Reports do nothing

RMT reports do nothing for gil site spammers. The other report functions don't seem to do anything. Still see questing bots teleporting between quest points, and similar named RMT bots coming back again and again. I know they make new accounts, and change IP addresses after an IP ban, but you CAN try banning the IP address that their ISP provides. They can't change that themselves. And if their ISP discovers that they're having them change the IP addresses to come back for their massive ToS violations, then these cheaters and bots can be denied internet in general. Just a suggestion.

I mean, if someone makes multiple reports, the offender should NOT still be standing there over 2 DAYS LATER!

Sadly they are never going to win the war against RMT. However, they certainly did turn the tide once the report RMT function was added. Before that people would be spammed at least once or twice a minute through /tell, leaving them no real choice but to set themselves to Busy status which takes away from a key part of any MMO: the social interactions. RMTs would also spam friend list invites. It was bad. Really bad. After the report RMT feature was implemented I was never bothered again. If I see one in shout chat or /say I will report them though. Just consider yourself fortunate that you weren't here before we could easily report them.

Fair point. Just sucks that they don't IP ban them through their Internet Service provider. They have a seperate IP address for customers that the customer can't change themselves.

It wasn't the report RMT function that fixed anything.

They just imposed several restrictions on communication/player interaction for trial accounts around the same time they introduced that function (Which doesn't even work as it's supposed to mute reported players if they keep spamming), including not being able to invite other players to parties.

The silly thing is that some of the sellers are still using subbed accounts to spam shout chat regardless. I'm inclined to believe they have to be cheating the system somehow to get free subs if they can afford paying for a new spam bot on a daily basis across several servers.

IP bans are tricky because you could have several players using the same one to access the game. In the East for example internet gaming cafes are quite common and yeah sure some of those players could be doing RMT, but the rest could also be bonefide players enjoying the game. You might also have other people in the same household using the same IP, a ban could result in punishing the wrong person etc, things like that.

IP bans are extremely easy to avoid while account bans are a loss of [character] data and work. Also, IP banning punishes anyone under that address or people that use a renewing address and happen to land on a banned one.

The report RMT function has definitely helped with the RMT problem - it was leaps and bounds worse before the function was added due to how time consuming and annoying it was to report people for it.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

Sadly they are never going to win the war against RMT. However, they certainly did turn the tide once the report RMT function was added. Before that people would be spammed at least once or twice a minute through /tell, leaving them no real choice but to set themselves to Busy status which takes away from a key part of any MMO: the social interactions. RMTs would also spam friend list invites. It was bad. Really bad. After the report RMT feature was implemented I was never bothered again. If I see one in shout chat or /say I will report them though. Just consider yourself fortunate that you weren't here before we could easily report them.

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This, to be honest. There was a stark contrast of 'before the RMT report function' and 'after the report RMT function.' The limiting on trial accounts was placed in ... uh ... I think near the end of March 2017? The RMT report function was added in patch 3.4 (September 2016).

All in all, cracking down and actively pursuing RMTs all of the time is an endeavor in futility. This is partly why you see companies ban RMT in waves.

I just wish they had an easy report feature for all bots or cheaters in general, not just RMT spammers.

I can't be bothered to type a report every single time I see the same gathering bots on a daily basis. The issue might simply be that there aren't enough different people reporting them (Or so I'd like to hope), and making reporting easier would encourage more people to report them.

I'd also like the ability to report people from player search, because you can't always target potential offenders, such as the warping gil farmers or the crafting bots that always stay holed up in their houses or apartments.

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Originally Posted by Salaru

Fair point. Just sucks that they don't IP ban them through their Internet Service provider. They have a seperate IP address for customers that the customer can't change themselves.

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IP bans are easy enough to get around with the use of a VPN. Besides, a IP ban can very easily hurt innocent people who happen to use that IP address for a variety of legit reasons.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The silly thing is that some of the sellers are still using subbed accounts to spam shout chat regardless. I'm inclined to believe they have to be cheating the system somehow to get free subs if they can afford paying for a new spam bot on a daily basis across several servers.

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Majority of sub'd RMT bots are paid for with stolen credit card information. People that buy gold get their information stolen, and there are currently websites you can go to to buy credit card numbers in bulk. SE doesn't like this either since it isn't free money for them, as soon as a card is reported as stolen their bank would issue a charge back to SE to get their clients money back (and refusing to pay them could get SE into hot water with that bank). Lead Dev of SWG years ago revealed in an article that charge back fees were costing the game just over $1M a year, I'd image it's gotten worse in more recent years.

Random thought. Why doesn't the site have their own bots sending periodic reminders in shouts/yells that it's a massive ToS violation to buy/sell gil from third parties, and that it can/will cost a person their account?

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Originally Posted by Salaru

Random thought. Why doesn't the site have their own bots sending periodic reminders in shouts/yells that it's a massive ToS violation to buy/sell gil from third parties, and that it can/will cost a person their account?

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Because they assume people are smart enough to read the ToS before they start playing.

SE's track record of enforcing the ToS has been horribly inconsistent in several regards (Particularly when it comes to punishing cheaters), so there's little to no fear of actually getting banned for any reason other then harassing other players (And even that isn't consistent).

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

Sadly they are never going to win the war against RMT.

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Come on now that's not true. Other games have won the war against RMT. Wildstar won it recently. Warhammer online did as well a while back as did City of heroes, Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies, Matrix Online... It's totally a winnable war.

While it's almost impossible to truly win, it would be nice if they at least attempted to take some lasting measures against them.

The gil farmers shouldn't be able to get away with the basic forms of hacking they use to do their work.

If I had the know how and authority, what I would do is:

Set up a system that detects key words (and the clever ways spammers use to bypass such filters)

If enough reports are made, the system checks the reported messages for those key words and then surreptitiously flags a spammer's account so that any and all characters that currently exist or are made in the future are phased (in much the same way inn rooms and the squadron room are).

This special phase would have npcs made to look like players running around the towns and a few automated messages in public chat channels to give the illusion that nothing is wrong.

The spammers would still be able to log and spam their messages but only other spammers would see them. Let them advertise to each other and get them out of our space while still getting their sub money. :P

Another thought. Get some folks to infiltrate the gil selling sites and get their bot programs that they use to send bots/players teleporting between all the main quest points to farm gear and gil to sell with their damned RMT crap, so you can figure out how to block access to the game for those that have those programs active on their computers.

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Originally Posted by Nicodemus_Mercy

If I had the know how and authority, what I would do is:

Set up a system that detects key words (and the clever ways spammers use to bypass such filters)

If enough reports are made, the system checks the reported messages for those key words and then surreptitiously flags a spammer's account so that any and all characters that currently exist or are made in the future are phased (in much the same way inn rooms and the squadron room are).

This special phase would have npcs made to look like players running around the towns and a few automated messages in public chat channels to give the illusion that nothing is wrong.

The spammers would still be able to log and spam their messages but only other spammers would see them. Let them advertise to each other and get them out of our space while still getting their sub money. :P

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It would be simpler to just shadowban the bots and permanently disable their ability to shout/trade/do whatever else is essential to their ability to conduct RMT transactions, but not the ability to farm gil, so they'd be in for a rude surprise when they do actually find a buyer.

Whoever runs them clearly doesn't spend much time monitoring them to make sure they're all functioning properly because I regularly see ones that break and stop moving, get flagged as AFK, etc, sometimes for days on end.

I definitely noticed a huge decline in gil selling chat spam when they introduced the report function. It used to be teleporting to any city would cause your chat log to instantly be filled with spam, and even if you weren't in a city they would constantly send you /tell messages. After the report function was introduced, the spam started slowing down until it became virtually non-existent. These days I only see the occasional shout in Limsa (never the other cities) and I haven't received any /tells since.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only purpose of the report button is specifically to combat the chat spam, not to actually put a stop to RMT. If you report someone for chat spam, a GM can easily check the logs and see right away to see that they're breaking TOS. For the gil farmers, while it may be incredibly obvious to us when we see a group of them what they're doing, the GMs have to actually do an investigation and prove that they're doing something wrong, and not just a group of legit accounts with names like "Xcusidonnd Applef".

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Originally Posted by Beckett

I definitely noticed a huge decline in gil selling chat spam when they introduced the report function. It used to be teleporting to any city would cause your chat log to instantly be filled with spam, and even if you weren't in a city they would constantly send you /tell messages. After the report function was introduced, the spam started slowing down until it became virtually non-existent. These days I only see the occasional shout in Limsa (never the other cities) and I haven't received any /tells since.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only purpose of the report button is specifically to combat the chat spam, not to actually put a stop to RMT. If you report someone for chat spam, a GM can easily check the logs and see right away to see that they're breaking TOS. For the gil farmers, while it may be incredibly obvious to us when we see a group of them what they're doing, the GMs have to actually do an investigation and prove that they're doing something wrong, and not just a group of legit accounts with names like "Xcusidonnd Applef".

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The thing is that while they do clean out the gil farmers on a weekly basis it only takes a day for them to hit 50 again and go right back to their business, so it's mostly a wasted effort, particularly because the time between their bans is more then enough for them to get enough gil to conduct a sizable transaction. They need to ban them constantly or find a more lasting solution if they want to actually gain some headway in combating them.

Though there's still another problem in that there are "legit" gil farmers who resort to mass-producing/gathering items with bots and selling them on the MB instead of hacking, which is far less likely to be caught and acted against while having all the same economy-crashing effects as someone botting for personal gain would.