Spammers/Gil Sellers

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Originally Posted by MoruteAshera

An easy solution would be to make a puzzle game when you log in... not a captcha, an actual little mini-game with even 9 squares that have to form a picture before you are allowed to load your character in.

We put this into other games, and it works fine.

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Dragon nest game have something like that , you need to add a 4 digit password with the mouse on screen , but the number on the pad change place so you have to be human to know where your digit are every time , seem anoying at start , but end up pretty usefull against auto-log bot and add another layer to the account security

with all the money SE doing with us , the least they could do is have an some emploi to monitor the chat-log in town , that woudnt cost them a fortune to do so , and now RMT start to shout at critical point outside town our serveur have shouter in Mor-dorna and dragon head camp now . soon theure will be shouter everywhere , seriously its is getting over-frustrating, i dont wanna pay for a game that need me to blist 50 ppl/hrs cause SE dont wanna do a move ... if it going to keep that way , i mignt stop SE payment and go play some FREE game that dont have RMT spamer .... i dont pay to be spamed

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Originally Posted by AlphaFox

I would just like to be able to block them from chat with a simple right click -> Blacklist. Its such a pain to spend time trying to catch "asdsad sdfsad" to block while in a town (I shouldn't have to turn off shout to talk to others who are asking questions). Even more so when you have 2 or 3 in the same area constantly spamming.

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Not sure if everyone has this problem or if there's a way to fix it, but when I scroll up to look at a spammers name it forces me to scroll back down every time that spammer reposts his message. It makes writing down/clicking a name difficult, though I suppose if I make the chat bigger(big enough for the whole spam message) that would help... I just don't want to.

Ctrl+C copy their name - Ctrl+V paste it into blocklist.

Now my BL has over 60 gil selling spammer / bots. Over 1/4 of my BL is filled already!

Honestly, if I were a moderator I would have banned over 60 of those gil selling spamming idiots by now!!!! Do something about it SE or let people report them more easily so we can get them banned faster than they can spam us.

It's not that hard to do.. just go in the game and instantly you will see it happening! Click on them AND BAN THEM!!!!

There is just no excuse for this situation. If you don't want to pay someone to do it then let me do it, I would ban them for free!

I can't imagine being a new player on an NA (or any RMT plagued) server. How would they learn to play, ask for help, or just chat with people? :( I ran off to a JP server while the log in problems were the biggest issue; now I've nearly abandoned my NA server character because of the constant spamming I'm hit with in every town. Not fun!

I'm sure that even the forums are better moderated than the actual GAME itself!!! I see no evidence of any sort of moderation in there.. any moderator would need to be completely BLIND to not see what's going on in there! 60 spamming gil selling bots on my BL still have not been banned.. some of them added last week.

I saw 2 of them just standing there at level 1, they are NOT playing the game they are just using bots to spam in public chat. They should be banned. Simple.

So why isn't it happening?

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Originally Posted by MoruteAshera

An easy solution would be to make a puzzle game when you log in... not a captcha, an actual little mini-game with even 9 squares that have to form a picture before you are allowed to load your character in.

We put this into other games, and it works fine.

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That only works in those games because they also use gameguard/hackshield+exe/memory crypto to prevent the bots from just reading/writing to the memory space. Most of the script kiddies are just using pixel-hunting keyboard-hooks. So the only way something like that works is by making the visual data something that can't be "screen read" eg 3D model.
SE can break the memory/packet hackers just by verifying that the information set is valid.
eg, command speed, idle time, position, repetition.

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Originally Posted by oceanne

a nice solution would be a "vote" system . when enough peoples (300-400) have blacklister somone

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Only need 4, not 400.
The tell'ing ones are memory or packet hackers, because they somehow know where you are. For example, I can be a fresh login, inside the inn, and get tell'd having never left the room. That was my first clue that they're hacking, not doing something visual.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Only need 4, not 400.
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well the number i wrote was only an example lol

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The tell'ing ones are memory or packet hackers, because they somehow know where you are. For example, I can be a fresh login, inside the inn, and get tell'd having never left the room. That was my first clue that they're hacking, not doing something visual.

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This happened to me too! I was wondering how they even knew i had just logged on, because i was still in the inn room!!! :S

I don't often post in forums because frankly I dislike them but I had to come here to say something about this problem. It's obnoxious and is ruining mine and my wife's first experience with the Final Fantasy series. I have had /shout turned off for a week. That wasn't enough. I get 2 to 3 private messages an hour. I have even had to turn off /yell. My blacklist is filling up fast. This problem is a huge issue and could be fixed so easily using any of the number of suggestions posted here by others so there is no need in me suggesting the obvious. Fix it.

TL;DR - /bumb

This needs to be acknowledged by SE already.

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Originally Posted by FFVII_CID

This happened to me too! I was wondering how they even knew i had just logged on, because i was still in the inn room!!! :S

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I actually already reported two of the script kiddie toys out there, I know there are more, I just need to stalk the hacking sites longer. I have a video of one, but I can't share it because the name of the hacking tool is in the characters name. Oh lol, one of their sites is already toast.

Please do something about this! It's to the point where I've decided to just turn off shout in my chat log.. I would love if RMT would be auto banned after so many people report them.. what more proof do you need than say, 30 or 40 people reporting one person?

According to the internet:

Average cost of a 1 bedroom apartment away from a city center in China: $100 USD.
Cheapest rent I've seen in USA for a studio or 1 bedroom: $3-700.

Unless SE decides to restrict access to NA and EU servers for people with IP addresses originating in countries with incredibly cheaper costs of living like China, etc., gold farmers will "love u long time" as it were.

To them, investing $30 on a new account every time one gets banned is a great investment because a lot of these buyers are dropping enough in a single purchase to buy them a month's rent.

To SE, well heck, I put enough accounts on my blacklist in 1 day to account for about $275 (multiplied by 365 that's $100k USD per year) just on one server, in a small number of areas over the course of a few hours while I was in town to restock, etc. Multiplying that by the total number of servers, these gold spammers are giving them a lot of business; possibly millions per year or more.

And we can't have SE banning all those can we at a loss of millions a year :)

/sarcasm off

Imagine how many more millions SE would EARN per year if they were one of the first MMORPGs to stop Chinese gold farmers! :D

We as players need GM's or someone else to battle the Sellers, not my job.

What they're doing is against the user agreement...what's the problem? Just boot em...I don't get it, why is it such a problem for them to just get rid of them.

Yeah I've wondered many times why they don't just pay 3 people $20k USD per year to just round-robin log in and out of every server and teleport around to the major cities and ban the gold spammers. 3 people with GM teleport and ban privileges could do it if each had an 8 hour shift so the servers were covered 24/7.

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Originally Posted by TimeForge

Yeah I've wondered many times why they don't just pay 3 people $20k USD per year to just round-robin log in and out of every server and teleport around to the major cities and ban the gold spammers. 3 people with GM teleport and ban privileges could do it if each had an 8 hour shift so the servers were covered 24/7.

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Sign me up, I'd do it!! :D

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Originally Posted by TimeForge

According to the internet:

Average cost of a 1 bedroom apartment away from a city center in China: $100 USD.

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Stop you right there. Chinese gold farms are either:
a) Run out of Chinese prisons
b) Run out of Chinese gaming cafe's (or someone who owns several computers)
c) Run by "lazy people"

A & B can't be solved with IP bans, because they defeat them the same way anyone else does. IP bans do not work, you have to attack the core problem.
C) Lazy people could be anywhere in the world, but the tools are usually made by Russian or Chinese hackers, and then pirated and hacked themselves by English people, with the addition of rootkits, keyloggers and whatever else they can use to bait lazy people into using them, and then stealing their login credentials to empty their accounts.

I've seen this before, many many times, on freemium games. The game's economy tanks the minute gold sellers start up. I've seen people asking for things in the millions, when almost nothing in the game gives you gil.

So how do you solve the problem? Stop using Gil. You've already seen the Seals used in the grand companies, the gear you get from those is equal or better than anything you'll get as a reward in a dungeon, and crafted items are only good for turning into materia. So you may as well just rank all the crafting/gathering skills yourself and avoid dealing with the market. So far only items crafted at level 10 seem to make any money at all, and even then it's like 10's and 1's. But this may have more to do with the Legacy server I'm on and the conditions may be different on the new servers.

Another way of "crippling" gil sellers would be to simply linearly scale the gil limit/inventory/trade-limit (including retainers) with the highest level of the character. Does nothing for the spam, but I saw this earlier:
http://i44.tinypic.com/4j9ug6.png

Somehow I don't think anyone is going to buy that except a gold seller.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Somehow I don't think anyone is going to buy that except a gold seller.

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I believe that this is a workaround for transferring gil from one character to another on the same server without having to find or bother a trustworthy person as a go between. While I haven't done it, and wouldn't, it was the pretty obvious solution. Since you can't give stuff to yourself, you sell something worthless for the amount you want to transfer. Go to your character with lots of gil and buy. Go back. Hey presto. Now you have lots of money on the character you wanted, without doing much. You can do the same trick for sending sell-able items once you have all that money, transfer some of it back. This way you can create new accounts, farm the early level stuff for gold, transfer. Delete. Repeat. I am not condoning it since I think it is a violation of the user agreement. But just pointing out it may not be a gil seller.

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Originally Posted by Rivienne

I am not condoning it since I think it is a violation of the user agreement. But just pointing out it may not be a gil seller.

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Money Laundering is still illegal :)

My opinion is that this is really the case, then SE needs to prevent listing retainers from your own account.

I reported a few but then received this message. Basically, you're going to have to suck it up and it's not going away anytime soon. Personally, I would just /blist all that do this and not even report because it seems as if it's not going to matter how much you report them. See response below.

Thank you for taking the time to report RMT advertisements within the game.

We understand that it is frustrating to have these types of advertisements sent to you, since RMT can be disruptive both to chat and to the ability to enjoy the game. Unfortunately, due to the number of reports that we have received about this customer, a personal response is not possible at this time. Our efforts are being focused on investigating this advertiser, and preventing them from continuing to advertise in the game.

To help prevent further chat from this advertiser, we recommend using the blacklist, which can be accessed through the Social Lists menu (defaulted to hotkey O) > Blacklist > Add > Enter their name (case sensitive) or by typing /blist add Player Name (case sensitive, with the player’s name between quotation marks) into the chat box.

We encourage you to continue to submit tickets regarding RMT Spam. In your reports, if you have not done so, we ask that you include the name of the RMT Spammer in the Subject Line and an example of the spam you witnessed in the body of the ticket. We appreciate all the details you provide and thank you for your understanding during this time.

This is only meant to be a temporary resolution while we investigate, and you can remove them from your blacklist in the future once we have had time to complete our investigative process.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we work to create a more enjoyable and advertisement free environment for you to enjoy FINAL FANTASY XIV in.

FINAL FANTASY XIV Support Team

This is for Midgardsormr.

http://imageshack.us/a/img109/8905/b8a.png