Its a BUSY day today but fun with Macro's... the RMT fight back

So Guys n Gals...

I know that you are all just as sick of the RMT spammers as myself and all my friends are - and we can and will fight back.

Its a pretty tough job that SE has to address, track, prove and successfully ban RMT agents, (due to VPN and inability to track through a peer network) and then they just make another account and do it all again. So, there are a couple of things we can do to make the spammers jobs a whole lot harder AND force those who are actually buying the Gil to do the same, by default, in a super friendly way :D

You can either nominate a few regulars or active players to "run" these couple of "ANTI RMT" events or put an LS of a small group of passionate Anti RMT players together, you'd be surprised how many would want to join and have fun with what Im about to give you... some beautiful RMT ammunition!

1. On a randomly nominated day (dont set a day on forums, or RMT agents will start checking them once they discover a server wide or game wide rebellion) decided by the ARMTA (Anti RMT agents) with one or two people in each of the major zones (Cities, Coerthas, Revenants) /sh to location for everyone to enter busy status announcing that this is a planned Anti RMT event. Its not hard, and yes, nobody will be able to whisper anyone for that day, but its worth it, and besides, you can /sh or /y for a bit, great way to meet new people in a fun way, and it will begin to cause question as to why everyone is in busy status and so much yelling convo's and shouting going on - you are effectively creating awareness.

N.B. As a sidenote, you will most likely have the real Gil BUYERS do the same thing and go in to busy status.... THEY dont want you knowing who they are, and if you DO see people not in busy status hanging around, whisper them, and ask them to busy themselves, unless of course, they ARE buying Gil. (Make no mistake, the buyers are the reason RMT agents exist.)

AND

2. Macros, macros, macros. BIG ONES. FUNNY BIG ONES. They dont have to be rude or abusive of full of language. They just have to be HUMUNGOUS... AND SPAM THEM. Just have them with a /r at the beginning of the line in a macro and HAVE FUN! The RMT agents will have their chat box filled with so much macro spam the second they send their RMT crap out world wide, we may just eliminate the second round of their spam - imagine just 2 or 3 people doing that with huge macros at the same time - what a f...ing huge mess on their screens.

And finally...if you are REALLY passionate about getting rid of these guys...

Go find their hangouts - and make a HUGE fuss pointing at them with emotes accompanied by shouts that you found a real live RMT spammer, gather a crowd, encourage people to come. One of their hangouts known to me personally is in New Gridania, right under the Aetheryte platform. There you will find them, New Adventurer, Level 1, spamming YOU.

If anyone would like to elaborate further with any other great ideas to give them a hard time and annoy them, sully their business... expose them in any way, by all means, reply to this thread and I'll add it up here.

Square Enix do one hell of a job banning hundreds of accounts at a time, but the problem is that there is a market - more to the point - buyers in this game. We will never be rid of them, it will never stop. But we can make it harder for them to do their jobs. Already, Im seeing approximately 35 - 40% these days, of our server players now in constant busy status and its on the increase. A month ago it was around 5 - 10%. If nothing else, we will be demonstrating that we do NOT like and will NOT tolerate their freedom to spam us with their "Lets make things better" crap.

We will not continue quietly into the night, pretending they dont exist. Or the buyers.

Post now complete.

I'm not soo sure about the first part but making a macro to /r them sounds awesome. Would totes make my day... I don't think going to certain areas and just shouting for ppl to put themselves in the busy status would work tho. You gotta realize that is taking ppl away from their game play. Yes, it is disruptive of our game play when they send us tells over and over and friend requests as well. Lots of players are either working on end game content or leveling to their hearts content before the expansion. What we need is a right click feature that allows us to report them and block them at the same time instead of taking the long route and going through the in game support desk. That's an issue because SE doesn't understand that we are all so busy and it takes a moment to pull up that support desk. Sometimes even takes a moment for it to even load.

It's too bad the RMTs are all bot-programs that just run their scripts and don't even notice when we go busy or spam emotes and shouts. The ones that transfer gil to players/mules are probably real people, but they won't be bothered either for the 2 minutes they log in to do their job :(

Maybe if everyone who knows people who buy gil could report the people who do. Close friends, relatives or your girlfriend... it doesn't matter.
Maybe SE could hire more people to do it. In the end credits of ARR there were only 3 people on the special actions team, who I believe handles all the RMT sleuthing, which is clearly not enough.
Maybe your idea won't change a damn thing because the people who want to buy gil, will. And then they will use that gil to buy runs and get through content much faster than you, forever.

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Originally Posted by Twivana

I'm not soo sure about the first part but making a macro to /r them sounds awesome. Would totes make my day... I don't think going to certain areas and just shouting for ppl to put themselves in the busy status would work tho. You gotta realize that is taking ppl away from their game play. Yes, it is disruptive of our game play when they send us tells over and over and friend requests as well. Lots of players are either working on end game content or leveling to their hearts content before the expansion. What we need is a right click feature that allows us to report them and block them at the same time instead of taking the long route and going through the in game support desk. That's an issue because SE doesn't understand that we are all so busy and it takes a moment to pull up that support desk. Sometimes even takes a moment for it to even load.

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Great point Twivana regarding the support desk thing, I got that down to a fine 45 second artform. But as for the organised event, shouting for peeps to go in to busy status, it takes just 3 seconds to type /busy, and we all know that as busy as what we are with levelling and end game content, there are a vast majority that "hang out" with friends in game, that would most likely, because they are online so much and are just as sick of the RMT, be more than happy to spend a bit of organised time getting people to /busy. its but a smaller proportion of more casual players that logon for limited time and target certain things they must get done today. Different levels of game occupation - dependent of RL demands of course.

And yah, totally agree, block and blacklist and report at the same time. Insta ban would be even better LOL!

Making a macro to spam RMT spam bots is as usefull as yelling at your lawn.

I was always under the impression that RMT spammers are bots (programmed computers, with no one at the keyboard), so I think point 2 and 3 are somewhat pointless... the computer won't mind the "huge mess on their screen", nor will its feelings be broken by being spammed with stuff the moment they spawn (whereas a new player will be offended, and sometimes you can't tell an RMT from a genuine new player, so be careful).

The idea to all go to /busy is good, but I wouldn't go so far as to pointing at non-busy people as RMT buyers. I don't buy gil and I do never go on Busy status, because I talk via tells with friends a lot (and I guess I have a high level of tolerance/lazyness, as I don't even bother blacklisting RMTs when I receive their tells. I just kind of ignore them). I'd hate to be branded as a gil buyer just for that.

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Originally Posted by Alash

Maybe if everyone who knows people who buy gil could report the people who do. Close friends, relatives or your girlfriend... it doesn't matter.
Maybe SE could hire more people to do it. In the end credits of ARR there were only 3 people on the special actions team, who I believe handles all the RMT sleuthing, which is clearly not enough.
Maybe your idea won't change a damn thing because the people who want to buy gil, will. And then they will use that gil to buy runs and get through content much faster than you, forever.

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And Maybe Im not nor WONT be deterred by those facts Alash.

Will NOT....sit back....and shutup... and put up with it...and do nothing.

As for buying Gil to buy runs... hey, lol, you wanna take the fun out of the game by not earning your clear yourself and cheat that way for the sake of that weapon that sits on your back, your choice. But in making my choice, am I gonna sit back and make that easier for you by doing nothing even though you are still able to buy the gil (Not talking to you personally btw Alash), damn straight Im not. At the very least, I know that Ive done anything and everything possible to deter you from doing that. I might not win, but at least Im fighting it.

If nothing else, do we think it MIGHT be possible, that by the player community taking a stand on fight back, that they MIGHT just reconsider the options open to us to PUT A STOP to our gameplay being interrupted if fight back hard enough for long enough. Its alright making post after post after post of complaining, and making suggestions... but what are WE actually doing..? Is that it? Lets make a LOUD STATEMENT to SE about what we are prepared to do and how we are going to spend some of our game time doing it. The mere threat of possibly losing subscribers because the options are not provided when they could be...

RMT is running rampant.
We need to run rampant.

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Originally Posted by Bluevann

I was always under the impression that RMT spammers are bots (programmed computers, with no one at the keyboard), so I think point 2 and 3 are somewhat pointless... the computer won't mind the "huge mess on their screen", nor will its feelings be broken by being spammed with stuff the moment they spawn (whereas a new player will be offended, and sometimes you can't tell an RMT from a genuine new player, so be careful). The idea to all go to /busy is good, but I wouldn't go so far as to pointing at non-busy people as RMT buyers. I don't buy gil and I do never go on Busy status, because I talk via tells with friends a lot (and I guess I have a high level of tolerance/lazyness, as I don't even bother blacklisting RMTs when I receive their tells. I just kind of ignore them). I'd hate to be branded as a gil buyer just for that.

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Some of them may well be bots, but what do we think happens when for example, they send a friend request... there has to be someone there to follow up on it right? And then there is... those letters at the end of the tell, they identify the RMT agent for commission, thats how they get paid.. so... unattended? I think not. Friend requests and I.D. of the tell for commission = people, yeah they might be scripting the macros out, but there is someone paying attention.

Thing is too Bluevann, with tells with friends, Im absolutely sure that you will have encountered being in the middle of a response to someone and an RMT comes in, I know that some people do it differently, but im always /r to my friend, and how many times that reply has gone to the RMT instead of my friend... you betcha its worth it, and nobody said you would be branded a gil buyer, its just the power of suggestion that you might be if you dont. Ignoring them is not an option.

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Originally Posted by SamAkemi

And then there is... those letters at the end of the tell, they identify the RMT agent for commission, thats how they get paid.. so... unattended? I think not.

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How do you know this? I thought the last letters are used to make each tell different (they change them every time they send a tell, I've noticed receiving multiple tells from the same RMT, the final letters were always different), so to circumvent the spam filter (since, changing the last letters, the tell they send is different from the one they previously sent, therefore, not recognized as spam). I have no idea where you got this information about "identifying agents".

This sounds incredibly annoying to anyone else who is in the zone with you.

Spamming is spamming afterall, whether you are an RMT or a ARMTA.

These are the most ridiculous things I've seen for a while and they wouldn't even affect any RMT bots. I think OP is clueless on how this works.

OP, I can appreciate what you want to do, but how is this fighting back exactly? Bots don't care if you spam them or ignore them. The people monitoring the bots don't care if you spam them or ignore them. You're yelling at the sky and expecting it to turn green.

Your plan will not be very effective against RMT, but it will be very annoying for the actual players on the server.

well I've finally got tired of the rmt spam and ended up /buzy, but I still see if in /shout in every town. Like this afternoon same guy been spamming it passed 4 hours in uldah....

How do I get rid of /shouts...


That anti everyone /buzy day will just make them spam /shout even more >.<

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Originally Posted by SamAkemi

Go find their hangouts - and make a HUGE fuss pointing at them with emotes accompanied by shouts that you found a real live RMT spammer, gather a crowd, encourage people to come.

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Won't work. Do a player search sometime with no filters on and look at how many players you find that are level 50 archers and thuramages (not to be confused with black mages and bards.) RMTs make these characters to gil farm with. You'll find these characters in all 3 starting cites most likely hiding inside the inns.

You poor thing if you think any of these suggestions are a reasonable way to "fight back". 99.9% of it is automated, you aren't messing with anyone, and no one is there looking at the screen. A computer program doesn't care if you insult it, ostracize it, spam it, or even block it. It doesn't have feelings and won't stop what it's doing just because you don't like it, or because you told it to do so, or because you pointed it out to everyone. You are literally shouting at a wall.

The only reasonable way for the average person to "fight back" is to report spammers and bots via the in-game support ticket system. Most other things are a waste of time and effort.

I'd love to see some progress on RMT getting booted, I really would. Also, you are thinking, which is great. These particular suggestions might be a little off, though. I mean for one, /busy status doesn't just block tells. You also won't have much luck doing some other stuff. :P
Sending tells to the RMT, which sometimes satisfying, is also ineffective because of what people said here. Honestly, I don't know if any of them even ever see the game client... probably just manipulated through other programs.

Also, I believe those randomized tags at the end of the /tells are not to identify an agent, but are actually randomized garbage. It's at the end of the tell so that those ads can easily avoid one of the simplest ways to catch them, i.e. looking for large numbers of character-for-character identical /tells. They make each one just different enough to skip such easy detection. The entire ad is crafted to avoid filters, nothing is a mistake (except, perhaps, the awful English XD).