Reporting Gil Seller Options.

So I do know there are lots of threads about this but with the new update coming we still haven't heard anything about how they plan on dealing with gil seller spammers. Why do we have the 200 blacklist limit? Remove the damn limit. Or even make it that if a person doesn't reply to 3 consecutive tells the person sending tells gets auto banned. Add to that that on PS3 and PS4 there is not an actual way to bulk report this accounts. I want to ask the community about creating a flame thread on the forums that way SE takes this shit seriously. There is no reason why ANY of us need to deal with GS spamming and SE crossing their arms. and NO deleting 100 accounts every month or so is obviously not the answer they need to incorporate a fix into the tell and shout system itself.

Every successfull MMO has this problem. It will NEVER completely go away. No matter what they do.

Blacklist 200 limit? Delete the first half. Most are already banned. (DELETED) characters are not banned characters. You can very likely clear most of that ban list with no ill effect.

Auto ban? What I'f I'm afk and my friend sends me 3 tells? Well now you're banned. See, ideas like this easily punish legit players and are bad solutions.

Bulk reports? Why should you need to? Click their name and "add to blacklist" and move on. Are you storing a list of 10 names to report them all at once or something?

Flame thread? That's how you get banned. Plain and simple.

SE crossing their arms? Are you seriously not seeing all the news posts they make where they tell us how many people they've banned? Here I'll grab one for you. http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...600ff44b3e9452

Having an issue deleting accounts? Stop playing mmos. As I said before this problem follows all successful mmo's. They will never eliminate this problem. If occasionally purging your list is difficult you might be in the wrong genre.

I understand they can be frustrating, but two wrongs do not make a right. Solutions you provided would make things worse for real players, and you suggest SE doesn't care. Obviously they do as the RMT news posts make clear, and the simple fact is that keeping us around makes them money. Letting RMT have their way would be counter productive to their primary goal. Making money.

200 limit is not nearly enough. They need to handle it by raising the limit by 50 characters each successive patch until they figure out how high they can go before the servers shit themselves.

If I show you my list you would understand. Some of my suggestions are extreme but then again you said it ... my reporting on an open forum 200 peeps by name will get my single account banned but those same 200 people would still be on doing the same stuff. The stem is flawed and we need fixing. I don't play other MMO I only play FFXIV and as such I expect BETTER solutions than other MMO's. If it is a problem shouldn't we fix it not just cover it up?
If they don't have enough people to manage all those reported accounts then they can just remove the limit so we can jeu keep adding until the servers crash due to performance then they WILL have to address the situation. You don't sweep a problem under the rug you deal with it plain and simple. just douse other MMO's do it wrong doesn't mean FFXIV should do it wrong too.

They don't sweep anything under any rugs. If you clicked my link above you would see the most recent news post where they detail what actions they took. There is no possible way you can objectively say they are brushing anything under the rug.

Also, adding more blacklist space adds a considerable amount of memory requirements to the server. Sure, for one player another 100 isn't anything more than another 100 strings. Multiply that by 2million users and it becomes another story. There are pros and cons to all approaches. A "This should never happen so do whatever it takes to stop it" attitude will not obtain good answers to this problem.

Why would you expect Square to have a better solution to a problem that plagues ALL MMOs? Isn't that a bit unreasonable to expect that level of innovation from them simply because it's the only MMO you play?

Why is there only 2 click blacklisting?!

Why on earth would you NOT put a report gil selling button in the same chat-box name-menu?!?!?
Let the report automatically just send a copy of the incriminating tell without the ability to edit it.

Bam. 30x more reports with evidence.

Tiggy my point is THEY need to make it harder for the Gil Sellers to do those actions and EASIER for us consumers to report them. On my friend list I can see when my friends are on when the are in dungeons and stuff like that ... but for accounts that I want to block .. all I can see if anything is their names. Is the problem they have the amount of people being reported or they need to verify the accounts or something else? I don't care how hard I make SE jobs in order to fix it when you think about it we are all paying consumers and they need to make it easier for us to report stuff like this. Fine don't create a flame war.. but then they can make an upload file that you can use to upload50,100 or 200 peeps at a time and they can create an algorithm that if the same player is reported thru that system by more than lets say 10 people the person on the list gets auto banned until his account has been verified.

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

If you clicked my link above you would see the most recent news post where they detail what actions they took.

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They're taking reactive steps (banning accounts that advertise). I don't see anything about proactive steps that they're taking to limit the number of gilspams that legitimate players must endure, nor steps to make it easier to report and manage the dozens of gilspams that we get every day.

They need to make it more difficult for gilspammers to get their message out and easier for legitimate players to block their messages.

Every single MMO has this problem. Even free to play ones. There is no exception. SE, like other companies that have MMOs, prefer to deal with botting and gil-spamming accounts en mass (i.e. a lot at one sitting), after they've done an investigation to ensure that the claim is legitimate. It is not SE's responsibility to clean out anyone's blacklist. Players have to have some responsibility.

All I really want is a more efficient means of reporting the gil spammers that automatically "mutes" them for the duration that I am logged on. It doesn't add them to a blacklist, just mutes them so that their spam doesn't clog up my chat. But I know implementing stuff that takes time, and I am relatively patient.

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

Blacklist 200 limit? Delete the first half. Most are already banned. (DELETED) characters are not banned characters. You can very likely clear most of that ban list with no ill effect.

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My problem is that my blacklist is so full of gil selling spammers that I don't remember which people I legitimately blacklisted - the people who annoyed me or harassed me who I never want to interact with. I can't blindly delete half my blacklist because then I will un-blacklist some of these people. There are many names on my list right now and I don't know if they're spammers or annoying people. Some of the spammers are obvious, but some of them have normal names.

It would be nice if in addition to "add to blacklist," there was also a "report as spam & add to blacklist" button.

It's unfortunate, but SE really can't disclose any measures they're taking or plan to take until it's actually done. It'd be like telling the open world that you are installing "this" specific alarm system into your house and how it's hooked up. You'd be giving a heads up about what measures you're using to protect yourself, so the bad people can basically find a way to circumvent your efforts. Auto-ban functions are never a good thing to do. Too many potential problems of accidentally hitting legit players. Level restrictions to /tell or /shout can also hurt legit players, but most importantly, it won't do anything to RMT because they just bot practically everything their characters do.

Honestly, for this game and the current situation players are in with RMT, a restricted friends-only /tell option is a decent band-aid fix. But then comes how RMT will try to bypass this. Will they try to hack the servers again in an effort to bypass the /tell option? Will they simply resort to spamming zones through /shout again? Will we see them try to spam random friend requests to people in an effort to get their ads out? Maybe we'll even see something a little imaginative with their characters, like the corpse RMT advertising in WoW. No matter what, RMT will always be here, and they will always try to find a means to get their ads out. They seem like those people on the sidewalks that are just trying to get rid of their little fliers. Perhaps RMT get commission for more ads that they manage to spam people with LOL.

So glad that I put tells into their own separate log with no sound. I made a linkshell called, "Tells are turned off" just so any friends not in my FC that need me can still contact me. It's sad I have to do this, but it's my only known alternative right now. I occasionally check the tell log in case a randomer has a question or something.

They can list exactly how many characters they delete over time, but when you are receiving over 100 different spammers in a single weekend, I do not see how they are actually doing a thing to fix the problem. Why exactly do they need to allow characters to send tells to every single person in a zone within a minute? This is pretty obviously a problem that SE needs to work on. But when your blist is filling up within a single week solely due to RMT, there is a problem that they need to work on a real solution for. When you blist a spammer and get 5 more tells within a minute from 5 other names, this is beyond what I would expect even in a free to play game. Perhaps you enjoy the advertising Tiggy, but many of us do not wish to be constantly harassed on a game we are paying to play.

A decent alternative to me would be to do something like the (DELETED) Message. (BANNED) would be just as effective and we could clear our lists far more easily.

As of today I have 200 Blacklisted Gil Spammers in my Blacklist. All of them are GS as I don't blast people just couse they anger me. SE already has a system where you can't receive tells while in Duty. I know they can improve on it to disable GS Shouts and tells. I deleted 2 GS from the blacklist and added 2 more and within 5 seconds i had a 3rd one spamming.
We ARE paying consumers and SE is offering a service. If their programers CAN'T figure a way to make it better for us to deal with GS they should invest in programmers that can. This is NOT FFXIV 1.0 this is FFXIV 2.XX they can do it they have to be made want to do it though.

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Originally Posted by Deathcharge

As of today I have 200 Blacklisted Gil Spammers in my Blacklist. All of them are GS as I don't blast people just couse they anger me. SE already has a system where you can't receive tells while in Duty. I know they can improve on it to disable GS Shouts and tells. I deleted 2 GS from the blacklist and added 2 more and within 5 seconds i had a 3rd one spamming.
We ARE paying consumers and SE is offering a service. If their programers CAN'T figure a way to make it better for us to deal with GS they should invest in programmers that can. This is NOT FFXIV 1.0 this is FFXIV 2.XX they can do it they have to be made want to do it though.

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Lol, sure. It's a super easy problem that better programmers can easily solve. Right. It's that simple. That must be why no MMO has ever come up with a perfect solution.

Seriously though. This isn't an easy problem that will be solved by just throwing better programmers at it. It's not a matter of programming. It's a matter of striking a proper balance between cracking down on the spam while not punishing real legitimate players. That harder you crack down on RMT the more you hurt your paying customer base.

FFXIV had a good example of this pre 2.1. Every time a market appeared that the RMT start exploiting to make gil SE would nerf that market. This in turn nerfs that market for legit players. Before 2.1 came out this left us with a nearly dead economy because they kept nerfing all the avenues RMT were using. This ended up punishing the players and hurting the game more because we players couldn't even make money.

If you can come up with a real idea that can catch RMT without touching real users and you'll finally have RMT prevention gold. Until then all systems will naturally let a bit of RMT in.

Have you reported them the correct way? Because I report gil sellers, then blist, get a response a few minutes later about 'thankyou for reporting we will look into this' etc etc then another 5-10 mins later I get another response with the typical 'we do not condone gil selling and we can not let you know results but you can safely remove them from your blacklist now,' and I do. I dont get any more tells from them after SE told me I could remove them, and it only took 10-20 mins.

Of course, most people never seem to bother reporting, they just blacklist then complain.

I agree with you there !!!!!! But how can they crack down or track this people if they make it so "Easy" for us to report such behaviors???
You CAN'T tell me that they cannot create a program to receive the "200 blacklist" and match them to the other persons "blacklist" and create a temporary ban on the names that are consistent within those blacklists. We have servers that can one of the most advanced graphics on the market but they can't create a system that can notify them about GS?
And you keep mentioning other MMO's ... MMO's like Retail Stores offer services that even though similar can be implemented in different way creating different experiences and if you are a person that wants FFXIV to be like ANY other MMO out there ... I can't make you change your mind. But me personally believe that the FFXIV team can do a WAY better job that what they have done so far.

Main thing is we DON'T need to fie a report for every single one .. they should establish a 1 form fits all to report this problems. They NEED to do an AUTO-REPORT . I don't need to waste my time filing a form asking What world , what time, what was the report about ... Tho one that really irks me .. "What world?" ... Shouldn't the report auto fill with the world i am sending it from already ??
And in all seriousness if any player is defending our current "Blacklist system" I don't think that is an argument I could ever win...

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Originally Posted by Dijana

Have you reported them the correct way? Because I report gil sellers, then blist, get a response a few minutes later about 'thankyou for reporting we will look into this' etc etc then another 5-10 mins later I get another response with the typical 'we do not condone gil selling and we can not let you know results but you can safely remove them from your blacklist now,' and I do. I dont get any more tells from them after SE told me I could remove them, and it only took 10-20 mins.

Of course, most people never seem to bother reporting, they just blacklist then complain.

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I have NEVER gotten the "you can safely remove them from your blacklist" message. I've never gotten a response at all when reporting a gil seller.

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Originally Posted by Seif

Why is there only 2 click blacklisting?!

Why on earth would you NOT put a report gil selling button in the same chat-box name-menu?!?!?
Let the report automatically just send a copy of the incriminating tell without the ability to edit it.

Bam. 30x more reports with evidence.

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this would definitely help, i'm on ps4 and reporting a gil seller (name, server, time, the actual message) is more time consuming than it should be. i mean, it's not like i can copy and paste, unless i'm missing something....

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Originally Posted by Dijana

Have you reported them the correct way? Because I report gil sellers, then blist, get a response a few minutes later about 'thankyou for reporting we will look into this' etc etc then another 5-10 mins later I get another response with the typical 'we do not condone gil selling and we can not let you know results but you can safely remove them from your blacklist now,' and I do. I dont get any more tells from them after SE told me I could remove them, and it only took 10-20 mins.

Of course, most people never seem to bother reporting, they just blacklist then complain.

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I do the same, and have an empty blacklist thanks to the speed with which SE deals with the person I reported. Sounds like folks don't know how to report.

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Originally Posted by Deathcharge

I agree with you there !!!!!! But how can they crack down or track this people if they make it so "Easy" for us to report such behaviors???
You CAN'T tell me that they cannot create a program to receive the "200 blacklist" and match them to the other persons "blacklist" and create a temporary ban on the names that are consistent within those blacklists.

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What happens when enough players band together to all blacklist a player. Suddenly you've given the players a powerful tool to forcefully lock someone out of the game based on nothing more than some correlated blacklist entries. As I said before. Really easy to abuse against legit players.

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Originally Posted by NaliaBrown

I have NEVER gotten the "you can safely remove them from your blacklist" message. I've never gotten a response at all when reporting a gil seller.

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Then you are reporting them wrongly. It takes 1 minute at most to copy paste the /tell you got from the RMTer, add world name, time and area...done. Within a few minutes, or 10 at most you get a reply from CS, apologising for any inconvenience and informing you that you can now remove them from your blacklist.

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Originally Posted by Rosy

Then you are reporting them wrongly. It takes 1 minute at most to copy paste the /tell you got from the RMTer, add world name, time and area...done. Within a few minutes, or 10 at most you get a reply from CS, apologising for any inconvenience and informing you that you can now remove them from your blacklist.

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The problem with this is repeating it up to 30 times a day. This should not be needed.

Tiggy ... our job is nOT to create and monitor situations like that. That is the job os SE. Now you have heard that there are punishable things for abusing the system. Well SE can always implement something like that.
Again abuse can happen if things aren't monitored. LIKE WITH ANY REAL LIFE event.
the truth of the matter is SE has NOT placed a proper audit system for banning GS. And if you played from Beta you will remember that at launch we didn't even had the option to properly blacklist them.
And Remember PS4 is NOT equipped with copy/paste feature. But again WHY are people saying that we need to go thru the trouble of 100 steps to report abuse when it can be added to the system with just a click of the button ??

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Originally Posted by Rosy

Then you are reporting them wrongly. It takes 1 minute at most to copy paste the /tell you got from the RMTer, add world name, time and area...done. Within a few minutes, or 10 at most you get a reply from CS, apologising for any inconvenience and informing you that you can now remove them from your blacklist.

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You do realise that PS4 players can not copy/paste, yes?

It is baffling that there isn't an easier way to report. It should be as easy as "add to blacklist", and certainly shouldn't require c&p (which is what the system tells you to do when you want to report a gil seller) when not all paying customers even have the ability to do so.

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Originally Posted by Rosy

Then you are reporting them wrongly. It takes 1 minute at most to copy paste the /tell you got from the RMTer, add world name, time and area...done. Within a few minutes, or 10 at most you get a reply from CS, apologising for any inconvenience and informing you that you can now remove them from your blacklist.

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Are you reporting them under "Harassment" or "Cheating"? I used to file under harassment till SE said, no, file it under cheating. I have NEVER received ANY message of ANY kind when reporting them. I even looked at the history tab, and my last response from them saying something similar to yours, was like a month after the game came out. Since then, i have never received any messages.

How about reporting gil buyers too!

How do you know if they are Gill buyers or not? I don't really care if people use real money to buy extra in-game currency. I have both Miner and Botanist at 50 so if i wanna buy something i farm tip i get it.
I really can't comprehend why people feel the need to defend the broken "Blacklist/Report" System we currently have. The system is broken and needs fix all you need if make 1 GM stay in a city for 30 min at least and they can weed out 60% of this accounts. And if this accounts banned where hacked accounts the person can actually ask for it to be re-instated.
This is simple stuff and it IS within the GM areas of responsibilities. I once had a friend pulled by a GM because his name was "Offensive" . You can even have GM rotate to monitor different areas for at least 1 of their 8 hour shifts and this spamming would end.

I do agree there needs to be an easier way of reporting, something like the way we add to blacklist.

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Originally Posted by Rosy

Then you are reporting them wrongly. It takes 1 minute at most to copy paste the /tell you got from the RMTer, add world name, time and area...done. Within a few minutes, or 10 at most you get a reply from CS, apologising for any inconvenience and informing you that you can now remove them from your blacklist.

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Sure, on a PC. But I play on PS3. Have you ever tried to copy/paste something on a PS3? First you have to go into mouse mode, then try to remember which buttons on your controller correspond to the mouse buttons, then try to figure out how to actually copy/paste (even more difficult if you don't have a keyboard). It's a huge hassle. What if you were in the middle of a quest or something? Or crafting or gathering? It takes me 10-15 minutes to actually report a gil seller (reporting as "cheating," by the way). I have done it. I did not get a response. I haven't done it lately because they are too frequent and reporting is not worth my time.

Bump"....................

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Originally Posted by Noshpan

Every single MMO has this problem. Even free to play ones. There is no exception. SE, like other companies that have MMOs, prefer to deal with botting and gil-spamming accounts en mass (i.e. a lot at one sitting), after they've done an investigation to ensure that the claim is legitimate. It is not SE's responsibility to clean out anyone's blacklist. Players have to have some responsibility.

All I really want is a more efficient means of reporting the gil spammers that automatically "mutes" them for the duration that I am logged on. It doesn't add them to a blacklist, just mutes them so that their spam doesn't clog up my chat. But I know implementing stuff that takes time, and I am relatively patient.

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I was with you until you said that players have some responsibility? How is this in any way the players responsibility/job. Their game, we are their clients. If we have issues, we voice them, if they don't deliver to their paying customers, there's an issue. And it's not on the client side.

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Originally Posted by Lucke

Are you reporting them under "Harassment" or "Cheating"? I used to file under harassment till SE said, no, file it under cheating. I have NEVER received ANY message of ANY kind when reporting them. I even looked at the history tab, and my last response from them saying something similar to yours, was like a month after the game came out. Since then, i have never received any messages.

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Support > at the bottom there is a section called "reporting RMT" (or some such)> click on it > click "Ask a Question" (yeah daft I know, but hey it works) > paste in the message you got from RMTer, give time, server and location > send.

So wanted to hold off till update notes to see if they did anything... People that have been blacklisted can't join my parties, All the tells from blacklisted people will be removed. Obviously SE is looking to GS but are taking BABY steps to deal with them. I don't think we as a community should let this issue go since it will improve quality of life in game. I did reported 2 different accounts yesterday ... I have yet to hear from support.

I don't report spammers. SE did not make reporting easy in this game. All the information has to be manually input into a form. If I report every single spam-tell I get everyday this game is going to turn into work. I'm not going to pay to play a game just so I can perform work.

And every time I report a spammer it's going to make me hate this game. I know this because the spammers were the final straw that made me quit the last time. Just got fed up with it. Even now I've already turned off my notification sound for tells and pretty much contemplating turning off tells altogether. It is so annoying, I don't know how people experience this sort of harassment and not get mad. I've never really used it much to begin with and I doubt I'm the only one who's thinking or have already turned their tells off permanently.

I've recently only come back and I've been severely disappointed that there still isn't an automated reporting system for spammers. This is such an old feature in older MMOs I'm kind of scratching my head why FFXIV still hasn't put a similar system in. WTF guys, this type of problem shouldn't be left for the customers to deal with.