RMT Menu Option

I did a search and didn't really see a thread on this yet.
I would like to request a new menu for RMT.

The concept is simple. Put it right below the current "Add to Blacklist" menu when selecting someone's name in chat. Is would do the following things.
1. Put the player under "BlackList" a new section for RMT only though, which would have up to 200 entries.
2. It would fill out a report cheating and submit it automatically. The current report cheating requires: World, Zone, Date, Character Name, and Detail. You can paste the /tell message content directly into the "Detail" section.

This is pretty much it. I currently have 150 names on my blacklist, all of them are RMT whispers. Copying and Pasting all of this information is quite frankly too cumbersome to keep up on. This menu option would allow people to do it one click. I realize that it has potential for abuse, but no more so than someone filling the form out manually today.

This could be so much simpler.

1. The option would be called "Report Spam", put right under the "Add to Blacklist" function.
2. Clicking it would put the player on a temporary blacklist that only exists until you logout - so you never have to worry about it filling up.
3. In addition, it would file a report so that the RMT spammers can finally be banned - only like 5 out of 200 spammers on my blacklist are "(deleted)", which makes it look like SE doesn't do a thing.

In addition: I get the same two sites spammed all the time. How hard can it be to just go through the chat text, replace "0" with "o", "|-|" with "h", "," with ".", remove the spaces, and then match against the spammed domain names? That's 10-15 lines of code - in C.

If SE did that, this game would have so much less spam - right now I'm getting more spam than any other game I've seen - and even more spam than I find in my emails.

there are a couple threads about this but +1 on this one as well this is a reaaaaaly needed feature

Yes we really need that feature.

It sucks to have to un-blacklist dozens of RMTs just to be able to blacklist the ones that are bothering you now...

And it is even worse that 99% of the RMTs are not even being banned.

yea i've actually had it happen to where i deleted one of the people on my blacklist from the top (had been there for weeks) and the next tell was from that same person it's a bit atrocious how long these accounts stay unbanned :(

i say that they should just have the selection of rather than "blacklist" have a "report RMT" option. I figure this would expedite the process of doing what ever they do to RMT. On SE end i think when this selection is made it copies the message that was sent whether it was a shout or tell and send it to the GM and that way they dont't get people doing it to people to just get them in trouble. Sort of ensuring that no one gets tangled up in any sort of collateral damage from just some blind RMT reporting.

There are a million ways they could go about fixing the RMT spam. Pick one and do it. The game's almost been out a year and it's only gotten worse. FIX IT!

Not trying to justify SE not banning them, but I wonder if they've done the math and figured how much money might be lost if they do this and decided, meh, they've got blacklist macros they'll be fine.

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Originally Posted by Coth_X

Not trying to justify SE not banning them, but I wonder if they've done the math and figured how much money might be lost if they do this and decided, meh, they've got blacklist macros they'll be fine.

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Sure seems like that's exactly what's happening. So many easy fixes for this and month after month nothing gets done.

I'm sure they have the text logs backed up at least a certain amount of time, and honestly "xxxaaare badlfkjalj" probably sends out gil tells if you look up the log on him.

Either they have decided on an arbitrary number for which if person A gets blacklisted x times we delete him, or they really aren't fast at it, or unfortunately, they are just gonna let it keep going :/

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Originally Posted by Coth_X

Not trying to justify SE not banning them, but I wonder if they've done the math and figured how much money might be lost if they do this and decided, meh, they've got blacklist macros they'll be fine.

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Do you mean "...and figured how much money might be made"?

If you ban the account they're using to spam, they aren't going to stop spamming... they're going to use another account. If they run out of accounts, they'll have to activate new ones. In addition to needing to purchase copies of the game, they'll also be burning up the remaining playtime on the account. So each banning brings (1) the account cost and (2) the remaining subscription time.

This is a business, they're going to want to keep advertising. A ban on one of their many accounts is not going to result in them giving up.

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Originally Posted by Nie

Do you mean "...and figured how much money might be made"?

If you ban the account they're using to spam, they aren't going to stop spamming... they're going to use another account. If they run out of accounts, they'll have to activate new ones. In addition to needing to purchase copies of the game, they'll also be burning up the remaining playtime on the account. So each banning brings (1) the account cost and (2) the remaining subscription time.

This is a business, they're going to want to keep advertising. A ban on one of their many accounts is not going to result in them giving up.

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Right this seems likely considering the 150 on just my blacklist on just my server that haven't been deleted since launch.

No, it seems they did the math alright, and that's why the only thing we got was an easier way to blacklist someone.

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Originally Posted by Coth_X

Right this seems likely considering the 150 on just my blacklist on just my server that haven't been deleted since launch.

No, it seems they did the math alright, and that's why the only thing we got was an easier way to blacklist someone.

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I think it's really a matter of not enough staff.


Ever since day one, people have been reporting spammers. Considering that a spammer will always /shout, potentially 100 people will report the very same spammer.

So when you delete the spammer based on the first report, you see "Oh, great, 99 more to go", and you NEED to check it (otherwise you're a slacker, and WE don't want that) and every time you open it "Dammit, this is the same guy", and again, and again and again.

Considering that it'd take time to open all 100 reports, the spammer will still have the time to spam, causing another 100 reports to flow in about the exact same person. If during this time another spammer enters the fray, the reports between those 2 can be mixed.

Let's say that report 1 is about "Trollface", second report about "Forever Alone", 3rd report about Trollface again, 4th about Alone, over and over again for the next 100 reports. If a report about yet another spammer, Scumbag Steve, comes in at the 101st, it'll take a helluva lot of time to reach Steve

Combine this with the multitudes of area (there are at least about 18 explorable areas), and multiply it to the number of servers available.

You can get where this is going: excessive spam reporting is potentially ruining the spam deletion program. I do encourage people to report spammers, it's the only way to tell the staff. The problem is ensuring that only one report per spammer is ever filed

It shouldn't require reports then. They should just track blacklisting. I mean if you manage to get yourself blacklisted 20 times, you either should be booted anyways, or you are rmt. Granted I can see how that could take time, but really they can't devote a small group to do this?

Or just add a basic word-list filter we can use to auto-ignore messages containing certain phrases that we can type in.

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Originally Posted by Coth_X

They should just track blacklisting.

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That's exactly what I think. When I report RMT, they act fast, but it's a pain to report, you have to copy and paste the message, put that character strange name in the subject, etc.

If the server tracked the number of times an account have been black listed, that could initiate an automatic /tell monitor on that account to check a random number of future messages sent, looking for keywords that are usually present. If the words are there, the account would be flagged for human reviewing along with the messages evaluated by the system. With two clicks the staff would be able to ban it or, in case of a false positive, set a timer to ignore that account. That wouldn't require any action from the players (besides blocking the offender) and they could react to it, instead of waiting to get the accounts manually reported. Since it's done server side, the RMT guys would not be able to avoid it.

I think there should be two additional options in the right-click menu, "Report RMT" and "Report Harassment". They should both create reports that include all the basic info the system already knows: submitter's name, name of who they're reporting, text of the message, world, location, time, etc. In the case of the RMT report, that's all it needs, and it should be followed by just a regular confirmation box like is used when blacklisting. In the case of the harassment report, it should bring up a window showing that defaulted information and having an additional box where the submitter can (optionally) add an additional comment or explanation before submitting it.

In both those cases, the person who was reported should also be added to the submitter's blacklist automatically.

And to address the issue Raestloz discussed, where (particularly for RMT) a lot of people may be reporting the same spammer, the system should combine all reports against a given player and display them to the GM investigating them as a single combined report, showing a list of submitters' names in place of a single submitter for each.


(And all of this really should have been in place when the game first launched. It's ridiculous that we should still need to be asking for it nine and a half months later.)

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Originally Posted by Seijinho

*snip*

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I can tell that this can work.
Assuming they have enough time to bug test it and stuff. All RMTs are jerks, but some jerks are not RMT

It'd be nice to somehow block the account (and its related characters). I assume the black list only blocks the character.

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Originally Posted by sew

In addition: I get the same two sites spammed all the time. How hard can it be to just go through the chat text, replace "0" with "o", "|-|" with "h", "," with ".", remove the spaces, and then match against the spammed domain names? That's 10-15 lines of code - in C.

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I'm not a conspiracy theorist, just a cynical person that understands (but has no appreciation for) corporate greed. I personally feel that SE doesn't correct this simply correctable problem, because they are one of the sellers themselves...if not all of them

I certainly can't make any excuses for S-E. I've been playing various MMOs over the last 18 years, and this game is by far the most overrun by RMT spammers. (Not to say no other MMOs have it any worse--some might, but I just haven't played them.)

Sadly, manually reporting spammers is a regularly recurring part of my gaming experience--so much that I'm beginning to feel there should be an achievement chain for it. The bottom line is that S-E hasn't prioritized getting any better at this. There are lots of ways to streamline the RMT reporting and mitigate the spam effect, but the most S-E has been able to muster after months of updates is an option to delete your tell history (which reportedly doesn't even work).

The fact that I'm playing this game is a testament to the quality of the remaining content. But the RMT stink is the single biggest thing keeping me from recommending it to friends.