New Goldseller spam, Square please fix

Goldseller spam to buy gil has just gotten more annoying.

I just not got a private tell to buy gil, as happens multiple times daily. However, this time the instant the tell came in it was accompanied by a friend invite request.

This made it so I was unable to right click the name in chat and blacklist them right away.

I had to go into my Friend's List, decline the friend request, and then I was able to blacklist them.

Square, please fix goldseller spam and please fix this exploit to being unable to blacklist these guys.

If you get a tell and a friend invite at the same time, you should still get the option to blacklist right away in chat. It should blacklist the person and decline the friend request instantly.

Yeah I had it happen to me today as well. The people that do these things are going to constantly change things up so they can get past whatever SE does. I noticed a little while back there was a big drop on how many I was getting and is still less than what was going on when I began the game. It's still there but bareable for the most part.

Why would anyone want to buy from someone who does that to them?
That's just counter progressive.

I still say we need a whitelist function.

But maybe if we had a blacklist and decline option?

What we really need is a right click > report function.

/blist doesn't alert anyone to gil sellers, it just shuts them up for as long as it takes them to make a new character and start spamming again. Square-Enix needs to implement a way to track these parasites for every time they interrupt a legitimate player. Letting us report them with a click (rather than the clunky and tedious harassment report that's the only in-game option now) would quite handily take care of this.

They do ban players who buy gil, but it's never going to be enough. This is always going to be an ongoing battle for any company running an MMO. The best they can do is to provide the most effective possible tools to combat it to both players and GMs.

/flist deny <r>

/blist add <r>

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Originally Posted by UltimateAoe2

/flist deny <r>

/blist add <r>

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They know that, the goal is to slow you down on the blisting, so most people will blist them whitin 1-2 seconds they want you to take time to do it now. RMT all are all about annoying you to the highest degree, this is just another new trick.

It's pretty much like an annoying salesman knocking on your door none-stop and when you open it they shove their foot in the door so you can't close it, and will keep it their till you punch them.

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Originally Posted by Braanu11

However, this time the instant the tell came in it was accompanied by a friend invite request.

This made it so I was unable to right click the name in chat and blacklist them right away.

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I thought it was just me @_@ been filing reports like crazy to get this sorted

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Why would anyone want to buy from someone who does that to them?
That's just counter progressive.

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I said the same thing about the guys that would send me a tell every 30 seconds for 5 minutes straight before they limited tells, but it's still those same companies selling gil.

I just had to deal with this now too.
+1 to the idea of having "Add to Blacklist" bypass the friend request and blocking the gil seller.

For the "Report" Function:
It could be set up that if "X" amount of players report someone, that account is looked into.

Unfortunatly RMT will always thrive in games like XIV because of no alternative solutions. They can ban and ban and ban true, but in this day in age the only way to beat the RMT is to beat them at their own game. Several companies have adopted business models where, okay in essence you're buying currency directly from the game's company to put it bluntly.

Guild Wars 2 did this with the GEMS system. A player will walk into Walmart or any other place. Plop down $25 for a GEMS card, go home and apply it to their account. Said player can spend the gems on the cash shop OR opt to convert the GEMS to in game currency. Arena Net employs a real world economist to control the gold exchange for GEMS depending on how much gold is in the economy. Some days the exchange is higher, other days are lower. RMT can't act fast enough to adjust prices. RMT can't make a profit because its cheaper to buy from Arena Net and no risk what-so-ever because its buying from the game developers company. RMT leave the world.

Wildstar does something similar with its C.R.E.D.D system. A player goes to Carbines website and plops down $22 to buy a C.R.E.D.D (one month paid subscription item) said player logs in the game and sells it on the market place. Due to limitations by Carbine where C.R.E.D.D can be purchased every 22 hours. The players themselves control the costs. Some weeks the price is lower because the economy has too much of it. Some weeks its higher because the economy has too little of it. Same as Guild Wars 2. RMT can't adjust prices fast enough to make a profit, zero risk because players are buying from the company. Player A can buy whatever goodies they want from the game, Player B gets a free month subscription off someone else's dime, Carbine makes more money, RMT can't make a profit and leave. A win for honest players and the game and the company.

I've played both games since launch and granted the first month was RMT spam everywhere. Now? I can't remember the last time I got a RMT mail, whisper or shout in either game. Since I probably already know people are going to scream "Pay to Win" at this model, Pay To Win is something completely different then this :P

I agree. There's no reason a Friend Invite that we haven't accepted should block us from being able to Blacklist someone. SE should fix this so it doesn't get exploited any more.

There was one point of the OP I did find a little odd, though. It was this bit:

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Originally Posted by Braanu11

I had to go into my Friend's List, decline the friend request, and ...

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Why would you take the extra step of opening your Friend's List? If they've sent a Friend Invite, it should be right there on your screen already. You can decline it from there quicker than opening your Friend's List and finding them just to do the same thing.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

Why would you take the extra step of opening your Friend's List? If they've sent a Friend Invite, it should be right there on your screen already. You can decline it from there quicker than opening your Friend's List and finding them just to do the same thing.

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Ok, found the answer to this part. Apparently, declining a Friend invite from the friend invite itself doesn't work. It still remains in that pending state of awaiting approval even after you've declined it. That part is clearly a bug, and SE needs to fix it. (That's in addition to needing to fix the rule that currently blocks blacklisting when there's a pending friend invite.)

Oh, and yes, I found this out when a gilseller did the same to me.
They send both a tell and a friend invite, and in the time it takes you to decline the invite they have a chance to disconnect, so you can't blacklist them.

Maybe they can add an option to deny all friend requests? That way, if we check it, it will block the gil sellers. And if we do want to add someone, we can talk to them first and then enable friend request for that instance. Kind of troublesome but it's better than nothing I guess.

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Originally Posted by Remina_Garamonde

It could be set up that if "X" amount of players report someone, that account is looked into.

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As much as I'd like to see an easy way to report gil spammers, this sort of thing is almost always universally abused.

Looking at this thread i'm so happy my server is currently closed off to new accounts.

As much of a pain as this is, doesnt this also mean that they can only message a maximum of 200 people thanks to the friendlist cap?

I got three of these yesterday, it's just going to get worse.

Hell it takes them a month to kill an obvious bot (who then starts a new account and starts right back in.....
Nothing will be done about this new tactic.

When I played WoW a gil selling website used some sort of third party hack to teleport dozens of their characters in the sky, which dropped them to their death. They used the corpses to spell our their URL. I am 100% for any countermeasures SE can implement, but somehow I know gil sellers will always find some way around it :(

Same! I don't understand the logic behind this new tactic. Why would they want to make themselves more annoying? That's the opposite of good salesmanship.

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Originally Posted by kidvideo

Same! I don't understand the logic behind this new tactic. Why would they want to make themselves more annoying? That's the opposite of good salesmanship.

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It's kind of like the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" rule. All they care about is making sure you see their name/URL often enough that you'll think of it if you ever do decide you want to buy gil from someone.

So, they're trying to stay off of people's blacklists so they can keep spamming them. They've been using the /tell and then disconnect pattern for a while, to exploit SE's rule that you cannot blacklist someone unless they're online (which is another rule I wish SE would change to avoid this exploit). But a lot of players are getting pretty fast about blacklisting, and can get it in before the gilseller has time to disconnect. By adding in the extra Friend invite, they make it take a moment longer before anyone can blacklist them, and that gives them the time to logout, so they can't be blacklisted.

They're probably also hoping to catch an occasional new player who's just joined the game, is looking for friends to play it with, and will accept a random friend invite mistaking it for a genuine offer of friendship. Then the gilseller can't be blacklisted for a much longer time (until the player realizes what's going on and finds where to remove them from the friend list), and they get the new tool of gil spam through moogle-mail.

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Originally Posted by kidvideo

Same! I don't understand the logic behind this new tactic. Why would they want to make themselves more annoying? That's the opposite of good salesmanship.

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RMT has never cared about how you feel, the goal is to make sure you see the adverstiment, back when this game started they were incredibly aggressive and was spamming you nonestop in shouts, tells, yells, everywhere untill they were stopped. they want to catch the weak people.

Regardless of what they "promise" you they are only after gill, like if anyone is actually stupid enough to use their PL service, good chance you won't be seeing your account again or have a very high chance of it being "hacked" and since you willingly gave your info you are helpless to ever get it back easily.

So they are not "salesmen" as much as they are aggressive salesmen who keep shoving their product in your face regardless if you want their business or not.

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Originally Posted by Mahri

What we really need is a right click > report function.
.

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Amen. Or at least put a system in place where 1 account being blacklisted by X number of people in Y period of time be flagged for investigation.

I mean come on 1 person getting blacklisted by 200 people in an hour? Check that #(*&@ out.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Why would anyone want to buy from someone who does that to them?
That's just counter progressive.

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Telemarketing, e-mail spam, snail mail spam, web popups - most people find these annoying as well. The problem is that they are so very, very cheap; if even a tenth of a percent of recipients take the bait, the marketing has paid for itself and more.

As long as a gilseller finds that ONE individual in a thousand who gets that tell and friend request and instead of instantly hitting blacklist thinks to himself, "Damn, this Novus is a pain. If only I had a little more gil to buy Det Materia..." then all of the effort was worthwhile.