Gil spammers

As a fairly new player/subscriber want to say what likely many others know.
The spamming of tells for gil buying is epidemic and is basically making many people turn off all tells, which in effect means a portion of the game/environment is being shut down for many.

If it is true that people have to be a paid subscriber to send a tell, then having a few employees who address the issue could in fact turn a company profit. People seen as being gil sellers in tells could get noted and shut down said account. That then means the gil spammer has to get a another account and pay for it.

Right now it is profitable for the spammers to leach on the environment and almost unlimited spamming. Consider turning it around and making in profitable for the company to have less of these bots/people.

Im very sure only people who have bought the game can send tells. Sadly as soon as one account is shut down another raises in its place, this speaks for the amount of money these people have which also means they have people purchasing their services.

Gil sellers are not only using bot paid accounts but also stolen and sometimes still active accounts, which makes difficult for Square Enix to punish the player who don't suspect their name is being tarnished.

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Originally Posted by Sento-Frost

Gil sellers are not only using bot paid accounts but also stolen and sometimes still active accounts, which makes difficult for Square Enix to punish the player who don't suspect their name is being tarnished.

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For sure a lot of them are stolen accounts and that is tough for those people. That said, those accounts are stolen and do those people really want their accounts being used like that. Think of it like a stolen car.

Yeah sure, it's a pain but it might be hard to address for SE at the same time.

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Originally Posted by DoUrden

For sure a lot of them are stolen accounts and that is tough for those people. That said, those accounts are stolen and do those people really want their accounts being used like that. Think of it like a stolen car.

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Well more likely they we're sold by the original owner of the account to RMT upon quitting the game. Too my knowledge I've never received an phishing email or message by anyone attempting to gain the password I use for the game.

The biggest flaw is that SE's makes it very easy to change a user's password and email without their knowledge. Just simply logging into the SE account management page with there username and password, from there you can change their email and password, and it won't alert the owner via email or any other way that their information has been changed.

WTB 'Blacklist Account' button. With a blacklist that auto-updates when I log in of any accounts in it that have received bans.

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Originally Posted by Ignnis

Sadly as soon as one account is shut down another raises in its place

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This would stop if the bans came quickly enough. Currently, these spam bots can continue long enough to reach plenty of gil-buyers, so they're making money for the RMT companies and will be replaced whenever they finally get shut down. If SE monitored reports in real time and banned the spam bots immediately, then their spam wouldn't reach enough potential customers to pay for the cost of setting them up. The RMT companies wouldn't keep replacing bots that are losing them money rather than earning any.

SE does eventually get around to looking at spam reports, and maybe a week or so after the reports come in, they'll ban the bots involved. The action is right. It's the timing that makes it useless. Bans would need to be immediate in order to actually accomplish anything.

As said here and there again, give us easier way to report the spammers. Add it in the right click menu on the player name in chat window. Even if this had confirmation window as it should have, it'd still be infinitely easier than the system in place now. Also since it'd be automatic, it would include the message in question with no user input, so there would no be room for falsifying it.

Add to this a temporal ban for all public chat functions, if receiving too many reports in short time. This could exclude FC channel, party chat and linkshells. Legitimately reported spammers propably wouldn't be in any of them (or if they were, they'd be easy enough to kick). But if someone was falsely banned for some reason it wouldn't cripple their game while they were clearing it up.

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Originally Posted by Sida

As said here and there again, give us easier way to report the spammers. Add it in the right click menu on the player name in chat window. Even if this had confirmation window as it should have, it'd still be infinitely easier than the system in place now. Also since it'd be automatic, it would include the message in question with no user input, so there would no be room for falsifying it.

Add to this a temporal ban for all public chat functions, if receiving too many reports in short time. This could exclude FC channel, party chat and linkshells. Legitimately reported spammers propably wouldn't be in any of them (or if they were, they'd be easy enough to kick). But if someone was falsely banned for some reason it wouldn't cripple their game while they were clearing it up.

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How hard would it be someone with friends to abuse that system and shut people down just for the fun of it? Don't get me wrong I fee that SE should be more proactive so they don't have to be reactive about the spam but I don't think the temp ban for global changes is an option