Bring back a /anon feature that counters RMT Spam bots.

I offer this as a solution to the huge RMT issue that's apparent in the EU/NA server groups.

about me:

I've worked as a payroll GM for 4 years, do not ask what game. GM's answer to someone in a higher position that makes the policies and in most cases never understand what players go through. However the 4 years i was in that job, i always forward feed back to the developers, to give us tools to dealing with malicious players. We already had ingame tools that helped us find and splat reported ingame bugs. For example wearing a shirt that granted it's wearer the ability to 1-shot any monster, and there were different shirts for all the different forms of damage. You get the idea. Eventually we were given tools that would allow us to force d/c players so we can go through our checklist of bot activity. Anyways.

It's my strong belief that GM's in FFXIV are either understaffed or not given the proper authority (or tools) to directly deal with RMT spammers.

My 2 cents on the situation.

At first i was like everyone else raging on the forum about RMT /tells. I was quick to copy pasta any rmt /tell i received and filed it to the GM department. This went on for months, then one day i asked myself, do GM's have the authority to for quick action against rmt spam characters? so i decided to not blacklist an offending RMT as soon as i received one, and send in the usual copy pasta report along with server name. To my surprise, i continued to receive RMT spam from the same faux character for 18 hours past when the GM left a copy pasta response, again for 12 hours past, and again. These were weekdays, no observed holidays in Japan, the EU or NA.

That "please blacklist any offending character" is just a shame.

Overtime i became desensitized to it, and eventually ended up removing /tell's from the general chat tab and disabling sound notifications.

The community has plead for more efficient methods of reporting, suggested specific filters and requirements to minimizing RMT spam. These suggested filters have been a huge success in that other particular mmorpg.

And as far as we can tell, the dev's can't be bothered to give 2 popotos.

Let us analyse the activity of the RMT spam bots themselves. So we know they send /tells by the dozen or so every few seconds. Now how are they finding victims to /tell? Do they sit in the middle of a gathering point and right click targets? or right click names that come up in general chat? My deductions lead me to the /search menu and the /search command. This is the only way RMT's can bite at so many victims in such a short time frame with ease.

The quick solution? disable /search and /search menu until devs can be bothered to give 2 krakka roots.

The graceful quick solution? An /anon feature that removes the player from /search and the /search menu hits.

and im going to stop writing for abit because im hungry brb.

Edit:
i remember the reason behind why the game didn't have an ingame global character search feature. Long before the game left in-house alpha testing they knew such a feature could be abused more than it could be beneficial. The result, RMT spammers have to take a 10min-20min run from the newbie zone to a point of gathering to spam in /say which is was always quickly dealt with the algorithm filter the devs themselves developed. The spam bots spam would continue to appear on their screen but be completely hidden to surrounding players. An invisible trap.

I'm not sure about SE's policy about /tells, but my employing company's policy was to treat /tells like private phone calls for the most part. We were not permitted to read through /tell logs unless a player involved sends in a ticket requesting help that could only be resolved by reviewing recent /tell log history. It was a real big deal as we had to attach the player's request to the request to access chat logs, and if a request to access /tell logs isn't found there was an extremely high chance that GM would be suspended or released from the job. Hence the need for very intricate restrictions on sending /tells, otherwise the GM's would be constricted in red tape.

Together (devs and gms) We designed a system where we were funneling said rmt spam bots into a trap, while completely locking down their /tell ability through prerequisite requirements, and the intentional lack of a global character search feature ingame. The need for GM intervention was next to never

The mailbox system was run on an even more complex algorithm created by the devs, the algorithm included a small fee for each mail you sent (*equivalent to 200 gil*), monitors the text if any note is attached to the mail, monitors if a cash on delivery request is attached, monitors how many players the same mail was sent too, the current location of characters the mail was attached to, whether the character is offline or online,

*200gil x 2,000 player victims = 400,000 gil. This was another trap. This made the RMT think twice, before abusing the mailbox, if they decided to abuse it anyways the algorithm picked it up and put all the mail and the gil into a trash bin, new characters don't have that kind of currency to do that, so in the rare occasion mass spam mail was sent out and trashed, we searched the origin of the currency and suspended the account in less than an hour and other accounts with close ties, IE same credit card would be closely investigated the following days.

The one time we missed a mass spam mail bot didn't have RMT text attached, but text that closely resembled flavor text and the name of a influential NPC figure at the head of a powerful lore organization, which caught us by surprise, the mail sent to over 2,000 characters per server was restricted to a hand full of servers with a mastermind player behind it. It came in the form of a Cash on Delivery of the equivalent of 10,000 gil, and the flavor text was in the title "donate to our holy war against ______" very intricate 200 word flavor text to follow. about 500 players (per server) fell for it, however their currency was swiftly returned when we gave the mastermind player and accomplices the choice, be suspended for 6 months or do the right thing. So they agreed, we warned them on what was about to happen, we force d/ced, issued a 24 hour suspension, took all their currency as the mid ground punishment and returned all the currency to the victims.

Anyways, i feel combating RMT's and malicious links, is a job that could only work with the combined efforts of software developers and GM's and not just the GM department alone. Work together to create traps they cant see, prevention will fail the moment they get around it.

P.S. My favorite tool was the one that highlighted the run pathing of a targeted player, in the form of lines on the ground, only viewable by the user, with the ability to cross-reference it with other character's pathing history. Made me feel like a cybernetic blood hound. Which is how we caught farming/harvesting bots, but that's a story for another day.

They are definitely using the search function, so that's a good idea. Although if there's a /anon setting to remove oneself from the search lists, they might as well just remove the search function. Everyone will /anon and there won't be many people left to search for lol

I support an /anon feature. Having an A name and being on a legacy, high population non-JP server means I'm pretty much screwed if I don't have busy on.

Easy solution with few drawbacks I can think of.

Yes please.

So here is my conspiracy theory. SE could not care less. What they do care about is to create the illusion they fight this egregious battle with everything they can. That way they don't feel the heat of the community. Unfortunately for them time told us they're not even trying and here is why.

Bots keep items alive. Subs are being payed. It eats up precious man hours to "investigate" accounts. Banning bots by the dozen would also mean they'd have to ban GIL BUYERS. One would be a bit credulous to think SE can't spot a gil buyer within seconds. They rather have the sub money which is totally understandable from a business' point of view. The spam on EU/NA servers also tells us that it's a big market so that's loads of subs to ban. SE will not touch it.

I'm on Odin and the last couple of months has been rediculous. I do not care anymore if people buy gil and keep these bots alive. However, do something about tells and friendrequests (friendrequest are horrid to deal with) please.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hiruke

I support an /anon feature. Having an A name and being on a legacy, high population non-JP server means I'm pretty much screwed if I don't have busy on.

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Doesn't matter what your name starts with I have a Z name and get rmt tells soon as I log in most of the time.

Or just remove the search function entirely. Myself and everyone I've spoken to rarely ever use the thing. Right now it just seems like a tool for easy RMT.

updated with details on the inner workings of how our company did it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KaedrianLiang

For example wearing a shirt that granted it's wearer the ability to 1-shot any monster, and there were different shirts for all the different forms of damage.

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http://i.imgur.com/7jgmXiX.jpg

I remember a story about a non-GM player getting this.

LOL...I didn't even know a /search exists. xD But if it does... I'd say disabling it would be beneficial in more ways than one: obviously it'd make the life of RMTs harder, but also it'd ease up on server stress, I believe. I mean dozens/hundreds of search requests less should lighten the load, right? With the frequency of hardware limitations being cited as "explanation" to why we can't have certain things - I'd think that should be even more of a priority. Sadly, it seems it isn't. But yeah those hardware limitations are probably also the reason for the lack of more complex filter/monitor algorithms. I guess. Not a pro, just how I think it is...by common sense and logic. Might be wrong though.

Eh. I've used the player search for legitimate reasons plenty of times, but I don't see any reason that a level 1 character would have to use it. Restricting the use for a higher level would make tell spamming tons harder.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ashkendor

Eh.

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There was an instance where an account was compromised because the account owner visited one of those account buying and selling websites that offer account value appraisals by entering your email. Once these websites get a hold of your email, your mail box will be littered with emails pretending to be the parent company of the game through suspension threats or promotions, asking you to login to your account through their provided link in the email to respond.

The phisher went as far as accurately IP and MAC address spoofing their machine to resemble the real account owner, so they managed to login on a level cap character and send out mass /tells about their appraisal website. It was dealt with swiftly. and a follow up general announcement from GM department to under no circumstances visit that website was sent out to players that received the spam. The investigation found that the Phisher used the parent website to retrieve a list of character names, there are countermeasures in place to prevent a bot from freely reviewing the website so it must have been an actual person that copy pasta'ed each name and put it on a notepad list.

That was a black unicorn occurrence where such a website managed to phish that much information about the account owner. The filter algorithm was upped to level cap level, after this event.

Bots have come very far since then, and are fully capable of reaching level cap in ffxiv, and in a short time where they can bypass any filter or procedure thats set up to regularly ban them

The only problem is it sounds like your company used complex algorithms that were frequently updated, as opposed to SE's method of covering their ears and pretending it will go away by banning the small fish. I really hope SE upgrades to a more sophisticated method of dealing with RMT.

You know, seriously, SE if y'all would just get rid of ALL the bots and spammers [who have paid accounts], all those player slots would soon be filled up by legit paying players!

I mean for crying out loud, what's so hard to understand about that?! :mad:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by T2teddy

You know, seriously, SE if y'all would just get rid of ALL the bots and spammers [who have paid accounts], all those player slots would soon be filled up by legit paying players!

I mean for crying out loud, what's so hard to understand about that?! :mad:

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They do get rid of them but its like a killing one of those spiders that carry all the babies on its back (Wolf Spider if you are interested, I won't post any pictures for those who might be squeamish) you kill one and a million more burst from the corpse of the one you just killed only worsening the problem.

On the /anon feature. If anything /anon will hide you from the search feature, but then all players will do this making the search obsolete, What if /anon made it where your name wouldn't show up unless your full name was searched for.

For example:
with /anon on if I searched

/sea forename a

My name Altrage A'uli would not come up in the list

however with /anon on if I searched

/sea all forename Altrage surname A'uli

then my name would appear.

This would allow the best of both worlds I would think. So just in case you run a dungeon with a really good player and you want to see if they are on your server you would be able to as you would have that players full name, versus an RMT would have to spend TONS of hours to cycle through every possible fore-/sur- name possibility on the chance of getting a hit with a real active player. It probably would not get rid of all RMT activity 100% but the frequency would drop tremendously with the possibility of it disappearing due to the low success rate they would encounter with a system like above.

At any rate I approve of a /anon feature to be added.

I'd be in support of a removal of the search tool - as it only works if the person is online and not engaged in duty anyway in which case I can just /tell + type their name. Makes the function rather pointless no? The only times I've ever trie dto use it is if I want to respond to someone from the forum whos posted in my server's subforum but it just doesnt work like that because of that issue.

Knowing RMT though, they'd find a way around it, like just adding characters who walk past a bot to a database that they will just spam even more.