Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

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Originally Posted by Maxipep

I can't understand how a lvl1 gil seller gets to coerthas. It makes you wonder if SE are supporting Gil selling. If it was a hack then the place would be full of them but given its only 1 or 2 different names its as though they have been "given permission", and why haven't all the previous accounts been deleted yet so we can start adding to blacklists again ?

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They aren't removed from your blacklist when the accounts are banned. You have to just prune from the top/earliest blacklisted and hope they were in fact banned.
Any RMT you see marked as 'Deleted' in the blacklist means it was deleted by the owner (to avoid detection). There's really no indication if a spammer was banned or not.

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Originally Posted by Saseal

And the blatant bot in Gridania, sitting at the Aetheryte spltting out RMT advertisements every few minutes.

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I have seen them in Limsa Aetheryte too after they /say there nonsense I always target them and slap them.

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Originally Posted by Saseal

I've had the opposite - Plenty of friend requests >_< Probably more than actual tells, as of the last two days.
It was so nice, all through early access... and then it started picking up.... T^T
And the blatant bot in Gridania, sitting at the Aetheryte spltting out RMT advertisements every few minutes. New players are going to see that, so easily... >_> Some may not know any better. At least the RMT bots I remember sitting Ul Dah's Aetheryte were just tell bots -.-

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I'm not sure what the best option for solving the /say spam is. Like what immediately comes to mind is to just have the Aetheryte mute players who repeat 50% of the characters in a message and flag them for banning.

They are now starting to do generic tells followed by a friend request got at least 5 or 6 Hi Bro tells that had delightful :rolleyes: friend request right after. for the first time since Heavensward ea I had to go busy again... this really needs to be fixed somehow

I actually got a few of those "Hey bro" requests, honestly thought it was legit at first and even replied (as the name wasnt too odd) had no reply, responded again a few mins later saying "Did you need something?" ignored it. Then got another one the next day, checked the friend request. Lv 1 gladiator...yup..RMT. I am kinda agreeing now, make Tells a level 5 unlock or something. Then again upon saying that, I suppose it wouldn't take long for them to start botting to level 5 eh?

"Hey bro..." Lol, their messages have really evolved to be more americanized haven't they :p. Sucks, I don't think SE is gonna really do anything at this point. Once the servers aren't filled to the brim with people RMT has an avenue to spam /tells once more. I suppose on some servers that has already happened.

Edit: Non-RMT players are taking to botting en masse as well, seeing as they can get away with it. Proof? Check this thread out. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...s-in-my-server.
Can't really let this get any worse SE, do something about all this bs please. You really need to be stricter on bots/RMT, or it will eventually hurt your great game.

We have herds of people farming in North Than as bots and so many RMTs, almost like walking into a house and seeing a ton of pests and being like "Yup....perfect place to live!" I'm just starting to have my doubts they will ever fix the issue, its not like I can be mad cus every single game I have ever played seems to have this issue, even the Free to play ones.

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Originally Posted by AlphaFox

We have herds of people farming in North Than as bots and so many RMTs, almost like walking into a house and seeing a ton of pests and being like "Yup....perfect place to live!" I'm just starting to have my doubts they will ever fix the issue, its not like I can be mad cus every single game I have ever played seems to have this issue, even the Free to play ones.

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It'd be more forgivable on F2p games, as you don't have to pay them if you don't want to. Here? We pay SE a sub every month to at least slow down the flow of things like this. I mean, it's good they put in all the quality content they do, but I wonder why they seem to think controlling the flow of cheaters/RMT isn't that important?

Was nice the first few days of Heavens Ward release the crowds were too big to allow the RMT online. But now that the rush has died down it was back to the same old harassment tell a minute from RMT again. I really wish they would do something about it already. Why has this not been addressed or acknowledged?

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Originally Posted by Zabuza

It'd be more forgivable on F2p games, as you don't have to pay them if you don't want to. Here? We pay SE a sub every month to at least slow down the flow of things like this. I mean, it's good they put in all the quality content they do, but I wonder why they seem to think controlling the flow of cheaters/RMT isn't that important?

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I'd assume cus they are still getting money from them. Why ban so many people when you know your going to be losing out on at least $13 a month per person?

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Originally Posted by AlphaFox

I'd assume cus they are still getting money from them. Why ban so many people when you know your going to be losing out on at least $13 a month per person?

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I won't speak for SE, but I'll speak from a parallel experience.

Y'all know who the "first online auction site" is right? Well internally they have immunity policies for Powersellers that the regular sellers and buyers didn't have. Some of the largest Powersellers that are akin to RMT bots, eg the ones that *auction site* was selling counterfeits but could do nothing about unless a DMCA claim was filed by a verified rights owner. Basically such powersellers did so much business that "losing one" due to erroneous complaints was considered a last-resort. Because when an account is suspended, someone could literately be losing thousands of dollars an hour. So the internal policy was closer to "phone PS and tell them their account will be suspended if all of brand X item isn't voluntarily removed immediately"

Like in that case, the reason they can't get rid of accounts easily is because it becomes a PR nightmare to even have ONE mistake. That's why people continually see fakes posted to the site, because not enough people report them, and IP holders tend to just "batch" report once a week, giving many listings too much visibility before they are removed.

So in the case of SE and FFXIV, it's likely that some of these RMT accounts have been around since launch, with level 50 characters, and suspending them immediately isn't an option since there's a possibility it's not a bot. The Spammers however, are clearly abusing the free trial system, so there is no money lost in immediately suspending such.

In SE's case, it's likely we see the bots because many of us have resigned to the fact that they will never get rid of them within 5 minutes, even though SE has shown they can respond to a ticket within 5 minutes (when you report someone for griefing,) they never do so with the cheating reports, not even acknowledgement that the ticket has been worked.

Like that missing feedback mechanism is something Archeage kinda-sorta solved. You could report up to 5 bots (a lot of good that did when zones would literately have 100's of them) and as long as the ticket had not been worked, you couldn't report more. At some point they would batch nuke the accounts that were botting and you'd get a bit of a reward for doing so in your inbox. But the time frame from reporting to an email would sometimes be a week. So during that time a bot could have got to level 50. Unfortunately it was impossible to report "spamming" bots in that game because the report mechanism required 5 reports in a 24 period for the automatic anti-bot system to do anything... which it did nothing. There was also a provision in the game to allow "good" players (eg ones that weren't pirates/criminals) to kill reported bots in "safe" zones, but wasn't actually enabled.

Like the one thing I wish every MMO would do, is allow the PvP mechanism to kill bots. I don't care how much like griefing it looks like, but if you provide a "Engage PvP (Suspect bot)" mechanism, so that killing the bot forces it to respawn in a "jail" somewhere it can't teleport from, can't shout/yell/say from, makes it vastly easier for GM's to count the bot activity. Because a real player will actually respond to a PvP fight by fighting back or running away, while a bot will just stand there and die, because even if it has PvP countermeasures, I've never seen a bot win against a real human except by being overleveled or ganged up on by PvP combatants. (Which to be fair is a problem in PvP... period.) But in the case of Archeage, the bot activity was extremely out of control (same software people use on FFXIV) to the point that there were hour long queues caused by bots having a higher population than actual players.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The Spammers however, are clearly abusing the free trial system, so there is no money lost in immediately suspending such.

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Can't send tells with a trial account. These are paid accounts.

Even better suggestion. Add a right click "Report Spam" option that forwards reported messages to a log. Automatically disable every channel for a player except guild and party (including sending party invites) once they receive "X" number of reports. Have customer service review the logs for all reported messages for a player once they have been locked for spamming. If the message are spam, ban the account. If not unlock the player's account. Have a simple machine learning algorithm adjust the "X" number of reports required to lock the account to minimize false bans while maximizing true bans (Seriously, it wouldn't take more than 10 lines of code to write the algorithm). On top of that, the log of true and false reported messages now becomes labelled data to build an automatic spam filtering system (similar to what is used in email spam blocking).

Lastly, tell the player base that a new spam blocking system is going into effect and there might be a lot of false bans initially. I am willing to bet that the players would be MORE THAN happy to deal with the short term inconvenience if it meant dealing with the spam problem in the long run.

This would take a trivial amount of development and similar systems used in email spam blocking are about 97% effective. They would be even more effective here. Other games use similar systems and have had tremendous success (the ELO system in LOL is a publicly well known system similar to this).

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Originally Posted by Amenian

Just take a page from TERAs book and ban ips out of China. Don't think I've ever seen an RMT tell in TERA.

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Top RMT site for WoW, for example, is actually based out of Canada and IPs are proxies from there.

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Originally Posted by Amenian

Just take a page from TERAs book and ban ips out of China. Don't think I've ever seen an RMT tell in TERA.

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The sites are only hosted in China, due to the fact China doesn't respect the laws of any country that isn't them basically. The actual money is usually gathered by North Americans (US and Canada have the highest population of RMT "farmers") and most of the advertisements come from outside China as well.

The recent "Hi bro" RMTs have had populated areas like Coerthas abuzz with chatter, mostly joking thanks to the lighthearted manner of the RMT. However, with the expansion still fresh in our minds, I'd imagine SE would rather its players be hyping each other up about new skills and jobs, new battles and new areas to explore, rather than talking about their gaming experience being encroached upon by RMT. It's clear that RMT is persistent and resilient enough to withstand the banning practices in place now, it's been near two years and now we're neck deep in an expansion, and RMT still has a very visible and noticeable presence. At the very least, the right-click > report as spam function that has been requested time and again is in dire need.

Yeah, the "Hi bro" spam is getting so bad, and worst part is that I don't think that's something they could filter without causing issues in regular conversation between actual players.

Just comes to show that whatever filtering and banning they're applying is a weak meassure to take. WE NEED the 1 step right click -> "Blacklist PLAYER" (not character) asap.

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Originally Posted by Saseal

I\\'ve had the opposite - Plenty of friend requests >_< Probably more than actual tells, as of the last two days.
It was so nice, all through early access... and then it started picking up.... T^T
And the blatant bot in Gridania, sitting at the Aetheryte spltting out RMT advertisements every few minutes. New players are going to see that, so easily... >_> Some may not know any better. At least the RMT bots I remember sitting Ul Dah\\'s Aetheryte were just tell bots -.-

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:-/

And some extra text so my reply isn't too short.

I haven't spotted anyone near the Aetherytes yet. But then I don't pay that much attention to the chat window.

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Originally Posted by Amenian

Can't send tells with a trial account. These are paid accounts.

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Trial accounts can still do /say 's since they are required to get through the tutorial.

Earlier it even got worse for me.. Not only they send friend request but also say "Hi Bro" at the same time! Its absolutely annoying! I can't go "busy" mode cause I am trying to recruit people...

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Originally Posted by TinyMonster

Earlier it even got worse for me.. Not only they send friend request but also say "Hi Bro" at the same time! Its absolutely annoying! I can't go "busy" mode cause I am trying to recruit people...

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My solution was to just remove the sounds from Tell, and move Shout/Yell/Tell into a tab I just have labeled "Spam". I primarily did this so that if I was streaming, none of the RMT crap would end up in the window.

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Originally Posted by aesteval

:-/

And some extra text so my reply isn't too short.

I haven't spotted anyone near the Aetherytes yet. But then I don't pay that much attention to the chat window.

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Some of the lingering aetheryte bots names look semi-realish (like... 'Nessie Myndayy' or something *pulls out of ass* - hell, I've been seeing the ever popular 'Tia' surname on a few RMT tell names) while others are the usual "FSFDSJ RUISYS" and "RCHSELL SELLGILAHJ" garble everyone knows and loves... they advertise in /s (hence super easy for newbies to see it) and now and then the RMT bot jumps to escape inactivity kicks :/ I used to see them a lot in Ul Dah by the aetheryte... I've yet to go see if there is a bot horde in Thanalan, on Couerl, like that Ragnarok server video...

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

My solution was to just remove the sounds from Tell, and move Shout/Yell/Tell into a tab I just have labeled "Spam". I primarily did this so that if I was streaming, none of the RMT crap would end up in the window.

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Oh love that idea, thanks!

you guys are still getting RMT tells? I cant count on one hand how many tells i have gotten since EA for heavensward

RMT is gone on Exodus since Xpac

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Originally Posted by Kyomagi

you guys are still getting RMT tells? I cant count on one hand how many tells i have gotten since EA for heavensward

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Yep I am getting a shit ton of them.. >.>

Things were really quiet during Early Access, but lately things have picked up again. Not as frequently as before, but I see around 2-6 tells an hour, and about 1-2 unsolicited friend requests.

From the suggestion list, I agree with the following: 1, 2 and 4 (generally the same thing), 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 19, 21, 22. These should not impede a player's playability to the game in anyway--minus the banning part--and work very well in others games for some of the options.

Maybes include:
3--This could be considered punishing newer players and it doesn't take much to get past what would have to be a modest level limit.
8--It helps but does not completely stem the problem (face it, nothing ever will other than a decline in interest in making in-game money or a decline in the game itself).
12--Would be nice but unlikely. Probably would take some resources (#9 on the list).
13--It shouldn't actually be needed if some options were put in place to ignore unwanted messages/requests better.
18--It might help but would probably annoy people more than anything. To be clear though, it did help with the fishing bots in XI at first but all they had to do is out level them and continue.
20--I can't see any "real" problem with this other than those who like breaking up tells/shouts into single sentences or having to correct yourself from a MT real quick.

Might I add an addition to number 20 that I believe should be considered for at least tells (maybe all chats outside of party, linkshell, and FC as well). Limit the macro chats. Your example shown is a very good example of a macro being done to quickly send messages. I can't say for certain if those messages are actually using the in-game macros or not but limiting that use could help with the spamming.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Like the one thing I wish every MMO would do, is allow the PvP mechanism to kill bots. I don't care how much like griefing it looks like, but if you provide a "Engage PvP (Suspect bot)" mechanism, so that killing the bot forces it to respawn in a "jail" somewhere it can't teleport from, can't shout/yell/say from, makes it vastly easier for GM's to count the bot activity. Because a real player will actually respond to a PvP fight by fighting back or running away, while a bot will just stand there and die, because even if it has PvP countermeasures, I've never seen a bot win against a real human except by being overleveled or ganged up on by PvP combatants.

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The problem is that there are a lot of real legitimate players who can't win against you in a PvP duel either, especially when you out-level and out-gear them. And they may not want to have to keep running away from you, especially if that costs them their unspoiled node or fishing window, or whatever else it was they were trying to do there.

Lol, what server is this? And I wonder how I never got any of those tell or shout at all by the 2 weeks I have been playing in Tonberry!

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Originally Posted by Alise

Lol, what server is this? And I wonder how I never got any of those tell or shout at all by the 2 weeks I have been playing in Tonberry!

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Isn't Tonberry a JP server? JP servers pretty much never get any RMT /tells, they leave the JPs alone. My screenshots in the OP were from Zalera at the time. Small NA servers have it the worst. Large NA servers have a near constant lockout on character creation, and JP servers simply don't get hit with /tells. Small NA servers, however, there is no protection or deterrence against the RMTs, they run rampant.

Well yeah, RMT tells are back to their totally-out-of-control regular levels.

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Originally Posted by Sicno

Well yeah, RMT tells are back to their totally-out-of-control regular levels.

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Yep... Hate being in our server sometimes.. I got 5 tells in less than a minute and I even got this "Hi bro" from the RMT while sending me a friend request..

damn im still not getting any tells. maybe they quit hyperion

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

The problem is that there are a lot of real legitimate players who can't win against you in a PvP duel either, especially when you out-level and out-gear them. And they may not want to have to keep running away from you, especially if that costs them their unspoiled node or fishing window, or whatever else it was they were trying to do there.

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I think people overestimate the amount of griefing that would happen when there are stiff penalties to abuse. A lot of what brews these fears is the lack of action against RMT, makes people think that there will be lack of action taken against griefers as well.

You wouldn't just allow everyone to do it. You'd only allow those who aren't constantly at odds with the community and SE to do so. So every time someone on here is warned or suspended from the forum or in the game for something, you'd already be on SE's "blacklist" of irresponsible players. People who report things accurately would more likely have the option.

A core design flaw in most MMO's is the PvP mechanism has "safe areas" at all. Any area defined as safe from PvP should also be an area that yell/shout/tell restrictions are in place, and walking in/out or teleporting in/out of such areas would need a cooldown so players aren't just camped inside.

But I digress, Solving RMT problems requires a far more aggressive stance than SE has taken so far.

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Originally Posted by Alise

Lol, what server is this? And I wonder how I never got any of those tell or shout at all by the 2 weeks I have been playing in Tonberry!

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That would be because you're playing on Tonberry, as explained.

Also, just because it isn't happening to you personally doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Still getting the occasional /t on Hyperion I've had about 9 since early access and i had deleted all but my 2 favorite RMT names of Dont Know and Like Me haha

So now that the dust has settled on Heavensward, how are the RMTs for people now? Any better? Still more of the same?

Same old same old. Not in as bad a frequency as it was, but more tolerable. I haven't bothered to go busy since HW with exception to once or twice when the friend reqs suddenly exploded for a day or two (IE, the "hi bro" phase). Now I just get a tell every 10-20 mins..... which isn't bad compared to the past.

Edit> THen again, I've been running dungeons/rouls/Alex nonstop and not as reachable as before.... *really needs to pick up hunts again*