Why hasn't the black list GUI been improved yet?

Straight down to business here, this is 100% about RMT spammers. The black list, ideally, shouldn't have to be used to manage RMT sellers and SE would have some method in place to detect and stop RMT spammers (really shouldn't be too hard to have some kind of /tell flood detection to halt messages but w/e, I'm not their engineer and I don't know their limitations). But the fact is that it's my only way to deal with them. If SE can't figure out how to halt or limit RMT spammers, then at least make it easier for us to use the tools we already do have to deal with them.

The first problem with the black list is that it only holds 200 names and I add 10+ names a day. Second, it is not easy to clean up and remove names from the black list. Each name has to be removed individually and each removal takes 2 clicks. We need to be able to mass-remove names, or have one click removal, or something. The time I have to devote every single day to 1) Add names to my black list and then 2) Clean up the black list so I can keep adding names is ridiculous and always has been ridiculous. But what I find the most ridiculous? Is that there's been no improvement made at all over the past year.

It really really effects my enjoyment of the game. Please, SE, please please please spend some resources into mitigating the RMT spammers. If you can't figure out how to stop them from sending me tells up front, please make it easier for me to manage my black list. I'm having to work too hard to deal with and manage something that has nothing to do with playing the game.

First, SE did implement a limit on the number of say/yell/shout/tell messages a character can send per second in 2.3

Second, macro this and add it to one of your spare hotbars
/blist add <r>

With that, you can blacklist the last person to send you a /tell in 2 button presses.

I agree that it should be easier to clean out your blacklist and/or they should increase the 200 person limit though.

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Originally Posted by JoeDono

First, SE did implement a limit on the number of say/yell/shout/tell messages a character can send per second in 2.3

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Then those rascally RMT spammers have easily circumvented that limitation because RMT spam is as worse as it ever has been right now. And I get that that's part of the challenge - they will continue to find ways to get around the restrictions that SE puts in place, and SE has to implement solutions that 1) Stop RMT spammers and 2) Make sure the impact of those measures is as minimal as possible on players. All the more reason why I would like them to make the black list easier to use.

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Originally Posted by JoeDono

First, SE did implement a limit on the number of say/yell/shout/tell messages a character can send per second in 2.3

Second, macro this and add it to one of your spare hotbars
/blist add <r>

With that, you can blacklist the last person to send you a /tell in 2 button presses.

I agree that it should be easier to clean out your blacklist and/or they should increase the 200 person limit though.

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They need to have a separate category for RMT spammers and blacklist. Normal blacklist functions as it normally does. Report for RMT spam will send an atomated report to the GMs as well as adding them to a separate blist that will not conflict with your normal one. When the RMT blist is full, adding new ones will simply remove the oldest RMT entry before adding a new one.

Alternatively, they could add an option where the normal blist will drop the oldest entry when adding a new one.

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Originally Posted by Geryth

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Looking at your join date, you weren't here at launch, where there was no such message restriction - which hardly even affects legitimate players as it is now - and RMT /shout spam was in full force, to the point where it was almost impossible to hold some sort of actual conversation in the main cities. Once /shout chat began to be moderated more closely, RMT then moved into sending /tells, which in my opinion was a huge "improvement" (for want of a better word). Even if you do impose more limitations in an effort to combat RMT, they're going to find a way around it (like you yourself have said), and there are very, very few options that will not catch actual players in the crossfire.

Also, investing a ton of resources into combating spam is more or less a waste, when they can be directed towards shutting down the actual RMT operation. If we keep banning the spammers without focusing on the RMT characters that are holding their gil, or the buyers, it's going to change nothing - they'll just find new accounts to hack and spam from.

As an aside, at this point RMT spambots get banned fast enough that you generally don't have to blacklist them. And because some people still don't know, banned characters are NOT deleted - any spambot older than probably a day or two can be safely removed from your blacklist. Personally I've turned off the sound effect that accompanies receiving a /tell so I can largely ignore these messages. Worst comes to the worst, you can either filter /tell messages out of your General tab entirely, or set yourself on /busy to block all /tells, regardless of who they're from - though that comes with the downside of not being able to receive /tells from friends.

Though I only have one person on my blacklist, that being an actual player who miraculously managed to irritate me enough, I agree that some improvements to the blacklist can be made, such as deleting chunks of people at a time.

Give us the option to limit /tells to people on one's friend list. Ideal? Probably not. Stops people from getting RMT spams? For sure. Would be hard to implement? I'm not a dev, but I don't see why it would be - correct me if I'm wrong. Said this so many times and it's such a blatantly obvious, well, band-aid if not an outright solution, I'm surprised why it's not implemented yet.

On the other hand... macros should not be a quasi-compulsory method to deal with UI shortcomings. Blacklisting actually can be done via right-clicking on the person's name in the chat? I think? Not sure how/if it works on consoles though. And let's not even talk about how complicated it becomes if they also send you a friend request. But yeah, actually managing the blacklist is a nuisance, especially if you pile up more than a few people on there, and it's mind-boggling why they don't improve it (same with emotes, separated into tabs, yes, simple alphabetical ordering? lol still nope). Reporting is also a major pain, it should be a one-click option in that right-click menu, like "blacklist and report as RMT" or some such - one that would send the necessary details automatically, name, message, etc. Like hello, things are getting logged anyway, why do I have to manually type all that in, instead of the system just highlighting it when given a command to do so? And then the replies - automatically generated, but flash up even in the middle of dungeons (kinda counters how /tells themselves are forbidden in there), the support desk always takes ages to load - if it doesn't fail, in which case if you try the history tab, it also takes ages to load and you have to open the message to do away with the notification, which then asks for confirmation of closing the issue (instead of directly just closing the message window), and then it pops up another information window saying the issue has been closed and you have to click ok again to get rid of it, after which you can finally close the support desk window. Tedious even to write it down. Oh and for some reason, some messages flash up the notification again, after a while, I'd guess if you didn't spend at least a few seconds with the window open, "reading" it. Lag/latency/whatnot, it's kind of broken.

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Originally Posted by gamesmart

Looking at your join date, you weren't here at launch, where there was no such message restriction - which hardly even affects legitimate players as it is now - and RMT /shout spam was in full force, to the point where it was almost impossible to hold some sort of actual conversation in the main cities. Once /shout chat began to be moderated more closely, RMT then moved into sending /tells, which in my opinion was a huge "improvement" (for want of a better word). Even if you do impose more limitations in an effort to combat RMT, they're going to find a way around it (like you yourself have said), and there are very, very few options that will not catch actual players in the crossfire.

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If the black list were the system that I would like it to be, then /shout spammers should be much preferable than /tell spammers. For one, I'm not always in cities, and secondly I can ignore /shout messages easier than /tell messages and when I get a /tell message I know it's actually someone wanting to tell something specifically to me. Heck, when I'm in cities I don't even care about the regular /shout messages from real players half the time. So to me, RMT spammers abusing /shout sounds like a dream to me right now (assuming I could have a more usable black list system). But yes, I am well aware that RMT spammers will find their way around imposed limitations. That's why I'm asking for a better black list system.

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Originally Posted by gamesmart

Also, investing a ton of resources into combating spam is more or less a waste, when they can be directed towards shutting down the actual RMT operation. If we keep banning the spammers without focusing on the RMT characters that are holding their gil, or the buyers, it's going to change nothing - they'll just find new accounts to hack and spam from.

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I have to wholeheartedly disagree 100%. My experience is heavily affected by this, I know other players' experience is hampered as well. Some less-educated players may even fall victim to their spam, waste their money, and then get key logged when they visit the RMT site. The integrity of their game is at risk, and that should send a huge red flag that they need to take some decisive action. If the RMT spammers are able to continue outsmarting them, then at least let the players have better options to filter out the crap that comes our way. And it all comes down to the RMT spammers. They are the ones harassing players and they are the ones advertising - halt/limit the RMT spammers and you severely limit the number of real money transactions that take place AND improve the FFXIV experience at the same time.

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Originally Posted by gamesmart

As an aside, at this point RMT spambots get banned fast enough that you generally don't have to blacklist them. And because some people still don't know, banned characters are NOT deleted - any spambot older than probably a day or two can be safely removed from your blacklist. Personally I've turned off the sound effect that accompanies receiving a /tell so I can largely ignore these messages. Worst comes to the worst, you can either filter /tell messages out of your General tab entirely, or set yourself on /busy to block all /tells, regardless of who they're from - though that comes with the downside of not being able to receive /tells from friends.

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The bolded part is blatantly not true. I was so fed up with cleaning up the black list, I just let all the RMT spam come my way last night. I received probably around 10 RMT messages in an hour, from only 6 unique names. This was just last night. Most of the time the duplicate tells came in within one or two minutes, but I had one bot send me messages over the span of 30 minutes. By black listing the RMT spammers I'm probably removing 30-40% of the tells that I get. That pretty much makes the black list the single best way to deal with this. Turning off the sound for /tells? Moving /tells off to a different tab? Block myself from receiving /tells? Aren't these the kinds of things that SE is afraid of when limiting RMT spammers' ability to communicate? So you're telling me that they don't want to filter out any real /tell communication between real players but then my solution is to filter out real /tells from real players? That's not a solution. The black list is not the solution either - but it's the best solution. If they can't stop the tells, they need to make a better black list. Plain and simple.

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Originally Posted by gamesmart

Though I only have one person on my blacklist, that being an actual player who miraculously managed to irritate me enough, I agree that some improvements to the blacklist can be made, such as deleting chunks of people at a time.

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Great! That's all I'm asking for in this thread!

Square Enix is simply lazy with their programming. Dozens of other games have come up with simple solutions mentioned by hundreds of previous posters on these forums for the last year plus. Simplest of them all is adding a "report gold spam" option to right clicking someone's name in chat who just sent you a RMT spam. Another very simple line of code or two to notify a GM that a single account has gotten a dozen or more of these report gold spam flags in a short period of time and shazzam, ban gold spammer.

Biggest problem, in my personal opinion, is that SE just doesn't care enough to fix the problem. Other games do it better, why can't SE?

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Originally Posted by Geryth

RMT spam is as worse as it ever has been right now.

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Oh you Summer child...

I'm not going to direct anyone anywhere, but there are third party apps (which of course violate EULA, you shouldn't use them) that give you a customizable chat filter. Any messages you receive containing the words you place on your black list will be automatically filtered. It would be great to see less than 5 gil spams a month, and sad that SE is unable to give us this themselves :(

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Originally Posted by Lalissly

Square Enix is simply lazy with their programming. Dozens of other games have come up with simple solutions mentioned by hundreds of previous posters on these forums for the last year plus. Simplest of them all is adding a "report gold spam" option to right clicking someone's name in chat who just sent you a RMT spam.

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This ^

A friend and I were discussing this the other day. Every american mmo I have played eliminated gold spammers within months of launch. Almost every asian mmo I have played forces the player to filter their own chat while doing almost nothing. Conspiracy? Yes.

Gold Spammers kill economies and ruin fair gameplay. FIX IT!