Why not defeat RMT the quick way?

Just look at how other MMOs handle this... in fact, everything I list here is being used elsewhere, e.g. in EO.

Step 1: Allow negative money balances up to a certain amount, e.g. -10'000'000 gil. The hard cap for actually buying items should remain at 0 gil.

Step 2: Each /tell to a character who is NOT on your friend list, in your LS or FC, or an reply to a /tell the player has received, costs a fee of 500 gil.

Step 3: Collect the AH fee when an item is put up for sale, not after it has been sold.

Step 4: Adjusting the price of an item in the AH results in removing it from the AH and putting it up again for the new price, thus collecting the fee again.

Step 5: when the Task Force realizes that someone bought gil or items for real world money, then do not give him a temporary ban. Instead, confiscate the entire sum, plus a second time as a punishment (see step 1).

Step 6: Make gil untradeable, respectively allowing gil transfers only within the free company a player is in.


And then fix the markets and stop punishing your customers which are interested in crafting, please.


Kind regards,

Sol

Your kidding, paying to send a tell to someone. Maybe im just congratulating someone for something or just saying hi and what not or maybe I'm giving someone some help. I shouldn't have to pay just to talk with someone, and if its RMT, well that's what a blacklist is and reporting is for.

The bans haven't been temporary they have been permanent (read the notices). They aren't punishing crafters either and yes I'm a 50 GSM.

Your suggestions are more geared to keep everything between a FC, Linkshell, friend list etc.and does not allow any interactions between strangers as it were.

The RMT people would just start adding people before they /tell. You may think "people just wouldn't accept, that's stupid", however the people who actually buy gold because of whispers are people not too familiar with RMT. These people are most likely new to FF14 and MMO's in general, so they'll most likely accept random adds too.

Even if you could stop RMT from advertising, it wouldn't stop. The majority of people who buy gold know RMT exists and can easily google a site to buy from. They realize they're struggling with gold and decide to take the easy route.

This would just negatively affect the rest of the community while the RMT people use work-arounds. If you made gil untrade-able they'd tell their customers to put a Potion on the AH for 10,000,000 and they'll buy it.

Not to mention they don't temp ban people, it's perm bans. You seem misinformed.

If RMT was so easy to get rid of it wouldn't exist anywhere. It's a lot harder than the average person thinks it is. Only thing you can do is monitor gil-flow and ban when necessary. Scarlet Blade (yeah I played it, sue me for being a weak male) tried by not letting people whisper until a certain level (been a long time since I played, could have changed) but like I said, the people willing to pay for money don't need people to tell them they can buy money.

There is no "quick" way.

LOL at /tell's costing more than most transports.


The real way to defeat the RMT's is for no one to utilize their services... and for people to file reports any time they get a /t from a RMT'er.

RMT is undefeatable! You kill one and two more spawn!

I also dislike the idea of it costing gil to /tell and would be more for the "hitting level X." This, however, wouldn't stop the RMT either.

Just check my Blacklist!

Actually, this would be a very good way of defeating RMT.

By implementing so many inconvenient blanket systems that you end up with a very small pool of players. Then the RMTs leave to make money elsewhere!

There's no way this could possibly have a downside!

I don't know if this may already be the case, but perhaps SE should ban accounts that get a huge amount of blacklists against them in short order? Unless someone is a total tool, it's hard to imagine a situation where hundreds of people blacklist an individual in only a day or two (and if someone is NOT RMT but somehow earns that many blacklists, they probably deserve a ban anyway :p).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SolArisa

Step 1: Allow negative money balances up to a certain amount, e.g. -10'000'000 gil. The hard cap for actually buying items should remain at 0 gil.
Step 5: when the Task Force realizes that someone bought gil or items for real world money, then do not give him a temporary ban. Instead, confiscate the entire sum, plus a second time as a punishment (see step 1).

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That moves the task of routing gil to either throw-away accounts or compromised accounts, but doesn't resolve RMT. Adding difficulty raises the street price of the good; it doesn't make the trade go away.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SolArisa

Step 2: Each /tell to a character who is NOT on your friend list, in your LS or FC, or an reply to a /tell the player has received, costs a fee of 500 gil.
Step 3: Collect the AH fee when an item is put up for sale, not after it has been sold.

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This alters a core feature of the game and gives new players no way to send or respond to /tells for help without generating negative gil (point 1), making the early game experience significantly more challenging (particularly if you also forbid gil trading between players). RMT moves back to Shout and Yell. I don't think we miss those days.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SolArisa

Step 4: Adjusting the price of an item in the AH results in removing it from the AH and putting it up again for the new price, thus collecting the fee again.

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An adjustment fee isn't a bad economic idea, though I can't see what it will do to alter RMT by much. Combined with the negative gil and other restrictions this seems like it would make being a new player that much harder.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SolArisa

And then fix the markets and stop punishing your customers which are interested in crafting, please.

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Aww, that doesn't sound RMT related at all. Now you just seem bitter.

I would rather they make it so that amassing large amounts of gil into something very easy and quickly done through normal means if they ever get the server space they need for player housing to flourish. Like increasing gil rewards by 3-5 times, and increasing the sale price of Allegan coins by the same multiplier. It should make it so that players would never feel incentivised to use RMT services, in theory. It would probably be even worse for RMT if housing prices for mid-sized homes were reduced to 800k-1m in price in that scenario...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MPNZ

I would rather they make it so that amassing large amounts of gil into something very easy and quickly done through normal means if they ever get the server space they need for player housing to flourish. Like increasing gil rewards by 3-5 times, and increasing the sale price of Allegan coins by the same multiplier. It should make it so that players would never feel incentivised to use RMT services, in theory. It would probably be even worse for RMT if housing prices for mid-sized homes were reduced to 800k-1m in price in that scenario...

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What you'll get is massive inflation and people will still continue to buy gil anyway.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tymora

What you'll get is massive inflation and people will still continue to buy gil anyway.

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Well, if you can't stop something entirely, then it's best to curb it in some way. The "why bother trying" attitude of your last statement helps no one.

NPC vender prices and gathering success rates for certain items can be set and reset since it's a game, and an increase in price for certain items on the market board would be pretty welcomed from what I've read from comments since the 2.1 changes.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” - Albert Einstein

Where do RMT come from? Are they hacking acounts? Are they using trial accounts? How do you keep them from getting in in the first place?
How do they gather gil? How do you make that less rewarding/successful?
How do they transfer gil?
Who buys gil? Why? How do you disincentivize that?
How will any solution impact the desirable population?

The way EO really defeats RMT is by doing it themselves with PLEX.

As way way back when I started EO in 2005 I did buy ISK for in game. Then after returning from one of the many breaks from the game I took they implemented PLEX and I never was bothered to look farther since it is an official way to convert IRL Resources ie Money into in game Resources to save Time and actually run content that I was interested in without having to farm for 20 hours to buy one mid tier ship early on.

At the time it takes to do something legitimately increases the likely hood that someone who values their IRL Time more than the Cost of the legit or illegit method to do the same in IRL money the greater the likelihood of them just buying it.

Put another way, using ISK as the example right now in EO, I can run LVL4 missions and make about 10-20M an hour without breaking a sweat or trying really hard, but need 250M for ship build out so need to farm for 20ish hours. Or for $15 buy 1 PLEX and convert it for 500M when I make about $25 an hour IRL which is more cost effective and time effective if the 20ish hours of farming is not fun.

The only way to beat RTM is to join them by releasing your own legitimate way that is 100% official and approved.

I said pretty much the same thing in another thread.

With the PLEX system, you can convert game-time into in-game currency. Since someone has to buy the time, then CCP got their cut.

The benefit to this is the demand for illicit RMT is cut to nil.

Don't these people have to buy the game to do their free trial? :\ where are these people getting money.....oh wait there rmt whoever is buying from them should stop or hope they get the banwagon as well.

I agree the only way to really thwart RMT is by not buying from them, but this message has been told and ignored for years. Somehow there are always going to be people desperate enough to make the whole business worthwhile to them.

It's like all those scam emails. Send ten thousand emails, get 50 responses. But those 50 responses are profitable enough to make them keep trying.

There is no RMT and botting.....

http://postimg.org/image/g5t5jdhd9/

I don't think the Task Force is doing a good job, to be honest. And not all offenders are met with permanent bans, despite what is being mentioned. I've been reporting names of characters who have been sending me /tells with RMT advertising since the beginning and the vast majority of them have not been "(Deleted)". I've already filled up my blacklist once, decided to empty all the names, and started blacklisting names again - and I'm seeing a lot of the same names.

To be honest all they'd have to do is properly staff the task force with people checking the report queues around the clock and being ready to go onsite, check the situation, and immediately banhammer when needed. If the time between account creation and banhammer becomes short enough, the business model for RMTs becomes less and less profitable, forcing them to raise prices, causing a drop in demand, eventually causing it to die out.

It's not like RMT are hard to spot anyway... the random names are a dead giveaway. "keyboard smash" name + standing in front of adventurer's guild + level 1 + sending lots of tells = RMT. Sure there's some who have adopted the method of imitating "real" names, but those are still a minority.

For bots they'd have to physically come onsite to check out the situation of course, but GMs can shadow observe as it is (ie: be there but you can't detect them), so everything that is needed is there, they just have to put the money in it to staff appropriately.

damn 1000 character limit

If they're smart they could even do what Wikipedia did to counter malicious edits: use an AI that monitors activity and picks out "suspicious" activity, often taking automatic action (in Wikipedia's case this is reverting edits). When using neural networks they can learn and adapt themselves even when the malicious players themselves adapt.

The advantage of using AI for "first line filtering" is that you don't have to spend money on "expensive" people to handle all the work. The AI does most of it himself and passes the things which it cannot safely identify on to humans (to minimise false positives), which identify it and take action, and that identification itself serves as input for the neural network again.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sparky

I agree the only way to really thwart RMT is by not buying from them, but this message has been told and ignored for years. Somehow there are always going to be people desperate enough to make the whole business worthwhile to them.

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What's funny is that many people realize that in order to stop RMT is to make it so that there's no money for them to be made in a game. The problem though, is that while many people realize this fact, it doesn't stop them from selling Relic clears, Extreme clears, or (these days) crafting power-leveling. I don't think anyone brought this up in this thread yet, but how about making "selling" difficult content clears against the rules? Bring on the flaming because I know there's going to be at least one person that's in an FC that makes money doing this but doesn't want to admit to adding to the RMT problem.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Astralos

I don't think the Task Force is doing a good job, to be honest. And not all offenders are met with permanent bans, despite what is being mentioned. I've been reporting names of characters who have been sending me /tells with RMT advertising since the beginning and the vast majority of them have not been "(Deleted)". I've already filled up my blacklist once, decided to empty all the names, and started blacklisting names again - and I'm seeing a lot of the same names.

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Again, [Deleted] will only show up the RMT deleted their own character. If they are banned, their name will still be on your Blacklist. SE does this in case the account is hacked. Then the original owner can get their character back. SE does not delete characters, just bans them.

instead of deleting the account, they need to burn the whole game / dvd key that the acct is registered too, make them buy another complete copy everytime.