per city per world? You do realize they would need to have 6 per world, for like, 50 worlds? At least 3 shifts to manage timezones and weekends. 900 GM's? To manage gold sellers? That is just.. Over the top that is larger than most games entire staff. No. What they need is to be able to feed shout/yell from all worlds to a much smaller subset who don't have to be logged into a specific server, to see the problems going on there. Chances are if they don't have such a thing they are working on it. But they are also swamped..

If you have 10 people in this special task force. And you get 1 report for every 100 people an hour, and you have 300K people concurrently, that is upwards of 300 tickets to go through every hour per person. And everyone has to be reviewed to be sure it is legitimate before you just ban someone. And it could be worse if more than 1 in 100 people are reporting..

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GMs probably have access to any world at any time. It would be enough to have few of them rotate each town in each server every few minutes.

Yes. That would work too. But it still doesn't change the fact that at this point in time, everyone in support is overwhelmed, and even if they have staff for that, chances are they busy with backlog. At best it will take a week before we start to see improvement, unless they are able to implement smart filtering in this next rollout, and that is still only a partial solution.

You don't need 900 GMs to do better than they're doing now. You have characters spamming shout for 8 hours or more without getting banned. 1 person could visit the 3 citys in all servers and ban the shouters in less than 8 hours. The way it is now, even if they had 1 or 2 GMs to deal with these shouters, and both of them were slow and lazy, they'd be banning these accounts faster. So either they have no ingame support for these violations, or they don't care to do anything about it.
I'm not saying banning shouters will fix the problem, but it'd sure as hell be a start. As it is right now a RMT company can steal or buy 1 account and get between 8 hours and days of advertisement out of it. Do a cost benefit analysis. It's a great business decision. Start banning people after a few minutes, or even an hour, and it isn't as cost effective.