Reporting RMT Suggestion

When we report suspected RMT activity, maybe it could also add that player to a temporary (hidden) blacklist for an hour or so. I don't think any of them stay logged in longer than that. It becomes tedious reporting them, and then adding them to the blacklist, when there are several shouting.

This! So much! Or at least auto-add people reported to BL! Oh! And I wouldn't mind having their chat deleted from my chatlog when I report for RMT either. It's annoying having to look at chat and constantly see those scrambled URL's still. :D

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Originally Posted by Valenth

Or at least auto-add people reported to BL!

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I was thinking of that too, but then you have to go in later and clean it all up. There isn't a "Delete All" button in the Blacklist window yet, is there?

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Originally Posted by Valenth

And I wouldn't mind having their chat deleted from my chatlog when I report for RMT either.

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That would be interesting. Sometimes I want to clear my chat logs too. Is there a button to do that anywhere?

Agreed. Nothing more annoying than having to continually see the spam after you've reported them

/clearlog and you're good to go

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

/clearlog and you're good to go

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Oooh, learned something new today! :D

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Originally Posted by needsram9

When we report suspected RMT activity, maybe it could also add that player to a temporary (hidden) blacklist for an hour or so. I don't think any of them stay logged in longer than that. It becomes tedious reporting them, and then adding them to the blacklist, when there are several shouting.

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100% this. Even if it was just a local filter list stored in RAM (i.e. applied client side and persisting until logout), it would go a long way towards making these spammers less annoying.

PS. I don't really want them added to the Blacklist (mine is already full of years old spammer accounts), as they generally aren't around for long, and clearing them from the BL is currently (as far as I've found) a very slow process.

Very frustrating to continue seeing someone you thought you reported still broadcasting.. almost as if your report did nothing.

Right, with the constant generation of new names. There should be a quick way to clear the Blacklist, or just a better way to handle RMT (what it boils down to).

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Originally Posted by needsram9

Sometimes I want to clear my chat logs too. Is there a button to do that anywhere?

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/clearlog will clear out everything, but I still wish the system would remove the messages from the blacklisted player when we Report/BL them. I want to still be able to see the rest of the log, just without those spam messages cluttering it up.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

/clearlog will clear out everything, but I still wish the system would remove the messages from the blacklisted player when we Report/BL them. I want to still be able to see the rest of the log, just without those spam messages cluttering it up.

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Agreed. While clearlog can be used, it's annoying to have to clear everything just because I want to get rid of one person

Also a "delete all" option wouldn't help those people who also have few people blacklisted on permanent basis for reasons. I have also been thinking it would be nice to have locally saved temporal blacklist. Either make it timed or even just based on session, clearing itself out when you logout. That way the actual blacklist, and the space it takes on server, could be reserved to more reasoned listings. Gil sellers are near never back on same names on next login.

Good suggestions, Sida.

It would help if the devs actually did their goddamn homework by doing a little research on how other games manage RMT issues. So far, they are clueless. I gave up a long time ago with this shit.

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Originally Posted by Jas710

It would help if the devs actually did their goddamn homework by doing a little research on how other games manage RMT issues. So far, they are clueless. I gave up a long time ago with this shit.

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Well, at least they finally got rid of the vast majority of the problem. What remains is still annoying, but it's nothing like the constant flood of /tell spam we used to get inundated with back before they put in the Report RMT option.

Basic Spam filtering. Not rocket science, I wouldn't think. Computer Science maybe! :D
Wouldn't hurt for one of the Moderators or whoever to bring this issue up with the Dev team.
Actually, I think I remember the general way to detect strings and work with text from spammers... The key is using Regular Expressions, I believe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...v=vs.110).aspx

A little bit of an update: the latest trend I've seen now is that they spam their RMT in /sh and immediately seem to log off, making it impossible to blacklist them. We can't even avoid it anymore now. I mean, what are they thinking btw? That avoiding people from /bl them somehow makes them more eager to buy? It certainly isn't raising sympathy points with me if that's what they're trying to get at :P

Ps. Why can't we blacklist an offline player either? That's just weird xP

Is it really that they just log out? Here I was assuming they found some exploit or were deleting/recreating the character over and over. If they're just logging out, the blacklist definitely needs changed to let us add offline players to it. That's just terrible design.
I figure they're operating on "if they can't bl it, they'll see more messages." Obviously doesn't work for most that don't care anyway, but it's all about getting enough attention from those few someones that are willing.

It is indeed far more irritating to not be able to stop it so quickly/easily (which is again probably the goal for them). I've just had to adapt to leaving the bl prompt window open for 5-10 minutes before confirming. If they spam again, the window is already up and the bl usually goes through if you hit it near immediately. Or if you just wait a while to try, sometimes the character is back and can be added to the blist.

I think one takeaway here is the Gil spammers adapt more quickly than does the game. And at present, the game is kind of putting the burden of spam filtering on players (by Reporting RMT and Blacklisting, and then some of the additional tricks mentioned above). Does this seem correct?

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Originally Posted by needsram9

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It's probably a scale tipping all the time. I mean, if the devs are ahead of the spammers, then we don't notice, right? This is usually the case with public work such as this. To make a comparison, the same goes for police work irl. If they do their job well you won't notice. It's a very ungrateful job because people often don't realise all the nastiness that is being prevented. It's a cat and mouse game with the true 'problem' laying in the fact there is obviously a market for gil-sellers (otherwise they wouldn't spam to begin with). I don't think any company has found a great answer though. Some try to combat RMT by having in-game currency sales, but I feel like this is kinda validating the spammer's existence which I'd rather not.