Gil Sellers - How long does it take to ban them?

I first started playing this game in like...October. Gil sellers that I have reported and blacklisted back then are STILL on my blacklist while only 2 have been shown as "deleted". Is it really that hard to investigate the spam they send and determine they are gil sellers? I feel like there isn't as much effort into getting rid of them as SE would like us to think.

Delete and ban are two different animals. SE does a clean out toward the end of the month and they ban the account. Meaning that the characters are still there but the owner of the account is no longer able to access them.

It is done this way just in case the rmt were not in fact the real owner of the account.

Rmt will randomly delete their own characters. I'm not sure why. Might be to try and slow down SE's banning process.

SE does the bans in waves, it seems.

As to why they're deleting characters, it's likely they're using the one character slot on their account to cycle bots since they know their bots are being blacklisted. Just delete it, make a new one, repeat. Hell they probably have a script to do that for them too. :p The RMT are unfortunately very good at their jobs.

I like how you didn't even try to prove your way of thinking by searching on the Lodestone for some of those older accounts before creating this thread.

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Originally Posted by cotti

I like how you didn't even try to prove your way of thinking by searching on the Lodestone for some of those older accounts before creating this thread.

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Maybe some of us don't know about doing that? Really glad you're good at those internets.

Delete usually means the RMT deleted the char, to make a new one, and get around your blacklist. They usually do this as I've been spammed by the same RMT message by several different names before. And of course, they get deleted a couple hours after I add them.

Ban however, I feel like never. If its in waves then Yoshi flat our lied to us when he talked about housing prices don't include RMT gil "because those accounts are banned immediately", no, they dont. I've seen teleport botters have fun for months. You can go on any botting forum and see how they all laugh at the pathetic attempt SE make in stopping RMT/Botting generated currency.

Deleted > Done by RMT to get around your blacklist
Ban > Once a blue moon probably gets about 20% of actual RMT/Botters.

I don't really blame the GM's work effort, I think there is some really long, bullshit process they have to do in order to process a ban, because if "investigation" is used an excuse again then that is just sad, sorry but you cant do your job if it takes months to investigate a teleport botter.

Here's a challenge for you, and anyone like you.

Take screenshots of your blacklist so you have a record of all the people you blacklisted.

Empty your blacklist.

Now over the next week, play as normal.

Everytime you get another RMT spam in your chatbox, compare that name to your screenshots.

I'm willing to bet that unless it was someone you blacklisted in the last two weeks, you will not see any of them pop up again.

Please, prove me wrong.

Lol SE announced that as of last night they banned exactly 1k players for RMT. OMG 1K out of a player base of what? At least 600k? Thats like throwing a deck chair off the Titanic to keep it from sinking! Good job SE, always good to know that you are right on those bans! Between the RMT, the bots and the trashed economy this game is SO freaking fun to log into now. Pretty soon all of Ezeroa will be ghost towns except for the RMT.

by the time SE bans any RMT they already made enough money for a few more accounts and made profit in there ever expanding business. the bans make them laugh.

blocking IP's wont help either they have proxys and ip v4 has 16 million adresses, and ip v6 has over 4 billion. they need to work faster like other mmo's

I would like to think SE does something about the bots... But the bots from 1.0 that are still around and still botting prove otherwise.

I'd let the bots gather the gil and then I'd ban the source of RMT's. The Buyers.

Knocking out the source of the problem is much better I feel.

In order to do so though, we need bait~ We'll let the RMT's fish out the culprits.

Also, think about it this way, If you were to be in the RMT business would you shout on accounts that farm the gil or distribute the gil? no as that would be stupid and way to easy to get flagged and banned killing your business. The accounts that spam are low levels with no gil or hacked accounts, ones that have basically no effect on the RMT world, so they are likely the lowest level of priority to ban/remove.

The accounts that SE seeks and bans quickly are the actual RMT banks, farmers, and distributors. While it would be nice if the spammers got banned quick so we don't get spammed, it would have little to no actual impact on the RMT issue as they would just get back to the hack accounts to spam problem we had at release to avoid their accounts getting banned, and they also know anyone who wants to buy gil will find the way to the site another way, i mean just google FFXIV and at the top of the page is a sponsored ad for a gil seller...

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Originally Posted by MageBlack

Here's a challenge for you, and anyone like you.

Take screenshots of your blacklist so you have a record of all the people you blacklisted.

Empty your blacklist.

Now over the next week, play as normal.

Everytime you get another RMT spam in your chatbox, compare that name to your screenshots.

I'm willing to bet that unless it was someone you blacklisted in the last two weeks, you will not see any of them pop up again.

Please, prove me wrong.

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As much as I like suggestions, the thought of comparing lists of a hundred different variations of "dkajdklfa djfaldf" and fdwer dafein" just seems painful. I hate these guys. I am proud of myself though for spamming one back and then getting blocked. lol..so either they botted it to do that or they were actually at the keyboard to do it.

I'm eternally amused by forum posters who complain, "I reported bot X three weeks ago and he's still here! SE's task force is a liiiiie!"

It reminds me of my e-mail spam filters. I occasionally recieve spam e-mails. So, clearly my filters are doing nothing, right? Then I check the log of messages blocked by the filters, and they're three pages long...

Bots/spammers/whatever that exist in game are either new, or the ones who've slipped through the cracks, just like the spam e-mails that slip through. "But I REPORTED them!" is no proof either; blanket bannings or not, SE needs to take care before banning accounts because legit players who get accidentally banned tend to get snippy on the forums (imagine that!).

I can pretty much guarantee, if SE was doing nothing about the spammers and bots, you'd notice the difference. Or maybe not, since you'd have quit ages ago, and for good reason.

A large number of the spammers were compromised accounts. They were likely restored to the original owner at some point and therefore not deleted.

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Originally Posted by odie

As much as I like suggestions, the thought of comparing lists of a hundred different variations of "dkajdklfa djfaldf" and fdwer dafein" just seems painful. I hate these guys. I am proud of myself though for spamming one back and then getting blocked. lol..so either they botted it to do that or they were actually at the keyboard to do it.

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I transferred servers during the free chr transfer event. Doing so completely deleted my blacklist. Since then I have only added 5 names to that list. At this point, if you are too afraid to manage your blacklist then the problem lies with you, not with SE. It has gotten much better in the last few months and will continue to. If anything SE might need to explain what they are doing in bright big bold letters sent by personal message to each of us so fewer posts like these are made.

But seriously, take my challenge and prove me wrong.

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Originally Posted by Yurikitty

Lol SE announced that as of last night they banned exactly 1k players for RMT. OMG 1K out of a player base of what? At least 600k? Thats like throwing a deck chair off the Titanic to keep it from sinking! Good job SE, always good to know that you are right on those bans! Between the RMT, the bots and the trashed economy this game is SO freaking fun to log into now. Pretty soon all of Ezeroa will be ghost towns except for the RMT.

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I wish some of you guys would actually think before posting this drivel.

How many bots per server do you actually think that exist? How many accounts advertising gil?

In the past month I've probably received around 10 RMT tells tops. I honestly don't even believe that there are more than 100 bots per server, there's probably not even half of that. And here you are complaining that they only banned a total of 1k players this week. /sigh

Though, I do agree that they do take a very long time to ban bots. They survive a lot longer than they should. I'm confident that I can log in to Phoenix and still find the same two bots farmind wind shards in the Central Shroud like they've been in at least the last 3 weeks.