Wow... Gil Sellers. Galore.

Hell-O everyone.

I've been playing FFXIV for all of maybe 9 hours now, and I have blocked approximately 30 or so Gil sellers from a company called wtsgg.com.
It's to the point that I'm considering not even playing through my 30 day trial, and definitely considering not subscribing at all.
If I don't sub, the two other new players I brought to the game with me will not sub either.
I'm not making a tiny threat here or anything I'm simply stating how I feel & the outcome.
This game (like all FF games) is AWESOME! I can't believe I didn't play it until now, we literally went out and bought 3 copies yesterday.

I refuse to pay a subscription fee AND be bombarded by spam every 5 minutes.

So before we abandon all hope and jump ship, is there a way to block or disable incoming /tells? Sadly this will make it so no one can send them at all, but it's the only viable solution I can see since they just change their names and spam spam spam spam...

Thanks in advance for any replies.

use /busy command in the chatbox.

not to justify the gil sellers, they really annoy me too, but it's like living next to a heavy traffic street or near an airport, after a little while you don't even notice them any more.

there's a setting under "character" where you can turn off sound notifications from tells.

Thank you I'll give it a shot. I don't take it that you are defending them at all. At first I was like whatever Lolz, but after awhile it's really started to do my head in. Other than these constant barrages, I'm utterly kicking myself for not playing this sooner.

Yea I reached the same point as the OP at one time but before deciding to block all /tell I simply changed the sound to a less annoying short one. Coupled with a self customized chat log I was able to eventually become accustomed to it. I hate that the gil sellers have so much freedom to spam nonsense but I gotta live with the little BS in an otherwise great game.

It's been an ongoing problem. SE, as is often their way until they're ready to speak, is mostly silent on the matter... but lately they've been really stepping up the number of gil sellers (and even buyers!) they've been banning. I can only assume they're quietly developing some superweapon to use on them. XD

In any case... It's a nice game overall; I hope that you and your friends will be able to stay. As another poster mentioned, /busy is a bandaid fix.

Blacklist works! Just highlight their name in the log, bring out the sub-command, then blacklist their asses.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by REPROBEAN_CHILD

Blacklist works! Just highlight their name in the log, bring out the sub-command, then blacklist their asses.

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You can actually add a macro to your hotbar: /blist add <r>

The <r> is the last person to send you a tell.

They seem to come in waves. On my server, Behemoth, December was absolutely horrid and I put more RMT on my blacklist in 1 month than I did the 6 months prior. SE seems to go the bans in batches so that it's a worth while endeavor. That's why it seems like don't do anything and then bam, it's quiet for a bit.

Oh, incidentally, you can go through your list occasionally and remove the names at the top of the list and anything that says deleted.

If you're going to want to keep it turned off regularly, there's another option besides /busy. In Character Settings, there's a section for configuring what's displayed on each chat tab. Configure the first "General" tab and remove /tell from the list of channels to display there. I think that's also where you can change or remove the associated sound effect.

Of course, either this or /busy also eliminates the ability to use /tell as intended. :( There's occasionally worthwhile stuff you'll miss out on. It's up to you whether that's a price you're willing to pay in order to not have to see all the spam.

On jenova, rmt is crazy, because there aren't that many players, I get more tells in 5 minutes in jenova than I did during my 3 month hiatus to balmung. Jenova has one of the smallest active player bases while balmung has among the largest. So, if nothing else, when you can, move to a larger server, more players to split the tells to, if you don't want to completely block tells, that's what I would do. Going /busy makes it so you can't trade or receive tells, never went busy, so don't know anything else it blocks, and taking tells out of your chat box removes a way to speak directly and privately with another player.

And what do you expect them to do? They ban over 10,000 accounts for this stuff every month (they post statistics all the time). What is to prevent someone from buying a new copy of the game and sending you a message? Unless you use the Busy command, there is nothing. Once they send you the message, the damage is done and you're annoyed. They can get banned after that, sure, but you are already affected. There is no way to stop this and it will continue in every single MMO you ever play. Ever.

Your only options are to turn it off or ignore it.

Thank you everyone.
There's a lot of useful tips posted here. I've been blacklisting them as they send /t, but at some point I imagine my b-list will get full.
Im trying to remain focused on why we bought the game in the first place and not let it get to me. I will be trying out some of the suggestions made to see which fit the best and go from there.
It's really a great game thus far and hopefully the suggestions made here will suffice.

I suggest not even bothering to blacklist them. Rarely do any of them /tell you more than once, and they rotate names so frequently (as they get banned) that it's almost pointless. I find it was honestly more of a hassle to blacklist them than just let them do their thing, and it's gotten to the point now where I don't even notice 3/4 of the time if a spam message pops up in my chat.

Hey man... come to jap server...
I invite you come to masamune.. you will never see that again.. believe me...

I used to blacklist the tells but since I turned off the incoming tell sound I don't really notice them that much unless I'm actively looking at the chat for something.

The habbits of RMT spammers make the blacklist almost useless. What they will do is buy a copy of the game (usually with a creditcard that was stolen or used without permission from previous customers), make a character and start spamming. They will run for a short time, 5-10 minutes at a time then they log out before they can be banned and create a new character to repeat the process. So you can black list one spammer and then 10 minutes later, the next character will pick up where they left off. You can set yourself to busy and block all tells, or just ignore it. Another factor is that on higher population worlds, where character creation is restricted, there is very few opertunities to create new characters for advertising so there is much less RMT tell spam. Lower population worlds will be open to character creation more often and will have more spam to go along with it.

SE runs waves of banning on RMT companies. They leave the advertisers alone for the most part and instead target the accounts that are holding the gil. If you play long enough, you will eventally see a hoard of (Usualy) new BLMs moving together after a ban wave as SE just banned a large chunk of their farming army.

Exactly.. Blacklist are no good on some servers.. I can black list someone and 1 second latter they are sending me another tell.. My blacklist can fill up in a few days.. Some servers the spam and bots are really bad.

Who wants to be on busy all the time, I have friends sending me messages all the time.

SE could do a lot more. There is something wrong when you see bots sitting in the same place for months queuing up for a dungeon.. They should have been gone and hundreds of people have reported them I am sure.