RMT are now advertising crystal/shards - Shards need changed

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Originally Posted by Meimei

Have *you* ever played FFXI? I quit about two years ago and even I remember that EVERY ENEMY IN THE GAME dropped crystals as long as you had Signet/Sanction/whatever up.

In this game, only Miner and Botanist get crystals. It doesn't compare.

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Actually anyone at any level can get Shards from Elemental Sprites and and get clusters and crystals. But yeah eveyone can get crystals starting at level one from any mob in FFXI also weapons and armor from other mobs I wish it was that way in this game instead we get one gil lol.

I don't know about other crafts but the prices for pretty much any white named goldsmith item on my server are in the toilet since people can just buy up massive quantities of bot farmed ores and shards on the cheap and then flood the market (while staying near the market to undercut within minutes)

Then there's the green two star crafts where the market for the tomestone mats is again dominated either by 1. Gil buyers or 2. Crafters who have no scruples against selling their items to said gil buyers

RMT has pretty much spoiled the crafting game for me and that's not even touching on the constant need to blacklist the spam bots anytime I'm not in a duty

shards are not hard to farm.

In 1 hour I can gather about 200 or more shards depending on the level of my Gathering class.

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Originally Posted by Noroi_Kisaragi

Yeah sometimes they have really weird names and othertimes i'm too busy to have to open a blacklist, memorize the complete gibberish these guys PUT in their names, and type said gibberish into blacklist.

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While I hate the pain SE force us to endure to make these reports it's NOT as bad as you're making out.

Select text in chatlog, CTRL-C, open report form, CTRL-V. Before hitting Report, Select, CTRL-C, open Blacklist, click Add, CTRL-V .. done.

Pain, yes need to memorise anything, no. To add a /tell to the Blackist it's a one-line macro,l one key-press to do, though that doesn't file a report.

One is for sure
The RMT would not make money with selling shards to legacy players ^^
* looking to my thousands of shards and crystals from 1.0 crafting and gathering *

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Originally Posted by Meimei

In this game, only Miner and Botanist get crystals. It doesn't compare.

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Also crafters get shards from crafting leves. And battle classes from killing elementars


SE can put the shards in a NPC shop again like in 1.0
I think it was in the grand company shop during 1.0, wasn't it?
Or was it in the guild shops?

Don't worry guys, bots got it covered. Guildie of mine saw someone put stacks of 9999 shards on the market underpriced.

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Originally Posted by Noroi_Kisaragi

And how large is this "Special Task Force"? It's been weeks and I still see the same old people spamming my /tell and /shout. My blacklist is getting larger by the day.



Yeah sometimes they have really weird names and othertimes i'm too busy to have to open a blacklist, memorize the complete gibberish these guys PUT in their names, and type said gibberish into blacklist. If im getting spammed by tells i obviously have to take the time to do that, but if Square Enix would simply add an option to right click -> blacklist i wouldn't be experiencing this problem.

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Catch their name in the chat window with a right click, click send tell, backspace the "tell" replace with "blist add" put a quote at the front and back of their gibberish name, hit enter and be done with it. Not hard. Ideally, it'd be nice if they would all just get evaporated, but hopefully that tip helps you restore peace and sanity to the republic......err...your chat log.

I didn't need to buy or farm any shards until my craft hit 40(Make sure you do the level 1 quests for each craft. That'll start you with a few hundred each. Optionally if you want to take them to 5 you can get a few hundred more each). At that point I just bought them with the money I made crafting, because that's what crafting is for.

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Originally Posted by Divinemight

By seeing this, I think I am right that WoW has brought a lot of negative impacts on MMORPG gaming. Everything must be hand it to you on top of a silver plate, otherwise it is a bad game design.:(

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i couldnt agree with you more, thats what i liked about 11, how it did not hold you're hand like WoW does.

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Originally Posted by Shiyo

Because once RMT are gone shards will skyrocket in price. There needs to be more way to gain an item in such high demand. You can use up 1k shards in 30 mins of crafting at 50. Enemies need to drop shards again and fishing + cooking needs shard synth as well as alchemy needing a cluster to crystal and crystal to shard synth.

Also the fact that shards are the best gil/hour right now as a 50 miner/botanist shows it will be even better once RMT are gone, meaning leveling mining/botany is a waste of time. That's bad design, higher level should equal more gil.

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since mining is a lot easier and getting crystals is a 100% thing. Also you have abilites to double the amount... really? getting crystals is so extremely easy and fast now. You can see at the market right now that everything is kinda fast and easy to get since we have a deflation in prizes from day 1 on 99% of the items i would say.

There needs to be more ways to get shards? Seriously? Level 1 gathering too hard for people to do now?

it's not that shards are hard to get it's just how annoyingly time consuming it is.

For instance when i make a set of jewelery for someone in fc that just hit 49 it takes longer to get the shards than the electrum and jewels combined
It just seems wrong that is what is basically just a catalyst is harder to get than the actual materials

Just feels like to me either it should be once you hit 30+ it goes to taking 1 crystal per synth instead and then 50+ stuff all just takes a cluster
or
Give the ability to break down crystals and clusters for lots of shards, It wouldn't really change anything outside high level gatherers being able to get them a little more efficiently


and why is there always someone saying stuff like this is just to deplete legacy characters, if that was true it wouldn't exist on non-legacy servers...

I saw an RMT spamming that they were selling game CD Keys for cheap..so yeah it looks like their basically selling everything.

Personally..I think the shards should not be attainable at the lowest level mining areas. However, its not like moving them up a few lvls of difficulty would solve much..I am sure their bot programs work just fine on those higher level areas and they level up quicker than the rest of us anyway with a PC bot teleport mining for hours on end.

Basically..either SE lays down the law and starts ban hammering the crap out of these jerks..or they will continue to exist because apparently there are plenty of dorks out there willing to shell out cash for in game currency.

It might also help if you could farm the shards in clusters at higher levels (heck maybe you can idk) but the fact that it is so time consuming to farm the shards is more than likely why people are going out to purchase them. I mean I really enjoy crafting..but the whole idea of mining for hours upon hours makes me want to send my in-game character off the nearest in-game cliff. That said I am not going to resort to supporting some RMT dousch companies..but clearly others are willing to stoop to that level.

there at the sheep in Dragonhead not too, farming fleece.

Gathering classes need something that they can sell for money. Did you think only crafters were entitled to make money in this game?

What is wrong with people? Think before you post.

RMTers have a simple equation. They want real world cash. They have time and they want to convert that time into cash at an optimal rate. To do that they want to focus their time on most profitable infinitely available item and if they can manipulate a market to create inflated value all the better.

FFXIV is actually really well designed to counter this. There is a Gil economy with fountains and syncs and there is a separate loop resource economy with gathering and drops being converted to gear which is then melded to materia.

Shards are a component of a crafting combine which comes from DoH professions just like Ore. If you don't want to invest time in the gathering then buy them on the market from the Gil you make from your crafts.

The only way that this could be terrible for the game if gil sellers manage to corner the shard market. But given that there is no restriction on supply that is pretty much impossible for them.

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Originally Posted by Noroi_Kisaragi

Yeah sometimes they have really weird names and othertimes i'm too busy to have to open a blacklist, memorize the complete gibberish these guys PUT in their names, and type said gibberish into blacklist. If im getting spammed by tells i obviously have to take the time to do that, but if Square Enix would simply add an option to right click -> blacklist i wouldn't be experiencing this problem.

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Type /blist add <r> and that will stick the last person who sent you a tell to you blacklist. Doesn't work for shouts though.

I had an FC mate mention how high shard prices were on the market boards the other day and thought well yeah but they've always been high. I made it a point to farm my own crystals for crafting ever since shards topped 20 gil a piece. I have a few spots for the shards I need where I can hit about 600 in an hour so I considered it ~10k profit per hour farming my own shards, which is still a substantial amount of gil to me even with a 50 crafter.

I pulled the auction house up, EVERY shard was at least 40, where multiple ones were at 50. And the lowest price deals people were laying them out in stacks of 1000+. So the prices were now DOUBLE what I considered to be a ridiculously high price for something I needed in the thousands upon thousands just to level crafting. So I took about 10 stacks of 100, put them up on the AH for about 5 under the lowest price each, about half at 35 per and the other half at 45 per. I had about 2000+ in all elements except ice which I'm constantly running dry from 50 Armorer. I sent my retainer back to market, ran over to a vendor to clear my inventory of trash, before I could even sell half a bags worth of stuff I had already sold ALL of the crystals. 20k gil turned over in less than 2 minutes.

So I tried it again, and it worked again. Then I dumped crystals down to about 400 in each as a reserve, and in about 15 minutes came out 250k richer. That is the most money I've turned over in a day even targeting the market with HQ armor and crafting tools.

So this all sounds great, right? Well it is for me personally, I've now learned I'm probably better off just selling shards until the market on them lowers again as they'll turn over instantly compared to HQ gear that might take a few days to be sold. I can still craft requested gear for FC mates and myself, but just crafting gear to put up on the market seems like a lot of work now.

The bad thing as I see it is this. I can pull about 600 shards an hour, up to 700 if I use the 400gp ability and I'm farming shards that I have the ability for (only have miner past 20 atm). But my potential will not increase from this point onwards at all. And I hit the potential to do 600 shards an hour at approximately level 5 in miner, which took me all of 30 minutes and some level 1 starter hear to hit.

So my highest profiting action that I can do, I was able to do after a day of game time at about 90% of my maximum speed that I will ever be able to do, even with all characters at 50 and bis gear in every class. And it's not an engaging activity, it's a simple, boring, and repetitive one. One that is extremely easy to create a bot for. And one that is actually increased to a higher output through the use of hex editing teleporting between nodes by these bots.

And there's the crux of the problem, the activity that I can make the greatest amount of profit at with a level 50 crafter, a almost 50 paladin, and multiple gathering and crafting classes in the 20s is an activity that you can do after a few hours of gameplay. In fact, no matter how much I improve my character, no matter how much I refine my crafting route, I will NEVER be as good at this activity as a teleporting level 5 mining bot.

And that's a RMT organizations wet dream. A game that the maximum earning potential can be gained by characters with a few hours set up and easily automated. A game that 95% of the accounts hacked can immediately be put to work making profit. A game where 95% of the profitable activities are repetitive and mundane and where the engaging activities requires support from these mundane activities, prompting people to say fuck it and buy gil/shards from them.

So what's my point? It is that when you make a game where repetitive, boring, time consuming activities(such as level 5 node shard gathering) are greatly more profitable than engaging activities (high level combat, high level crafting, basically anything that requires non automated feedback) you create an environment in which RMT organizations can develop easily. Then when you create as much of a reliance on the repetitive, boring, time consuming activities to succeed at the engaging activities you create an environment in which RMT organizations thrive.

How do we fix it? I'm not sure, I'd think multiples of shards at higher level nodes might help, but I'm not sure that might not just prompt the bots to level higher and seek out brave new zones. Having some type of moderation by SE would be nice, which I do believe will come once they've got a handle on server problems and the general overcrowding which I'm sure is an infinitely higher priority. I heard someone mention really using the tiers of shards, crystals for 25-40 recipes, clusters for 41-50 recipes and adjusting nodes to hand them out.

Truth is though I don't really have a solution, it's always easier to point out an issue than to fix it. My personal solution is going to be to continue to farm shards for about an hour a day and sell anything over what I need for personal use on the board until the prices drop below 20 gil again, if ever. But until they drop I don't see much point in crafting HQ gear to put up unless I see major inflation in those prices also.

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Originally Posted by Meimei

Have *you* ever played FFXI? I quit about two years ago and even I remember that EVERY ENEMY IN THE GAME dropped crystals as long as you had Signet/Sanction/whatever up.

In this game, only Miner and Botanist get crystals. It doesn't compare.

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Not true. If the mob was <<Too Weak>>, you got no crystals from it, so there could be some some difficulty soloing them once you were past the very first levels. And anybody can be a Miner or a Botanist that can gather crystals; all you have to do is visit the guild and you can go out and get shards more easily than you could get crystals from mobs in FFXI.

BTW, the one you're forgetting is Sigil. Signet in the original FFXI areas, Sanction in the Aht Urhgan areas and Sigil in the Crystal-War-of-the-Past areas (Wings of the Goddess). Looking things up, I see that Seekers of Adoulin has apparently added "Ionis". I weep for the loss of the alliteration.

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Originally Posted by Ryios

What?

So your saying crabbing a pick axe as a level 1 miner and farming 300+ shards an hour is difficult and not efficient?

Man... Ever played FFXI? In ffxi the only way to get crystals was off Elementals (Sprites) that spawned in various places under certain weather conditions and every crafter needed 1 crystal per synth just like this game...

This game is 100000* easier when it comes to getting shards...

"Give an inch, want a mile" I guess.

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Didn't they drop off enemies that were even match and above too?

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Originally Posted by Seiver

there at the sheep in Dragonhead not too, farming fleece.

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This pisses me the EFF off SOOOOO FREAKING BAD! Fleece is worth like nothing now compared to prices 2 weeks ago. Its all because the bots and STUPID SE is too busy dealing with the people advertising RMT and not the bots creating the currency they are selling. WTF SE get ur stuff together.... Pretty Please for the sake of this games economy and the game as a whole.

Reported a teleporting bot like a week ago and it's still mining away... not like it ever logs off. Banning these guys in waves doesn't make any sense.

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Originally Posted by worldofneil

Erm, sorry to correct you, but it was way easier than that. All you had to do was have signet/sanction on you and then crystals would drop from *any* defeated enemies. It was made even easier by being able to buy Signet Staffs so you could get signet at any time if you forgot to get it and then you could just carry on doing whatever you wanted and getting crystals was a by product you didn't even have to think about :)

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Yeah I forgot about signit etc. When the game launched though you got maybe 1-2 crystals from mob and they didn't drop all the time. Elementals dropped whole clusters.

Imo it was still harder than mining in FFXIV. I can mine up 999 shards in FFXIV in an hour or two tops.

It's been more than 6 years since I last touched FFXI.

Also, imo, this game will lose a lot of the bots and spammers when Subscriptions kick in for EVERYONE. Most of the bots with RMT are hacked accounts. Once they get banned they have to relevel to 20+ doing all the story line to be able to sell stuff on the AH.

In my opinion, this game won't be worth it for RMT with a 15$ a month sub and the amount of leveling they have to do to be able to use the market place. Unless they bot selling something for 1 gil to an npc.... In which case they would need thousands of accounts at (15$ each) to make that efficient.

So SE, Turn on the subs, and get out the Ban Bat.

The naked rmt teleport miner bots that farm low level 1 shards on my server are nolonger level 1, they are in their 30's and some higher so I don't know that simply making higher level nodes will help. [Legacy server btw so people thinking legacy player's crystal backlog from 1.0 will eliminate rmt are mistaken].

The concept of having to interact with these annoying rmt reappearing every 3 seconds or so is discouraging me from mining as of late so I am kind of delaying it until the problem is hopefully fixed. It is unfortunate that it effects game play but I don't know how to just pretend they are not there when they appear on top of you constantly while mining.

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Originally Posted by CianaIezuborn

Best post ever alert

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This is EXACTLY my problem with shards, this is why they need fixed. This is a fantastic post saying exactly what I've always thought, thank you! The reason I won't level miner or botany? Because my most gil/hour is being level5 farming shards all day, I don't gain more gil/hour by leveling up, by getting gear, etc. I barely make more at 50 in full HQ + melded gear, and sometimes I won't even make more gil plus it's more effort and running around and teleporting compared to mindlessly farming the same 4 nodes over and over for shards.

It ruins the entire point of miner or botany leveling up for me, I'm supposed to make more money the higher level I get, but with the way shards are that's NEVER possible, or barely more money for literally 400x the effort and time.

Once the RMT problem is taken care of and we lose all these THOUSANDS of bots we have teleport hack farming and selling shard the price of shards is going to SKYROCKET even further and they will always be more gil/hour than anything else even more so than they are now.

Shards need fixed, and they need fixed NOW.

you have quite a few options to get shards or crystals go kill the mob that drops them do a crafting quest or go gather you some that simple

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Originally Posted by Bruiser_Cruiser

This pisses me the EFF off SOOOOO FREAKING BAD! Fleece is worth like nothing now compared to prices 2 weeks ago. Its all because the bots and STUPID SE is too busy dealing with the people advertising RMT and not the bots creating the currency they are selling. WTF SE get ur stuff together.... Pretty Please for the sake of this games economy and the game as a whole.

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Uh. I'm on the same server as you and 1k per fleece is a little ridiculous so I don't know what you're talking about... It looks like to me that the RMTers have complete control at making the prices of fleece and snurble tufts way too high..

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Originally Posted by Camate

Greetings,

The Special Task Force is not only combating RMT solicitation, but they're also taking action against users who use teleport cheats to gather and battle over and over. The team has been looking over every report submitted and taking action against users found to be involved in RMT activity, so we greatly appreciate you continued efforts in reporting these players.

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Honestly, doesn't seem like the task force is doing much to combat the SPAM every time you enter a city state you get bombarded with 3 or 4 people shouting with names like "Aasdfsdadadf Iililiiliili" which take forever to figure out to /blist add "xxxx" them. You have to do it 3-4 times because they are cycling through their multiple accounts and their names float off the screen before you are done typing. Also, they are sending /tells to people zone wide now as well.

Why is it so hard to add a report button on the right click menu? And, why is it so hard to set up filters that can block this kind of crap. There needs to at least be a limit set so someone can't send infinite messages in shout. Perhaps after 5 shouts in 15 seconds you have to wait a minute to shout again.

Just do something.

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Originally Posted by Lycanar

Honestly, doesn't seem like the task force is doing much to combat the SPAM every time you enter a city state you get bombarded with 3 or 4 people shouting with names like "Aasdfsdadadf Iililiiliili" which take forever to figure out to /blist add "xxxx" them. You have to do it 3-4 times because they are cycling through their multiple accounts and their names float off the screen before you are done typing. Also, they are sending /tells to people zone wide now as well.

Why is it so hard to add a report button on the right click menu? And, why is it so hard to set up filters that can block this kind of crap. There needs to at least be a limit set so someone can't send infinite messages in shout. Perhaps after 5 shouts in 15 seconds you have to wait a minute to shout again.

Just do something.

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I agree that a right-click blist is greatly needed. However, it's great when they sent you a /tell. /blist add <r> and they're gone. You can even put it in a macro and bind it to a hotbar button.

The RMT spammers seem to be getting worse every day. My blacklist is huge. All I see are players shouting about the same websites. Makes me wonder if SE is going after these sites to solve the root of the problem.

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Originally Posted by Camate

Greetings,

The Special Task Force is not only combating RMT solicitation, but they're also taking action against users who use teleport cheats to gather and battle over and over. The team has been looking over every report submitted and taking action against users found to be involved in RMT activity, so we greatly appreciate you continued efforts in reporting these players.

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Yeah but how long does it take for them TO RESPOND because I have seen the same bot mining for 13 days. Hes gone from lvl 12 to 31 in that time and I bet all he has done was harvest crystals so your guess is as good as mine on how many he has collected. Also the day after I reported him for the first time he had 3 more friends with him so I reported all of them at the same time. So besides just stopping these people vary slowly it seems is the STF also removing items from the market board or do they leave them?

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Originally Posted by Camate

Greetings,

The Special Task Force is not only combating RMT solicitation, but they're also taking action against users who use teleport cheats to gather and battle over and over. The team has been looking over every report submitted and taking action against users found to be involved in RMT activity, so we greatly appreciate you continued efforts in reporting these players.

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Why I have been reporting the same people for botting and position hacking while mining all week long?

I could name 6 hackers/botters right now off the top of my head without even thinking about it on the Behemoth server. That is how often I have come across this.

And after doing a quick player search... surprise! They're still at it!

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Originally Posted by Camate

Greetings,

The Special Task Force is not only combating RMT solicitation, but they're also taking action against users who use teleport cheats to gather and battle over and over. The team has been looking over every report submitted and taking action against users found to be involved in RMT activity, so we greatly appreciate you continued efforts in reporting these players.

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It would be nice if Alch 30 had a recipe to revert crystals to shard and later, clusters to crystals. This would allow for the experience and level based farming of the three variations and at cap a speedier process. Part of what the OP pointed out is the quality of game time dedicated to returning to low level areas to mash the insert button for 2 hrs a week for no reason other than to collect a core resource and a very fixed rate based on real time and with no consideration for skill sets or levels in the game.

I'd understand if there was no alternative but we know there is. There is no need to convert even two hour a week of game time to such a blunt and tool. You will be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks shard farming is quality time in the game.

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Originally Posted by Laume

She's saying in general. Right now, there's no reliable way for anyone except gathering classes to get shards/crystals/clusters. And it's a huge hassle to level DoL at the moment. And, as a level 50 miner and botanist. I have to agree. Even for us, it takes a good while to get 1k shards for 1 element.

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1k in one element.. 45 mins worth of work. it does not take long to get shards. specially when you get abilities that add an extra to each swing or add an extra swing. with good level gear, and knowing where to farm and what level to farm at.. even a lvl 10 miner/botanist can pull in 1K in less than 1 hour.

Yeah the problem with RMT's seems to be growing rather than decreasing its getting to a point where reporting them is becoming extremely pointless and tedious. Spending half my day reporting people and adding them to my blacklist is NOT why im paying for this game. Something really needs to be done about this RMT business. But then again if they just removed the market board and only allowed trading between people on your friends list for items or gil then the RMT's would dissapear soon enough. I for one would gladdly suffer without trading and a market board if it would help get rid of those annoying spammers. And they dont just post once or twice every half hour no no they have to post the same message over and over and over ever single second so that the shout chats are no longer useful and /tell and /yell are even being compromised. I turned /shout /tell and /yell all off because of this nonscense.

Couldn't Square-Enix patch in a system where they messages from being displayed that containing gil selling website address. Seems like it'd cut down a lot of the shouts and whispers.

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Originally Posted by Jampol

Couldn't Square-Enix patch in a system where they messages from being displayed that containing gil selling website address. Seems like it'd cut down a lot of the shouts and whispers.

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They're already scanning messages for gilselling websites. The problem is: how do you define what a gil selling website address looks like? The RMT spend a lot of effort obfuscating the web address so that humans can read them but the filters don't recognize it. That's why the addresses always look so weird.

Is there even a point to report them? None of the ones I report seem to stay on my blacklist. They are there, but I can still see their spam about their sites.
The reporting seems to not being noticed, as I get answers, but no action. The spammers are still here, and I can still see the "blocked" ones =)

I'm totally confused how they can just spam all day, when in FFXI if you were to use shout too much people would report you and you'd be taken to jail within like 30 minutes? Are we saving money not hiring GMs or what?