A rational proposal to reduce blind FC invite spam

Unfortunately, there isn't a way in game to just auto-decline FC invites while allowing everything else, like party invites and tells.

However, there still are problems with blind FC invites. I think there's a very easy fix, removing the Player Search feature. This is the intro screen.

https://i.imgur.com/1uAO0Ua.jpg

Once you go through that intro screen, and search results come, you can literally send FC invites to everyone without a FC.

https://i.imgur.com/C8EZXuP.jpg

As you can see, it is way too easy for a mass recruiter to send spam blind FC invites by right clicking on characters who don't have a FC.

So there's two fixes. One fix is to get rid of the player search feature. The second idea is to remove "Invite to Company" when right-clicking on a character found using player search.

Lemme hear your ideas.

Edit: A solution I like that someone here suggested is a cooldown on FC invites. The cooldown would end either when the person invited accepts the FC invite, or five minutes, which is how long a FC invite lasts before it expires.

I'd rather just have an FC recruitment board in each of the main cities. Post an ad for your FC. If someone likes what you say, they can elect to join or send an application.

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Originally Posted by Matrinka

I'd rather just have an FC recruitment board in each of the main cities. Post an ad for your FC. If someone likes what you say, they can elect to join or send an application.

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That makes way more sense than some rando spamming Ildyllshire or some other popular afk place with their FC promo every 5 minutes. Half of my blacklist is people like that because I just don't want to see it anymore. And since people use the party finder as a recruitment board anyway, it would solve multiple problems.

Also a cooldown timer would be nice if no meaningful fix is added.

Your suggested solution is backward. Player Search, and the ability to invite players into FCs, linkshells and the likes, are very strong, legitimate tools. Not always the person who does the recruiting have the permissions to actually invite the recruit into the FC, and so they have to ask someone to do it, and they do it through Player Search. That's fine, works as intended, I believe.
The fact they're misused doesn't mean you should take them away. If you're already asking for a system change, how about addressing this:

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Originally Posted by Sonikku13

Unfortunately, there isn't a way in game to just auto-decline FC invites while allowing everything else, like party invites and tells.

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Ask for this to be changed. A sub-status of Busy, or a custom Busy that lets you decide what you want to block. This will protect anyone who doesn't want the blind fc invites while leaving the rest of us free to use those functionalities the ways they were intended.

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Originally Posted by Matrinka

I'd rather just have an FC recruitment board in each of the main cities. Post an ad for your FC. If someone likes what you say, they can elect to join or send an application.

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I like it. This shouldn't be the only way to get people into an FC ("hey, we just ran this together and you're pretty cool, now please go to the FC board and look us up and submit an application---" hassle. Let me just invite them) but it'll be a really good tool for people who want an fc but don't know where to look.

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Originally Posted by BillyKaplan

I like it. This shouldn't be the only way to get people into an FC ("hey, we just ran this together and you're pretty cool, now please go to the FC board and look us up and submit an application---" hassle. Let me just invite them) but it'll be a really good tool for people who want an fc but don't know where to look.

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Or, alternately, make any person-to-person direct request be initiated by the applicant, not the FC member. I should have the ability to right-click someone's name and request to join their FC (assuming the FC is recruiting). They ideally shouldn't have the ability to send a ping to me unsolicited or, if SE really wants to leave that functionality in, I should have a client-side option to disable unsolicited FC invites completely.

I mean, there are outside tools to find a player. Like the Lodestone's player search function. What I'm railing against is blind FC invite spam.

I am not saying take away FC invites, not at all. I'm saying if you have the Player Search menu open, you shouldn't be able to right-click on a name in there and send a FC invite, and then one second later, another name, another right-click, another FC invite, rinse and repeat. I don't know how to fix private tell spam though.

Maybe you're right, an invite cooldown sounds like a great idea, and a player-configurable chat filter would help things tremendously. Ideally, perhaps a cooldown would consist of this: if you send a FC invite, the cooldown for another invite ends in five minutes, or if the person invited accepts the FC invite, whatever is sooner.

Anyway, here's said player search function on the Lodestone. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/

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Originally Posted by Sonikku13

I mean, there are outside tools to find a player. Like the Lodestone's player search function.

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You completely missed the point. The lodestone doesn't let me right-click and invite that player to my linkshell or FC. Very often people in my hunt linkshell will run into people asking for invites and then the easiest way for me to invite them is through the in-game player search. I have also invited friends of friends into my fc because that particular member didn't have invite permissions. Again, this was done by the in-game search option.
The very thing you're complaining about is useful and should not be taken away just because it's being misused. Doing that will hurt a lot of people and likely won't solve the problem as much as you'd like it to.

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Originally Posted by Sonikku13

I mean, there are outside tools to find a player. Like the Lodestone's player search function.

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Only a tiny fraction of the playerbase actually bothers with things outside the game itself, an FC recruitment board in the game itself would be a great idea, especially if it operated like the current market board where you have to put the ad up and check on it every couple of weeks, to ensure there aren't any inactive FC's taking up space.

As a recipient of a handful of these every so often (Yes they are frequent and annoying, ranging from 2-3 per hour to once every 2 days, depending on the time of day.)

1) Remove it from player search, there is no reason for it to be here, and invites abuse. If we don't allow RMT to spam players, we should not allow any players to spam anyone with anything.
2) Leave it on the right-click menu, but grey it out unless the player joined the party for at least 10 minutes. If you can't even do this, you have no right to have a FC. I don't know why anyone would accept an invite to a FC you haven't even met or played with. Do not permit "party as advertisement" spam either however.
3) Only one person may be invited at a time, and apply longer cooldowns for declines that persist at an account level. eg 1 minute, 3 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 60 minutes.

While we're at it, disband all self-FC's. Players should not be able to have more than one character per account in the same FC, and you typically see this or people begging you to join for a few minutes so they can do this.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

While we're at it, disband all self-FC's. Players should not be able to have more than one character per account in the same FC, and you typically see this or people begging you to join for a few minutes so they can do this.

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Outside the fact that you are annoyed by them why should they be disbanded? What rule do personal FC's break? Seems like you want to punish the players that keep to themselves because 2-3 people per hour to once every 48 hours send you a blind invite. Seems a tad overkill.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Because they fit all the criteria of RMT, when you find one FC with only 4 level 1 characters in them and only one character is leveled to anything.

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If you are asking for SE to investigate claims of personal FC for RMT and then take action based off what they find. That makes sense, but to blanket disband all personal FC's is not fair to those that have not broken any rules.

Because they fit all the criteria of RMT, when you find one FC with only 4 level 1 characters in them and only one character is leveled to anything.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Because they fit all the criteria of RMT, when you find one FC with only 4 level 1 characters in them and only one character is leveled to anything.

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Then ban them for RMT if that particular FC partakes in it, don't ban self-FCs as a whole.

If they are going to go through all that at remove tools from people who use them in other ways, why not just add options for people to block various kinds of invites..... Plus some people brand new to the game might decide to accept a random FC invite and then are actually happy where they ended up. They need to just give the the choice of whether or not to receive FC invites to players.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Because they fit all the criteria of RMT, when you find one FC with only 4 level 1 characters in them and only one character is leveled to anything.

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They also fit the criteria of legitimate players looking to evade the Housing purchase restrictions that SE implemented, or players simply looking to avoid FC invite spam. I created a personal FC for myself way back when, precisely to block invites I wasn't interested in. I had a friend create a dummy character I could invite so that we had enough signatures. As far as active characters, it currently contains only myself and my girlfriend, though if she ever left, it'd only contain me. There are a few other friends in there that I collected over time, friends from FFXI who also hated the FC spam and had no interest in joining a random FC, but they haven't logged on in years. There are other reasons, such as having access to the FC-only crafting workshop (though you'll admittedly need to invite other Crafters to the party to take full advantage of it).

If SE wants to adjust a bunch of systems in order to enable this functionality without obligating players to join a private FC, fine. I suppose at that point there's no big deal either way. But there are legitimate reasons why solo FCs are currently used.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

But there are legitimate reasons why solo FCs are currently used.

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This. Not all personal FCs are RMT breeding grounds; anyone making such blanket statements clearly have no idea what they’re talking about.

I have a personal FC to avoid FC invite spam back when I didn’t have one; it started to grow and then it was suddenly Rank 8, and now it’s me, my best friend, and our alts. I had a few other friends in it at one point, but they left to join other FCs for statics or other friends. I like my small FC and would rather not have the option taken from me.

As for the FC board idea, I like that. Make it browseable similar to the Market Board. That sounds like a really good idea.

Have to blacklist anyone asking if I need a FC even if their the coolest person in the world. I get about 10-20 requests a day. Get tired of saying the same thing all the time.

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Originally Posted by Matrinka

I'd rather just have an FC recruitment board in each of the main cities. Post an ad for your FC. If someone likes what you say, they can elect to join or send an application.

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It's possible I'm thinking of a different game. But didn't the dev team suggest somewhere that they might in time offer an improved recruitment tool?

In any case, I don't think that would necessarily solve the invite spam. They could just add an "auto decline FC invites" checkbox somewhere...

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

They could just add an "auto decline FC invites" checkbox somewhere...

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They can also get around dumping this on the servers by having the check and decline be client-side. Means you'll have to set the option on every platform you play on, but it's better than this being shot down due to 'server limitations'.
Granted, the ideal option would be an online status like busy that won't let people even send the request in the first place, but I feel like client-side things will be easier to implement.

Sorry for the revival of this 2 month old thread, but I have to voice my support of this. The invitation spam is really irritating and annoying. I don't want to put myself on /busy and miss messages from my friends. PLEASE can we get a fix for this?

/busy

problem solved.

Start the FC creation process until you are required to get signatures.

No FC will appear on your character but you won't be able to join one either.

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Originally Posted by Sonikku13

One fix is to get rid of the player search feature. The second idea is to remove "Invite to Company" when right-clicking on a character found using player search.

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Sorry but I don't agree any of them. They are useful features I use for people that wants join but my fc member cannot invite, removing these features causes more harm than good.

I like a lot this, instead:

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Originally Posted by Matrinka

I'd rather just have an FC recruitment board in each of the main cities. Post an ad for your FC. If someone likes what you say, they can elect to join or send an application.

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It will be great have an in-game "FC search" feature, listing FC open to recruitment and their info. As a FC-less character I'll surely look at it if I wanna join one.

The PF entry isn't that great, if I use it then cannot join other duties for all the time that is up.

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Originally Posted by Yasminou

Start the FC creation process until you are required to get signatures.

No FC will appear on your character but you won't be able to join one either.

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If I remember correctly, your character is marked as member of the FC you are going to create. Anyway, that is a nice solution, if you don't mind the 20k Gil required (don't remember if you pay first or when finalize the request...)

I do so hate those FC invites when I'm just trying to play an alt, but realistically, this doesnt warrant removal of the player search function. That has other uses beyond FC stuff. Just put on /busy if it bothers you.
Most of the time I get an FC invite and it reminds me to /busy. And I usually only get them when I'm in a city like Gridania or Limsa.