Same story as other thread. Log in, RMT tell within 30 seconds. Blacklisting is almost pointless. Banning the spam accounts doesn't work. It will probably never work.
The root problem is they they have gil to sell. Fairly straightforward thinking, I think. If they don't have gil, they can't sell it, right? And there's no point in spamming to sell nothing.
What gets me is... why don't they address that problem, instead of slapping bandaids on? Just have a script look for high-level players that do a lot of grinding and no social interaction. Compile IP address ranges. Track gil trades. Find the warehouse characters they feed.
Then, they just nail the warehouses. Cut the supply. Ban the lvl 50 grinders.
It takes a lot longer to level a character to get significant money than it does to roll a new one and start spamming people.
And for bonus points, maybe even inhibit the ability to send mass tells to everyone?
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03-12-2014, 11:29 AMTheSmooWhy are they addressing the RMT symptom instead of the deeper causes?
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03-12-2014, 11:32 AMEnkidoh
Because the gilsellers just create new accounts - it's not an easily fixed problem sadly (it's why you see those lowbie ARC groups in Gridania all acting zombie like every few weeks - SE is banning them quickly but the RMTs just come back with new accounts.).
Really, if stupid people stopped actually buying their ill-gotten gil in the first place and actually destroy the black market for it, you wouldn't have that problem. -
03-12-2014, 11:38 AMLucke
Actually, all they need to do is ban/sue/whatever buyers. I wanna play keyboard lawyer for a sec. If the buyer is from the US (I don't know international law), would that mean SE can bring charges to them? Specifically "Receiving stolen property". If SE gets a rep for taking buyers to court, it may stop buyers from actually buying.
Recing stolen property: "The offense of acquiring goods with the knowledge that they have been stolen, extorted, embezzled, or unlawfully taken in any manner." Keyword there is "knowledge". Buyers know it's not right to buy gil, but they do it anyway, prolly because they think they can get away with it. They may not know it's actually stolen from SE.
Remember kids, you don't own jack when you play this game. Your character, actually belongs to SE. Your mega-awesome gear, that's SE's too. Most importantly, the gil belongs to SE, it is not yours to sell or buy from an RMT.
Reference: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedicti...tolen+Property -
03-12-2014, 12:23 PMAnova
There are several issues preventing SE from pursuing these issues. The most prominent is that RMT is a cybercrime, and while it is possible to punish individuals within certain countries, pursuing them internationally is not always viable. The majority of RMT companies are located in China (and there are rumors of N.Korea having a special RMT military department to earn money). The main rationale is these countries have very lax laws concerning intellectual property. According to their laws, these companies may not be entirely clean, but the offense hardly warrants extradition or any possible punishment that would dissuade them from continuing business. It does not help that the relationship between Japan and the rest of East Asia is on par with the US relationship with the drug-addled countries of South America. There are trade agreements, but more force is needed to arrest a criminal you know is hiding there.
As for targeting the buyers, while I think it is possible, the actual amount bought from an individual buyer is miniscule at best. I am not certain it would be worth the cost for SE to pursue the case, much less prove financial damage resulting from the actions of an individual buyer. It's much cheaper to simply ban the buyer for breaking the EULA and hope the message gets out that if you buy, you are risking not only your own credit information but also risk losing access and progress to the game.
A second issue is the process of identifying gil farmers. Ironically though, the most fervent FFXIV players and SE's best customers look a lot like gil farmers. They have multiple accounts and multiple characters on the same server (because of myth cap, etc) and they utilize very complicated techniques to make gil and generally be the best at the game. It's not easy to distinguish them apart. If your aim is to target the actual Lv.50 farmers, it is much safer to simply follow the trail of gil from the account that sends gil to a potential buyer. None of these require you to stop the RMT spam, although I am certain SE has some filters in place considering the RMT are encoding their advertisements. Still, it only takes a little testing for RMTs to identify the algorithm and rules of the spam filters and change the message appropriately. -
03-12-2014, 12:34 PMRyuko
It's very difficult to weed out the people who have a lot of gil who aren't legitimate players. Back around the start of ARR, a lot of legitimate players were making a lot of legitimate gil... but, a lot of RMT were making money the same way. What was SE's solution? They blanket suspended every single person over a certain amount of gil (the 'cap' changed depending on which server you were on -- legacy players were allowed to have more before being flagged). These suspensions were not permanent... they were pending investigation. A lot of legitimate players were stuck offline for a while waiting for their accounts to be investigated. I remember this very vividly because when I found out that was happening, I stopped trying to make money as fast. The RMT were banned but... at the inconvenience of a lot of legitimate players just trying to make gil. It's hard to know who is RMT and who isn't from a SE standpoint. It can seem obvious to us, but I'm really wondering what SE exactly tracks regarding social activity.
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03-13-2014, 03:33 AMRhazeCain
Hmm.. Some interesting ideas being brought up here. I'll add my own 2 cents.
First, for any every and all things that could be done, consider this balance:
On one hand, how much money is your displeasure at being spammed costing SE? Hard to measure, certainly greater than zero.
On the other hand, how much would it cost them to take whatever anti-RMT steps in question?
Obviously the first has to be greater than the 2nd, or else the steps in question don't make business sense. So that cuts off a lot of options, including most of what I've seen in this thread.
The things I could see maybe making sense still would be
1) Add a minimum wait between every chat message sent. 1-2 secs. Good: longer for spammers to cycle through all of the players, unless they get more accounts. Bad: legit players will be annoyed by it sometimes too.
2) The option we call blacklist needs to become "Report Spam", or add new option for "Report Spam". This option both reports the offending message and blacklists the person, with a single player action.
3) Where are all the accounts coming from? Hopefully SE is banning spam accounts eventually in response to abuse reports (if not they need to start), so any "free trial" or other way that people get easy new accounts needs to stop. Depending the situation it may not be so easy, but maybe. -
03-13-2014, 04:01 AMSacred-Oblivion
Is there a reason SE doesn't implement an anti-spam feature similar to WoW?
In WoW when you receive you spam you:
1) Right click their name and select "Report Spam."
2)
3) Profit.
That's it. Doing this prevents them from sending you any more tells, and if at least 5 people used the report spam feature on someone then that account is prevented from using the chat stream on every character until an investigation occurs.
WoW had this problem for awhile too until they implemented the above feature. RMT spams went down to almost 0% (I almost stopped receiving them entirely). I know the devs played WoW for research purposes when working on this game, so I don't see why they don't mimic this feature as well. -
03-13-2014, 06:51 AMNiwashi
There's three sorts of accounts involved here.
1) The gil-buyers' accounts
2) The gil-sellers' bot accounts for gathering gil in order to sell it
3) The gil-sellers' advertising accounts for sending spam messages to annoy... err that is to entice customers
All three should be banned when they're identified, but as already pointed out, the first two of those three aren't easily distinguished from active legitimate accounts. It takes a thorough investigation to determine how all that gil was accumulated and where it went before SE can be sure whether a suspected account really is a gil seller or buyer. They are doing such investigations, but that takes both time and manpower. The manpower costs money so is always going to be limited enough that there's likely a backlog that adds even more time. The gil-sellers know that all that gives them time enough to make the profit they need, so it remains a viable business.
The third group of accounts on the other hand (the spammers) should be very easy to identify. Add a "Report Spam" option to the chatbox right-click menu. Have it send a copy of the message that was reported to the group that investigates this. Because the tool itself would be providing the message straight from the chat system, there's no further investigation needed to verify if the person really sent what the reporting player said they did. The GM who gets the report can tell at a glance that it's spam just as quickly as we can tell ourselves when we get these messages. The account could then be banned immediately.
If they also add in the rule Sacred-Oblivion mentioned, where the system automatically identifies when several such reports have been made and cuts off their chat privileges pending investigation of those reports, then it doesn't even have to wait for a GM to get to it and spend the couple seconds it would take him/her to glance at the report, verify that it's indeed spam, and ban the account.
With proper tools in place within the game software, when a gil-seller gets a spam account, they'd be able to send off maybe half a dozen tells before their chat privileges are cut off. Then the account itself would be banned within minutes, all without requiring more than a couple seconds of a GM's time to glance at one of their messages and verify that yes, it's spam. Only a tiny minority of players receiving these messages react by deciding to go to the gil-seller's website and give them money, so it takes a lot of such ads before the gil-seller makes any profit from them. If each advertising account they set up can only send a few messages, then it would take a lot of accounts before they get a single customer out of it. As soon as the cost of setting up new accounts exceeds the profit they anticipate getting from those ads, then the ads will stop. (Or at least they'd stop in-game. They'd move the advertising onto third party websites, where at least its less intrusive.) -
03-13-2014, 07:19 AMNaberrieNot necessarily. They don't need to have the product to advertise it.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheSmoo
A lot of what they do is hacking. There's a reason they spam these links. A player clicks on one, or types it into their browser. Maybe they're just curious about prices. Maybe they're actually considering buying gil. They visit the site.
At this point the damage is done. They've just initiated malware install on their system. Next time they login a keylogger has recorded their information. They're now hacked. The RMT takes control of their account, strips it of gil, sells what it can, uses it for more spam. Like the malware the user installed, it perpetuates itself.
They will always have gil because there's always someone stupid enough to go to the sites.
The only way to ever end RMT, and I do mean the only way, is to end the demand for gil. If there's no market to sell to, there will be no sellers. Just. Stop. Buying. That is the only way to end it. -
03-13-2014, 08:53 PMHitokirinomadNo, ending the demand for gil means to not have an economy. As long as there is an economy, there will be a demand for gil. The BEST way to end RMT is for SE to sell gil themselves (a la Eve Online). A good (but much more difficult) way would be for SE to fix their economy by allowing actual gil fountains within the game itself, or at least reduce the heaviness of the gil sinks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Naberrie
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03-13-2014, 09:00 PMGeryth
There are other ways to combat this though. We know gil sellers will continue making accounts. We know people will continue buying gil. What do people complain about though? It's the /tell spam we all get every single hour we're logged in. It's the most horrid in this game as I've ever seen in an MMO. That is something that can be easily fixed by some simple solutions:
- First, limit the chat capabilities of accounts with no characters over level 5. Take away their ability to /tell anyone unless they are mutual friends and unless someone /tells them first. This should have minimal impact on any real people playing and starting the game, and it will inconvenience the RMT's and make them have to spend more time getting a spam bot set up. And time is money, so that will hurt their pockets.
- Second, limit the amount of tells someone is able to send out in a small amount of time. If someone sends more than 15 tells within 3 seconds, lock them to a timer so they can't send anymore for a minute or two.
- Couple the above with a report spam feature as mentioned by Sacred-Oblivion. If their /tells hit a certain percentage that gets reported (say 70% after a total of 15 messages), then ban the account from chatting completely until an investigation concludes.
Congrats, SE, without a whole lot of effort, reduces RMT spam to near nothing, because it will NOT be profitable for the RMT's to spend $15 on a new account just to be able to advertise to a handful of people, and they'll eventually stop completely.
The RMT spam will migrate to other means and you'll probably only ever see lowbies standing in major cities spamming /s, which the report spam should also shut down relatively quickly. But your ignore list will be useful for toxic players and not just an RMT name bank. -
03-13-2014, 09:13 PMHusband
There is a really simple solution to RMT.
Remove all references to gil from the game.
Make players farm stuff they want themselves.
Make all gear tradeable.....
... Then change the market board so people can just "list" gear they want to give away for free when they are done with it.
Crafter's can still craft and help their friends. They can't make gil? So what. Do it for fun. Farm materials and craft. You will be needed to help supply your FC giving the jobs meaning.
Gil is a redundant concept. Let's banish it forever.
No cost. No gil. No RMT. No problem. -
03-13-2014, 10:01 PMGerythRMT just shifts into gear in your system. $10 cheap gear! Fast delivery! Lowbie sets, mid-game sets, and best crafted end-game sets! Stock your entire FC for a $500 bulk sale!Quote:
Originally Posted by Husband
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03-13-2014, 10:06 PMMladenaught
I am vigilant at removing any and every one of them Gil sellers that pops up in the chat by blacklisting and reporting, and it takes no more than up to a minute. However, I am not sure if a subcommand 'Report RMT' would do any good without a small team of GMs hunting those characters down to the source and locking them out instantly and permanently.
So the deal would be simple, wear them out swiftly enough where their business couldn't stand perpetual new account purchasing, abusing /tell to the benefit of in-game advertising, while retaining our freedom of communication.
A sound plan? -
03-13-2014, 10:12 PMGerythThis could do a ton of good without any action needed from a GM. As I said, there's no reason to let someone send 100 tells in 10 seconds. That should be easy to catch and halt. Second, a "report RMT" button could easily record that the tells are coming from said account are illegal advertisement. If 70% of of the messages it sends are reported RMT, the game could shut off that accounts ability to talk completely.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mladenaught
Easy peasy, the problematic RMT spammer is left unable to ruin peoples' day and the time consuming and harder process of banning the account can take it's normal course. -
03-14-2014, 01:54 AMNiwashiI don't agree with this part. New players entering the game for the first time very frequently have questions they want to ask and are looking for other players to make friends with. They're among the most likely of anyone in the game to want to have a /tell conversation with someone. I think you're wrong about it being a "minimal impact". The impact could be huge.Quote:
Originally Posted by Geryth
I don't think it should allow 15 tells in 3 seconds in the first place. The /tell command should itself have something like a 1 second cooldown. I can't think of any legitimate, non-spam reason for sending multiple tells in the same second.Quote:
Originally Posted by Geryth
I agree with the Report Spam option and with automatically blocking chat when several such reports come in, but I think it should be a set number of reports rather than a percentage. These RMT guys are good at figuring out what rules are being used and finding ways of getting around them. If it's a percentage of messages they send, then they'd just need to send some other messages that don't clearly look like spam and serve no purpose but to dilute that percentage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Geryth
They already have such a team. It would be the GMs that are already getting reports when players take the time to fill one out. This tool would mean a greater number of reports, but at the same time make handling those reports much easier/quicker for the GM team to deal with. We're basically just asking for that team to be given better tools so they can be more effective.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mladenaught
They're already doing a really good job on keeping RMT out of the shared channels like /shout and /yell where it used to show up. They apparently just don't have good enough visibility to when it shows up in private /tell messages (which of course is the reason why the RMT spam moved to /tell). So this tool would be giving that GM team the visibility into where the spam is appearing now. -
03-14-2014, 02:18 AMHusbandOuch. I didn't think of that. Guess we will have to do away with market board and trading too.....Quote:
Originally Posted by Geryth
.... Unless we keep trading to FC only.. When you have been a FC member for 10 days or more.... For example
Trying here.... -
03-14-2014, 02:34 AMNaberrieThat's like saying the best way for the police to fight drug lords is to sell drugs themselves. The best way to fight drug lords is for people to stop buying drugs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitokirinomad
I'm not saying kill the economy. SE's already done that. I'm saying people need to stop being idiots and buying gil.
If SE started to sell gil, RMT still wouldn't go anywhere. They'd simply undercut SE's own prices, and become even more ruthless in their hacking, botting and spamming. All you'd do is create an even more fierce and proactive enemy. -
03-14-2014, 03:38 AMGerythI JUST went through as a green-faced new player. Heck, I didn't even know how to /tell probably until after level 5. If I really needed help, I could stick around the major city inn area and use /say. Level 5 is really quick to get too, like an 1-2 hours of play and a good chunk of that is cinematics. I really do believe the impact of this on legitimately new players would be hardly felt at all. Remember, I didn't say to limit all forms of chat, just personal tells.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niwashi
Well it depends on how they plan on us using AddOns in the future. Let's say some FC wants to use a DKP system to hand out gear (I don't know how end game looting here works so I don't know if this scenario is valid but the concept illustrates my point). Someone might have an addon that spits out someone's DKP as a /tell if they ask for it through a /tell. For example, I might type something like /tell PlayerA mydkp and PlayerA will send /tell [Me] Your DKP is 0.. Well, what's to stop 10 people from typing /tell PlayerA mydkp at the same time? PlayerA would then send out 10 tells simultaneously. Or, what about future implementation of damage meters? Someone might code a damage meter addon to /tell each member individually their damage report. This would require an instant spit of a bunch of different /tells.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niwashi
I understand there's a practical need for a quick succession of tells. But more than 15? Not likely. Plus it's easy to differentiate scripted /tells versus human-typed /tells. Humans are capable of 1 tell per second. Not 15 per 3, unless they spammed something like <enter> a <enter> a etc. as rapidly as possible. The difference is differentiating RMT versus a useful AddOn. That comes with the report RMT feature. But I'd rather have the /tell limitations on AddOns (that we don't even have yet) than the RMT advertisements I currently get. Also, Macros can be used to send /tells too, which we DO have, I just can't see any reason for a macro to spit /tell to that many people though.
Good points. Yeah, it would probably be better to have stop it at a certain number rather than a percentage, but if you do that then the number needs to reset at some point. People make mistakes, it probably wouldn't be uncommon for someone to receive 30 accidental spam reports over a year of playing or something if they talk a lot. 30 reports in 1 day = RMT. 30 reports over 12 months, probably not.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niwashi