Why can't we have the same anti-spam feature that WoW has?

Years ago in my WoW days I use to get a lot of RMT spam too. Then in one patch a system was implemented where after receiving spam you follow these steps:

1) Right-click their name and select "Report Spam"
2) ???
3) Profit.

That's it. The report spam feature delivered all the information the GMs needed to investigate the matter. And if at least 5 people reported someone for spam, then that person was prevented from using the chat stream on every character until an investigation happened.

This system worked. The number of RMT spam I received afterwards went to almost 0% -- It didn't eliminate them entirely but the difference in frequency was huge. So I'm seriously asking, why can't we have a feature like this?

OMG I so wish they would implement that feature here. Today of all days seems to be RMT hell for spams. Must have cleaned house and starting attacks in full force.

most times these days whenever I go to block gil spam I get the message "a player with this name does not exist"


I also clean out my blacklist every 2 days or so, and I never see repeat names spamming again. Whatever they are doing, its working.

I've said the same for months now. On Behemoth it seemed to slow down a bit a few weeks ago but the last few days have been absurd. There's an RMT spam every few minutes. To the point where I'm missing LS messages because they're getting bumped out of the chat window so fast.

They also need to, when you block someone, they remove the messages too...i still have to scroll up and find even after blocking
and i have to have my chat box a bit small.

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Originally Posted by Moheeheeko

most times these days whenever I go to block gil spam I get the message "a player with this name does not exist"


I also clean out my blacklist every 2 days or so, and I never see repeat names spamming again. Whatever they are doing, its working.

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When you do get that "player with this name does not exist" message it's because they've finished advertising on that character and have deleted it. So in other words, by not blocking them right away you've just enabled them to accomplish what they wanted to do.

Receiving spam every 20-30 mins is indicating of a broken system. This is not something we should have to tolerate in an MMO in the same way we have to tolerate other unsavory people.

They also made it where they were it was required to be level 10 on their character to whisper.

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Originally Posted by Sacred-Oblivion

Receiving spam every 20-30 mins is indicating of a broken system. This is not something we should have to tolerate in an MMO in the same way we have to tolerate other unsavory people.

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I was online most of the night yesterday and got maybe 1 tell. And last I checked they dont spam in /shout at all anymore.

They are working on it. Fighting RMT spam is a neverending battle, heck wow has been around for nearly a decade and they still have RMT spam.

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Originally Posted by SeekerScorpio

They also made it where they were it was required to be level 10 on their character to whisper.

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I know that this statement is false for during the time I played. I can't say if WoW has this implemented now, but if it does then they did it for another reason because stopping low lvl chars from whispering wasn't necessary to stop RMT spam during the time I played.

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Originally Posted by Moheeheeko

I was online most of the night yesterday and got maybe 1 tell. And last I checked they dont spam in /shout at all anymore.

They are working on it. Fighting RMT spam is a neverending battle, heck wow has been around for nearly a decade and they still have RMT spam.

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I'm getting tells every 20-30 minutes. Sometimes less or more frequent than that. And WoW does not have the RMT spam problem that FF14 has. On WoW I'd get spammed maybe once a month, and then when you compare that to how often we get spammed on here... Why would you be content with the way things are?

There is a practical solution to this problem. It's not just a never-ending nuisance that we have to put up with.

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Originally Posted by Sacred-Oblivion

I know that this statement is false for during the time I played. I can't say if WoW has this implemented now, but if it does then they did it for another reason because stopping low lvl chars from whispering wasn't necessary to stop RMT spam during the time I played.

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they implemented this during early cataclysm... they may have taken it out when the whole panda expansion came out, but definitely was the case then, was trying to whisper friends while starting on twinks.... yeah nope. It got to the point where a lot of them were botting to 10 and took the same path route. Hell I remember making a character in northshire (starting human location) and seeing them take the exact path all the time to level... it was funny see a good amount vanish after the 1st or 2nd quest.

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Originally Posted by SeekerScorpio

they implemented this during early cataclysm... they may have taken it out when the whole panda expansion came out, but definitely was the case then, was trying to whisper friends while starting on twinks.... yeah nope. It got to the point where a lot of them were botting to 10 and took the same path route. Hell I remember making a character in northshire (starting human location) and seeing them take the exact path all the time to level... it was funny see a good amount vanish after the 1st or 2nd quest.

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Are you sure you weren't playing on a Free Trial account at that time? The trial accounts have certain limitations, and iirc the inability to send tells is one of them.

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Originally Posted by Sacred-Oblivion

I'm getting tells every 20-30 minutes. Sometimes less or more frequent than that. And WoW does not have the RMT spam problem that FF14 has. On WoW I'd get spammed maybe once a month, and then when you compare that to how often we get spammed on here... Why would you be content with the way things are?

There is a practical solution to this problem. It's not just a never-ending nuisance that we have to put up with.

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Once a month on WoW? You must've played on a dead server. Most servers it's about the same as here. 20-30 minutes. The only difference was WoW blocked the account from spam (until you logged out) instead of ignoring the player. Also in WoW, you have flying dead player advertising like a giant undead billboard, plus /say all the time.

I'm still patiently waiting for addons, in WoW one of my favorites was BadBoy which filtered all RMT tells from your log and automatically reported them.

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Originally Posted by Nikita

I'm still patiently waiting for addons, in WoW one of my favorites was BadBoy which filtered all RMT tells from your log and automatically reported them.

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Sadly from what I have heard (all rumor of course) is that addons in FFXIV might just be interfacing skinning.

Yeah WoWs system to stop spam was pretty amazing. Very very rarely did I ever get a whisper of any kind, and I played on Stormrage US (alliance) which is like top 5 for largest servers the game has out of hundreds.

If you want WoW features. Go back to WoW.

*oh sorry, was trying to be like one of those people that say go back to FFXI for suggesting FFXI features :D*


Not a bad Idea.

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Originally Posted by DragonFlyy

Sadly from what I have heard (all rumor of course) is that addons in FFXIV might just be interfacing skinning.

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All I've really heard about addon implementation was the following:

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Sonomaa (BG): In the 2.0 PDFs, addons were highlighted as something you want to see happen. Tanaka said the same about addons early in XIV's development but we never saw anything come out from it. Will you be releasing a developer kit to help create new addons for the game and show you're fully supported in evaluating and balancing addons? I know one of the most asked ones is a parser for people who like to min/max their damage, and just customizing the screen to look more like what players want.

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Square-Enix: Rather than XML or LUA, like World of Warcraft is using, we're thinking of provide this in Flash simply to make it more visual. We'll be preparing a dev kit and providing that with help for the players. Once we get closer to the release of the dev kit (before it's even released), we will talk to the community and show what we have planned to put in it - UI engine, what we're providing - and then we can get feedback. So you could say, "This is not going to be enough, we need this," so we can get that feedback and get as close to what the community wants as possible.

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http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/107...-Transcription

I honestly don't know why this was not implemented at launch, let alone being discussed as might happen in the future
It shouldn't be up to a player to routinely edit their blacklist to clear out old rmt to add new ones,
I've never known any mmo that makes it such a convoluted process to report someone for illegal activities

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Originally Posted by Sacred-Oblivion

That's it. The report spam feature delivered all the information the GMs needed to investigate the matter. And if at least 5 people reported someone for spam, then that person was prevented from using the chat stream on every character until an investigation happened.

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This part we would want to be very careful with, and consider being a lot more lenient with. I've seen it on other MMOs where groups would simply decide they don't like what another player is saying in regional/party/global chat, and coordinate to get them silenced, just because they can. Stopping RMT is good. Enabling bullying is bad.

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Originally Posted by SeekerScorpio

They also made it where they were it was required to be level 10 on their character to whisper.

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Yep, that started around the same time they made it F2P up to level 20(?).

They also gave players the option to choose what level someone had to be in order to send them a tell. This occurred sometime around WotLK launch. The option could be adjusted at any time the player chose to do so.

I've been asking for this option in FF14 ARR for a couple months now. I'm guessing SE is ignoring my requests because they think it will reduce RMT reports. It won't reduce my reports, because I stopped wasting my time on them after 6 months of doing so. RMT is just as bad as it was at launch, the only thing that changed was their switch to a more personal approach....

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Originally Posted by fixitman

Yep, that started around the same time they made it F2P up to level 20(?).

They also gave players the option to choose what level someone had to be in order to send them a tell. This occurred sometime around WotLK launch. The option could be adjusted at any time the player chose to do so.

I've been asking for this option in FF14 ARR for a couple months now. I'm guessing SE is ignoring my requests because they think it will reduce RMT reports. It won't reduce my reports, because I stopped wasting my time on them after 6 months of doing so. RMT is just as bad as it was at launch, the only thing that changed was their switch to a more personal approach....

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Personal approach, you mean the "hey how are you? By the way buy..."
I swear every time I see an rmt spam another hair goes grey, I will be white by November

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Originally Posted by DragonFlyy

Once a month on WoW? You must've played on a dead server. Most servers it's about the same as here. 20-30 minutes. The only difference was WoW blocked the account from spam (until you logged out) instead of ignoring the player. Also in WoW, you have flying dead player advertising like a giant undead billboard, plus /say all the time.

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Actually, I played on Gorefiend which is a medium populated server. Before WoW implemented their anti-spam system the frequency of RMT spam was comparable to FF14, but since then it has become very rare to receive them (eg 1/month) since the spammers are blocked from using the chat stream after their first few spam messages. This is why their system is so effective at reducing them. And I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "flying dead player advertising like a giant undead billboard" -- This was something I've never seen or heard of throughout my years of playing and I've trolled the forums quite regularly. Seriously, that comment makes me suspect that you're just a troll making things up, which means I've just wasted a precious 2 minutes to quote and respond to you. D'oh.

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Originally Posted by Seschat

This part we would want to be very careful with, and consider being a lot more lenient with. I've seen it on other MMOs where groups would simply decide they don't like what another player is saying in regional/party/global chat, and coordinate to get them silenced, just because they can. Stopping RMT is good. Enabling bullying is bad.

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This is a legitimate concern, but throughout my years of playing and trolling the forums I've never heard of a single instance of someone innocent being abused by this system. You can easily mitigate this by increasing the number of allowable spam reports before restricting an account's chat privileges temporarily. Once an Admin investigates the matter they'll know right away if the reporters were just bullying someone. Obviously anyone who abuses the system would need to be punished... And obviously that punishment should be to de-level all of their classes by one level...

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Originally Posted by Sacred-Oblivion

Years ago in my WoW days I use to get a lot of RMT spam too. Then in one patch a system was implemented where after receiving spam you follow these steps:

1) Right-click their name and select "Report Spam"
2) ???
3) Profit.

That's it. The report spam feature delivered all the information the GMs needed to investigate the matter. And if at least 5 people reported someone for spam, then that person was prevented from using the chat stream on every character until an investigation happened.

This system worked. The number of RMT spam I received afterwards went to almost 0% -- It didn't eliminate them entirely but the difference in frequency was huge. So I'm seriously asking, why can't we have a feature like this?

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That would mean World of Warcraft is still ahead of the curb in terms of dealing with bots but some companies don't like to admit to it and try to solve a problem on there own that they never truly fix properly.

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Originally Posted by fixitman

Yep, that started around the same time they made it F2P up to level 20(?).

They also gave players the option to choose what level someone had to be in order to send them a tell. This occurred sometime around WotLK launch. The option could be adjusted at any time the player chose to do so.

I've been asking for this option in FF14 ARR for a couple months now. I'm guessing SE is ignoring my requests because they think it will reduce RMT reports. It won't reduce my reports, because I stopped wasting my time on them after 6 months of doing so. RMT is just as bad as it was at launch, the only thing that changed was their switch to a more personal approach....

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Good to see someone else knew what I was talking about. Ole boy earlier said I got confused with trial... I played since vanilla, heavily in TBC... I have a good to decent memory over the course of game (everything before firelands in cata).

I think there are a few easy fixes for the gil spammers:
1) Report Spam, and after the same character gets 10 or more they instantly get locked (the entire account not just the character) until reviewed by SE
2) Limit number of tells per minute to 6-7 or something like that, there is no reason you need to send more than 6-7 in a min to different people (perhaps this should be as high as 8 so you can message everyone for getting a full group together)
3) Limit new characters to not be able to shout or tell for the first 30min (or more), this prevents spammers from just making a new character right away to get to spamming again

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Originally Posted by Kelthos

I think there are a few easy fixes for the gil spammers:
1) Report Spam, and after the same character gets 10 or more they instantly get locked (the entire account not just the character) until reviewed by SE
2) Limit number of tells per minute to 6-7 or something like that, there is no reason you need to send more than 6-7 in a min to different people (perhaps this should be as high as 8 so you can message everyone for getting a full group together)
3) Limit new characters to not be able to shout or tell for the first 30min (or more), this prevents spammers from just making a new character right away to get to spamming again

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To number 2 would really hurt the players of the community to greatly as many people like to chat in tells and prefer not to have clutter at times when discussing certain matters that come up to the general public.

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Originally Posted by Inosaska

To number 2 would really hurt the players of the community to greatly as many people like to chat in tells and prefer not to have clutter at times when discussing certain matters that come up to the general public.

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Are you really sending more than 7 tells in a minute though, thats more than 1 every 10 seconds, and i wasn't saying total lock out of chat if you try to send more than that, just to block if the user trys to send more than that and have to wait the few seconds. It could even be pushed to 12 so you can send 1 every 5 seconds should be more than enough for normal use.

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Originally Posted by Sacred-Oblivion

And I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "flying dead player advertising like a giant undead billboard" -- This was something I've never seen or heard of throughout my years of playing and I've trolled the forums quite regularly. Seriously, that comment makes me suspect that you're just a troll making things up, which means I've just wasted a precious 2 minutes to quote and respond to you. D'oh.

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The dead player advertising wasn't that common but I saw it a few times in Orgrimmar(Crushridge server). They would spell out the name of some goldseller site with dead bodies. Usually they appeared on the ground, but sometimes they'd be floating in the air.

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Originally Posted by RandMierdin

The dead player advertising wasn't that common but I saw it a few times in Orgrimmar(Crushridge server). They would spell out the name of some goldseller site with dead bodies. Usually they appeared on the ground, but sometimes they'd be floating in the air.

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Wow, that's actually borderline hilarious. They can't annoy players by spamming them directly so they resort to spending all that time positioning character bodies into a recognizable pattern. I'd happily trade spam tells for that.