Losing the RMT spam war SE?

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

I think though that you are misunderstanding their point. The take action continuously, they do ban in waves, but that doesn't mean that they are doing nothing in between. Each account ban has to be handled correctly, they cannot just ban on spec because there are reports of RMT spam. Your post says they do nothing but take action once a week, that's not true.

The situation has changed, the frequency of spam has gone down as well as up, and will again.

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fair enough, but still... too much RMT. T_T

i tell your now, though. and again, i have never seen such high volumes of RMT in all of my years of online gaming since from 1996. i am sure this simply attests to just how popular the game is. which lol, is actually an upside to the RMT... at least we know since there is such a huge market here for them, that we are playing a AAA game. :D meh

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Originally Posted by Amenian

More exasperation than anger. It seems like every day there's a new person from Balmung in these threads going "I don't see what the problem is, I rarely get RMT tells. I'm on Balmung!!".

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I'm from Ragnarok and i also get only RMT spam around 5-10 times the week

Better? ^^

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Originally Posted by Kuwagami

I'm on cerberus, a server which is (as far as I know) totally open for character creation at any time of the day. Yet I get even less RMT tells here than I used to receive back when I was on Balmung. Honestly, if your server is overrun by RMTs, that's because some of your server mates (enough to justify a market) are lame and went the easy road of the credit card. Not because your server is open.

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Yes, it's possible that other open servers don't have it as bad as others. But Balmung specifically won't have it bad at all simply due to the fact that they are always closed except for a very small window of time. My point still stands.

As to your other point. Yes, of course, no buyers would solve the problem. Kind of a pointless thing to tell people who don't buy gil that are looking for a solution though. It's like telling people complaining about high taxes that the solution is to stop passing tax increases. Well, duh, but realistically how are they supposed to stop that from happening?

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Originally Posted by Felis

I'm from Ragnarok and i also get only RMT spam around 5-10 times the week

Better? ^^

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I see Ragnarok closed quite often for character creation. You're in the same, although not as bad, boat as Balmung.

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Originally Posted by Amenian

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Yeah, but just look at it :

You're on a buying-heavy server (or at least enough to justify the RMT spam).
You're complaining on the forums, where only a minority of players come. Also this issue is on a case-by-case basis. A few servers only have it.
You're expecting SE to fix people (because anyone saying that there is a way to fix RMT is just naive or willingly ignoring the facts)

Well, sorry to say, but SE can't really do anything, apart removing any form of trading in the game (which would be an horrible idea in a MMO). Your only option if you want to get rid of it is to migrate on a better server, where RMTs aren't active. Which is not a solution.

I truly feel sorry for you, but you've got to work around the /t feature. Use the mog post, promote linkshells, idk. But stop blaming SE for an issue player brought.

I really wish players would stop bragging how RMT tells don't affect them. If that is the case why come to the forums and speak about it on a thread where someone clearly stated they do have a problem with it.

We need better spam control and the ability to block tells from certain levels of characters say lvl 1 to 5 maybe. You get the point the brand new player rmt that is just ready to spam tell the world. Something else I would like to see, Block a way to keep players from searching zones they have not already visited. It worked in FFXI. Finally like the OP said when you blist someone you block their entire account for not only you but your alts as well. No reason not too since it's an RMT spammer anyways.

Other games are doing stuff about this problem more aggressively than SE and I do not see why they cannot take more drastic measures.

Please don't dismiss the problem simply cause you personally aren't affected by it. It's a fair bet many of us are.

Something I hadn't thought of before but sadly might be the case is that a lot of these people claiming to not have a problem are on the Euro data center. Could it be that RMT are targeting Americans specifically? This is just a theory mind you. It could be my server is full of gil buyers but I've run into this issue every time I've visited a non-locked server on the Aether Data center.

Also I don't get why some people think we shouldn't complain about something that detrimentally affects the game for us simply because it doesn't exist on their server. I've never seen the RMT as bad on any mmo in my entire life as here. I played a week of GW2 and it was so peaceful not getting any tells save for those by other players. The worst part is FFXIV is the game I love above all others. This game rocks in so many ways. While I've thought of transferring off server, I got friends and family here. I even saved my duckets for months so I could get a house. It's not fair I should have to give all that up to enjoy the game without spam. I don't blame Squeenix because they didn't invent nor fund the gilsellers, but I implore them to look into options like account wide blacklists or character deletion restrictions to make this world the best it can be.

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Originally Posted by Sandoria

I don't blame Squeenix because they didn't invent nor fund the gilsellers, but I implore them to look into options like account wide blacklists or character deletion restrictions to make this world the best it can be.

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You can't blame them for the existence of RMT, but you can - and should - blame them for still not giving us any proper tools to get away from the spam, and you can blame them for not taking bot reports seriously.

Its crazy simple...

#1 Give us customized status (/tells from friends and party invites)

#2 Account wide Blacklist to avoid the rapid changing of characters.

It is freaking crazy past month or 2 atleast on Midgardsormr. Since a ban wave happened I am getting a /tell every 30 seconds - 2 minutes it seems. O and those /tells I get are double /tells .

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Originally Posted by Airget

I really do wish people would stop saying "DO SOMETING" when clearly they have.

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I really wish people would stop believing in a report SE gives us. For all I know they just put it out there so it looks like they try.

I do not believe for one bit they do the best they can. Want to stop RMT? BAN BUYERS. But no, all these buyers pay a sub, so let's "investigate" bots for months. From a business point of view it's just not worth it to ban buyers. They'd lose a lot of sub money, so they just won't.

I bet you can point out 5 buyers on your server. They will never get banned, like the other hundreds who keep RMT alive and well. There is a reason JP servers are very, very low on RMT spam. EU and NA buy a LOT.

So to find middleground, at least give us a right click report account option. Who knows what they do with reports, but right now people just don't want to go through the whole process. We can be of better help when it's not this cumbersome.

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

Speak for yourself. I almost never see RMT spam. Maybe one message a week. I think I have 2 people on my black list at the moment. Everyone does not share the problem the same way you do. You're assuming that all players have the same problem.

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Just because you play on a server that only unlocks character creation like 1hr every week doesnt mean its not a problem for a majority of the player base.

Just opened my log I have in the last 30mins 11 tells from 6 different RMT sites and 8 different characters

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Originally Posted by Kuwagami

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There are quite a few reasonable people, insofar as what they expect SE to do, in the anti-RMT side of this debate. I like to believe I'm one of them. Those who are reasonable don't expect SE to be able to fix people, I sure don't. What we're requesting is more options for us to reduce the spam we get, such as account-wide blacklists. I think this is more than fair.

My suggestion is simple have an automated system where you put a character that is invisible to see put them in an FC to avoid getting FC invite tells basically give no reason for someone to send them a tell. So when they get a tell have that 1 intern monitoring the 30 or whatever characters across all servers look at that screen and just ban that account 3 interns 8 hour shifts you just massively cut the RMT problem. if you dont want to pay the 3 interns then make it automated to ban an incoming tell and have an appeal proccess regarding this specifically to fast track them. 1-2 mistakes a week > sifting through thousands of RMT accounts.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, make shards unsellable and for those that don't want to mine buyable from NPC's. No shards = Less Gil for RMT to sell

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Originally Posted by Maxipep

I've said it before and I'll say it again, make shards unsellable and for those that don't want to mine buyable from NPC's. No shards = Less Gil for RMT to sell

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I really doubt those groups of 4 BLMs/ARCs disappeared at the same time after signing up for duty in order to farm shards.

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Originally Posted by Yurimi

My suggestion is simple have an automated system where you put a character that is invisible to see put them in an FC to avoid getting FC invite tells basically give no reason for someone to send them a tell. So when they get a tell have that 1 intern monitoring the 30 or whatever characters across all servers look at that screen and just ban that account 3 interns 8 hour shifts you just massively cut the RMT problem..

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Actually a variation of this would work pretty well, kind of a honeypot trap. It would work well if you could come up with some way for the honeypot to parse incoming tells to determine which are RMT sells, and which are just stupid player spam. Either way, it would work well for tracing the spam accounts - not the spam players since the RMT can create a character, spam for X minutes, and delete the character. But by tracing the account this way it would help greatly.

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Originally Posted by Lexxuk

Sadly, it's got to the stage where we're getting 1 a minute now, we would be doing nothing but filling in spam reports constantly, add that to the fact the RMT logs out, makes a new char and starts spamming on THAT one, and we'd be reporting the same account several times a day. We need to be able to block them at source, so that we're getting zero spam messages.

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Exactly. These days, I find that I already have 1-3 tells from RMTs when I enter the game most of the time.

There's a lot of SE apologists in this thread. What you guys don't realize is tell spam is virtually gone from most MMOs. Trion, Blizzard, SOE, etc... all have filters in place and proper blacklists. Gold sellers are reduced to sending in-game mails which are also usually blocked.

So... No... SE hasn't really done anything. It's very disappointing for a game of this size.

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Originally Posted by Red_Wolf

There's a lot of SE apologists in this thread. What you guys don't realize is tell spam is virtually gone from most MMOs. Trion, Blizzard, SOE, etc... all have filters in place and proper blacklists. Gold sellers are reduced to sending in-game mails which are also usually blocked.

So... No... SE hasn't really done anything. It's very disappointing for a game of this size.

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This is very true. Because Blizzard would smack the banhammer down on /tell spammers, the sellers would resort to hacks making their dead character bodies spell out the names of their websites in the center of town. It would have been amusing even if it wasn't promoting RMt nastiness.

well i reported this teleporting bot here collecting at lv30 Wind aspect nodes... two weeks ago. legit question... is it really that difficult to trace an account?

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Originally Posted by Red_Wolf

There's a lot of SE apologists in this thread. What you guys don't realize is tell spam is virtually gone from most MMOs. Trion, Blizzard, SOE, etc... all have filters in place and proper blacklists. Gold sellers are reduced to sending in-game mails which are also usually blocked.

So... No... SE hasn't really done anything. It's very disappointing for a game of this size.

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and this^

while they do do SOMETHING, it really is very little. and could be considered next to nothing at all. either way, whatever they are doing... it isn't effective in the slightest.

now don't get me wrong, i'm not trying to bash SE here. they probably got teams on this game that are new, or relativity new. they may simply not have such grandeur experience like those other companies. them others have been at this a long time.

Losing the war indeed. The gil sellers are like "Meh, they aren't banning us or doing shit let's take it to shouts now boyz!!"

http://puu.sh/gJy9H/07ba56203c.png

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Originally Posted by Elusana_Celah

Losing the war indeed. The gil sellers are like "Meh, they aren't banning us or doing shit let's take it to shouts now boyz!!"

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Let me also point out the irony that the forum protects bots with its "no naming&shaming" rule.

Bots? No trouble. Player mentioning a bot's name on the forum? Trouble!

I've been getting 4 tells per minute quite often :( It's not fun to play with /busy on all the time...

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Originally Posted by Iromi

I've been getting 4 tells per minute quite often :( It's not fun to play with /busy on all the time...

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Well it's in shouts now so you have to turn off shouts. In fact now you pretty much gotta shut off all forms of communication channels except linkshells and FC chat. For someone like me who likes to socialize a lot with people this is incredibly frustrating. But those shout bots were CONSTANT like 4 times in 3 seconds.

Next they will flood our party finder.

i get the feeling the spammers sending 4 tells a minute are using a bad macro...they might be gone in the next sweep.

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Originally Posted by Elusana_Celah

Next they will flood our party finder.

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Actually makes me wonder why they haven't yet.

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Originally Posted by Riepah

Actually makes me wonder why they haven't yet.

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Because then the GMs can easily spot and ban them. The reason /tell advertisements are so common is that a /tell is less likely to catch GM attention than anything else.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Because then the GMs can easily spot and ban them. The reason /tell advertisements are so common is that a /tell is less likely to catch GM attention than anything else.

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They are spamming /shout now, so ...

Please help us Yoshi-obi-wan-kanobi, you're our only hope!

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Originally Posted by Bishop81

They are spamming /shout now, so ...

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I'm guessing a GM wasn't around when that bot was shouting. GMs can't ban what they don't know about.

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Originally Posted by Bishop81

They are spamming /shout now, so ...

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Now ? That must be a new company on the market. They did try to shout back in 2.0. Didn't end well for them as they were getting baned quite regularly and easily, so they stoped really fast and began the tells.

They alsl did try the PF, but that didn't end very well.

For both shouts and PFs, GMs were able to immediatly investigate clients and weed them out of the game. That's why they /tell or try to send mog mails now

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Originally Posted by Kuwagami

Now ? That must be a new company on the market.

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For a new company to be here Behemoth must be a cesspool for gamers who can't play a game without paying their way to the top. So profitable for RMT on Behemoth server that we're attracting fresh RMT companies. I employ everyone to report people if you know they bought gil... Even if SE won't do anything I am literally at my wit's end with this. All we can do is sit here and endure it and it feels like nothing we do ever changes anything. SE won't comment about it anywhere or give us any reassurance that things are being done besides weekly 'bans' yet none of those bans seem to have changed anything on Behemoth at least... it's gotten so much worse, not better.

The only way that this problem will be fixed is just ban the gil buyers as well. A few examples need to be made of those that buy gil.
First offence : 1 week game ban. Second offence : 3 week ban. If caught a third time then perma game ban.
Though personally, I lay blame at the door of greedy grasping crafters that add a few zero's on any item. That's another can of worms entirely.

I was away from the game for 5 days, RMT was already bad when I left but gd when I logged in yesterday I don't think I ever saw that much RMT tells. And let's also mention that those messages are getting only creepier. This is honestly one of the thing ruining the game for me right now.

This is getting really, really bad. SE needs to realize that one of the first thing a new player see in this game is RMT. I made an alt not long ago, the cut-scene to go to Gridania barely started that I was already receiving RMT tells.

They just need to go after the gil buyers more actively and name and shame them. There's no better deterrent than having your server reputation ruined, with a black mark permanently fixed on to a players lodestone page.

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Originally Posted by Freyah

They just need to go after the gil buyers more actively and name and shame them. There's no better deterrent than having your server reputation ruined, with a black mark permanently fixed on to a players lodestone page.

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I really don't think gil buyers should be getting second chances like this. Permanent ban on first offense would be a better deterrent and more appropriate, in my opinion.

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Originally Posted by Riepah

I really don't think gil buyers should be getting second chances like this. Permanent ban on first offense would be a better deterrent and more appropriate, in my opinion.

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I agree with you on that. In my opinion gil buyers are undermining server economies, thus ruining every player on that servers buying power. It's a double edged sword that s/e need to firmly get a grasp of quickly as the expansion approaches.

The alternative approach would be to enforce a gil ceiling cap ( which would be an unpopular move I think ).
Quite frankly, the way things are going right now it won't be much longer before we reach Diablo 3 levels of stupid pricing when the R.M.A.H was around.

The amount of RMT tells I receive is absurd, maybe make it so you can only send tells at lv3 or 5 after doing a quest but you are still able to receive them? (Sorry if someone already mentioned this in a previous post, I haven't read the whole thread)

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Originally Posted by TriksteR

The amount of RMT tells I receive is absurd, maybe make it so you can only send tells at lv3 or 5 after doing a quest but you are still able to receive them? (Sorry if someone already mentioned this in a previous post, I haven't read the whole thread)

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That would just increase botting and they'd still spam us the same anyways lol

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Originally Posted by TriksteR

The amount of RMT tells I receive is absurd, maybe make it so you can only send tells at lv3 or 5 after doing a quest but you are still able to receive them? (Sorry if someone already mentioned this in a previous post, I haven't read the whole thread)

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This wouldn't help. In this game, bots can play all the way to level 50. What they SHOULD do, is give us a status that blocks incoming whispers from people not on our friend list, in our FC or any of our linkshells. /Busy is way overkill, blocking invites, trades etc., but it's the only real defense SE gives us against the spam. It's more than high time that they give us a proper protection that *doesn't* cripple us in everything else.

Some of the people in this thread are absent of mind on the issue. In addition, if you come from a server like Balmung where character creation is in fact quite limited, you lose a lot of credibility in your argument. A big server like Balmung would actually be heavy feeding ground for RMT if you removed the character creation lockout entirely.

The overall situation I would imagine on most servers, is RMT is a thing. Someone stated that RMT goes, where it is supported and I also agree with that 100%.
However, that is ultimately not the end all solution. Just because other players we cannot feasibly control make these purchases, does not mean the other several thousands of the server should suffer through it.

If you are on the side where you do not see what the big issue of RMT is in FFXIV, I invite you to come to other servers where it is a serious mess, and still maintain the same position. Getting a good 4-5 tells per minute is absolutely dominating in chat. Essentially you play on /Busy no longer able to receive tells from anyone now. These accounts may not be reported entirely either, but the blacklist function needs to be account-wide. If a player account is hi-jacked, that is essentially that players fault not SE's. Put a claims system in place that pending investigation, can allow players to potentially reclaim accounts if they are in fact hi-jacked.

SE needs to provide the tools against RMT and that is what kills RMT as well as stay on top of it with disciplinary action on these accounts.

As for people saying RMT is "infinite" and never ending? Simply Untrue.

Several MMOs, both supported servers and private servers have dealt with RMT in numerous ways and each iteration I have seen personally has worked dramatically after implementation.

1) Systems that legitimized RMT from the company work very well.

2) Systems that have account wide banning. (Big one!)

3) Systems that have a trade functions locked behind pay walls (both inter person trade and selling on market), this does not include ability to actually buy items from the market.
(PSO2, essentially eliminates RMT outright.)

4) Continuous IP bans. People largely feel you can get around this with no work, however that is untrue. These companies, are hampered down by continual IP bans and get increasingly discouraged by them because it essentially shuts down their entire operation for a good amount of hrs per day. The day to day RMT fades into oblivion because they lose advertisement time and accounts in the process. They lose money way faster trying to advertise by making new accounts then what they actually make. (Ragnarok Online, both supported and private servers). Credit card fraud is a thing. So? How is that an excuse to not attack RMT? It's not. Keep attacking them and you will see, the chat cleans up noticeably to eventually nonexistent no matter how severe the starting point.

SE reports they have taken some sort of action against accounts that support RMT.

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RMT and other illicit activities upset the balance of the game and, as such, are prohibited under the Terms of Service.

Because we have confirmed the existence of players who are engaging in these illicit activities, we have taken the actions listed below.

Time Period: Mar. 12, 2015 to Mar. 18, 2015
- Accounts receiving disciplinary action for RMT advertising: 646
- Accounts receiving disciplinary action for RMT/illicit activity: 2,491
- Action Details: Permanent ban from FINAL FANTASY XIV

- Accounts receiving disciplinary action for participation in RMT/illegal activity: 11
- Action Details: Temporary ban from FINAL FANTASY XIV

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Let's focus on the last bit. Why are accounts that participated in RMT/illegal activity only temporarily banned? Are we assuming only 11 people were victims of credit card fraud? No. This 11 is likely people that actually bought gil and somehow let that slip out and got caught however the actual number should likely be way higher. These people should be permanently banned with an additional claims system in place if it was in fact an account that was stolen and used for the sake of advertisement.

Do not kid yourselves. SE can do several things more to actually fight RMT advertisement/tells. The reason they don't is because in the end they profit from them. The reason they only temp ban? The exact same.

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Originally Posted by RyuRoots

I'm aghast. RMTs are back to shouting in hub cities like in the early days of 2.0. It's gotten so bad that I've just turned off shouts (in addition to /tells). They're probably doing this because they know SE doesn't give a damn; why NOT be more bold, if you know no one will do anything to stop you?

This is effing ridiculous. SE, you need to step your game up and step it up soon before no one is playing yours anymore except RMT bots.

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I have also started seeing the shouts on my server.