A real solution to the RMT spam.

My solution would be for SE to employ a few of the players in each server to act as chat moderators. Do not allow other players to be able to distinguish them in any way from other players when viewing the search list so that RMT will continue to spam them as though they were normal players. Allow these players to simply right click on a players chat, and mute them. It could be as simple as a 24 hour mute, but this would make a massive difference in the amount of spam that people are sent each day.

Some of those players may try to abuse that power though by muting people that have angered them in some way, and each time a player is muted, they may file a complaint against the moderator that goes directly to a GM. After reviewed by a GM, the player can either be cleared of the mute status, or left on mute status. A player that continuously has the mute status they put on other players can have their moderator position revoked for abuse.

Another more simple but likely less effective method would be to disable the player search feature for all new players with a leaf symbol next to their name. This would force RMT sellers to work a little harder before spamming people with /tell and /shout. The above method would be infinitely more effective in eliminating the problem.

Neat in concept but I could see it being abused unless an actual employee of SE and even then It's questionable if some of the ban stories I've heard about on here are true.

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Originally Posted by Ninimo_Babamo

Another more simple but likely less effective method would be to disable the player search feature for all new players with a leaf symbol next to their name. This would force RMT sellers to work a little harder before spamming people with /tell and /shout. The above method would be infinitely more effective in eliminating the problem.

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The first one is not a crazy idea, some games do have a system like this, their mutes are always reviewed by their superiors. However, this second one would not work, RMT bots don't use player search, they just read the RAM and get the player names from there.

Restrict the ability for level 1 players to send out spam. While you may say that this would just be a trivial matter for those to level beyond 1 to start spamming, I can assure you there is the side benefit of having their activities logged by the server and thus be able to track down the accounts in question. Currently, the RMT spammers will just create a character, and be able to spam before or during the initial cutscene (using exploits) By pre-empting this, SE can force these RMT to have to expose the offending accounts, and also allow time for their engineers to investigate the data packets as well as figure out how these people are exploiting the system. Unless the exploiters are revealing their tricks, SE can only guess, so anyway they can obtain more data would be very helpful to them.