RMT countermeasure idea (Yes another one just hear me out)

The way I see it, the tells just need to have multiple categories just like an E-mail account. I think 3 categories should cover what's needed:

*Tells from people on your Friend list, Free Company and linkshells.

*Tells from "New Adventurers" (All existing RMTs are in this category)

*Tells from any non-New Adventurers that are not on your friend list, in your free company or your linkshells. (The reason is in case RMTs get wise and build their characters up in order to get around this feature.


The 3 categories can be added to the log filter as the player so desires notification sounds included. This way the tells can be managed into different tabs depending on who it comes from. Example: "General-Battle-Event-Junk Tells."

This way the blacklist and /busy status never needs to be used on RMTs ever again! It is also useful for people who want to receive tells after /shouting in Mor Dhona or some other place for events and don't want to have to take off /busy in order to see them. I know this feature is possible because and grouping system already exists in the game for the friend list.

So what do you guys think?

People suggested something like this a billion times, yet we get everything else in the game BUT that.

This solution is very straightforward and very obvious, I've had the same idea long ago. But nothing is done. Spammers spam, botters bot. Go ahead and report an obvious bot. Bring friends, show them the bot, have them report too.
Enjoy watching the bot happily botting away weeks and months later still.

There is no solution to RMT, none. You don't want to see the spam, filter it. Doesn't matter how many suggestions, ideas, or magic bullets people come up with, the RMT are never going to go away or ever going to stop spamming. The only real solution is shutting the game down, obviously that's not in SE best interest nor in the player base. For as long as there are knuckleheads on the Japanese, North American, and European servers buying gil, this problem will not have a solution.

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Originally Posted by SCUBA_Instr

You're not asking the programmers to do something that
requires a herculean effort to accomplish.

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When they can implement FC privilege settings so that a subordinate can't dismiss all his superiors other than the FC leader and promote himself to the highest ranking officer slot.. (yes, if somebody has promote/demote on their ranks, no matter if it's the lowest ranking officer, CAN demote/promote ANYBODY except for FC leader. He can also promote himself..) When SE figures THAT out, I'll have a little more faith in their programming abilities..


YES, boys and girls, you heard it here first! Now go to your FC, kick everybody off, promote yourself to highest ranking officer, and loot the fc chest.

Maybe when SE gets an influx of reports like this they'll implement a more logical FC privilege settings..

Also, why can't we choose how much/many from each tab a specific rank can take out of the chest? I wouldn't mind some of my lower ranking officers to be able to take out 100k or 200k here and there.. but when there are millions in the fc chest, there's no way for me to enforce any of that other than just trust.

You are basically using my idea except mine is a bit better.

1. add a private option that you can invite Free Company's and Friends into that they can only see only trusted Free Company's of your choice, delete option and add option- Do not include Linkshell because RMT would just make them and try to send invites.
2. A option that turns off/on friends invites- If I want to invite someone to my friends list i'll turn it on and invite them other than that nobody is sending me invites.
3. Leave the /tell option there and just go shut it off if you wanna see outside tells then that should be left up to us to decide who we wanna see.

This eliminates Random invites and tells completely

I don't see any other way around this the only thing they would probably do to annoy everyone is to shout but who gives a crap about that.

Though, I highly doubt they will give us these option due to the fact it gives them income and as long as nobody is buying from them and they are just spamming us they aren't breaking rules due to that nobody is buying so they spam spam spam away.

I see those reports how they banned 6000 of them but then you noticed the same bots teleporting or the same rmt running around makes me wonder.

I stopped getting on so much now I just log in to do the jackpot as the golden saucer and log due to random invites I wanna do some of the new fights but stuff like that unmotivates me I don't feel like hitting cancel non stop and well I just log out.

So, due to the RMT spams, everyone will just filter out the new Adventurer tells permanently right? I don't think SE wants to do that.

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Originally Posted by Radkat

So, due to the RMT spams, everyone will just filter out the new Adventurer tells permanently right? I don't think SE wants to do that.

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New adventures can use the Say option its not very hard to ask someone right there if they can have a Link shell or free company or post on the forums and get one.

That is why the forums exist and say exist but at this point tells and other means are used for RMT traffic and is bull crap.

Say will only work if someone is stationary. People are often on the go, it will not be easy. And there are times when you don't want to let everyone near you hear what you want to ask or talk about.

But aren't you guys focusing on the wrong issue here? As long as there is demand, there will always be a supply. RMT sellers will always exist when buyers can buy all they want without repercussions. Not just this game, but all RMOs is the same.

No because the ones who aren't buying the Gil shouldn't suffer because of the ones who are buying.

Being banned is not solving the issue and people who are banned from buying isn't solving it either so why do we have to put up with the spam?

so best to block it out give us the tools to fight back, why should our experience of the game be lesson due to some bad apples.

Nobody is being banned from buying, that's the problem. People who spend extra money to buy gil tend to care about their characters. So if people are constantly getting banned for buying gil, most would not dare to risk it. That is the solution. The proof is that there is no RMT spam in JP servers, since JPs mostly don't buy gil.

Then you'll just get friend request spam, which is as annoying lol. Having the ability to deny newcomer friend requests, FC requests and Tells would be great.

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Originally Posted by Skeith-Adeline

Then you'll just get friend request spam, which is as annoying lol. Having the ability to deny newcomer friend requests, FC requests and Tells would be great.

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I did think of that. However from an RMT's perspective, the friend request would be pointless if players won't see the advertisment tells in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Natashio

There is no solution to RMT, none.

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While you're quite correct in that it's impossible to stamp out completely, there are many games that have a much better handle on it than this one.

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Originally Posted by Radkat

Nobody is being banned from buying, that's the problem. People who spend extra money to buy gil tend to care about their characters. So if people are constantly getting banned for buying gil, most would not dare to risk it. That is the solution. The proof is that there is no RMT spam in JP servers, since JPs mostly don't buy gil.

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You haven't been paying attention to the lodestone posts if you think they aren't banning buyers.

Filters on what tells you see is ultimately a band-aid with limited effectiveness. The most effective approach would be to create a "report RMT" option right next to blacklist and have various restrictions triggered automatically when enough reports are received. Restrictions could be things like temporary restrictions from using tells, shouts, friend requests, etc or account suspensions. I'm sure this would require a massive programming effort, but it would be extremely effective.

A close friend of mine created a new linkshell yesterday and added me and a couple other close friends who are always on busy. At least in that way he or we can communicate with each other even though we're on busy status. There is NO EXCUSE for forcing the community to have to put up with this invasive abuse. They can fix it by allowing preferences in who sends tells, who sends friends requests and more. For those not bothered by the status quo they would not need to do anything. For those who want to eliminate it they should have the tools to do so.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ALREADY. FIX IT SE.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

While you're quite correct in that it's impossible to stamp out completely, there are many games that have a much better handle on it than this one.

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Indeed. This is why I called it a countermeasure instead of a cure.

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Originally Posted by giantslayer

The most effective approach would be to create a "report RMT" option right next to blacklist and have various restrictions triggered automatically when enough reports are received.

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I wouldn't recommend this myself. I can see it too easily being used by large groups to gang up on a single person they don't like. Hunt "networks" for example. "Hey this jerk likes to pull hunts early and ruin the game for the rest of us! RMT report him and get him auto-banned!"

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Originally Posted by Darki

I wouldn't recommend this myself. I can see it too easily being used by large groups to gang up on a single person they don't like. Hunt "networks" for example. "Hey this jerk likes to pull hunts early and ruin the game for the rest of us! RMT report him and get him auto-banned!"

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There are several games that use this successfully. The key is to have temporary, relatively light restrictions (no character on a so-flagged account can send tells, for example, but can still play) until a GM reviews. Accounts that abuse the report functionality, lose it.

And, at least there's a human intelligence making these reports. Automatic filter systems... too narrow and they're circumvented quickly (what we have now), too broad and mentioning the wrong term can get you autobanned.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

You haven't been paying attention to the lodestone posts if you think they aren't banning buyers.

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Actually, I read the lodestone reports every time. They have never mentioned any gilbuyer bans, only RMT advertisements and RMT/illicit activity, which is essentially botting. Trust me, if SE starts banning gilbuyers, you will hear about it in this forum. Many NA/EU players buy gil, RMT is flourishing in those servers with constant ad spams. Those are the ones that can afford to lose paid accounts just to ad spam. If gilbuyers start getting banned, many here will jump up and down swearing they were wrongly banned for no reason.

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Originally Posted by Radkat

Actually, I read the lodestone reports every time. They have never mentioned any gilbuyer bans, only RMT advertisements and RMT/illicit activity, which is essentially botting. Trust me, if SE starts banning gilbuyers, you will hear about it in this forum. Many NA/EU players buy gil, RMT is flourishing in those servers with constant ad spams. Those are the ones that can afford to lose paid accounts just to ad spam. If gilbuyers start getting banned, many here will jump up and down swearing they were wrongly banned for no reason.

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To be fair, buying gil would fall under "RMT/illicit activity". And I doubt many gil buyers would bother to post complaints about it on the forum, even to feign innocence.

A. The random forum people can't do anything about their ban.
B. They would get far more people doubting them than supporting them, which would make it counter productive if their goal was to rally support.
C. Even if they were to get support and force SE to look into it, SE would just see that they were correct to ban them.

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Originally Posted by Aerowaffle

To be fair, buying gil would fall under "RMT/illicit activity". And I doubt many gil buyers would bother to post complaints about it on the forum, even to feign innocence.

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I highly doubt those RMT/illicit activities include gilbuying. Sellers have no problem getting banned in NA/EU servers because they are able to make massive RL money in between bans. This is not the case for buyers. They get banned, they are finished, they will not be returning customers. The fact that RMT flourishes so well right now implies people have no issues with buying at all. Compare this to JP servers that have no RMT spam. I'm sure they still exist, but they cannot afford to lose accounts to ad spams, just because JP generally aren't noob enough to buy gil.

And yes they WILL complain here if they get banned. Just like shortly after launch when there was a big hoo-ha in this forum of people claiming they were banned simply because they had too much gil.

Bots pay monthly subscriptions too. SE just turns a blind eye on them. This is a fact they're not admitting.

Anybody with an IQ of 50 can figure out that those people in BLM AF gear standing around Uldah's Aetheryte are bots. Yet, SE does nothing.

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Originally Posted by Radkat

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Why do you talk like you are against the idea of muting GIL sellers?

Tell me a Loop hole in the this idea for me.

1.Free Company and Friends only Private messaging
2. Turning Off/On option for friend invites to party and Turn Off/On option for friend invites.

Remember we can choose to do this and tell me how RMT are going to get around that?

They cannot invite to friends or party with the option off unless I turn it on and they cannot send tells anymore with the option off and cannot invite themselves to the free company or your friends anymore so that would ruin them.
They might stick around for people who actually buy gil but at least we dont have to hear or put up with their crap.

Cause you keep saying it wont work tell me how it wont if I shut off my tells and use the private messaging only in my Free company and Friend list?

Only thing that would happen is basically shouts, please do so we can point out the high level shouters and get them banned.

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Originally Posted by HeroSamson

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That may create a large influx of botters using more normalized names, something that SE is trying to avoid, and sending applications to FC's to try to spam through fc chats.
loophole found.

honestly, the best way to eliminate them, is to ignore them. they are like trolls. all you are doing by posting on the forums about them are giving their general business more awareness, aka free advertising.

these threads HELP RMT, not hurt it.

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Originally Posted by tocsin

That may create a large influx of botters using more normalized names, something that SE is trying to avoid, and sending applications to FC's to try to spam through fc chats.
loophole found.

honestly, the best way to eliminate them, is to ignore them. they are like trolls. all you are doing by posting on the forums about them are giving their general business more awareness, aka free advertising.

these threads HELP RMT, not hurt it.

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That is not a loop hole because you know that as soon as someone spams they are kicked.
Then would force them to invite to Link shell and there is no private messaging in that so if they spam they get kicked easy and then people will be more aware of who they are joining just like FFXI.

This thread is not helping, sometimes I believe some of you who are actually trying to stop threads like these have a hand in what we are against.
I find it very weird you would be against or try to stop or say this stuff promotes their actions.

Why would anyone be against stopping the RMT that fishy because I see no advertisements here about prices.

You say ignore though everytime they send a invite to you as a friend are you ignoring that? or are you hitting the cancel button? if you hit your black list are you ignoring them?
That isn't ignoring them at all soon as you hit cancel they know you are there meaning it wasn't ignored at all.

The thread is to find some way to mute them, you are not helping at all, you are basically going against everyone who says to add something to stop them, if you don't think it will work fine but that does not mean we still don't want these options.

About what you said at beginning there are already a large number of bots and what does that have to do with spamming and inviting us?

Also I ignored them since the very start but you can only take so much before its become a problem.
FFXI they filtered them out and they disappeared maybe not from area's but they couldnt talk to me and I set myself invisible so that they couldnt invite me I went through the game just fine without being bugged by them and them botting SE had to take care of it with goblins and actually forced RMT to level up and do something legit.

Then Rare/ex pushed them out of the game and I hardly seen rmt at all.

The only addition I'd like to see is a chat wipe when I blacklist. As gamers we train our brains to absorb information in the UI. Having their spam on the screen is in their benefit and I'd rather not grant them that.

If SE wanted to stop RMT they could, simple face is they make money from it, why would they stop them?

I bet there's a guy employed just to monitor RMT and hit the ban button when it makes the most cash for SE. I.e. When the guill sellers have made enough that it makes it worth their while to buy the game again and re-sub.

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Originally Posted by HeroSamson

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Please think carefully about what you are saying! Take a minute to think logically will happen to the game when such an idea happens!
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Yup, that's right, it can potentially kill the game. When you are in a server with constant tell spams, why would anyone EVER leave the option to receive tells from non friends/fc on? No, everyone will turn that option off. And the legit new players won't be able to use tell with anyone. Using 'say' won't work very well either, because you need to stand in the same area to hold a conversation. You can't go anywhere throughout the whole 'say' conversation. And when people are on the move, which they usually are unless they are afk, 'say' will not work well at all. Furthermore, quite often people do want everyone to read their conversation, people around them do not want to see constant 'say' spams on their log. You can say, well they can invite them as friends for that 10 minute conversation then kick them off after. That is not only awkward, but quite troublesome as well. Most players are very fickle nowadays, and will just elect to ignore the poor newbie spamming for help in 'say'. And after the conversation ends, and the old player turns off tell or friendship with tthe newbie, the newbie won't be able to ask follow up questions later. All this will make new players feel very difficult and unwelcome and likely lose interest very quickly.
All these ideas, are only temporary fix with serious side effects to the legit players. If you are serious about the RMT issue, you need to deal with it at the root of the problem. And the root of the problem is the constant, profitable demand that is driving the sellers in huge numbers. And please tell me, why do you NOT want to solve the entire RMT issue, and is just interested in the tell spam issue? The ad spam is just a symptom of a larger disease called RMT. If you go to your doctor because of a fever due to an infection, do you want the doctor to treat the fever only, or the cause of the fever?

I am sorry but I cannot take you serious due to the fact you are from Tonberry server and that is the JP server I hear that not much spam happens there.

So you have no clue what people are going through.

Go make a main on a bot infested, gil seller server and try to put up with it for a whole month and come back and say that again.
Nothing against you or anything but I have read comments before on here about some of the JP servers getting no spam at all.

Made a new character tonight to visit a friend on Zalera. Not even passed the 1st cutscene. Got 10 RMT tells. Yeah, its that bad. Nice way to show new potential players how RMT infested some worlds are SE.

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Originally Posted by HeroSamson

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That is true. There is no spam here in Tonberry. We have the cure for ad spam, proven right here. I keep trying to tell you and everyone here what that cure is, but you are just being deaf to it.

Now I undertstand how Jesus feels trying to save people who don't want to be saved.

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Originally Posted by HeroSamson

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Yeah, I ignore the friend requests. I just looked, I have a total of 4 of them. thing is, and i dont think you notice because you have just SO much time to complain about RMT, is that if you dont respond, eventually 90% of the bots will withdraw their own friend requests. without you ever having to lift a finger.

I also have a total of 6 people on my blacklist, because i dont waste my valuable time just sitting there clicking "add to blacklist" for a character that will be eliminated within 10 mins anyways, then going on the forums to complain about them.

JP servers dont get RMT spam. do you even know why? its because 1. they dont buy gil, and 2. they dont feed the trolls, they just ignore them.

I dont know who you think you are, trying to accuse regular players of being RMT, but I assure you, most of us arent. We just have legitimate gameplay reasons to not want certain forms of communication to be overly moderated, and affect our gameplay as a result.

a lot of people dont like swearing, and I am the leader of an 18+ FC, specializing in adult conversations. Should my entire FC be banned for swearing? just because a few forum people complain "its hurting my immersion, with swear spamming!"?

I think you really need to get a handle on exactly what you are trying to complain about. Stopping RMT is all fine and dandy (although, SE would have to fix the crafting system if so, because the current shard/crystal system would be unsupportable without RMT bots), but dont start trying to damage actual players gameplay.

I'm sure SE can easily add filter to /tells but you have to ask your self...

Whats better?...Getting /tells from RMT....VS... getting /S /Shout /Yell from RMT?

The very moment SE restricts/filter the /tell chat, RMT will reprogram there bots to use the /S /Shout /Yell chats. and because of the range restrictions of this chats, you will than see REAL spam on the chat logs not just 1 tell from a single RMT bot.

If you look at your /tell log carefully, you might notice that you only got ONE or two RMT /tells from the same bot. This is because the odds are that RMT send mass /tells to everyone once or twice than a couple of minutes later they proceed to DELETE there character and make a NEW one thus bypassing the Blacklist filter.

this means that SE has to implement a character deletion/creation restriction just to combat RMT. T_T

*** When this game came out I was playing TERA and decided to give it a try as NEW player. the first thing new players are introduce to is RMT harassment non-stop. this became very irritating to me and I ragequit after lvl. 4. as I founded it unacceptable for a P2p game and still deciding to continue trying the game or go back to TERA. I went back to TERA. than it became F2P so came back to FF14 couple of month after Tera was f2p..

***I don't think there is a real automated solution but SE could do a bit more to slow them down. i.e lvl 10+ restriction ect. and GM monitoring of "ALL" severs which is not cost effective. go in as new character...right click/banned any RMT spam it receives...again this is just too much to monitor in all servers unless is automated.

So here is my question for you guys...If SE decided to increase base subscription amount by an extra $1 just so it could have extra funds to combat RMT, would you all be ok with that? Now before someone post the typical "SE should have enough money already", and "I pay a sub, i should not have to deal with this", I'm saying, if SE cam out and said they are increasing the sub by one dollar (US of course) but the extra funds are going into a task force to combat RMT, would you be ok with that? I think I would. Just wanted you guys thoughts

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Originally Posted by tocsin

Yeah, I ignore the friend requests. I just looked, I have a total of 4 of them. thing is, and i dont think you notice because you have just SO much time to complain about RMT, is that if you dont respond, eventually 90% of the bots will withdraw their own friend requests. without you ever having to lift a finger.

I also have a total of 6 people on my blacklist, because i dont waste my valuable time just sitting there clicking "add to blacklist" for a character that will be eliminated within 10 mins anyways, then going on the forums to complain about them.

JP servers dont get RMT spam. do you even know why? its because 1. they dont buy gil, and 2. they dont feed the trolls, they just ignore them.

I dont know who you think you are, trying to accuse regular players of being RMT, but I assure you, most of us arent. We just have legitimate gameplay reasons to not want certain forms of communication to be overly moderated, and affect our gameplay as a result.

a lot of people dont like swearing, and I am the leader of an 18+ FC, specializing in adult conversations. Should my entire FC be banned for swearing? just because a few forum people complain "its hurting my immersion, with swear spamming!"?

I think you really need to get a handle on exactly what you are trying to complain about. Stopping RMT is all fine and dandy (although, SE would have to fix the crafting system if so, because the current shard/crystal system would be unsupportable without RMT bots), but dont start trying to damage actual players gameplay.

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Do you think that somehow, RMT actually increase their efforts when they see people complaining about them? No. The community voicing their concerns about RMT lets SE know their options; try to deal with RMT, or have more upset customers.

As for the market shard reliance, you do realize that gathering retainers can bring back shards and crystals. By the bucket-full as well, every hour to 40min (depending on the retainer's level). So I believe the argument that the crafting market needs the bots for the shards is pretty shit. SE has given us an easy way to get as many shards and crystals as we could ever want.

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Originally Posted by ValkyrieL

***I don't think there is a real automated solution but SE could do a bit more to slow them down. i.e lvl 10+ restriction ect. and GM monitoring of "ALL" severs which is not cost effective. go in as new character...right click/banned any RMT spam it receives...again this is just too much to monitor in all servers unless is automated.

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No, there is an automated solution. It is giving a chat log option to report RMT that systematically triggers restrictions when various thresholds of reports are reached.

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Originally Posted by Aerowaffle

As for the market shard reliance, you do realize that gathering retainers can bring back shards and crystals. By the bucket-full as well, every hour to 40min (depending on the retainer'slevel). So I believe the argument that the crafting market needs the bots for the shards is pretty shit. SE has given us an easy way to get as many shards and crystals as we could ever want.

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umm... no offense, because im not sure if you are actually one of our end game crafters instead of a dabbler, but retainers bring back like, 80 per venture. I used almost 40,000 shards last week, alone, on my mastercraft farming. retainer ventures for shards are nothing, and a completely inefficient use of the retainer system. have them bring back the valuable stuff, sell it, and buy shards. you will get more out of it per venture.

im just saying that if a new player logs into the forums, and sees a thread like this, it creates the question. it affects the gameplay before players potentially even enter the game, and before the game has a chance to hook said new player in.

obviously, though, Y'all think that making the ten thousandth thread on "RMT sucks" makes more of a difference than the 9,999th one did. Seriously, it isnt, and there are more efficient use of our times, like actually playing the game that we all love.