Square Enix, what is your plan to stop RMT advertisers sending party invites?

Would like to know because frankly it is harassment and is disruptive to us to just receive a party invite like that out of the blue.

Unfortunately, it's not a problem that can just stop. Some way or how they can still worm themselves in. Unless there's a GM or two watching 24/7 at the entrance point to police the city states, they're going to keep popping in. If there's a name spam filter, they'll get by it. Roe names look nonsense as is(ignoring lore), and it's not like Quwrof Wrlccywrlir can be differentiated from Ascryswf Plrglvhds. I think some games have crazy hard spam filters for names, but then that takes away from creativity. Players can decide to sell their own accounts if it came down to making a profit as well. You can throw 100 security walls and verification to make an account but it'll only end up annoying people not involved.

Another mmo I've played bars the player from speaking in chat until like lv 10. But lo and behold, those bots can speedrun and make it past the quest npcs to shout:B U Y G O L D* SCAM SITE dot C OM HAVE GOODDAY. I know it's annoying and boy do I hate having to run past the closest Market Board to see a giant wall of gibberish.

I mean they could make a toggle option along the lines of "Not accepting party invites" I guess. But /busy will help in the short term at least. I can already foresee people forgetting to turn the toggle off though. :p

The thing is, these RMT companies are *really* good at what they do. They're excellent at finding loopholes and workarounds. Patch one hole and they'll find another that people didn't even consider. It's almost amazing.

I'm going to tickle them until they can't breathe and they die and we'll be rid of them forever and live happily ever after.

auto mute when sending same messages too many times ?

Why not just let us right-click report people who send invites?
Most of these RMT bots use the website they're representing as their name anyway. :-B

They could just add it to the inappropriate names list if they have one and block them from creating those characters in the first place. The only reason they're using that method is they can make the character with their website in the name.

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Originally Posted by Aerish

auto mute when sending same messages too many times ?

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They put a small differentiator on the end of each message so it isn't the same message. I watch the patterns.

Create a milice of bot hunters in game, made of players ?

We have Systems like Linkshell and even something to point out a place in any map, dev could make a system from it i guess

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Originally Posted by Aerish

Create a milice of bot hunters in game, made of players ?

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Is milice suppose to be militia?
I don't know if we should be giving players that kind of power or encouraging witch hunts... >x>
Plus, that would make me curious as to where/what our subscriptions are going to if they can't hire more GMs to monitor such things... >x>
Are we in .hack now?

Why does this even need addressing? It's not exactly an invasive tactic.

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Originally Posted by Alistaire

Why does this even need addressing? It's not exactly an invasive tactic.

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It's still spam

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Originally Posted by Alistaire

Why does this even need addressing? It's not exactly an invasive tactic.

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Because spamming RMT-advertisements is annoying.
And decreasing RMT-spam without it being a detriment to the rest of us is always a good thing. :-D

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Originally Posted by Alistaire

Why does this even need addressing? It's not exactly an invasive tactic.

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Are you kidding me? It's annoying as hell.
I used to just get shouts but past few days i keep getting part invites from these jerks.
One should not need to set status to busy to avoid this, since from time to time i get tells from new players and i help them out

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Originally Posted by Mimilu

Is milice suppose to be militia?
I don't know if we should be giving players that kind of power or encouraging witch hunts... >x>
Plus, that would make me curious as to where/what our subscriptions are going to if they can't hire more GMs to monitor such things... >x>
Are we in .hack now?

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It worked well on my previous game, those community helpers where able to take care of request for bot/spammers, manage their own mini games/ forum events and help new players. of couse an apply to GMs is required and not evryone can get access to it, since it ll ask some IRL skills ( writing and spelling correctly in diff langages)

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Originally Posted by Alistaire

Why does this even need addressing? It's not exactly an invasive tactic.

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It's annoying and easily prevented by even the most cursory GM activity, you can spot them easily using Player Search and providing us an option to auto-reject Party invites (and also FC invites which I also find aggravating) has to be a trivial bit of coding to add considering there are already several comparable options such as auto-skip CSes, etc.

Not that me is playing devil's advocate but ya kinda gotta respect the tenacity of gil sellers to push their wares lol. As long as there are means of one player communicating with another, they'll find a way. Ive just come to accept it as part of mmo-life. Just b-list em as usual and keep going. Ive noticed that there are a LOT less pt inviters than other methods used thankfuly though.

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Originally Posted by Rhindas

I mean they could make a toggle option along the lines of "Not accepting party invites" I guess. But /busy will help in the short term at least. I can already foresee people forgetting to turn the toggle off though. :p

The thing is, these RMT companies are *really* good at what they do. They're excellent at finding loopholes and workarounds. Patch one hole and they'll find another that people didn't even consider. It's almost amazing.

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This if from the other rmt invite post I put up.. Those are options in SWTOR
https://s4.postimg.org/axylkmhbh/image.jpg

On your second point, yeah, they always find a way, but I would hope that its never used as an excuse to not do anything. :)

I'm honestly amazed how can they send me invites while I'm doing fates far from the main city.. There's like legit no one nearby and my friends list is empty :(

I wish there's an option to remove the random party invites..I tried looking for it at the settings menu.. ;-;

All SE has to do is allow us to mark ourselves as not searchable. This way our names wouldn't show up in the Player Search facility which is what the RMT spammers parse to send their invites and in previous time /tell. A not searchable setting would also allow us to still have all of the social interaction functions available that you lose with /busy.

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Originally Posted by Claviusnex

All SE has to do is allow us to mark ourselves as not searchable. This way our names wouldn't show up in the Player Search facility which is what the RMT spammers parse to send their invites and in previous time /tell. A not searchable setting would also allow us to still have all of the social interaction functions available that you lose with /busy.

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That would not solve the problem, it might only alleviate it slightly by initially slowing them down or preventing direct cross-region spam.

The reason is because the bot spammers do not necessarily need a search list, they can just stand idle at some place and get the name of any player passing by in their radius which is bigger than normal visibility or line of sight (the game client knows more than what the player sees on his screen and bot software usually have access to such informations). So this would just force them to teleport and eventually run around as well, instead of spamming everyone from the same place but they can automate that easily.

The best solution would be some settings (if they don't already exist - most don't, but not sure about the "block" items):

• Allow Tells From
  • Friends
  • Free Company Members
  • Linkshell Members
  • Others
• Allow Party Invitations From
  • Friends
  • Free Company Members
  • Linkshell Members
  • Others
• Block Friend Requests
• Block Guild Invites

The "allow" settings should be enabled by default, the "block" settings should be disabled by default.

Note: The "busy" setting, while interesting, is an "all or nothing" setting which, imho, isn't a real option for stopping RMT spam.

--Erim Nelhah

Lots of ways Square Enix can improve the situation, with some good ideas in this thread as well. I just hope they do something! Not that they haven't already or that I'm ungrateful for what they have done but it's a neverending war against RMT and as much as possible must be done to disrupt them without disrupting us!

I think their solution comes with the party finder changes, one of which allows players to start a private party that requires a password.

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Originally Posted by Paladinleeds

They put a small differentiator on the end of each message so it isn't the same message. I watch the patterns.

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Spam is still spam regardless.

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Originally Posted by caelumsixsmith

I think their solution comes with the party finder changes, one of which allows players to start a private party that requires a password.

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How is that going to stop RMT-bots from sending party invites though?

Or do it Ragnarok Online style: Be at a certain level to be able to send invites of any sort, shout/yell, or do anything of the sort. This seems like the best solution I can think of.

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Originally Posted by Mocita

Or do it Ragnarok Online style: Be at a certain level to be able to send invites of any sort, shout/yell, or do anything of the sort. This seems like the best solution I can think of.

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Bots level up like nothing, so that wouldn't stop them.

It would not stop them, no. But it would slow them down a bit. While bots can level like crazy, that's only if that's what they are being bottled for. Spam bots, if you've noticed, are always level 1. Forcing them to level up to 10 or, better yet, complete the level 10 class quest, would at least serve to slow them down.

Unfortunately, stopping all tells, party invites, etc. hinders the sprout. And that is something that SE is looking to avoid doing.

The other issue you would create is the "can't send invites/tells/etc" till level x" rule also affects new players and alt players.

As far as I know there's no reason why a new player *needs* to request a friendship. If two players want to be friends then the "older" player can make the request. It's unbelievably easy to get to lvl5 in any class, it's almost handed to you when you begin the storyline, so they could make it so that you can't request friendship until then.

In short - players should have to complete a quest to enable friendship requests at circa lvl5.

I'm wondering what they'll do next...
Linkshell invites? At least you can fill your 8 up and not be bothered with it.
Free Company invites? Can also be skipped by being in one.
Using Party Finder for it?
Going into Duty Finder and advertising there too?

This is why we can't have nice things.

I know this doesn't sort party invites, but I'd like them to introduce 30 min afk = kicked to title screen, on trial accounts.

Tired of seeing them there for hours, with no action taken against accounts reported hours ago.

That won't do anything, unfortunately. You can manually set AFK on and continue to do stuff while "AFK" - and that's exactly what they appear to do.