Exactly how obvious do RMT need to be SE?

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Originally Posted by Felis

You can delete names in your blacklist

Don't forget, characters don't get deleted on banned accounts. Delete the older 50 names in your list.

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Or they could, y'know, give us handy QoL tools like a "Delete All" feature for blacklist so that we don't have to right-click--->Delete 50 times.

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Originally Posted by ElHeggunte

And what exactly would you have SE do to "stop" RMT? The one thing these threads have in common is no one ever gives a realistic, tangible solution to the problem. It's always knee-jerk, stop-gap, band-aid fixes that would do more harm than good. Or worse, giving no real feedback at all and instead just screaming "fix it!" while they foam at the mouth.

Completely stopping RMT is virtually impossible just by its nature. Not without taking such aggressive measures that you hurt your players. The only thing we can ask for is an easier way to ignore and report RMT accounts.

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Here, just on the previous page, an excerpt:

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

3) The problem is the fact that so many suggestions have been made so many times, it boggles the mind to even try to keep up with - either of the numbers of those.
- private/invisible mode to hide from /search
- limit receiving tells from LS/FC/friendlist members only
- limit sending tells either by account or character age
- word filters, word filters, word filters - the amount of times I myself have seen the same character strings over and over again, I can't believe they can't instate any sort of filter to prevent such messages (not to even mention character names!) from being sent
- actually remove the characters (heck, the accounts) from the game, I can't believe I don't see the reported names turning into "(Deleted)" on my BL - I know they block them, but they are still somehow there, and yeah I understand they want to prevent the same names to be used again, but gods, build a database for it instead of actually keeping dead characters on any server?
- automatically clear the deleted ones from our blacklists, or at least give us a batch-delete feature?
...and these are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. :mad:

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Originally Posted by RyuRoots

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There wasn't a massive RMT increase long before HW. Shortly before, sure.

The Task Force does a great deal. You're simply an ungrateful and acting like a tantrum throwing child.

As I said, this isn't a F2P game. That means every account they use for RMT was either paid for or stolen. Which means those thousands of accounts that have been banned either A) cause RMT to lose a lot of money or B) sees the account returned to it's owner.

Yes, there is an "ocean" of RMT, but eventually the drain is going to be pulled. It happened with FFXI, it will happen with FFXIV too. The problem is that if they attempt to get more draconian in their measures, there will also be thousands of false positives that ends up punishing honest players.

It's not like old FFXI when RMT was being spammed so fast you couldn't even see what anyone else was writing. These are tells that you can instantly ignore and mails that you can delete. Sure, your list might fill up, but you can delete the characters that have been deleted/banned.

I will say it might be nice to have a "delete multiple" option and an instant report feature, but not essential.

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Originally Posted by Kaedan

LMAO

Yeah, the special task force does nothing. SE certainly hasn't banned thousands of accounts, nope.

You do realize that FFXIV isn't a F2P game, right? That means every account they ban is lost money for RMT. Sure, some accounts are stolen, but those accounts are then returned to their owners, yet another plus.

Armchair developers like you really should just stop trying to fix problems they know nothing about. Leave it to the professionals.

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People who know better like you? On a JP server that doesn't even experience these issues, or on Balmung where the RMT can't even create characters? Yeah you're just a troll, or incredibly ignorant. Put your money where your mouth is, go create a char on a low-mid pop server for even a week then come back and say it's not a big deal.

The task force does ban thousands of accounts a month, and you know what, it does nothing. That makes it even worse that doing nothing. They're wasting their assets instead of addressing the problems. I dunno why you care so much about RMT accounts being banned. I pay the same amount of money those stolen/bot accounts do, but I am not breaking the TOS which you seem to think is not a big deal and shouldn't be dealt with HARSHLY.

If you break the law, you go to jail. SE should be banning with reckless abandon at this point because what they're currently doing doesn't amount to squat. Yes RMT costs them money, but you know what, so does losing legitimate people who get sick of the RMT spam and just quit. But as long as we don't punish the poor RMT accounts, right?! Yeah...

I'm not a developer, I don't know the exact numbers but I do know it's not working, saying the bans are working is a lie so stop. I did not say do this and this and this and the problem will be fixed. I suggested what HAS worked in the other MMOs, as have MANY others who've suggested the same things. This is fact, not some wishful thinking on my part. Even F2P MMOs have a better grip on RMT than this subscription based one does, and that's just sad. Blacklisting does not work, it's pointless, and you're being super ignorant for suggesting "oh just ignore them, they'll go away!" That's stupid, I'm sorry. It's not getting better, this is not me projecting some agenda. Everyone who's making suggestions isn't trying to bash this game, we want it to be better, to suggest otherwise is a lie. The reason we're angry is because we obviously care more than SE apparently does.

Your ignorance is sickening. Stop defending Square Enix. They have done nothing to be defended for.

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Originally Posted by RentisB

No.1 is part of the problem. With WoW when an account gets enough reports it's automatically silenced and then sent to review. No weeks of waiting, and bots are even less time. RMT bots stopped using the tell function in that game because it was too quick.

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I don't know what World of Warcraft you were playing, but last I was there (for the beginning of WoD expansion) there was no such thing. RMT bots where still rampant and I still would get mass tells every few minutes. At least Blizzard had the report and ignore account feature, but when you log in the next day and get the spam tells from the same name (because the ignore account feature was only for that logged in session) then you know nothing is being done. Blizzard would mass ban every few months but stopped reporting about it after awhile.

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Originally Posted by RentisB

Stop defending Square Enix. They have done nothing to be defended for.

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If you ever get the chance to work in customer service, you'd completely understand why stuff isn't done "right now", a lot it has to do with the fact that customers/players report less than 1% of the bad activity they see, because it wastes their time.

I used to work for "the worlds largest online auction site" at one point in time when it was still #1. You know what the most common complaint is "<site> is not doing enough to get rid of fakes/counterfeits/keyword spamming/etc"

But what goes on during the day is only maybe 300 reports from users come in per day, and of those 300, maybe 2 of those will be for the same item. That's how little customers actually bother to report bad listings. The rest is done through data mining things like keywords that don't belong together (Eg using "like" in the item name is a red flag for either a counterfeit, or keyword spamming,) or certain brands that counterfeiters go after. I was there when the iPhone, Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360's were all released, and you would not believe the amount of fraudulent listings ordinary people would put up, just because they thought people were stupid. During days when hot items were released, we manually data mined the site and reviewed -every- Wii and PS3 listing that was put up.

The RMT people and bots in online games assume players are stupid, and hope we will just ignore them instead of reporting them.

And SE could improve the situation by having ANY mechanism to 1-click report players engaged in spamming, and leave the more complex reporting up to players and GM's who actually see non-spamming RMT activity. Spamming accounts take up server resources, even if they can just be ignored, they are still logged in.

The only thing SE has done, or rather hasn't done, that isn't defendable is not providing a tool to report accounts and game-wide block spam. The Blacklists are useless, because even if you block one... the next tell comes from another bot with a different name.

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Originally Posted by RentisB

No.2 It's not OUR JOB to police the game. I pay SE money every month for them to take care of these issues, and they're just not.

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No you are paying them to access a server and play the game. RMT may be an inconvenience but it in no way impacts you ability to play the game.
Your not even paying then to access a server of your choice just a server.

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Originally Posted by DragonFlyy

I don't know what World of Warcraft you were playing, but last I was there (for the beginning of WoD expansion) there was no such thing. RMT bots where still rampant and I still would get mass tells every few minutes. At least Blizzard had the report and ignore account feature, but when you log in the next day and get the spam tells from the same name (because the ignore account feature was only for that logged in session) then you know nothing is being done. Blizzard would mass ban every few months but stopped reporting about it after awhile.

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But you at least had that feature and it could be easily implemented.

The only positive about this is that Gil is already becoming largely useless. Excalibur has several FC that have maxxed out gil both in FC bank and on retainers... 2 BILLION GIL+ for a small group of 8~16 players.

I never understood why people need to hoard so much gil when there's nothing meaningful to spend it on.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

If you ever get the chance to work in customer service, you'd completely understand why stuff isn't done "right now", a lot it has to do with the fact that customers/players report less than 1% of the bad activity they see, because it wastes their time.

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See, that's one of the points. In this particular game, that too would be a much better use of assets to be allocated to. I mean the fact that the Support Desk and the report feature as well as clearing away new reply notifications - they all are absolutely clunky and cumbersome to work with. Half a minute to load, IF it loads (if not, even more, switching back and forth between tabs), and then copy-paste/type everything manually, in a text field that can't even be scrolled with a mouse wheel. Even when reporting specific issues. Yeah, improve the means to actually do the reports and when it's not a complete waste of time, people will be more likely to do it. As it is now, the sheer amount of spam we get is enough to have driven people to simply "quarantining" the /tell channels to a separate tab and muting it, or just simply going /busy, and not care about anything at all.

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Originally Posted by Doki

Excalibur has several FC that have maxxed out gil both in FC bank and on retainers... 2 BILLION GIL+ for a small group of 8~16 players.

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...I'm genuinely curious about how on earth so few people can do that. O_o

On the subject of ignore-and-report...

I strongly suspect that blacklisting DOES cause a player to be reported. Even when I don't use blacklist, I don't think I've EVER received a tell from the same gilspammer two days in a row. The average lifespan of a spammer is less than a day. Whether this is becuase that spammer is being banned, or has been removed by the gilsellers themselves to hide their efforts, I can't say, but if the former then it seems likely that SE is being informed somehow that the character has been blacklisted by a ton of people.

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

Here, just on the previous page, an excerpt:

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The request was for anti-RMT measures that aren't band-aids, and don't harm the legit playerbase. The list you posted addresses neither of these requirements.

Band-aid:
- Word filters: These DO exist. Why do you think gilsellers are constantly spamming things like, "Visit X.Y, replace X w/ goldfountain and Y with com!!1!"? Word filters are in place, and gilsellers instantly defeat or work around any new filters that are added. notafix
- Limit tells: If tell is limited, there will be an increase in shout and say. This also does nothing to actually stop RMT, just hide them from you personally. notafix
- Hide from search: Same problem as Limit tells. RMT will simply use other channels than tell and, again, this doesn't do anything to stop their business. notafix
- Actually remove the account: Not even a band-aid, let alone a fix. As long as the player can't act, it doesn't matter if they're "immobilized" rather than outright banned. notafix
- Auto-remove from blacklist: Again, not a band-aid or a fix, just a convenience. Not one that I'll argue with, since I'd love a more convenient way to clean my blacklist, but doesn't help the problem. notafix.

Harms players:
- Limit tells: Harms newbie players who want to make new friends, or ask about the game. They can still use say, but unless they understand how friending works, they may quickly lose track of the helpful folks they find.
- Hide from search: Makes it difficult for legit players to find other legit players. Even with just the current "busy" status, I once ran into the issue where I couldn't contact a player who'd expressed interest in joining my T9 run the week before, becuase I hadn't yet friended them and they had "busy" on to avoid gilseller tell spam. While I managed to eventually get through to them with help from their FC comrades, with hide from search I wouldn't even have known they were online.

Players think they are way more clever then thay actually are when it comes to "solutions" to the RMT problem - every so-called solution that I've seen has been easy to punch countless holes through. They also are WAY too prone to wearing rose-colored nostalgia glasses when comparing the RMT problem in this game with that in other games. The grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence.

Could SE be doing more? Sure. Their RMT task force is apparently quite small (only three people, if the game's credits list them all). Hiring more people could help, or diverting other staff to the job - but hiring means that we pay more, and diverting means that game content suffers. Is it a worthwhile price to pay? Depends on who you ask.

Personally, I'm more-or-less content with the state of things as they are. RMT tells are annoying, but I can blacklist them quickly, and if I miss one they're gone the next day anyway. Cleaning the blacklist is annoying, and could be improved, but I don't have to do it more than every couple of weeks. RMT aren't destroying the economy, like they did back in FFXI in Christmas 2008, when SE FINALLY sat up and realized RMT were an actual problem - and, since the economy in this game is mostly pointless, there's only so much harm they can do even if they do get out of hand.

I'd like things to be improved, but I put RMT on a MUCH lower priority than, say, balancing Machinist or giving us the ability to use items within macros.

There are RMT in balmung which is probably why WE can't make new characters because they are taking up all the room by making theirs. Myself and someone else caught them leveling or farming or whatever they were doing in central thanalan so we aggro ed mobs and let the aoe kill them off. Instead of returning to their home point they just warped right back to the spot they died at. They died repeatedly for about an hour.

Ignoring doesn't help because it fills up so quickly, I've taken to moving Tells to its own tab and ignoring it, which sucks cus I get people who message me asking questions too. Would like the option for Tells from friends to be a different color to help that but regardless. As to the mention of less than 1% reporting, its cus the system takes to long. I have to fill out a farm to report someone for botting? No thanks, I'd be busy majority of my time reporting spammers and the few bots I find. Another thing is its hard to see the "mass bans" working when they are replaced so quickly, if we actually saw people being banned on the spot or making announcements from time to time saying X people have been banned for botting/rmt, least then we can see they actively seem to be working on it just put it in the same category as the server maintenance tabs.

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Originally Posted by Kaedan94

Yeah, I have a character on Balmung. Your example is hyperbole in the extreme.

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Make a character on Mateus and then tell us it's hyperbole. I'm on Cerberus now and I haven't had ONE RMT since I've been on here, but Mateus was absolutely awful. I shouldn't have to clear my blacklist of 200/200 every day because of RMT. Some servers are absolutely bombarded with the RMTs and people shouldn't have to spent their play time clearing a full blacklist to add even more RMTs to it.

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

...I'm genuinely curious about how on earth so few people can do that. O_o

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When they do merc runs of Coil/EX primals/etc at 7mil a pop, it adds up pretty fast.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

I never understood why people need to hoard so much gil when there's nothing meaningful to spend it on.

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It's because there isn't a whole lot to spend it on.

I just want this problem to go away, #sqex come on, a powerhouse company shouldn't let stuff like this happen to its community....

http://i.gyazo.com/e705b4859a04506d2c0c5273daadc343.jpg

I probably average 1 whisper a minute on Siren. Why is there no limit to the amount of whispers per second you can send? They are selling 10's of thousands of whispers to every player and somehow the systems till lets them do this. On WoW they would get auto silenced and auto reported for mass spam.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

The request was for anti-RMT measures that aren't band-aids, and don't harm the legit playerbase. The list you posted addresses neither of these requirements.

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Well if you're so clever, why don't you suggest something that's not "notafix"??? I clearly said that wiping them out is an impossible goal. I clearly said I'd just be happy for some proper tools to help battle them, to make our in-game lives more bearable. And that's what I've suggested - features to make the situation less annoying. I've never for a minute believed that it's a situation that can be solved, but (and excuse me) those things go beyond being "band-aids", which is what the mass-bans are, which bleed through the moment they're applied. But go ahead, share your ideas of proper solutions then.

So bloody fed up of people complaining that nobody ever suggests anything and when someone does, it basically just gets shrugged off as stupid. At least some of us are trying here. And if you think RMTs aren't hurting the economy, you need to wake up, because gatherer bots say hello. All the checks that SE does to ascertain average wealth for prices like housing - they all include the massive amount of gil these traders deal with, since their characters are as much part of the game as anyone else's. But whatever, glad you're happy with the few thousand accounts being permanently or temporarily banned on a (bi)weekly basis.

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

It actually is our responsibility to keep our servers clean and tidy. It is like RL, if you let someone else pick up your own garbage or someone elses' garbage it will never be picked up.

It is your job to make sure Square knows about the situation, do you think every employee sits and wait for something to happen? People are paid to work, not sit on their arses waiting for something to happen.

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I'm sorry but if you somehow consider it my job to police the gil spammers in game then square might as well start paying me per month instead of the other way around. Banning thousands of accounts is simply a bandaid fix that really passes over the root of the problem. I think that Square should start selling the gil themselves through the mog site and undercut these bastards. The amount of gil spammers/BLM farmers is really a disgraceful sight in such a beautiful game.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

I strongly suspect that blacklisting DOES cause a player to be reported. Even when I don't use blacklist, I don't think I've EVER received a tell from the same gilspammer two days in a row. The average lifespan of a spammer is less than a day. Whether this is becuase that spammer is being banned, or has been removed by the gilsellers themselves to hide their efforts, I can't say, but if the former then it seems likely that SE is being informed somehow that the character has been blacklisted by a ton of people.

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I'd love for SE to clarify if that's the case. It would probably make the job of enforcement easier if they gave us a right click-report feature though as it would allow them to include extra metadata (the message, date, time, character, world) being clicked and reported on. I'd bet that would speed enforcement a bit.

On a QoL side, an auto-prune of deleted accounts and an account blacklist would also be nice.

People are persistent. They will continue to use up space on a topic that SE has blatantly ignored since the launch of 1.0. You want a response introduce a subject that makes SE look good. The more fluff the better.

What I would like to to know is how I could start a new character and be in the very first cutscene before I even have control of my character and hear a RMT message in my not yet existent chat window?

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Originally Posted by Veilqa

I'm sorry but if you somehow consider it my job to police the gil spammers in game then square might as well start paying me per month instead of the other way around.

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It is our job to help police the game. Your stance on this is ridiculous.

It's like having a guy come into your neighborhood every day to sell drugs. He doesn't look like a drug dealer, but you know he is because you've seen him at it and he always offers you some. You don't know how he got your number, but sometimes he even calls you at odd hours of the day. No one else seems to have noticed him or if they did, they're either buying his product or they just don't seem to care. However, as much as he's annoying you you decide it's "not your job" to help police your neighborhood so you don't bother reporting him. A few weeks later when you see an officer driving by you flag him down and demand to know why the drug dealer is still hanging around your street and offering you drugs every day. You want to know why the police haven't done anything. He's been there for weeks, after all! Confused, the officer asks why you didn't report the guy if you saw him weeks ago and knew what he was doing. You respond by telling him that it's his job to do the policing, not yours. The officer pepper sprays you for being an idiot and drives away rolls his eyes and finally arrests the guy that probably would have been gone weeks ago if people had simply reported him.

Asking SE or any game company to police every inch of their game 24/7 for RMT activity is absurd. A lot of the accounts that get banned are only ever brought to SE's attention in the first place because someone took the time to report it. If you aren't going to help because you don't think it's your job, you have very little room to complain.

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

Well if you're so clever, why don't you suggest something that's not "notafix"???

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A right-click menu for reporting a player like what Blizzard has for WoW. It would automatically log and report the name, location, time, and the content of the message so you don't have to sit there and type it all out manually like a jackass (and it automatically eliminates the possibility of a typo). It'll also ask if you want to place the person on you blacklist at the end of the process to kill two birds with one stone get two birds stoned at once.

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I clearly said that wiping them out is an impossible goal. I clearly said I'd just be happy for some proper tools to help battle them, to make our in-game lives more bearable. And that's what I've suggested - features to make the situation less annoying. I've never for a minute believed that it's a situation that can be solved, but (and excuse me) those things go beyond being "band-aids", which is what the mass-bans are, which bleed through the moment they're applied. But go ahead, share your ideas of proper solutions then.

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So why, when I asked RyuRoots how they would stop RMT, did you respond to me with your list of non-solutions? Ryu, like most other people in these threads, is demanding for SE to "stop" RMT. I'm asking how they suggest SE should handle the impossible task of eradicating RMT, not how they would alleviate the annoyance.

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So bloody fed up of people complaining that nobody ever suggests anything and when someone does, it basically just gets shrugged off as stupid. At least some of us are trying here.

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Because the vast majority of proposed "fixes" in these types of threads are stupid. None of them would eliminate RMT (which you agree is impossible) while almost all of them would wind up screwing over legit players in some manner. They typically amount to trading one annoyance for another bigger one. Some people need to stop and think for a minute before they try. It would save a lot of headaches.

p.s. SE, your ridiculous character limit sucks. There's no reason to have a 1000 character limit that can be bypassed anyway or otherwise causes someone to make multiple posts. If you insist on a limit at least make it something reasonable like 5000.