RMT: Time to start banning IP addresses

It's nice to see the news on the launcher about how you folks at Square Enix are taking action against accounts involved in RMT and that the action you are taking is banning them. The problem is that, particularly of late, the are more and more RMT spammers in the game. Some, like gkplayer.com, are changing the character they spam with as often as every 15 minutes.

If this keeps up, we won't have the time to delete old names from our Blacklists to make room for the new ones.

Clearly, your strategy of banning accounts is a failure, despite your intentions. I'm not going to take the cynical stance of suggesting that you're making good money off RMT traders whose accounts you ban over and over. If this game has 1.8 million subs, then the revenue generated for you by RMT accounts is minimal.

The only way you're going to make any headway is to start banning the IP addresses of those banned accounts, the same addresses that are being used over and over by these nuisances.

I guess you never heard of IP address spoofing

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Originally Posted by Shirai

I guess you never heard of IP address spoofing

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+1

And not everyone has a static IP. There are a lot of ISPs issuing dynamic IPs to residential address users.

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Originally Posted by Ooshima

+1

And not everyone has a static IP. There are a lot of ISPs issuing dynamic IPs to residential address users.

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yes yes and dynamic IP is common now a day from ISP, you can get it for free now and include in the pack

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Originally Posted by Shirai

I guess you never heard of IP address spoofing

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Sure I have. Maybe you should have read down to the part of that article that talks about neutralizing IP spoofers. If Square Enix is pulling in north of $25 million/month from OUR subscription fees, they can easily out-spend whatever any gold-seller business would be able to counter them with. On top of that, it's the sort of network security work Square Enix should be doing to protect our account information from the sort of disaster that happened to Sony Online Entertainment had a few years back when their system got hacked and 77 million people had their account data stolen. Given the amount of subterfuge any serious cyber-criminals would take in hiding where they would be attacking from, what any RMT companies could do would probably look negligible.

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Originally Posted by Shirai

I guess you never heard of IP address spoofing

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IP spoofing isn't really ideal for receiving packets, only sending. It's really not practical, if even possible, to spoof one's IP to play this game without receiving any packets.

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Originally Posted by Ooshima

+1
And not everyone has a static IP. There are a lot of ISPs issuing dynamic IPs to residential address users.

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-1 For that Spoofing... that won´t work ^^

ok, it would work, but is not a efficient approach on that ^^

Most RMT use VPN services like battleping, pingzapper or WTFPing.
If you ban those IPs you would piss off a lot of people ... trust me on that one :)

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Originally Posted by Sepix

Most RMT use VPN services like battleping, pingzapper or WTFPing.
If you ban those IPs you would piss off a lot of people ... trust me on that one :)

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Same thing for players who happened to have ISPs that issues dynamic IP addresses.

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Originally Posted by Ooshima

Same thing for players who happened to have ISPs that issues dynamic IP addresses.

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I think dynamic IPs would be less of an issue. If someone happens to get a banned IP all they have to do is reset their modem. Although I think banning IPs is not really a solution because there is always ways around IP bans.

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Originally Posted by EllemEnopee

what any RMT companies could do would probably look negligible.

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You are severely underestimating what these guys are capable of.
This isn't a bunch of amateurs that is out to make a statement or make a little extra pocket money.

This is their living, their daily bread and they will do anything to keep their business going.
These guys are capable of programming bots to perform certain actions in this game, they are able to make a program that sends tells to thoudsands of online players, multiple times in a matter of minutes.
And you don't think them capable of doing something as simple as masking their IP addresses?

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Originally Posted by Kunihiro

I think dynamic IPs would be less of an issue. If someone happens to get a banned IP all they have to do is reset their modem. Although I think banning IPs is not really a solution because there is always ways around IP bans.

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Um, no, resetting the modem fixes nothing, it simply exacerbates the problem because the user likely gets yet another IP address which also will get banned.

IP banning is a total FAIL when trying to deal with this, or most other problems trying to target specific end-users .. forums generally don't use IP banning to deal with trolls for the same reason, it rarely works.

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Originally Posted by Kunihiro

I think dynamic IPs would be less of an issue. If someone happens to get a banned IP all they have to do is reset their modem. Although I think banning IPs is not really a solution because there is always ways around IP bans.

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Reseting the modem doesn't guarantee that a dynamic IP address changes, it's dependant on ISP's DHCP configuration. And it's like you said, it doesn't work, IP banning is so early half of last decade.

Best solution is still to give a /tell filter to player, filter based on friend list, FC, whitelist, combination of them or allow all.

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Originally Posted by Shirai

You are severely underestimating what these guys are capable of.
This isn't a bunch of amateurs that is out to make a statement or make a little extra pocket money.

This is their living, their daily bread and they will do anything to keep their business going.
These guys are capable of programming bots to perform certain actions in this game, they are able to make a program that sends tells to thoudsands of online players, multiple times in a matter of minutes.
And you don't think them capable of doing something as simple as masking their IP addresses?

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No I don't think they're capable. It doesn't take much skill to make a bot.

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Originally Posted by Kunihiro

I think dynamic IPs would be less of an issue. If someone happens to get a banned IP all they have to do is reset their modem. Although I think banning IPs is not really a solution because there is always ways around IP bans.

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and how is that a solution? I for one would be immensely pissed if I have to keep restarting my modem just to get into the game.

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Originally Posted by Kunihiro

No I don't think they're capable. It doesn't take much skill to make a bot.

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And it takes even less skill to mask or spoof an IP address.

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Originally Posted by Kunihiro

No I don't think they're capable. It doesn't take much skill to make a bot.

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Well, then you are certainly underestimating them.

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Originally Posted by Shirai

And it takes even less skill to mask or spoof an IP address.

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The process of spoofing an IP consists of modifying the source IP in the packet header, a IP that is not the IP you're sending it from. So when the server proceeds to send a response packet to the sender, it doesn't go to the fake sender. You can't play the game only sending packets.

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Originally Posted by Kunihiro

The process of spoofing an IP consists of modifying the source IP in the packet header, a IP that is not the IP you're sending it from. So when the server proceeds to send a response packet to the sender, it doesn't go to the fake sender. You can't play the game only sending packets.

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a simple proxy or VPN would do the job of masking your own IP.

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Originally Posted by Kunihiro

I think dynamic IPs would be less of an issue. If someone happens to get a banned IP all they have to do is reset their modem. Although I think banning IPs is not really a solution because there is always ways around IP bans.

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Not necessary though. It depends on how many IPs does the ISP has versus the amount of subscribers they have. Generally, ISPs will push the IP:Subscribers ratio as much as they could, so at times, especially peak times, resetting modem or attempting to reset IP via command prompt doesn't end up changing your IP.

Had such experiences before in other games as my country's ISPs are on dynamic. Tried resetting modem/using command prompt at times doesn't help. End up I have to write long explanations to the GMs in order to get my account unbanned. :(

Only way anything IP related will work is by contacting the offender's ISP and having them block access to XIV for the offending client.

Fight fire with fire (use illegal methods, while backing them up in ToS)! Problem solved.

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Originally Posted by IzumiRaito

Fight fire with fire (use illegal methods, while backing them up in ToS)! Problem solved.

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Egging on the types of people who make their living off of such sleazy and leech-like methods by purposely trying to tick them off via illegal methods is like asking to go through the rest of your life with a headache.

Banning IPs is impractical; all it does is start to overflow onto innocent players who don't know how to fix the problem, and even then, they shouldn't have to worry about it. "Elminating" RMT is far from practical simply because the people who do it will not give up. They're persistent. In the meantime, the best that can be done is banning accounts convicted of RMT while anti-RMT measures are implemented and for us (the players) to take proper measures to avoid engaging with RMT.

Or player's could stop buying from them that be great to...

Why not setup a program where if they Send /tell to 10 people in a few seconds it mutes them for 2 days.

or

As I said before, Free Company, Link Shell, Friends List, Check Mark box in Options if I turn it on, I can only get tells from the three things I mentioned, this gives people a option if they wanna keep getting tells from strangers and RMT at same time or NO rmt

The way I see it if we wanted to talk to someone we have the /say option

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Originally Posted by Sheer

"Elminating" RMT is far from practical simply because the people who do it will not give up.

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^
This, absolutely.

No matter what you try, they will find ways to go around it.
As I said earlier in the thread, these people don't RMT for an extra pile of money, it is their income, their daily bread and rice and they will stop at nothing to keep their business up and running.

The most effective way to handle them is to keep banning them, their banks, their farmers and the buyers they can connect to them.

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Originally Posted by Shirai

No matter what you try, they will find ways to go around it.

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*nods*

I suspect there is more RMT on NA servers as they seem to be the biggest customers, so logically the RMT would target the servers with the biggest turnover.
(People saying they are 200/200 on blacklists are all from NA servers it seems)

No profit, no business... please don't buy services from RMTs ... if they have no customers they will leave right? ^^;;;;;

ITT: OP doesn't understand IP addresses.

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Originally Posted by Shirai

You are severely underestimating what these guys are capable of.
This isn't a bunch of amateurs that is out to make a statement or make a little extra pocket money.

This is their living, their daily bread and they will do anything to keep their business going.
These guys are capable of programming bots to perform certain actions in this game, they are able to make a program that sends tells to thoudsands of online players, multiple times in a matter of minutes.
And you don't think them capable of doing something as simple as masking their IP addresses?

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I'm hardly a skilled "hacker" yet I program for a living and I make over 60k a year for an extremely secure job with fantastic benefits. Oh, and it's all legal and I don't have to worry about police knocking on my door at any moment. If these people had any real skills they wouldn't need to spend their time creating bots that spam whispers to everyone for a RMT site. They would get a legitimate job making legitimate money. I hardly expect anything they are doing is extremely complicated.

Also, if you have two accounts in the same house, your evil brother can get you banned?

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Originally Posted by Geryth

I'm hardly a skilled "hacker" yet I program for a living and I make over 60k a year for an extremely secure job with fantastic benefits. Oh, and it's all legal and I don't have to worry about police knocking on my door at any moment. If these people had any real skills they wouldn't need to spend their time creating bots that spam whispers to everyone for a RMT site. They would get a legitimate job making legitimate money. I hardly expect anything they are doing is extremely complicated.

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Flaunting around with your sallary sais nothing, while you sit safely and comfortably in your desk chair with your education and carreer oportunities the people resorting to RMT usually have nothing of that.
Most of them don't live in countries with those oportunities.

By the way, I make about the same as you doing retail automation. /notimpressed

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Originally Posted by Shirai

Flaunting around with your sallary sais nothing, while you sit safely and comfortably in your desk chair with your education and carreer oportunities the people resorting to RMT usually have nothing of that.
Most of them don't live in countries with those oportunities.

By the way, I make about the same as you doing retail automation. /notimpressed

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I made my education and career opportunities happen. I didn't get a dime from anyone for my education. I worked two jobs for 60 hour work weeks AND going to school full time, living on 5 hours of sleep a night if I was lucky. And because of terrible college choices, I basically had to start over as a freshman after I was already a junior, and I have nothing but an Associates Degree to my name after over 120 credit hours. I worked my way up from dirt nothing and gained myself a career in the midst of a terrible economic recession where every employer wanted a bachelors degree and 10 years experience.

You can point your finger at economic "privilege" all you want, I worked damn too hard for what I have to be phased by your /notimpressed.

And if these people you're talking about had half that work ethic, they could have the same.

They would have to ban the source of IPs, much like SE swept banned Korea to get rid of a majaority of the RMT and DDoSers in XI which sadly affected legit users who played from there. (Huh Korea? Exactly, RMT is actually Korean/Japanese and American largely.)

So banning IPs does nothing - They'd have to regionally ban which could be bad.

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Originally Posted by Niqote

No profit, no business... please don't buy services from RMTs ... if they have no customers they will leave right? ^^;;;;;

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It will help, but for John Doe who lives in Imaginary Land, to simply update a script that creates bots and launches tens if not hundreds of them into the game, it's not a problem. Developers can only have so much hindsight as to what bots will do and how they will perform. Past that, it's all a game of tug-of-war. Each time one side pulls, the other has to pull back, and it's unfortunately the case that developers tend to fall on the reactive side - this isn't their own fault, it's just that there's so many different ways to execute a script/program and mask it that it's nigh on impossible for them to fully prepare for whatever bot programs are thrown at them.

Of course, if every single legitimate account didn't get involved in RMT, then of course the numbers would decrease. But let's put this in perspective as to how fragile the balance is: Yoshi-P recently talked about how there's 500,000 daily active users each day. If eight of those 500,000 buys $20 worth of gil from a particular bot vendor, then the the person behind the bots has had a pretty good work day. So imagine getting "To Crush Your Enemies VI" on ten different accounts in a single day, and then imagine just eight of those MoBs. That's how many it takes to tip the balance in favor of the bots. Not to mention - I doubt they're doing this just for ARR, so it doesn't even have to be just eight people. If they have bots on two games then it takes just four people. Or if they're on four games, then just two people.

It's a difficult issue where, if every single person who plays the game was actually innocent, it would be much less of a problem if one at all. But unfortunately, it's not the case.

Well seeing as RMT is a huge plague on MMOs in general, they will be making a fortune, I wouldn't be surprised if the bigger companies actually have IP ranges leased and their own DHCP server (jut get a Linux install on a PC and download the DHCP package to avoid excess costs, low power but you don't need much) and they can then get around any IP bans, if they don't do this they would just use a VPN or proxy, anyone can get round IP bans.

Personally for the OP I would have mentioned MAC banning first, but anyone can still spoof a MAC address and get around that as well.

Also Geryth, your holier than thou speech is very inappropriate, try going to China, Korea etc, the places where the most RMT are and bascally say "Get a job", there would be a lot of people really offended by your attitude, the fact is you got lucky if everything you have said is true (going by my personal experiences looking for work) I remember 2 years looking for work, 2 years of "well your skills are better than what we would expect, and yes you would fit the role perfectly, however one other candidate had more experience" tells me you got lucky.

If players would just stop buying then the RMT's would have no market. The south park episode where they wanted to kill the Wal-mart comes to mind. When they found the heart of the Wal-mart it was just a mirror for them to see themselves in.

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Originally Posted by Geryth

All of this

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Please show some class. Lots of us have done the same thing, but many are not so lucky, regardless of how much "hard work" they put in. That's just a fact. You're being inconsiderate to not only other players, but people in general. And frankly, none of what you have said in this thread has anything to do with this topic.

OP, I'm sorry, but that solution would not be viable in any way, and would end up hurting more customers than it helps. There is no "solution". This has been a problem for years in many MMO's and they all have the same general ways of handling it. There will never be a way to stop it. I would love to see a documentary on the daily life of an RMT company employee. Seriously, it could educate people on tactics they use, and in general what their daily lives are like.

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Originally Posted by Tupsi

(Huh Korea? Exactly, RMT is actually Korean/Japanese and American largely.)

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Add Filipino players. *Cough* Tonberry *Cough*

RMT would just adapt. It's what they do. They'd find ways around the IP ban. Meanwhile, the innocent affected by the IP ban would be the ones truly affected. You'd only slow RMT down for, at best, a day. Probably not even that.