Why can't they auto-block RMT posts?

Seems that my main activity is reporting RMT spam when in main cities, and I constantly see the SAME text in them all the time, like "Gil & Eukera level & Gear 390"

Seems to me that Sq Enix could write software to monitor player reports, and once ten reports have been submitted on ads that contain the same text, start blocking all that contain that text.
Yes, the spammers will just change the text by one character, but they'll have to identify what part is triggering the block to change it, and eventually, they may run out of ways to get their message across.

What’s to stop someone from abusing it and getting someone blocked for something frivolous?

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Originally Posted by SamSmoot

Seems that my main activity is reporting RMT spam when in main cities, and I constantly see the SAME text in them all the time, like "Gil & Eukera level & Gear 390"

Seems to me that Sq Enix could write software to monitor player reports, and once ten reports have been submitted on ads that contain the same text, start blocking all that contain that text.
Yes, the spammers will just change the text by one character, but they'll have to identify what part is triggering the block to change it, and eventually, they may run out of ways to get their message across.

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since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

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Originally Posted by MorbolvampireQueen6

since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

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Yes, because vpns are definitely not a thing they are using to get past the great firewall of China already, so why wouldn't they use one to bypass region blocks.

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Originally Posted by Hugowulf

What’s to stop someone from abusing it and getting someone blocked for something frivolous?

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exactly there are people who use shout and yell chat to advertise there crafter skills or items if they did that then they'd get banned for trying to make money the legit way

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Originally Posted by SamSmoot

Seems that my main activity is reporting RMT spam when in main cities, and I constantly see the SAME text in them all the time, like "Gil & Eukera level & Gear 390"

Seems to me that Sq Enix could write software to monitor player reports, and once ten reports have been submitted on ads that contain the same text, start blocking all that contain that text.
Yes, the spammers will just change the text by one character, but they'll have to identify what part is triggering the block to change it, and eventually, they may run out of ways to get their message across.

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Do you not see the weird characters they use in their posts? They could use anything from any language out there that remotely looks like a letter for their advertisements

Beta - β
Eta upper case/lower case - Η / η
Epsilon lower case - ε

What you're suggesting could only add problems to the game if they start using normal text players use all the time.

I was on a mmo that they blocked all IPs from china and Russia. After that it wiped out 99% of the rmt bots. It was very rare every seen one spamming after it. Maybe they should do samething here. They can always trace your route.

My guess is it would probably take resources SqE don't have or as a company gain very little (to them) to use. It's a machine learning problem where someone / a group will have to first sit and manually flag several millions/billions of examples of chat messages as RMT or not, to train and run a Bayesian network or support vector machine algorithms (or RNN, FCN, etc... i.e. different AI neural network archetypes) on.

(I realize by writing this that it can be misused) If the bots break up the lines it becomes much more difficult for an algorithm to recognize and block the text real-time, same with adding spacing b e t w e e n characters, symbols, and adding non-printable (invisible) characters. Human read-able, but more difficult for algorithms that build up/use dictionaries from the training. Then again, one could design the algorithm to look at the full chat history (with/-out spacing) after being reported for RMT. Then the botters would have to figure out how much they could spam before being banned, and such, and in some cases have to intersperse with other text than spam. At Google they regularly change the algorithm up to prevent misuse of the search ranking. The developers could do the same e.g. each maintenance day, but compared to Google, they don't risk much by having the bots, and the botters sadly lose little by being blocked. Maybe they already do something like this when doing their ban-waves, but who knows...

They ought to come up with a way to shadowban them instead of banning them outright.

IE, put them on a DC-wide blacklist if they get reported too many times so they can keep spamming away without actually knowing that nobody can hear them.

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Originally Posted by MorbolvampireQueen6

since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

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You can spoof a MAC address easier than logging into a VPN these days.

Also there is no way to get a list of MAC addresses in China. You don't assign MAC address to a country like you do an IP address.

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Originally Posted by MorbolvampireQueen6

since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

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Tbh this is what PSO2 did. Banned all of china, bots and actual players alike.

yes lets just ban whole countries. that's a great way to run things. /sarcasm

look just because something isn't seen as being "instant" it doesn't mean things aren't happening in the background.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

yes lets just ban whole countries. that's a great way to run things. /sarcasm

look just because something isn't seen as being "instant" it doesn't mean things aren't happening in the background.

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the thing is without harsh choice it doesn't matter ban 1 bot 50 more spawn this is never ending and it can't be stopped by taking 1 or even 50 down will never go any were.

taking down the country that has the bots spawning non stop might seem harsh but it needs 2 be done

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Originally Posted by hynaku

blocked all IPs... and Russia. ...Maybe they should do samething here.

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Hey. We already suffer with no shipment from SE store, no Russian language, 13 Euro sub with 300 Euro monthly payment, can we at least play quietly without wondering about good VPN service? There is not so much of us in this game to block us by IP. :/ (I doubt there any RMTs in roughly 300 active players anyway)

Perhaps, they could recruit players with in-game items as reward? Or maybe have GM's sit in cities. They're easy to spot as they /s and /sh all day long. On the other hand RMT have to buy actual accounts to get into the game so...

Reminds me of someone that was effing and blinding on the Blizzard forums because an enemy player with a username in Chinese seemed to be hacking (or so they say) in Overwatch. Obviously because of the name it turned in to a rant that all Chinese players were hackers and should be banned, like I guess everyone in FFXIV with a Japanese name must be Japanese, silly isn't it.

In the end it just goes to show that hackers, RMT spammers, cheaters etc, can be from any part of the world, let's not generalize an entire country based on mostly personal opinion. The game just needs a better method of handling RMT, like if I report someone I expect it to be blacklisted at the same time rather than having to do both individually.

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Originally Posted by Kurando

Reminds me of someone that was effing and blinding on the Blizzard forums because an enemy player with a username in Chinese seemed to be hacking (or so they say) in Overwatch. Obviously because of the name it turned in to a rant that all Chinese players were hackers and should be banned, like I guess everyone in FFXIV with a Japanese name must be Japanese, silly isn't it.

In the end it just goes to show that hackers, RMT spammers, cheaters etc, can be from any part of the world, let's not generalize an entire country based on mostly personal opinion. The game just needs a better method of handling RMT, like if I report someone I expect it to be blacklisted at the same time rather than having to do both individually.

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u know u can search their location with what they spam right lol its not assuming and note i said most rmts a few are russian

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Originally Posted by MorbolvampireQueen6

u know u can search their location with what they spam right lol its not assuming and note i said most rmts a few are russian

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They often write their sites, but the issue is that if some site registered in certain country doesn't mean that RMT is from this country by himself. Thanks, but I don't want to be blocked from the game just because there is possibly one rmt jerk in incredibly low amount of Russian players, we already suffer enough. Same goes for China - I have no idea how many rmts are from there, but blocking whole country because of few jerks? It's just wrong. Or you are one of those who thinks that it's okay to punish whole class because one boy broke the window? Blocking country is not a solution.

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Originally Posted by manamoppet

My guess is it would probably take resources SqE don't have or as a company gain very little (to them) to use. It's a machine learning problem where someone / a group will have to first sit and manually flag several millions/billions of examples of chat messages as RMT or not, to train and run a Bayesian network or support vector machine algorithms (or RNN, FCN, etc... i.e. different AI neural network archetypes) on.

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The players would do the pattern recognition. After many RMT reports from different accounts, the only thing software would have to do is find matching strings in, say, 100 of the reports, then start blocking anything that contains that string. Such as: "[Ultrafast Deleviryin 10 Mins]". If they change a few characters, players will report the new ones, and they get blocked again, along with the old ones.

Example: Take this popular posting:
Ysteueqr Kejajuue: ----[SCUMBAGS.COM]----[Best Buy Gil Store]----[Cheapest Price]-----[SCUMBAGS.COM]---[Ultrafast Deliveryin 10 Mins]--[6% OFF Code;LOVE]---8qwet

After 100 reports, the blocking algorithm sees the highlighted strings in 50% of them, and starts blocking on just ONE of them.
The spammer then has to figure out which one is causing the block and change it.. Next 100 reports, and it picks a different string than it blocked on previously, and it continues. The spammers will have to keep finding and changing the blocking strings every 100 posts, and they may eventually run out ways to say what they want.

It's unfortunate that there's no way for them to detect the modded clients that the bots are using, because they're essentially running a completely stripped down client that basically only sends out the commands needed to log in their characters and make them function

There's virtually no GPU or CPU usage involved, which means that they can multibox several hundred characters on one potato of a PC with their connection speed being the only real limiter.

If IP address spoofing wasn't so easy, they could also just block out access to any addresses being used by several hundreds accounts simultaneously since not even the busiest of net cafes are likely to have as many players connecting from the same IP as these RMT farmers do.

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Originally Posted by Coatl

Tbh this is what PSO2 did. Banned all of china, bots and actual players alike.

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The sad thing is that it actually worked. In the first six months of the game being out or so, it was insanely common to see piles of hacking bots trying to farm money on empty server channels and there was also some isolated RMT spam.

As soon as they went through with their somewhat extreme move to deny all service for China, this activity stopped completely and never resurfaced.

Problems with automatic pattern recognition (Disclaimer - all domains are examples and not sites that I am aware of, any actual site that is included is purely coincidental):

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www.buymygil.com
vvvvvv.buymygil.com
www.buymygil.(0/\/\
vvvvvv.buy/\/\¥gil.¢0/\/\

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How do you plan to pattern match that? Those are just a few possible examples off of an iPad keyboard. Once you're in a PC and have access to the full ASCII set... yeah, you're not going to pattern match anything. Relying on players to report strings being used so you can block them? There's so many possible variations that no one is going to spend time reporting more than one and your average player is just going to ignore it.

The only way to stop RMT is to make it not profitable and that's a very difficult thing to do without becoming the RMT yourself.

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Originally Posted by MorbolvampireQueen6

since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

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That is a common misconception. While the sites that people SELL the gil to are Chinese sites (and thus the accounts that trade the gil bought), the actual bots are run most commonly from American and Canadian accounts, usually the west coast.

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Originally Posted by MorbolvampireQueen6

the thing is without harsh choice it doesn't matter ban 1 bot 50 more spawn this is never ending and it can't be stopped by taking 1 or even 50 down will never go any were.

taking down the country that has the bots spawning non stop might seem harsh but it needs 2 be done

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No. Just no. It does not NEED to be done. Nor will it be. There are already well known American botters. Should we ban the entirety of the U.S. too? Don't be silly

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Originally Posted by SamSmoot

The players would do the pattern recognition. After many RMT reports from different accounts, the only thing would have to do is find matching strings in, say, 100 of the reports, then start blocking anything that contains that string. Such as: "[Ultrafast Deleviryin 10 Mins]". If they change a few characters, players will report the new ones, and they get blocked again, along with the old ones.

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That's true, but can take a while (10 hotbars with different macros on them pr. bot), and after a while uses more storage than necessary when new string variations are added. Think of how many combinations words can be altered in a Twitter message, and that's only 140 characters. With machine pattern recognition you don't need exact matching strings, just be close enough when calculating e.g. cross-entropy for loss equations, and the number of parameters to learn is mostly unchanging (the values of each parameter will change). I meant that initially one would need to manually label that many chat messages, but of course after the initial training one would augment the training by adding the players new RMT reports (players doing the pattern recognition).

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Originally Posted by SamSmoot

Seems that my main activity is reporting RMT spam when in main cities, and I constantly see the SAME text in them all the time, like "Gil & Eukera level & Gear 390"

Seems to me that Sq Enix could write software to monitor player reports, and once ten reports have been submitted on ads that contain the same text, start blocking all that contain that text.
Yes, the spammers will just change the text by one character, but they'll have to identify what part is triggering the block to change it, and eventually, they may run out of ways to get their message across.

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Considering how some RMT spam is garbled and saying stuff like |3uy G1L, I think maybe they do have some kind of auto-block or ban in place and do this to not get detected.

That being said, gil would only be sold if someone bought it. If nobody was buying gil, then the bots would eventually go away to a different game for money. Maybe we need big warnings when someone creates an account saying "Do not participate in RMT or get banned instantly!" (considering if buyers get banned after they buy gil, the gil sellers still make the money, you have to discourage people from buying in the first place), try to fight the problem on both sides.

At this point I'd just like the ability to add client side chat filters so I can block the messages myself without having to blacklist hundreds of gibberish names or wait on the devs to make a move.

I'm not sure why they can't just make the server auto-DC bots for moving too quickly using their hacks.

It's been suspected that they already have some kind of countermeasure in place in PvP zones and PotD as using movement skills like Shoulder Tackle and Onslaught can randomly DC you there, but not anywhere else.

The truth is that there are a lot of things they could be doing to lower if not stop the gil farming that's being done, but they seem convinced that repeatedly banning the bots when they instantly create replacements is actually working.

I report the spammers so much, Squeenix should cut me a paycheck for it.

Remember when third party programs did a better job filtering out RMT in FFXI than SE could, to the effect that SE just simply allowed it to exist because it did their job better then they ever could?
Nothing's changed since XI. SE is just as bad at handling RMT.

im more concerned by the fact that they go after innocent people who provide a service like the guy who runs mogboard and not these RMT jerks

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Originally Posted by hynaku

I was on a mmo that they blocked all IPs from china and Russia. After that it wiped out 99% of the rmt bots. It was very rare every seen one spamming after it. Maybe they should do samething here. They can always trace your route.

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How about maybe they shouldn't?

The short answer to OP's question:
Because anything that's scripted or automated that results in a ban/silence can and will be abused by players who figure it out.

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Originally Posted by hynaku

I was on a mmo that they blocked all IPs from china and Russia. After that it wiped out 99% of the rmt bots. It was very rare every seen one spamming after it. Maybe they should do samething here. They can always trace your route.

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I’m pretty sure all IPs from China are already blocked. They have their own region and cannot log in the NA/EU/JP version without a VPN.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

im more concerned by the fact that they go after innocent people who provide a service like the guy who runs mogboard and not these RMT jerks

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Thats still automation. But it’s not like SE isn’t going after RMT, they just need our help.