My idea for cutting RMT.

1.) You can only create one (1) new character every 48 hours ACCOUNT WIDE. Not cluster, not world, ACCOUNT!

2.) A character can only be deleted 48 hours after creation.

No more create, spam, delete so name can't be traced, recreate, spam, wash/rinse/repeat.

No more excuses of they delete too fast to catch. People report name, S-E staff finds that logged out but not deleted character, bans account.

Even the richest RMT'er is going to tire of having to buy a new account for every spam toon they need to make.

This won't kill off the bots/farmers, as obviously the gil is sold through third party sites. But it WILL drastically cut the advertisement spam, which in turn will make selling that gil a lot harder.

SE doesn't have the problem of deleted characters that we do. The server keeps records of which characters belong to whom, so they can still track the spammers even if they were to delete every character on the account.

The problem isn't deleted characters anyway. The problem is the pay-per-hour system in place for China. Unlike western players who have to purchase the game and then pay a monthly subscription, they only pay for the time spent in game. It's nothing to them if a character or account is banned because they can easily get a new one at relatively low cost. They basically pay the equivalent of 10 cents an hour.

Mind you, while that might sound cheap to us that's just because of the dollar exchange rate versus the Yuan. It's actually one of the more expensive subscriptions in China due to their lower income.

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Originally Posted by Lemuria

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if you think all the bots spam are from china, you will have a bad time

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Originally Posted by Shneibel

if you think all the bots spam are from china, you will have a bad time

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No, but I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them are. There's no money to be made in advertising if every new bot costs you $40. Besides, I doubt it's merely coincidence that the explosion in RMT spam happens to fall around the same date as the Chinese release.

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Originally Posted by Lemuria

RMT spam happens to fall around the same date as the Chinese release.

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we already got RMT spam before that. And they have their own server, with different client & version

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen...inese_servers/

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Originally Posted by Shneibel

we already got RMT spam before that

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Interesting way of editing and interpreting that response.

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Originally Posted by Lemuria

No, but I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them are. There's no money to be made in advertising if every new bot costs you $40. Besides, I doubt it's merely coincidence that the explosion in RMT spam happens to fall around the same date as the Chinese release.

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Ehhhh. I don't think Chinese players can login to US or JP servers using the Chinese client.

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Originally Posted by Whiteroom

Interesting way of editing and interpreting that response.

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I can edit it back to full quote if you want

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Originally Posted by Lemuria

The problem isn't deleted characters anyway. The problem is the pay-per-hour system in place for China. Unlike western players who have to purchase the game and then pay a monthly subscription, they only pay for the time spent in game. It's nothing to them if a character or account is banned because they can easily get a new one at relatively low cost. They basically pay the equivalent of 10 cents an hour.

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China datacenter is separate from the rest, it does not even use square enix account, so it has nothing to do with you unless you play in China server

Only way to combat RMT in a sub-based game is with your wallet. We've tried everything else when it comes to reaching out to SE to work with them.

I'm going to actually try to contribute to the conversation I have an idea to re-add. It's an old one but since we are recycling ideas and ways for SE to combat RMT I'll repitch this with my own twist.

Have in-game ai that you can report to and who also monitor key words and symbols and not just entire repeat phrases. Who then automatically after enough evidence transports them to timeout for an undisclosed period of time where they can continue to do their thing until a GM can get to them round them up like cattle and deal with the herd in greater mass and less frequency than sifting through some lame click x on a spreadsheet and of course the current reports that back you up.
Hell you could even add an in-game feature for screenshots where the ai or GM or one of these community rep ghosts could add to file as an attachment. Helping identify targets based on real time in game information for players who don't play the forum mini-game.

What they need is right click repot after so many reports the account is frozen until unlocked by a GM. If it is indeed an RMT or other spam then the account is banned.

Well come Heavensward the bots are going to be largely screwed since they will need to complete the story to access any of the expansion areas and content. That means the bots will have a hard time farming anything in 3.0 and if they get banned they have to play through all that story content again on a new account.

It won't directly impede their /tell spam but it should severely harm their productivity which might scare them off a bit.

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Originally Posted by Tuathaa

What they need is right click repot after so many reports the account is frozen until unlocked by a GM. If it is indeed an RMT or other spam then the account is banned.

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This crap really? Again? Really?

This has been suggested so many times already.

AND AGAIN NO IT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. It would be used by trolls and the like to harass people so no it is not a good idea to click report so many reports lock the person JUST NO GAWD

Real best way to combat RMT is for people to stop buying friking Gil from them so here's how it needs to be the so called people who do buy Gil GET GUD OR GTFO.

And if that last remark offended any one sorry but only really most unskilled person would bother buying Gil and their in the wrong game.

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Originally Posted by Dererk

This crap really? Again? Really

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Apparently this is the only mmo you have ever played. WoW handles it this was as well as SWTOR and GW.
You will never get people to stop buying gil it will never happen so get that notion out of your head. The only to control it is with a decent reporting, investigation and banning process.
Their systems also put the person reported on an ignore list until you re log which combats the trolling.

The reason I brought up timers on character creation/deletion is because Elder Scrolls Online uses a tamer version ( can only delete 3 characters per every 24 hours ) and it does work to curb the spam. I think I remember less than a handful of /tells from RMT toons in the 4+ months I played ESO. And ESO is buy to play, not even a sub required. But that box price PLUS deletion limits make a pretty good deterrent. I say 48 hours for FFXIV for both creation and deletion simply because FFXIV's RMT population is completely out of control. I haven't seen a game this thick with RMT outside of FFXI ( which doesn't give me much hope as we all know how S-E let that situation fester for most of that games life before taking any real action ) and the crappy Korean assembly line mmos.

Putting limits on an RMT'ers ability to advertise what they're trying to sell is the easiest way to push them to target games with more lenient measures.

While it's true you can never get rid of them completely, this can make the RMT'ers job as hard as possible AND give players a bit of a respite from the constant spam spam spam.

But even with this added, or any other measures that others have proposed, if S-E isn't willing to use the banhammer for every spam account reported ( and give up that money from spammers rebuying the game to make new accounts, as they'll soon tire of spending that chunk of cash everytime a spam account gets banned after only being able to spam one time. RMT having to spend $30+ for one advertisement = quickly depreciating profit ), then they might as well tell us now so we can all move on.

In fact, if S-E is willing to get on the ball, you wouldn't even need the deletion limit, simple the "one character per account every 48 hours". That's ONE time, and only ONE character on that entire account can be used to spam before it goes bye-bye ( and 48 hours give a small team of banhammers the ability to keep up with the bannings without becoming overwhelmed ).

My solution is simple. Players stop buying the money so that the RMT have no market. Done.

In many ways you can only blame the players for giving these people a market.

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

My solution is simple. Players stop buying the money so that the RMT have no market. Done.

In many ways you can only blame the players for giving these people a market.

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Someone who gets it. Remove the market, sellers leave as no profit to be made.

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Originally Posted by Sapphic

Someone who gets it. Remove the market, sellers leave as no profit to be made.

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Someone who doesn't get it. In a perfect world yes this is the solution but realistically you will never get people to stop. Even if SE started selling it themselves there will still be RMT spam.

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Originally Posted by Tuathaa

Someone who doesn't get it. In a perfect world yes this is the solution but realistically you will never get people to stop. Even if SE started selling it themselves there will still be RMT spam.

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Sadly true. Guild Wars 2 even has goldsellers and they already have a built-in gem market where you can buy gold legally!

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

My solution is simple. Players stop buying the money so that the RMT have no market. Done.

In many ways you can only blame the players for giving these people a market.

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That would stop the overall gil sales eventually, yes. My solution is simply to get rid of the advertisements and make things harder for the RMT people.

Banning those who buy gil is an obvious tactic as well, but proving who bought gil and who simply made a trade not even knowing the other player was an RMT ( and an experienced RMTer WILL involve unknowing legit players to muddy the waters of any investigation simply because they know any dev company will always err on the side of caution before letting themselves get tangled up by banning legit players ). It can be done, it's just a lot more involved.

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Originally Posted by Lemuria

No, but I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them are. There's no money to be made in advertising if every new bot costs you $40. Besides, I doubt it's merely coincidence that the explosion in RMT spam happens to fall around the same date as the Chinese release.

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The bots don't cost the spammers anything. They use stolen CC info (from gil buyers) or abuse charge backs to avoid actually paying sub's.

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Originally Posted by raela

The bots don't cost the spammers anything. They use stolen CC info (from gil buyers) or abuse charge backs to avoid actually paying sub's.

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So do, some don't. Many of these RMT companies run themselves just like a legit business.

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Originally Posted by Alberel

Well come Heavensward the bots are going to be largely screwed since they will need to complete the story to access any of the expansion areas and content. That means the bots will have a hard time farming anything in 3.0 and if they get banned they have to play through all that story content again on a new account.

It won't directly impede their /tell spam but it should severely harm their productivity which might scare them off a bit.

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They'll do it the same way they do now. Use level 1 characters to spam tells and friend requests. Use the same characters they've been using to spam the same old dungeons and the other things they have been spamming for the gil. Pool the gil on bank characters and use mail to get that gil to the buyers. Heavensward won't change anything, aside from possibly an upsurge in activity at the release due to sellers trying to tap a new market. The old dungeons aren't going away so I don't see how the introduction of higher level content into the game would harm their productivity at all.

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Originally Posted by Tuathaa

What they need is right click repot after so many reports the account is frozen until unlocked by a GM. If it is indeed an RMT or other spam then the account is banned.

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The right-click report feature is definitely needed.

But I think they'd be better dealt with by 24/7 coverage of people monitoring and dealing with these reports in real time as they come in, rather than with an automated X number of reports = block rule. Particularly for spam, action should be immediate anyway. (For farming/gathering bots, the reports will have to be investigated a bit before a final GM decision can be made, but not for the spam.)

The team dealing with these reports can see whether a message is spam or not at a glance, just as quickly as we can ourselves, so spam reports shouldn't take more than a second to process, provided that the reporting and banning process is set up efficiently. (The only part of that process that should take human intervention at SE's end is to look at the message in the report and acknowledge that yes, that message is spam, just as it was reported to be, or no it's not. A quick glance at it, then click one of two buttons.) If, once an RMT account has been banned, the system automatically filters out any other pending reports against the same account from the report queue, it's literally about one second of a GM's time for each new spam account the RMT companies set up.

So long as the spam report queue has a higher priority than the bot report queue (since the former needs to be processed immediately and the later neither can be nor needs to be) and the top spam report pops up in real time as soon as it occurs, spam accounts can be banned moments after they begin, and long before they could become profitable.

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Originally Posted by Dererk

NO IT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. It would be used by trolls and the like to harass people so no it is not a good idea to click report so many reports lock the person

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Harassment is also a bannable offence. Nobody is going to send their harassment directly to the GM team by putting it in a GM report that way. Report an RMT message as spam and the spammer gets banned. Report a non-spam message as spam and you're the one who will get banned. (Maybe a warning for a first offence, to allow for the chance someone accidentally clicked the wrong name when both a real message and spam message came in one after the other. But doing it again should earn at least a temp ban.)

(As I said above, I don't think the automatic locking should be necessary if the GMs stay on top of it, but nor do I think harassment concerns are a valid argument against it.)

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

My solution is simple. Players stop buying the money so that the RMT have no market. Done.

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The best way to limit the number of buyers is to remove the advertising. Of course, it's also important to ban buyers when possible, but as Zorvan pointed out, that's hard to prove so will only catch a small percentage. Advertising spam, on the contrary, is very easily provable 100% of the time, which makes it the easy part to eliminate entirely. Get rid of the ads, and there will be a lot less buyers. (Which the gil sellers clearly know, as that's the whole reason they're sending all that spam in the first place “—to get more people to buy from them.)

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Originally Posted by Alberel

Well come Heavensward the bots are going to be largely screwed since they will need to complete the story to access any of the expansion areas and content. That means the bots will have a hard time farming anything in 3.0 and if they get banned they have to play through all that story content again on a new account.

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I dunno. I think they are preparing for this as we speak because the other day I saw like 10 level 50 black mages at the Uldah aetheryte with garbage letters for names that were constantly queuing up and doing im assuming guildhests or maybe low level trials because they weren't gone very long. They would respawn back in 4 to 5 at a time and then requeue and disappear again. This was repeated over and over while I was standing there in a span of 30 minutes. I think they are already set to go into Heavensward and are just farming gil to sell at this point.

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Originally Posted by Ashkendor

They'll do it the same way they do now. Use level 1 characters to spam tells and friend requests. Use the same characters they've been using to spam the same old dungeons and the other things they have been spamming for the gil. Pool the gil on bank characters and use mail to get that gil to the buyers. Heavensward won't change anything, aside from possibly an upsurge in activity at the release due to sellers trying to tap a new market. The old dungeons aren't going away so I don't see how the introduction of higher level content into the game would harm their productivity at all.

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Simple. Inflation. In most MMOs higher level content rewards slightly larger amounts of currency and thus the goods at that level end up being worth more because the players engaging with that content that need said goods have more money to spend.

If the difference in monetary rewards between level 50 content and level 60 content is significant then the effective value of any gil RMT might farm from low level dungeons will be greatly reduced. They will also be entirely shut out from accessing any of the new gathering nodes which will cut off another source of revenue for them.

I'm not saying it will solve any problems but it WILL slow them down a lot.

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Originally Posted by Alberel

If the difference in monetary rewards between level 50 content and level 60 content is significant then the effective value of any gil RMT might farm from low level dungeons will be greatly reduced. They will also be entirely shut out from accessing any of the new gathering nodes which will cut off another source of revenue for them.

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They don't make money with the new gathering nodes, though. That would require melding and such. They make money off shards. There will always be a market for shards even as crafting recipes move into crystals and clusters, because there's always going to be a market for lower level equipment. This will be especially true as new classes are introduced.

Unless I'm missing something, won't Ishgard be RMT free (aside from friend requests) as lvl1 characters can't access it?

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Originally Posted by Fortified

Unless I'm missing something, won't Ishgard be RMT free (aside from friend requests) as lvl1 characters can't access it?

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It may be free of /shout spam, but you can send /tell messages from anywhere.

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Originally Posted by Ashkendor

Ehhhh. I don't think Chinese players can login to US or JP servers using the Chinese client.

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Indeed, but it's definitely not something difficult to get around. China in general has a very strict set of rules when it comes to the internet. So much so, that they set up what is known as the Great Firewall (of China). To get around this, practically everyone in China that is or knows of someone that is a little tech savvy has installed a VPN to bypass this whenever they have need to. These things don't always work however, as they tend to crack down on these servers, but those devs tend to find ways around it soon after. I'm not sure about today, but a long time ago (~10yrs) it was dominantly Chinese folks doing the RMT related activity. They would simply use Western domains to sell these goods, which was typically under some Western mother IP that benefits from the sales (be it that they had some connection to RMT activity starting or not). There were several documentaries at the time when this whole practice came to light.

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Originally Posted by Welsper59

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Right, but the person I quoted was saying was that Chinese were abusing their pay-as-you-go "subscription" arrangement in order to sell gil on our servers. I don't think the Chinese client can access NA/EU/JP servers at all. China has a slightly different version of the game because of restrictions on what you're allowed to show in games there.

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Originally Posted by Ashkendor

Right, but the person I quoted was saying was that Chinese were abusing their pay-as-you-go "subscription" arrangement in order to sell gil on our servers. I don't think the Chinese client can access NA/EU/JP servers at all. China has a slightly different version of the game because of restrictions on what you're allowed to show in games there.

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Ah gotcha.