Gold Sellers

They need to be attacked at the source. Sue them in open court, file injunctions, do whatever is required. You only need to log on for less than an hour to get all the major gil-selling websites to spam you. The list is growing too, as word is getting out SE does nothing to stop them. Probably gets kickbacks.

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Originally Posted by moudoka

They need to be attacked at the source. Sue them in open court, file injunctions, do whatever is required. You only need to log on for less than an hour to get all the major gil-selling websites to spam you. The list is growing too, as word is getting out SE does nothing to stop them. Probably gets kickbacks.

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This seems to be the only logical explanation. Why else would Square Enix ignore this issue for so long? There are hundreds of threads on the subject & just yesterday the top 2-3 threads on reddit were rants about the RMT bots. It is ruining the player experience. I find it hard to believe that with the player population increasing from 2 to 4 million recently that it is in SE's best interest to turn away potential customers. I'm relatively new myself & when I first started I almost quit within the first few hours over getting spammed by RMT tells. Its a sign of poor moderation. If they continue to ignore the issue, it will only attract more RMT bots.

It would be a little hard to attack them in court if they are hosting servers in China or areas that do not recognize intellectual property laws ie have signed the Berne Treaty/Convention.

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Originally Posted by QT_Melon

It would be a little hard to attack them in court if they are hosting servers in China or areas that do not recognize intellectual property laws ie have signed the Berne Treaty/Convention.

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Well, it's a certainty most of these bots are from China. Just look at the syntax of their advertisements "Come on friend" and so on. I've had a great deal of experience playing with a variety of people from all sorts of demographic locations, from China to Egypt. Even if they don't adhere to the IP laws of the rest of the world, there are still actions that can be taken, and many people have offered some very good suggestions to alter the base coding of the game to allow for easier reporting. Prevent tells from characters under level 5/10, whatever. They're not openly shouting, simply mass-telling from the player search function. Setting yourself to busy prevents them from finding you. It shouldn't be that difficult, but apparently it is.

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Originally Posted by moudoka

Well, it's a certainty most of these bots are from China. Just look at the syntax of their advertisements "Come on friend" and so on. I've had a great deal of experience playing with a variety of people from all sorts of demographic locations, from China to Egypt. Even if they don't adhere to the IP laws of the rest of the world, there are still actions that can be taken, and many people have offered some very good suggestions to alter the base coding of the game to allow for easier reporting. Prevent tells from characters under level 5/10, whatever. They're not openly shouting, simply mass-telling from the player search function. Setting yourself to busy prevents them from finding you. It shouldn't be that difficult, but apparently it is.

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Yes there should be actions taken against them, I'm just contesting people's rationale on "sue sue sue" when it's not that simple, breaking a ToS is not equivalent to breaking the law. The way SE could send a C&D letter to various websites is enforcing their IP if say the site is using names under trademark but as I said if they don't recognize Berne to begin with...

Setting yourself to /busy hampers gameplay. It means people can't invite you to parties, and those who actually send legitimate /tells cannot message you. It also messes up the Ready Check system since if you're still on /busy in a group doing a ready check it auto-declines saying you're not ready.

Players for various privacy reasons should have an option set if they can be found in search in my opinion. This prevents bots from just getting a large field list of people they can potentially spam. If a person wants to find me by name and has my correct name and not a fuzzy filter of names for example starting from "A" it would be a much better system than allowing anyone to get a wide berth of searches as spam fodder.

Honestly, I didn't read everything til now, so sorry if this is a repeat. But I agree that this is a serious issue. The gold spam is getting STUPID excessive. Most my friends have taken to labeling themselves as busy to prevent the tells.

This needs to be addressed. I am a programmer, I know it's not an easy fix to "identify" gold spam messages by content. There have to be some work arounds for context though. E.G. If a player pm's 10 people who aren't on their friends list inside a minute > red flag. if se doesnt feel okay taking action on that alone, so be it. They need to PAY a handful of people to sit there and look at the flagged messages. "Is this spam y/n" and give these people an instant ban hammer. Honestly, a handful of minimum wage employees could put a big dent in the flood just by sitting in a zone and banning the people that message them. Might not be ideal, but it's ACTION. Action I doubt they've taken.

Or at the very least, how about changing the right click menu options for tells? Right click -> report spam. I'd do it, and they would get the information they need to collect these names efficiently.

Really, having to walk through the support ticket process is atrocious SE.

Introduce a level cap on sending tells.

Must be level 10 to message people.

Problem solved. Most ridiculously simple fix yet hasnt been done. So yes, I would also like to lean towards the comment on SE getting kickbacks.

Edit - While it wouldnt COMPLETELY eradicate RMT spam, it would definitely reduce it.

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Originally Posted by QT_Melon

Yes there should be actions taken against them, I'm just contesting people's rationale on "sue sue sue" when it's not that simple, breaking a ToS is not equivalent to breaking the law. The way SE could send a C&D letter to various websites is enforcing their IP if say the site is using names under trademark but as I said if they don't recognize Berne to begin with...

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Actually, SE could have a case. I'm not so sure on Japanese/EU law, but SE owns all the digital stuff even though it doesn't exist physically. That's why you aren't allowed to sell your character. SE owns your characters, items, gil, everything. You don't own anything. Gil is not the gil sellers to sell. That's theft. Even though the item is digital. Anyone buying gil can be charged with "Receiving Stolen Property". SE prolly doesn't take action against violators other than a temp/perma ban because can you imagine the articles that would come out? "SE sues customer(s)!"

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Originally Posted by moudoka

They need to be attacked at the source. Sue them in open court, file injunctions, do whatever is required. You only need to log on for less than an hour to get all the major gil-selling websites to spam you. The list is growing too, as word is getting out SE does nothing to stop them. Probably gets kickbacks.

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Gold selling sites, and gold spammers are one and the same. They are from chinese companies, sometimes they even have adsense/doubleclick accounts, which is why you sometimes see this junk show up on youtube videos for the same game.

SE just can't outstaff bots. For every 1 bot you see, there's likely another 32 doing the exact same thing on another server or another character:
This is 2:00AM Pacific on the 18th
http://i60.tinypic.com/98rrt5.png
Note the cyrillic letters.


This is 2:00AM Pacific on the 16th
http://i59.tinypic.com/352eurq.png

There's always this uptick on spam around 2AM because that's when you can apparently create new characters on Excalibur, and then it's rather quiet for a while.

There's more practical solutions. The reason level limits aren't practical is that the bots would just clog up the server leveling... making it impossible for new players to actually get out of the starting area. The most practical requires "farming out" the reporting process and mentoring type of mechanics where someone should be able to right-click on a username and go "report", and then a different user (perhaps on a different server) can verify that the report is valid by being shown a screenshot. This has privacy implications. You also do -not- reward this. Players that are good mentors can then be given access to a little bit more privileged information to see how many times an account has been reported so GM's can prioritize dealing with RMT trash and gold spam.

In PvP games, usually the PvP mechanic is what keeps bots in check, but it doesn't work on spam bots because they just spawn in the safe area. The solutions in those games are very simple however, create a type of "Botbomb" type of item, use it on the suspected bot, it sends the bot to "bot jail" and then requires something more turing-test complete to get out. If you can't find the bot, you can also just enter the name. In much older games, they implement a type of captcha, but these no longer work because the bots just intercept the captcha generator.

But generally reporting this stuff to the forum, just barely will get the attention of the community manager.

When I worked for a certain site that has the same kind of fraud problem, there will be less than 4 people ever working on the entire system to eliminate fraud/bad people/accounts, those 4 people only get to pull the banhammer if something is reported through the tools or directly via email. The latter takes much much longer. I suspect the reporting form SE uses just creates emails that drop into their general purpose support queue.

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Originally Posted by Lucke

Actually, SE could have a case. I'm not so sure on Japanese/EU law, but SE owns all the digital stuff even though it doesn't exist physically. That's why you aren't allowed to sell your character. SE owns your characters, items, gil, everything. You don't own anything. Gil is not the gil sellers to sell. That's theft. Even though the item is digital. Anyone buying gil can be charged with "Receiving Stolen Property". SE prolly doesn't take action against violators other than a temp/perma ban because can you imagine the articles that would come out? "SE sues customer(s)!"

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You don't understand it at all.

China doesn't recognize international copyright laws. If they aren't part of the Berne treaty, there is no case. Plain and simple. Berne is an international treaty for groups to sign copyright laws and recognize it. Another problematic region is also Iran.



On the subject of capping /tells on a level. That's not a good solution given that RMT bots have been known to level 50, and you'd see them queueing in various zones or hang around Mor Dhona in clusters.

What would be best is editing the filter settings on searches. I also think this would be good for privacy, although this is rated Teen, parents could have a lock if their kid is searchable to begin with. If people could set themselves to invisible on the search filter than just /busy. It can also cut down on abuse and spam. It should be a player's choice even if this an MMO whether or not people can search for them in general in case of issues with harassment. This would also kill bots from using a wide filter result to spam people given that /busy is the only choice people have from being searchable.

Busy prevents all tells. Whereas if someone is invisible a person on the friend's list could still send a tell to see if the player will respond.
Busy also prevents ready checks from being done properly. It's interfering with gameplay because someone is forced to be /busy to avoid tell spam.
Busy makes it hard for players to invite another as well.

So the status filters need to be adjusted. Invisible, Away, Busy, Online.