Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

I guess I never mentioned I'm signing this lol. I had a much happier social life in FFXIV when I didn't need to keep /busy up 24/7.

/signed

I personally don't think we are being loud enough on this subject.

Consider this:
in the latest "ask questions for the live letter" http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...!-(FFXIV-ARR)/ The word RMT was only mentioned 15 times in questions, out of the first 310 questions. for a total of 4.8% of questions being about RMT. This is compared to 78 questions being asked about "Can you make X item dyable?", for 25.2% of questions asked.

We need to start being a LOT more vocal about this, if we are ever going to get a response. get out there, and start pestering, until they HAVE to answer.

/signed here its getting really bad on my server, i cleaned out 50 entries the night before, i am up to 45 tonight over the course of the day

/Signed - Steve UK, Mateus Server.

I think you guy's have it lucky, every hour i get between 20-30 /tells from RMT trying to sell gil.

Mateus is a low populated server, and most people move from our server, to a more populated server once they see the bad progression the majority of our server has, the prices on items on marketboard, and more active player's around their timezone (Mateus is dead, apart from 2-3 hours at american evening's)

The RMT spam is worse during the day than it is at night, since less players are being harrassed, but with the population dwelling, and currently we are loseing players because of certain issue's, i'm surprized they even stick around.

I've already spoken to SE in customer support, and tried to suggest/offer ways they could implement restiction's to those spamming more than others. (there should also be an register account limit of 1-2 per week, Per IP.) since it's very unlikely a normal player will make alot of account's per week, espeically if your having to pay for them :/ i dont think their should be a free trial period, or atleast there should be a reduced fee for the first month (I.E £5 for the first month, then £8 for every month after)

Theres nothing we can do to stop these RMT spammer's as ive seen them in every game ive played in 12 year, but we can live in hope that square enix finally support their player's, by implementing something..

Steve UK

/signed

I've been sick and tired of this bullshit that's going on.

TIME TO STEP UP TO THE PLATE SE!

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Originally Posted by Steve_UK

The RMT spam is worse during the day than it is at night, since less players are being harrassed, but with the population dwelling, and currently we are loseing players because of certain issue's, i'm surprized they even stick around.

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I actually stopped playing, I haven't done a dungeon or fate or tried to do anything for a while, the only thing keeping me here is golden saucer at the moment.

I shut off tells but get friend invites a lot and got sick of putting up /busy, I wanna play but I am worn down from cancelling invites, so I hop on do my scratch off match my 3 numbers each day do a few events inside saucer log out till tomorrow before I get invited.

it really sucks the fun out of the game and me and my girl are thinking about not getting expansion because of the hassle.

My cousin quit and my nephew and my sisters bf quit because of the spam, my girl she doesn't even wanna log in at this point like I said I don't even know why we are paying for it still.
I stay because I wanna do stuff, though once I get that first invite from a level 1 about GIL I log out and just don't have time for that crap.

FFXI put up the spam filter when I was playing that, I was on the brink of leaving that game, I actually did for a few months till I heard about the filter.

Came back to FFXI it was refreshing not to see a single spam, I left FFXI for FFXIV after SOA was released and makes me almost regret I did if I had known the spam was going to be this bad I wouldn't of been so hasty to leave but I lost progress on FFXI.

Oh well.

I can catch up here, just hoping they fix this soon.

YESSS!!!

/sign
/sign
/sign

I'm kind of surprised at the amount of tells people get, having skimmed through the thread. On Phoenix, I get like 0-3 tells per day depending on when I play and how long I play for. Played like 10 hours before the emergency maintenance kicked in today and I was mostly out of instances (ie. in the open world) and I think I got 2 tells in that time frame. So it definitely seems like NA has it the worst by far. My condolences to all of you. Here's hoping SE takes action more efficiently.

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Originally Posted by Tranquil

I'm kind of surprised at the amount of tells people get, having skimmed through the thread. ...

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Hey Rin, i can agree with you. On Phoenix i also getting around 0-3 at average per day. I think its probably because Phoenix isnt really a progression server, even if the player base is kinda big. I think thats why Phoenix is probably not that important for thoose rmt sites. But when i take a look on the pictures from op and seeing that he is getting a rmt tell once every minute is just ridiculous. If i would be on his place i would probably already have stopped to play this game. I mean, running around with busy status so noone can /tell me is just even more ridiculous.

With Heavensward i really hope they adding a function that REALLY helps on rmt. This whole thing with blacklisting takes WAY to much time, because at some point you have to clear your whole blacklist wich takes even more time to do.

/signed

/sign
/sign
/sign

There are times on Midgardsormr when I get tells before the loading screen can disappear and I can actually play. Its to the point that I log in and the first thing I do is put my self to /busy. But my biggest peeve has been them bots standing round bonding all day. I use to be able to screw with them and get them killed but then they started using cure when their HP got so low so they took that away from me.

*I'm Alousolu Tatawai and i approve of RMT/bot user's/spammers getting ran over by a car*

Please be more proactive with this it HAS gotten a bit worse in the past month. Is STF on a vacation or are they just useless?

Spamming the chat with their adverts is one thing -- now these gil sellers are resorting to creating level 1 toons with nonsensical names like 'ghgjhjghgh hghhgjhg' and then disturbing other players by (repeatedly) sending friends request. It's not always possible to block them immediately (e.g., if you are doing the main story quest and watching the cutscenes).

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Originally Posted by Seif

Please be more proactive with this it HAS gotten a bit worse in the past month. Is STF on a vacation or are they just useless?

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Something you also have to keep in mind, from the credits at the end of the 2.55 storyline (spoilers but not really?) is that there are a total of THREE (3) people on the Special Task Force. three people, to handle all of the RMT on 64 servers. that's 120 work hours total for the department. With that information in mind, a couple thousand bans is pretty good.

/sign

I am worried because in the past two weeks, Jenova has seen a spike in RMT Spam telling. I'm pretty sure it's due to some a$$hole on our Server buying some Gil but I have to empty my blacklist every week now. I've only emptied it three times before.

As all we all have our opinions about this. I think this thread is a great idea and a form of showing how frustrating it is to see Rmt spamming more often than usual.

But my question is, do people really think that the SE staff just do nothing about it?. It is virtually impossible to get rid off of all the gil spammers and etcs. They know what is going on and they are doing something about it. people need to understand that sorting this is not like switching off and on surely there's more to it.

Don't get me wrong this is a noble idea but you have to put yourself in their position too. So for this reason I'm not signing this as it kinda obvious that they know about this issue and trying to sort it.

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Originally Posted by tocsin

Something you also have to keep in mind, from the credits at the end of the 2.55 storyline (spoilers but not really?) is that there are a total of THREE (3) people on the Special Task Force. three people, to handle all of the RMT on 64 servers. that's 120 work hours total for the department. With that information in mind, a couple thousand bans is pretty good.

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I think that's the point that most of us are trying to make.

SE isn't taking the RMT problem seriously enough, they've only assigned a few people to manually ban. Sure, the few people that they have assigned are probably working their hardest to quell the tide. I have nothing but respect for these few soldiers, but SE really needs to develop new prevention methods and hire more employees to deal with this, because the current situation is pretty bad.

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Originally Posted by UNDEAD10000

only thing that really helps is by reporting RMT spammers in-game

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But with the current system, it takes longer to report a spammer than it does to get your next spam message. You could maybe report every second or third one if that was all you were going to do the entire time you're online, but who's going to pay every month for a game of report-the-spammers? We haven't been given the tools necessary to report spam because SE hasn't put together either the tools or the team to deal with the reports. If they cared about their customers or their game, they would have provided both, like any reputable P2P.

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Originally Posted by tocsin

Something you also have to keep in mind, from the credits at the end of the 2.55 storyline (spoilers but not really?) is that there are a total of THREE (3) people on the Special Task Force. three people, to handle all of the RMT on 64 servers. that's 120 work hours total for the department. With that information in mind, a couple thousand bans is pretty good.

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With that information in mind, there is even more reason to be upset at SE. If they don't hire more than 3 people to deal with this then it is 100% their fault that we're in this RMT hell and there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever.

What seems to work for me is to clear the blacklist. Then blacklist throughout the whole play session, then take a screenshot of that blacklist and upload it on the website reporting system linking them the screenie and giving all of the particulars.

/sign

I hate having /busy on, it's unfriendly and I'm a social person. I've had to keep it on the last two days since patch because the tells every 5 seconds has been driving me crazy. It's gotten seriously out of hand.

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Originally Posted by Gunspec

Turn off tell? You want to see all of my conversations about "Hey I'm going to get a pizza", "brb in 3 minutes, I'm getting coffee", and various other riveting facts cluttering your text log? Because I'm going to stand next to you and type it all in /say from now on.

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Outside of harassment, this shouldn't bother anyone (it wouldn't bother me), especially in /s. It is funny though that no one complains about all the off-base convos that go on in /sh in Mor Dhona on a few of the more populated servers.

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Originally Posted by tocsin

Something you also have to keep in mind, from the credits at the end of the 2.55 storyline (spoilers but not really?) is that there are a total of THREE (3) people on the Special Task Force. three people, to handle all of the RMT on 64 servers. that's 120 work hours total for the department. With that information in mind, a couple thousand bans is pretty good.

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Why do they only have 3 people working on something that has clearly been an issue for a long time now. Something that has become far worse now. That is actually upsetting and explains everything about this current situation. I wonder how long they are going to let us suffer? How bad are they going to let it become? By the time Heavensward comes out, it may be possible that every server will become as bad as mine.

P.S. Signatures updated.

Has it been suggested yet that SE implement some sort of client-side chat filtering in-game? I've been told XI had a feature that allowed you to make changes to your client's chatlog preferences that would prevent certain key phrases from making it to your chatlog. i.e. if someone sent you a /tell that had "000k" in it, or something along those lines, it would simply prevent you from ever seeing it. This would allow players to take the fight against RMT into their own hands by finding new ways to implement certain phrases as the RMT try different measures. I think this would help to battle RMT far better as a preventative measure rather than trying to keep up with it (especially when the team only has 3 people).

Then perhaps allow players the option to auto-refuse incoming friend requests.

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Originally Posted by Kailok

Has it been suggested yet that SE implement some sort of client-side chat filtering in-game? I've been told XI had a feature that allowed you to make changes to your client's chatlog preferences that would prevent certain key phrases from making it to your chatlog. i.e. if someone sent you a /tell that had "000k" in it, or something along those lines, it would simply prevent you from ever seeing it. This would allow players to take the fight against RMT into their own hands by finding new ways to implement certain phrases as the RMT try different measures. I think this would help to battle RMT far better as a preventative measure rather than trying to keep up with it (especially when the team only has 3 people).

Then perhaps allow players the option to auto-refuse incoming friend requests.

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This has indeed been suggested, among a plethora of other things, such as.

-Right click report function
-Increasing blacklist capacity
-Allowing only friends to whisper you
-Putting a level limit on whisper
-Banning the gilbuyers
-Banning the suppliers
-Increasing the size of their Special Task Force

Gotcha - Sorry, I tried a thread search and didn't see anything so I figured I would put a suggestion forward. I agree the RMT situation has gotten so out of control so I've been trying to find any sort of response from SE about the situation, to no avail. Hopefully this thread is making a dent!

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Originally Posted by Kailok

Gotcha - Sorry, I tried a thread search and didn't see anything so I figured I would put a suggestion forward. I agree the RMT situation has gotten so out of control so I've been trying to find any sort of response from SE about the situation, to no avail. Hopefully this thread is making a dent!

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It's fine, I may put up a suggestions section today, compiling those together. And with that, we are at 51 signatures!

/signed

My experiences with GM's and the almighty Task Force since my 9 yrs of ffxi and now here are well... sad. I won't claim to know what goes on at their workplace or what is actually being done and what cannot be done on their end.

I do know that some of the most obvious cases of rmt and regular players using 3rd pty software to bot shards are not being taken care of. I will not mention names as my post will just get wiped and temp banned but it's shameful to see groups of rmt or shard botters since last Fall still going at it in the same locations.

You provide them with all the clear cut evidence you need it would be obvious to a child and they do nothing. Plenty of examples on Excalibur of this type of non action. The tells.. I've had to resort like most to /busy mode. Some of my friends loathe this and put up with the rmt /tells of which I cannot comprehend.

Reporting names is a waste of time especially when they are temp accounts. I gave up and stopped reporting rmt/3rd pty users...but hey if someone reads the petition and actually wakes up one day to care then power to them. Overall the Task Force and GM services are laughable.

As from a technical aspect I have no idea what all they can do but I strongly feel they can do a lot more.

I appreciate this thread and your action but I think it is ultimately pointless. SE could care less besides the accounts they nuke. I would only imagine better filters and /tell options for us would be a remedy.

I'd sign this 100 times if I could. after weeks of dealing with the ever increasing spam on Famfrit (They are even shouting in the cities again). I finally had to break down and filter /tells completely off my chat logs. I removed it from my normal chats channels and made a separate channel just for tells which I named Tell Spam.

I've had to post in my comments that /tells are off and if you need to get my attention you will have to shout in my area and hope I'm watching general chat.

Offically Signed.

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Originally Posted by Zabuza

It's fine, I may put up a suggestions section today, compiling those together. And with that, we are at 51 signatures!

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Way to go! and feel free to add any or all suggestions from my thread under my original post, must have had around 15 or so suggestions there.

Maybe if we all move to the jp servers, might get something then...

I'll sign.

Considering we already have services to pay for gender changes,name changes etc I think the quickest and easiest method of eradicating the RMT spam bots is by SE allowing subscribers to buy gil from the store it'd certainly stop the sellers then if SE themselves offer the service although itd also mean the economy would inflate to ridiculous levels too.

If anything, this most recent report of how many accounts banned, shows just how ridiculous this has gotten.

I mean seriously 11,000 accounts banned?

SE is not getting to the root of the problem, and they're loosing more customers to people being annoyed by the harassment than they would if they just permabanned the buyers.

The buyers is part of the problem Damun, the gil farmers need to be banned as well.

It's absolutely ridiculous. They ban more accounts in a month than some games have subscribers, and the next day I still can't log in for more than five minutes without getting half a dozen tells and a couple of friend requests from spammers. Blacklisting is useless as they create new characters faster than any normal person can block them, and banning a whole bunch of accounts once a week obviously does nothing when they all crawl back out of the woodwork under new accounts the very next day.

Harsh penalties for buyers and decisive broad-brush action against sellers is the only way they're going to even begin making any headway with the problem.

I think Blacklist is a placebo Jimbo, I think it only actively works for as long as your logged in on Behemoth I've had a lot of spam tells while crafting I blacklist then real life things need to be done and log out. Hours later the same spammer is back spamming tells to me on log in again. But again I think the quickest solution to removing gold sellers would be for mmo companys to offer ingame money to be paid for like other micro-transactions they offer in their online stores but then that'd inflate prices too they need to take lessons from Blizzard in preventing RMT.

Great thread, consider me signed on to this!

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Originally Posted by Shizzle

The buyers is part of the problem Damun, the gil farmers need to be banned as well.

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Yes they are, they're not doing enough, they're not giving us the tools to really help them mitigate this. The farmers, and the buyers are just getting off way too easy.

I really don't want to use the busy status. I want to communicate with my friends. But the RMT is all to real as of recent. Especially so on non Legacy servers.

/signed

17 pages in this thread, countless other threads about the issue, and not 1 Community Mod response. Please SE, for the love of the Twelve, and for all of your loyal, devoted, customers, please provide us with a response as to what is going to be done about this surge in RMT activity. There have been very many helpful suggestions as to actions that could be taken, or systems that could be implemented to quell the RMT /tells, most of which are very good suggestions. The only suggestion that I have a small amount of disagreement with is to prevent low level players from being able to use /tell. New players will want to be able to communicate with other players, and /s, /sh, or /y are not the best means of communication for new players to use if they want to ask for help, inquire about joining a free company or linkshell, or to tell a friend that they have joined us in Eorzea. Can we please get at least 1 Community Mod response in regards to the constant inundation of /tells that we, as paying customers, are receiving from unwanted RMT who are violating the ToS by even simply sending a /tell promoting a gil selling website?

Other issues, even very, very, minor issues are getting very quick Community Mod responses and it really lowers the morale of the players who feel very strongly about this issue when all we receive is silence in regards to this issue. Even if all that can be said is, "We are looking into the issue, action will be taken, please look forward to it!" I think that would be acceptable by the majority of people who have posted voicing their concern, and upsetness, about the constant receipt of /tells and friend requests from RMT.