Spam tells ruining the game

I was enjoying this game (aside from having to blacklist often), now my list is full and I am constantly spammed.

Any options other than the poor one of "/busy", essentially taking the MMO out of MMORPG...

Fix or I'm gone, sadly.

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Originally Posted by Dontee

Any options other than the poor one of "/busy", essentially taking the MMO out of MMORPG...

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Turn you tell sound off if you want to and ignore it.

but then I miss FC chat, and chat tells from friends and/or people wanting to legitimately talk to me.... right?

Not if you just turn the notification sound off, you'll still get tells you just wont hear when they come.

Has someone suggested to have a filter option to throw spam tells into it automatically? I know some mmorpgs out there have them. That would be nice to see that added in FFXIV. The wall of text, the amount of hearts and stars and their professing to be our friends would be a good starter for the system to automatically land those annoying tells to the spam tab.

I think cracking down on the buyers is the solution. Permanent ban. Done. No buyers, no sellers.

There are plenty of solutions out there to help alleviate the RMT problem.

But we're getting absolutely no acknowledgement from SE beyond the ban sweep information.

Sadly, while SE remains as indifferent as they are when it comes to genuine action and while there are willing buyers out there, there isn't really an ideal "fix" for this, unless you were to migrate to a server that is free of it, namely the Japanese servers.

Though yes, it is absolutely galling to see the tells constantly appear (I swear they've been more and more frequent and ubiquitous than I remember) and now the sellers seem to be spamming zone chat as well. Still, it's not been so endemic that it's actually ruined my gaming experience. They're a plague, sure, but they're not quite the Black Death either. Then again, I do willingly keep my status to "busy" and have much of the socialising go on in the FC and LS channels.

SE likes to encourage grinds in their games. Just gotta suck it up. When your blacklist gets full it's a grind just like leveling a job or farming relic. Gotta remove one person at a time going through all those lovely confirmation windows. The reward is to be able to blacklist the newly created gil seller bots who will just make new accounts and characters anyways and fill up your newly cleaned off blacklist in a day or two which means more grinding! :)

Please look forward to it!

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Originally Posted by Dontee

but then I miss FC chat, and chat tells from friends and/or people wanting to legitimately talk to me.... right?

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i stopped using the tells window a long time ago

sometimes i wonder if a real person has actually tried to talk to me and that makes me a little sad, but whatever. when i was playing the game pretty frequently all the people i wanted to talk to were in my FC or Linkshells.

/busy is your friend.. still get all FC, LS ,shout,yells if somone wants to talk to me they can always use /say.

No reason why we can't have a /tell option window where we can check off to receive tells from people on our friends list and FC only. It really has gotten out of hand, I switched servers a week ago and my list is 3/4 full already.

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Originally Posted by Eight

No reason why we can't have a /tell option window where we can check off to receive tells from people on our friends list and FC only. It really has gotten out of hand, I switched servers a week ago and my list is 3/4 full already.

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Would you enjoy having to decline hundreds of friends requests per day by gil sellers? :P

could easily be circumvented by requiring players to be level 10 to send tells or friend requests

i really dont pay it much mind, it is one of the few gripes i have with the game

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Originally Posted by Aerowaffle

There are plenty of solutions out there to help alleviate the RMT problem.

But we're getting absolutely no acknowledgement from SE beyond the ban sweep information.

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I think that is the issue ultimately..
I did some digging around on my server, I found a group of bots (4 BLM with 4 chocobos out) and I was able to find some hints linking them to actual players.. Posted a post about it and I was slapped with a half day ban on the forums and the post was deleted of course.. I understand that the ban probably resulted from breaking the forum rules posting people's names, But I didn't actually list any of the names, I just redirected people to the appropriate pictures that I have uploaded to imgur :D

Sad to see it, but that seems to be the general attitude.

To be honest, SE has done a lot more in ARR than they had during 1.0 I cannot recall how many times I've ratted players out using bots and even admitted in chat. And then you find all these instances of players actually boasting about in websites or even people selling these bot products, complete with PayPal accounts and a Twitter feed, FB page, etc. And SE didn't lift a finger. While I can empathize (and I certainly do feel overwhelmed by the RMT spam on some nights), I can assure you that all online games suffer from this problem and SE has been doing more than they used to do.

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Originally Posted by Discordia

I can assure you that all online games suffer from this problem and SE has been doing more than they used to do.

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Which, compared to other games, is still not a lot :)

It's time to admit that SE doesn't have enough GM presence in the game, People can rarely ever speak to one, coupled with the horrid UI we have to blacklisting/reporting or general gameplay over all, it all adds up.

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Originally Posted by Delorean

could easily be circumvented by requiring players to be level 10 to send tells or friend requests

i really dont pay it much mind, it is one of the few gripes i have with the game

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You already have trial accounts that can't send tells up to level 20. And it wouldn't be "easily circumvented" considering how easy it is to even level up anyway. All it would do is delay the inevitable by a few minutes.

They could just make it where you can't receive tells from anyone not on your friends list/FC/LS whose highest class/job that isn't at least level 5. At the very least it will make the RMTers do some FATEs. Could do the same to friend requests.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

You already have trial accounts that can't send tells up to level 20. And it wouldn't be "easily circumvented" considering how easy it is to even level up anyway. All it would do is delay the inevitable by a few minutes.

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lol gil spammers having to get to level 10 to spam tells would actually help the game. i really dont think gil spammers are trying to play a game to do their job though. and trials can send whispers, but only to people on their friends list

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Originally Posted by Dontee

I was enjoying this game (aside from having to blacklist often), now my list is full and I am constantly spammed.

Any options other than the poor one of "/busy", essentially taking the MMO out of MMORPG...

Fix or I'm gone, sadly.

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I honestly think if SE does this it would be great
make an option to where only your friends can give you tells
Sadly this hasn't been implemented

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Originally Posted by Dontee

I was enjoying this game (aside from having to blacklist often), now my list is full and I am constantly spammed.

Any options other than the poor one of "/busy", essentially taking the MMO out of MMORPG...

Fix or I'm gone, sadly.

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This is what i do:

-Turn off sound notification for /tell

-remove /tell's from the general chat tab and put them into the battle tab (or any other tab you please).

= It's like the don't even exist for me anymore.

The people i get /tells worth reading are on my friendslist. i just tell him to send a moogle mail to me to get my attention. If i'm expecting a /tell, lets say from a GM or because i started a PT in the PF, i monitor the battle log. besides 99.99% of /tells are from spam bots.



As for solutions, the dev's should follow examples made by other games. In the instance of WoW, they made it so that if you are a char under a certain level, or a new char you may not send tells to other players unless they FIRST send you a /tell, this is how friends can still communicate while circumventing the RMT spam bot problem. Friend requests were independent between players. Meaning you didn't need a player's permission to add them to your friendlist, the countermeasure mentioned earlier allows this to be with no draw backs. a FFXIV version of blocking friend requests should work similar to how WoW's anti-spam /tell system works. Players under a certain level may not send friend requests, but they are free to receive friend requests from players meeting that level requirement.

2 New chars that know each other IRL but trying to add each other to their friends list? Maybe make it so you have to be face to face with a player to send a friend request, or even better, make it so they are in the same party, and face to face to send a friend request to each other.

What if they want to be classes that start in different cities? Well i guess thats just a stigma of the game's design and theres little next to nothing that can be done.

I never ever got a RMT spam /tell while playing WoW, they also had a huge ingame player support team as well with GM's with little or no red tape authority to take action.

would love tells to only be accessable from people on your friends list the friend request dialogue is far less intrusive then people spamming tells see it or not it does create an amount of lag that i dont apreciate

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Originally Posted by Delorean

lol gil spammers having to get to level 10 to spam tells would actually help the game. i really dont think gil spammers are trying to play a game to do their job though. and trials can send whispers, but only to people on their friends list

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Then gil sellers could just resort to botting until they hit level 10 and then resume business. RMTs have something the average player does not: Persistence. Everyone who keeps suggesting level limits to do anything only throws up a speed bump to RMTs and a brick wall to legit players.

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Originally Posted by Caoihmin

I think cracking down on the buyers is the solution. Permanent ban. Done. No buyers, no sellers.

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SE bans account, gil seller steals another one. Besides, the money they sell probably isn't on the same account that they advertise on.

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Originally Posted by LazyMemories

I honestly think if SE does this it would be great
make an option to where only your friends can give you tells
Sadly this hasn't been implemented

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Sadly, this is a terrible idea. Because let me tell you what will happen next.

Every gil spammer in the game is going to be sending you friend requests that you have to decline TWICE, instead of sending you tells 10,000 times that you can filter out to a spam log now. It'll compound the problem, not alleviate it.

Here's the problem with just blacklisting them. No report is sent. Nothing to tell SE, "Hey this guy is being an asshole!" The simplest solution is click or right-click the name in the chat window with an option for "Report for spam" or "Report for RMT". The option then blocks THE ACCOUNT, not the character, THE ACCOUNT. Doesn't interact with the blacklist, has it's own list with no limit. Generates a ticket with a snapshot of the conversation and sends it to SE GMs.

I also see some people are all like, "Well if people would stop buying it and we ban all the buyers..." That's a nice thought.. but it isn't realistic. There will always be buyers and if there are no buyers that's only going to give the RMT spammers incentive to spam more. This has to be a multi-pronged strategy for combating this problem. Just doing one this isn't, and obviously hasn't, going to solve it.

Then what do you suggest? Either we get tell spam or we get friend request spam. Pick your poison.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

Then what do you suggest? Either we get tell spam or we get friend request spam. Pick your poison.

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It isn't one or the other. there's multiple options. requiring to be friendlisted is just one of the worse options.

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Originally Posted by DragonFlyy

SE bans account, gil seller steals another one. Besides, the money they sell probably isn't on the same account that they advertise on.

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I said....permanent ban on the BUYERS.

What's exactly stopping a banned buyer simply making a new account to do it all over again?

The spam doesn't really bother me that much but really all we need are 2 new options. The option to automatically reject friend requests and the option to only receive tells from people in your FC/Flist. Options meaning that you can turn them on or off if you want to.

Shout spam isn't going anywhere though but it's easy to filter out shouts and only look at them when you want to.

not ruining the game for me cause i only see/get 1 mayb twice a week

I have tells disabled and my search info says so, if anyone wants to talk to me outside of LS, they will see my message if they click me. I've done this because on busy status I miss party invites and ready checks, which is very annoying. And as soon as I remove busy, the spam just goes through.

But now RMTs seem to know this and just spam me friend requests. I've had a conversation with a GM about this today, and as usual he said I should blacklist and report. But all the reports I've submitted, I've seen the same characters around for more than two weeks, and SE says they swipe a ban hammer once a week?

Now with this friend request, if I ignore it, a diferent RMT will send another request, and if I decline, the same guy will keep spamming.
I am really fed up and it breaks my immersion, I have to be absolutely un-communicated? I don't see how I should do their job, pausing my game to report and fill my blacklist? When 5 minutes later I get more spam from diferent RMTs, and more and more and more... You can't even have a conversation in tell anymore, RMT pops in, alt+R and then have luck filtering your friend.
I really don't understand how they can tolerate so many complaints.

Gm also said I should post a comment or suggestion in the forums... ;)

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

What's exactly stopping a banned buyer simply making a new account to do it all over again?

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Do what again? Grind away at their levels, buy Gil illegally, only to get banned permanently once more? Keep creating characters repeating this behavior and you are clinically insane. Sellers have the privilege of virtually no time investment or desire to advance in the game. Could be a case for prohibiting all chat access until at least lvl 10. This is implemented in many MMOs.

The buyers are buying the gil to progress in the game; the sellers, to gain profit. When a buyer has progressed significantly and invested a good portion of their time they might think thrice about purchasing from these numbskulls if SE laid down the law. If they don't, they are deserving idiots.

Bring down the iron fist on the short cutters and problem solved. No more market for these annoying RMT.

Read this yesterday and got depressed it's true on Faerie too rmt tells are out of control. So I did something about it, I don't use the PM system except to reply to excessive rmt noise with death threats. So I clicked select or the touch pad on ps4 controller, created new chat tab called it spam, went to settings and directed all PM's to that tab, then went out and back in under General, and deselected Messages. Now All PM's including rmt spam go to a designated tab. It works no more rmt messages in my normal chat, i'd turn off notifications too but every notification makes me smile now i've taken the fangs and claws from my tormenters but left the bell. Do this everyone we don't need the PM system so do away with it for SE system by system. Why the tab? well it has to go somewhere.