The Silence Penalty

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Luxpheras

Greetings!

Thanks for all the feedback and ideas on how to better restrict and prevent spam messages in FINAL FANTASY XIV.



We are pleased to share that the dev. team is currently looking into a new system to address RMT advertisement spam, and we're planning to implement this in the future. Rest assured, we're making sure that this system won't inconvenience normal players.

Please continue to share your thoughts, and we will keep you posted with any future updates. :)

---

This is great news thanks for the reply rmt is still a big problem on low/med pop servers

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KariArisu

Or just remove the "Send Tell" option from Player Search > Right Click. Their job becomes much more difficult if they have to type names or use other methods. The reason they're so "efficient" is because they use tools to search/spam tells, making it harder to automate makes it harder for them to work.

---

Part of me hopes we can use the upcoming context menu report from the player search...

All those delicious rmt bots just sitting there, all displayed in a nice list for reporting...

....or, we could just have gms sitting at every MB to mark and ban all the toons with "no names" constantly logging in and out....Limsa is ridiculous.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AutoWhit

....or, we could just have gms sitting at every MB to mark and ban all the toons with "no names" constantly logging in and out....Limsa is ridiculous.

---

And there's enough GMs to do that? On every server?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TaranTatsuuchi

Part of me hopes we can use the upcoming context menu report from the player search...

All those delicious rmt bots just sitting there, all displayed in a nice list for reporting...

---

But what is it that you could report from there? That a character exists? I don't think even spam bots put spam in their search info message, and unless they do, there's nothing you can see from player search that would be reportable.

No, the chat box is the best place for it. For the spam bots, it's the messages they're sending that are reportable, so it's easiest to report those where they're at. And for farming bots, well, those really need to be spotted by SE themselves who have access to the server information.

You can report exploits if you see someone doing something that would clearly be impossible without hacking the software, like fighting or gathering from below the ground or something. But in that case, you have to write up an explanation of what they're doing that would be reportable. That explanation means it's not as well suited to an automatic right-click report feature. (Being able to right-click on a character or their overhead name to initiate a report filling in fields like their name as well as the server, time, location, etc, but leaving the description field for you to fill out yourself would still be helpful, but that's a different feature from just reporting them directly from the right click menu.)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KariArisu

Or just remove the "Send Tell" option from Player Search > Right Click. Their job becomes much more difficult if they have to type names or use other methods.

---

A program can parse the text on the screen very easily... Your solution would just make things more difficult for real players, not bots...

I would say have an option to blacklist accounts that the RMT bot s use. Unless the botters are using some Jedi voodoo I don't know about, I would assume that it takes a lot more effort making/taking an account than it takes to make a new toon.

Dota does silence penalties and it works pretty awesome, I'd be for it.

Limit people with the penalty to only using auto translate.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Niwashi

They only keep churning out spam bots because the bots are profitable to them. As soon as they're not, they'll quit replacing them. The current system is that a spam bot can spend weeks sending out thousands upon thousands of ads before they're finally banned. That's long enough to bring in some sales, so replacing the spam bot is just the cost of advertising.

---

Weeks? Hardly. Your average spam-bot lasts only a few hours before getting banned, and pretty much never lives longer than a day. You're correct, though, in that this system would reduce this lifetime from hours to just minutes. I still believe that RMT have the resources to continue to proliferate their spam-bots at this enhanced pace while still remaining profitable. So, a placebo it remains.

Gather-bots and level-bots tend to live quite a bit longer. They do not directly harass players, and so players don't care as much about them, see no need to blacklist them, and under this new system will probably be much more likely to neglect reporting them. Which is a shame, as these bots are how RMT actually makes the gil that they sell. Getting these guys regularly banned would be much more harmful to RMT than scooping buckets of spam-bots out of the spam-bot ocean.

Of course, the BEST solution would be a punishment system directed against gil-BUYERS that is draconian enough that only an idiot would buy gil. RMT only advertise, because they have customers to sell to, after all... I don't see this happening, though, as it can get ugly when a company that gets a reputation for mass-bans of its own "legitimate" playerbase. :P

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KariArisu

Or just remove the "Send Tell" option from Player Search > Right Click. Their job becomes much more difficult if they have to type names or use other methods. The reason they're so "efficient" is because they use tools to search/spam tells, making it harder to automate makes it harder for them to work.

---

As Amnesia noted, this would not slow spam-bots down in the least. There aren't any human players behind these bots, right-clicking names and choosing "Send Tell". That would be way too inefficient. These are fully-automated programs. They most likely use the Search menu to bring up a list of the names of everyone on the server and methodically send tells to each name, one by one. The only folks likely to use the right-click method are players. So this solution would harm RMT not at all, while forcing players to type out wretched Rogadyn names by hand.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Weeks? Hardly. Your average spam-bot lasts only a few hours before getting banned, and pretty much never lives longer than a day.

---

Well, the few times I've checked, every bot that spammed me lived a lot longer than that. If I forego blacklisting them, and instead make a note of their names to compare with later spam, then the same bots will continue spamming me throughout the day and the day after. A couple days at a time is as long as I've actually kept track of it that way before giving up and blacklisting them, so I can only say definitively that their normal lifespan is more than a couple days. (Including "more than" in that assessment is because of how trivially low the chances would be for every bot I encountered having been just created right at the moment I started keeping track of them, then staying active throughout that time only to be banned immediately as soon as I stopped tracking it.)

Plus, we know from the messages SE themselves put out that they only ban a few spam bots each week, nowhere near the number who are active. According to their last message about it, for instance, they banned 616 spam bots over the course of an entire week. That's less than 10 per server. At best guess, it looks as though it would take them a couple weeks or so to clear out the spam bots that are active at any given time, meaning that's about how often the bots need to be replaced. I think your "a few hours" estimate is just wishful thinking. The numbers just don't support the idea that they could be clearing them out multiple times per week, let alone multiple times per day.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LineageRazor

You're correct, though, in that this system would reduce this lifetime from hours to just minutes. I still believe that RMT have the resources to continue to proliferate their spam-bots at this enhanced pace while still remaining profitable. So, a placebo it remains.

---

If you mean they'd still remain profitable overall as an RMT company, sure. But the spam bots themselves would no longer be profitable to them. In order to be worth using those spam bots, each bot has to attract enough new buyers who wouldn't otherwise be buying from them, for those buyers to add more to their net profit than the cost of the spam accounts and effort to set them up.

[I'm going to be making up all the numbers and percentages below, but they only need to be reasonable enough to illustrate the point, and I think they're close enough for that purpose:]

The vast majority of players won't buy gil. There's various reasons, whether it's because they're afraid to break the ToS, too principled to break agreements or do something that harms the game's economy, or the most common reason, that there's simply not much incentive to spend extra money you don't need to just for extra gil in a game where most playstyles provide plenty of gil in rewards to cover any costs you'll come across. So lets say around 1% of the population are potential gil-buyers.

That wouldn't mean that 1% of a spam-bot's messages bring in revenue. Gil buyers who have already looked into the RMT market are generally going to buy from wherever they'd already decided to buy from, so spamming them is either unnecessary or ineffective. The real target market for these spam messages is new potential gil buyers who can be persuaded to use the spam-bot's site for it. And persuading them generally takes a lot more than one message. It either takes inundating them with enough spam that whenever they think of gil-buying, your site is what immediately comes to mind, or else it takes messaging them at the ideal moment when they just decided they'd be interested in buying gil but haven't yet looked into where to do so, and are willing to just take the advice of the next message about it that they see. Since trying to hit a perfect moment like that is also achieved by repeated messaging, in either case a spam bot needs to send lots of messages to potential buyers before they'll get a sale out of it. So let's say it takes a hundred such messages to get a sale from them. (It's probably more than that, but a hundred is a nice round number to make the point with.)

Having 100 messages reach the 1% of players who might respond means the spam bot needs, on average, to send out 10,000 messages in order to generate a sale. But it still wouldn't be profitable yet at that point. To be more attractive to customers, RMT sites have a lot of low-cost deals, relying on volume rather than high prices to raise profits. If a spam bot only attracted one new customer and that customer spent $3 or $5 once and was never heard from again, it wouldn't cover the cost of the spam bot's account, let alone any of the other overhead costs. To achieve profitability, they have to either bring in a whole bunch of these small-fry customers, or reach one of those rare customers whose appetites for gil is insatiable and who will keep coming back to buy more and more of it, spending more on that than on the game itself.

So if we figure around 10 new customers is the tipping point for making a spam bot worth the cost of setting it up, that bot needs to remain active long enough to send over 100,000 messages before it gets silenced or banned. Currently, they last long enough to do significantly more than that, so they're a good deal for the RMT companies, who will continue making more of them whenever their current ones finally get banned. If, however, we could report a spammer as easily as blacklisting them and after 20 or so such reports the spam-bot's account was silenced, that wouldn't work. Even if a few people are a bit slow to report them, so they manage to eke out 30 messages by the time 20 of them get reported, that's still only 30 out of the 100,000 they would need in order to be worthwhile to the companies creating them. They're unlikely to even reach a potential gil-buyer, let alone convince them to make a purchase.

The RMT companies are in it for the money. They're not going to keep spending money on spam bots that don't bring in more in profits. As soon as SE fixes the system to prevent a bot getting out enough ads to be profitable, the RMT companies are going to move their advertising budget elsewhere (to web sites that won't kick their ads off after the first few page views). Getting the spam out of the game wouldn't end RMT (though it would cut it down a bit), but at least we'd be able to play in peace without that constant annoyance.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Gather-bots and level-bots ... Getting these guys regularly banned would be much more harmful to RMT

---

That's true, but it's also a lot harder to do. Spam is clearly identifiable at a glance. But the activities of a bot that's gathering gil aren't all that different from those of a legitimate player who's gathering gil. SE has to watch them long enough to verify if the patterns and timeframes involved make it clearly a bot. (And then they monitor longer after that to watch where the gil goes in order to identify buyers.) It takes a significant amount of time and effort that can't be streamlined away to something that can be done with a click, the way getting rid of the spam-bots can.

It makes sense to take the low-hanging fruit, the part that can readily be eliminated. That's especially true when, as you pointed out yourself, the spam is the part that's directly harassing players and which players therefore care the most about. Spam is a bigger detriment to the game than the actual RMT that it's advertising. (What's more, getting rid of the in-game spam would cut down somewhat on the RMT itself. The reason RMT companies go for this relatively expensive form of advertising is because it's effective at bringing in more sales. The corollary is that without it, there'd be fewer RMT sales.)



(Oh, man. I really didn't intend this message to grow so frickin' long. :rolleyes:)

Jagex called this muting in RuneScape. it works.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Luxpheras

Greetings!

Thanks for all the feedback and ideas on how to better restrict and prevent spam messages in FINAL FANTASY XIV.



We are pleased to share that the dev. team is currently looking into a new system to address RMT advertisement spam, and we're planning to implement this in the future. Rest assured, we're making sure that this system won't inconvenience normal players.

Please continue to share your thoughts, and we will keep you posted with any future updates. :)

---

Are you going to remove the entirely-too-prohibitive "You Can Only Mail People On Your Friends List" restriction? How about allowing us to mail our alts? How about allowing friends to bypass /busy? How about having FC members receive the same benefits of friends (unique nameplate color, ability to send mail, bypass /busy if this is implemented), without me having to actually friend my entire FC?

If SE were serious about removing bots it would have done the following ~ any player who hasn't moved for 15 minutes would be logged out, and any player who logged back in and didn't move or progress in the game for another 15 minutes would be logged out and flagged as a bot, who in their right minds would log into a game, stand in the same place all the time and accumulate zero exp. A bot.

There used to be an automatic log out if you idled, it was super annoying. Also, crafters often sit in one spot for a while doing something repetitive and not gain exp for it. I'm sorry but your suggestions would just hurt honest players more than the bots. They just hop onto any one of a billion alts they have the moment they are impeded. What would be more effective is GM's actively investigating reports of bots. Bots are pretty distinct in their appearance and actions it would just take a GM a short time of observation to make that determination and deal with them accordingly. To be honest I'm not certain why these reports aren't taken more seriously in the first place.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Niwashi

*Statistics*

---

To be perfectly honest, I've always been amazed that RMT are able to make a profit - but they do, somehow. They're paying for all these accounts to do various things, just about everyone in the game knows they're putting themselves at risk by buying gil, there's no good REASON to buy gil since it can be made quickly and there's nothing to spend it on but fluff - and yet people still buy, and in sufficient quantities to pay these expenses and then some.

I don't know RMT's profit margins. However, I'm guessing that neither do you. NEITHER of us has any REAL idea how badly this penalty against shout-bots will hurt RMT. We can only speculate. My speculation is that while it will cut into RMT profits, it won't be nearly enough to curb their activities in the slightest. RMT tells will be as vigorous as ever, the only difference being the rate at which RMT deploy new bots. Your speculation is that this will hurt RMT enough that shoutbots will no longer be economically viable; that they will withdraw shoutbots from the playfield entirely and rely on other forms of advertising to get the job done.

Well, this new feature is coming, so I suppose time will tell which of us is correct. I'd be delighted if you're correct, and RMT shouts become a thing of the past - but I'm not gonna hold my breath!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Maxipep

If SE were serious about removing bots it would have done the following ~ any player who hasn't moved for 15 minutes would be logged out, and any player who logged back in and didn't move or progress in the game for another 15 minutes would be logged out and flagged as a bot, who in their right minds would log into a game, stand in the same place all the time and accumulate zero exp. A bot.

---

This is a pretty terrible idea. I, personally, have had FC and LS conversations that last much longer than fifteen minutes, during which time I don't move around much, if at all. I usually remain logged into the game when I prepare dinner, or make a quick fast food run, both of which can easily take longer than fifteen minutes to accomplish. Heck, I've stayed still for more than an HOUR waiting for FATEs to pop for relic progression - can't leave the FATE area, after all, 'cuz if it pops while you're away, the other twenty individuals waiting for the same FATE will slaughter it in thirty seconds. There are many, MANY legitimate reasons to stand in place for long periods of time in this game.

Meanwhile, if this was implemented, all shout-bots would gain a "wiggle" function which causes their character to run in a tight circle every five minutes or so, all fully automated, all inconveniencing RMT not in the slightest.

The same to comment in forums Wow, this system if not checked before could fall into misuse of this as what happened expulsions system BG or dungeons.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Maxipep

If SE were serious about removing bots it would have done the following ~ any player who hasn't moved for 15 minutes would be logged out, and any player who logged back in and didn't move or progress in the game for another 15 minutes would be logged out and flagged as a bot, who in their right minds would log into a game, stand in the same place all the time and accumulate zero exp. A bot.

---

Me, all the time. Almost every day. I log in. I might step away while it loads. I might step away for up to 30 mins. I have kids. Sometimes they are keeping busy so I think I can log in. Sometimes they see me log in and suddenly decide they need a 3 course meal for breakfast. Sometimes I can get caught up watching TV or reading articles, and don't move in game for a while. Or I might be deep in a great conversation with my FC or a friend and don't move. So you're gonna boot me for that? And if I do it twice in a day, suddenly I'm a bot?

Not everyone plays this game with max efficiency. Sometimes, some of us log in, and do something for a few mins then AFK to take care of RL, then come back to play for a few mins, rinse, repeat.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MaeIsMean

Me, all the time. Almost every day. I log in. I might step away while it loads. I might step away for up to 30 mins. I have kids. Sometimes they are keeping busy so I think I can log in. Sometimes they see me log in and suddenly decide they need a 3 course meal for breakfast. Sometimes I can get caught up watching TV or reading articles, and don't move in game for a while. Or I might be deep in a great conversation with my FC or a friend and don't move. So you're gonna boot me for that? And if I do it twice in a day, suddenly I'm a bot?

Not everyone plays this game with max efficiency. Sometimes, some of us log in, and do something for a few mins then AFK to take care of RL, then come back to play for a few mins, rinse, repeat.

---

I can confirm this lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kio

There used to be an automatic log out if you idled, it was super annoying. Also, crafters often sit in one spot for a while doing something repetitive and not gain exp for it. I'm sorry but your suggestions would just hurt honest players more than the bots. They just hop onto any one of a billion alts they have the moment they are impeded. What would be more effective is GM's actively investigating reports of bots. Bots are pretty distinct in their appearance and actions it would just take a GM a short time of observation to make that determination and deal with them accordingly. To be honest I'm not certain why these reports aren't taken more seriously in the first place.

---

But a crafter wouldn't be Lvl 1, as for the super annoying comment about being idle, imagine you are trying to log on to your world only to be told it's full, and when you do log on you find over 100 people AFK. It's not hard to log back on

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gramul

I like the idea of community dictated moderation. My only concern is that some might use it as a way of abusing others. For example, someone could get their linkshell to constantly report someone they just don't like.
If they can prevent that kind of abuse, then I'm all for it.

---

There is an easy way to mitigate this.
The frequency of messages, the number of users telled to, the discentrality of spammers and the number of previous interactions initiated by the player to the spammer before the first tell received are some easy factors to consider.
Further first-level passes and checks include a low account age or moderate account age with no high level or an inactive account that suddenly logs on as red markers.

From fact by observation, we know that bots consistently send messages on a periodic basis to multiple players. A normal player is more sporadic with their tells, and usually only whispers one or two people at a time at most. Spammers might use locations of cached players' names or simply an observer that parses everyones' names nearby, while players typically tell to people they met already or had interacted with on a per-frequency basis much higher than spam bots. This could be from dungeons, from free company invites, from trading - whatever the case. Spam bots are more likely to be lower level players, simply by virtue of mass creation being the more economical choice when choosing to spam messages than initiating any effort in obtaining a certain character level to seem like a 'real player'. Organic players don't just pop up one day and tell many random players. They do quests, they move around and stuff. Metrics like dungeons done, quests done, achievements done, etc can correlate to a certain player profile. Deviants after sufficient analyses of these bots can come up with a profile that just doesn't add up, creating a complexity factor hurdle that needs to be overcome with better programming to skip through these hoops and loops of red flag heuristics, effectively lessening the impact of spam bots altogether.

After a player-based 'vote', we could add an automatic test that followings through the aforementioned metrics/profile that is being weighted against, and then finally confirm it to be a 'bot' or not and quickly silence them (while having them on their screen show as spamming messages). We could also add a second metric that determines the reputability of each said player after confirming some random samples of 'autoconfirmed silenced bots', and players with low reputability, either stemming high correlation of a subgroup like [A, B, C friendship; A, B, C free company; A, B, C linkshell) ganging up on people or reporting 'organic players' could simply just have their report weights be zero.

Kicking AFK players is not a systematically sound solution. Secondly, 'spam bots' must mimic keyboard input, thereby negating the 'AFK' arguement completely. Organic players do AFK at random intervals, they do not follow any predetermined threshold or steps. However, from a probablistic perspective, people are more likely to be AFK after a certain period of time from logging in more so than when they just logged in. Since players logged in typically don't feel burned out from playing yet, and they are more likely to have less time waiting on them like going to work or having to do other responsibilities, factoring in that most people decide to block in their game time during the day when that time is a leisure block and as you progress through it - there are more likely to be interruptions like calls, and whatnot.

Curbing RMT activities is also possible. If the marketplace is a place to transfer currency, then we can infer that if we take the 7, 15 and 30-day trending prices of various items, and take the weightings of the price by each respective unique buyer, and set a % threshold over the average and median price like 5000% on item X, then we flag all these buyers who sell 10 gil priced items for 100000 gil or something like that. Additionally, a very disproportionately low amount of people would ever set their selling price to higher than the lowest going price, although people do put them at the median 50% percentile of the list (i.e. a list of 10 prices), or better - rarely do they set a price the highest of the market and over a magnitude of 10 times or more unless they're buying out the market. Secondly, it's more likely that these gil sellers are using these proxy measures because of the level of convenience and lack of tracability. Players that do more than one purchase transaction of this type, are, more than likely not by mistake, and are bots themselves.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MaeIsMean

Me, all the time. Almost every day. I log in. I might step away while it loads. I might step away for up to 30 mins. I have kids. Sometimes they are keeping busy so I think I can log in. Sometimes they see me log in and suddenly decide they need a 3 course meal for breakfast. Sometimes I can get caught up watching TV or reading articles, and don't move in game for a while. Or I might be deep in a great conversation with my FC or a friend and don't move. So you're gonna boot me for that? And if I do it twice in a day, suddenly I'm a bot?

Not everyone plays this game with max efficiency. Sometimes, some of us log in, and do something for a few mins then AFK to take care of RL, then come back to play for a few mins, rinse, repeat.

---

I can also confirm this. Kids wait as soon as you sit down to call you for something. -___-

I believe we should look at this from another perspective.

Instead of trying to find a way to recognize and ban RMT advertising characters, it would be much, much simpler to add a chat filtering option to the character menu.

This filter should allow to choose to what chats it has to be applied to, be it a single chat, some specific ones, or even to get them all filtered out.

The filter should include a number of options, I would personally like to have these:

Filter by Level (maximum among all classes) [choosing in ranges of 5 would be ideal]
Filter by Job [wether the character has none, or by specific jobs]
Filter by Newbie Status [wether they are still a newbie or not]
Filter by membership of Free Company [wether they belong to your FC or not, potentially to certain FCs we might choose/write]
Filter by presence within our Friend List [self explanatory]
Filter by Presence within our Linkshells [self explanatory]
Filter by players within the Newbie Network [self explanatory]
Filter by Mentor Status [wether they have a mentor status on DOL, DOW/DOM or DOH]

This way, not only are we able to lock out RMT advertisers from sending us whispers, but we might also be able to profit from this by being able to filter the chat conversations to what we want to, such us talking to specific players with certain jobs to which we might have some questions, or requesting crafts, or whoever knows what. I admit this can seggregate the population, so maybe some of these options should be restricted to the /say, /yell, /shout and the /tell chats, since they're the ones mainly used by RMT advertisers.

I also believe this filter should be client-side only (though some options might incur in message reception lag when selecting specific filtering options), not only would the servers not get any extra load, but additionally, this way the log is still generated and SE can analyze what the RMT advertisers try to say, and at the same time, by analyzing the different setups for the filters the users have configured, SE might just be able to directly log only the RMT messages and study how they usually write them, in order to ban them more efficiently in the future.


Well, I'll cross my fingers so that they consider my proposal seriously!

the best solution to eliminate the spam would be for them to allow the players to have filters we could add to. it wouldn't be that hard to do
it would be as simple as
*word*
there are many setups that could be added to this
once you figure out the word or words being used and add them you will not see messages with those filters. and they could do one step better as well by keeping it server side they can check our filters and add them to the system as time goes on thus making it very hard for RMT to sell anything.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Anyaira

The filter should include a number of options, I would personally like to have these:

Filter by Level (maximum among all classes) [choosing in ranges of 5 would be ideal]
Filter by Job [wether the character has none, or by specific jobs]
Filter by Newbie Status [wether they are still a newbie or not]
Filter by membership of Free Company [wether they belong to your FC or not, potentially to certain FCs we might choose/write]
Filter by presence within our Friend List [self explanatory]
Filter by Presence within our Linkshells [self explanatory]
Filter by players within the Newbie Network [self explanatory]
Filter by Mentor Status [wether they have a mentor status on DOL, DOW/DOM or DOH]

This way, not only are we able to lock out RMT advertisers from sending us whispers, but we might also be able to profit from this by being able to filter the chat conversations to what we want to, such us talking to specific players with certain jobs to which we might have some questions, or requesting crafts, or whoever knows what. I admit this can seggregate the population, so maybe some of these options should be restricted to the /say, /yell, /shout and the /tell chats, since they're the ones mainly used by RMT advertisers.

---

this is a good idea as well

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Anyaira

I also believe this filter should be client-side only (though some options might incur in message reception lag when selecting specific filtering options), not only would the servers not get any extra load, but additionally, this way the log is still generated and SE can analyze what the RMT advertisers try to say, and at the same time, by analyzing the different setups for the filters the users have configured, SE might just be able to directly log only the RMT messages and study how they usually write them, in order to ban them more efficiently in the future.

---

I disagree with this part because even if the filters were server side the GMs could still see the RMT messages unfiltered. they dont need to have filtered logs for the servers only the clients and this can still be done server side with very little extra load.
FFXI has server side spam filters, they are halfway decent too.







as for the silence option...this might work to a degree but it would be easier to abuse than filters would

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Wildsprite

I disagree with this part because even if the filters were server side the GMs could still see the RMT messages unfiltered. they dont need to have filtered logs for the servers only the clients and this can still be done server side with very little extra load.
FFXI has server side spam filters, they are halfway decent too.

---

I didn't mean for the filter to be exclusively client-side, but for the action the filter does, so instead of having this:

Spam bot writes msg > Player Filter loaded to server > message filtered > messages logged > filtered message sent from server to player > Filtered chat displayed

We would have this:

Spam bot writes msg ---->Message sent from server to player > player client filter activates > filtered chat displayed
******************---->Message logged into server > player client filter load > log filtered and unfiltered messages

This allows for the server to have less load (ridicule for a single player, but quite large for thousands of players). Still, this depends on how the chat works internally, I simply pictured a raw message transmission and applied the filtering there, but it could be quite different and allow for what you said, which would be ideal btw, since it prevents unnecessary data (bot messages) to get past the servers, and thus lowers the amount of transmited data from server to client (less server load, again).

Still, this is something the devs will see when they decide to implement such a system, I bet they have a much better idea of what they're doing than I.

What still worries me though, is that, as I said, a system such as this could seggregate players if applied to normal chat channels, so I could see the devs being reluctant to add it.


As for the message filter by black-listed words you mentioned, I've seen some people use an add-on that does just that, and I can tell it's not effective in the least in the long-run. The words the SPAM bots use are too strange, too varied to be able to keep up with a filter that must be created manually (and yes, filtered words could be shared and all that, but it still wouldn't be very effective). There are even filters like that in many forums and the bots still manage to slip through them, plus the risk of filtering real messages is very high (I look at you proffanity filter), moreso when so many different languages are used within FFXIV. It could have its uses, but the system is so open that in the end the bots would still win... on the other hand, I don't see a gold seller company leveling all their bots and making them run dungeons and making FCs just to get past those filters, it wouldn't be worth it (unless they have some super fast leveling system, such as super speed attacks and instant teleportation, but then again, they would be very noticeable in a short amount of time).

Whatever filtering options you might suggest, there's no chance SE will implement them unless they can reliably differentiate between a bot and a legitimate new player. SE is afraid - and justifiably so! - that if they implement, say, filter-by-low-level, eager new players will join the game and encounter a wall of silent strangers who completely ignore them. There will be far too many players who justify throwing the baby out with the bathwater by assuming that other players will be there to catch that baby - when all those other players are assuming the very same thing.

Withholding the players' option to blanket-blacklist all new players was a deliberate design decision, and not one that I anticipate will change. New players are the lifeblood of any MMO and need to be made to feel welcome. The hardcore, I'll-be-here-til-the-servers-die faction is far too small to support the game on their own.

Your argument doesn't really hold by the fact I simply proposed several filtering options. You say low level players will be left out? Well, leaving aside the fact that new players play solo for the first... 10 to 15 levels or so, that these levels can be done leisurely playing for a couple of hours, and that all the content until lvl 14 is focused on solo play... if SE believes adding a filter option for level and newbie status is too much, having the other filter options is still a VERY possible option; I and most of my FC play usually ony with the FC chat active, and relying on /tell and Linkshells for any other chat interaction, as well as the newbie network; adding filters to the /tell, /sh and /yell would help us a lot for the remaining interaction, since we either talk casually, recruit party members or request/offer crafts for these chat channels, making the presence of bots absolutely unbearable, and giving up on using them and deleting them form the chat windows we use. I believe adding a filter so we can reuse those chat channels is much better than staying on /busy all the time form the beginning of our game sessions to the very end, and not looking at any other chat channel than our linkshells, FC chat and the Party Finder; it's leaps and bounds better wether you ask me or anyone: [/fc, /lX & PF] vs [All channels + filer], it's pretty obvious what the best solution is. And as stated before, newbie players won't even notice, I've known zero newbies trying to whisper me, they have all been at least level 14, or, currently, they have used the newbie network for any questions.

Besides... wouldn't newbie players have played the trial before purchasing the game? If memory serves me right, the Trial version does NOT allow for /shout, /yell and /tell on trial accounts, they cannot trade, use linkshells, join free companies, etc. These restrictions are there for a reason, as well as because of a simple fact, players below lvl 20 (level cap for trial account characters) are not expected to join in advanced chat channels with other players, for the content is not designed in that way, it's focused on learning basic gameplay, understanding simple mechanics and user interface, as well as game systems such as the first duty through the DF, summing up, a tutorial that takes around 20 levels.

However, speculating about this is meaningless, we are here to propose systems by which SE will make playing much better, and the whole community thinking together about solutions is much better than a couple of devs taking spare time to think them up. Trying to find fault on the systems we propose is also a meaningles endeavor, lots of us are posting, so it's far better if you post your own version than complain about others's versions, you can take what the others have said and create your own revamped proposal that might just blow our minds.

That goes for me as well, replying to such a fruitless post is also meaningless, since no human has ever convinced another, but I still hope, as dumb as that is.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gramul

I like the idea of community dictated moderation. My only concern is that some might use it as a way of abusing others. For example, someone could get their linkshell to constantly report someone they just don't like.
If they can prevent that kind of abuse, then I'm all for it.

---

Well of course they can. If a group of people continues to report you, you can just report that to an GM and they will give them a warning/ban. Easy as that.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gramul

I like the idea of community dictated moderation. My only concern is that some might use it as a way of abusing others. For example, someone could get their linkshell to constantly report someone they just don't like.
If they can prevent that kind of abuse, then I'm all for it.

---

If you read how Blizzard is doing it, the person doesn't get silenced until a GM reviews the reports. It's not automatic. So abuse will be easily spotted by a bunch of reports on someone for no reason. Unless the person was being abusive or spammy, the GM wouldn't silence them.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MaeIsMean

If you read how Blizzard is doing it, the person doesn't get silenced until a GM reviews the reports. It's not automatic.

---

That's how they claimed they were doing it, that it would be Report->Investigate->Silence/Not Silence based on said investigation.

What it's turned out to be is Report->Silence->Investigate->Repeal/Uphold.

There's a lot of irate forum posts over on their boards right now because of that.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sanghelios

Well of course they can. If a group of people continues to report you, you can just report that to an GM and they will give them a warning/ban. Easy as that.

---

You don't even need to report it to the GMs since they're the ones who get the original reports, so they'll already know when false reports come in. (And that's a good thing, since you also wouldn't be able to report it. Who would you even report? It's not like you'd know who had falsely reported you. You might not even know you'd been silenced.)

One person reporting a message that's not RMT spam would probably just get a warning. (After all, maybe they just mis-clicked when trying to report the name below yours, rather than having deliberately tried to harass you.) But that's also why a single report wouldn't silence anyone, and it takes multiple reports against the same person before that happens. If 20 or 30 false reports all came in against the same person, it's not going to be a simple error. The only way that can happen is if they all conspired with each other to harass that player. A harassment conspiracy of that sort justifies a permanent ban on all their accounts rather than a simple warning.