They have forsaken us. the spammers will win

There are no GM's in game. there needs to be at least 2 full time GM's stationed in every main city banning all those spammers. this has gotten retarded.

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Originally Posted by chilledmilk

There are no GM's in game. there needs to be at least 2 full time GM's stationed in every main city banning all those spammers. this has gotten retarded.

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I have to agree I can`t even read thier names long enough to ignore them... 4-5 every 2-3 seconds spamming chat... SHAME ON YOU YOSHI!!! You are ignoring the community and this is now your fault... for letting it get way out of control. I hope you or one of your incompetent lackys reads this. SHAME ON YOU!!!!

I have no idea why they have a report function in support desk. It's obvious nobody is even reading the reports.
When you have I'm guessing hundreds of reports on a single user (3 from myself) and he's still sending tells and shouts 8 hours later, this goes beyond incompetence. I've sent 13 reports today and not a 1 account has been stopped. They obviously don't care to even read the complaints.
At this point I don't even think a fix would be enough. Whoever is in charge of the ingame contact, and/or rule enforcement needs to lose their jobs.

And making a report is a pain. I would prefer they implement a "report buttom" when you right-click the user's name. That's the system used in GW2, for example. It's faster and you don't have to write a report about it, just report->select issue->send.

Yeah, spammers are ridiculous. Can't even read the names because they spam so quickly.

they need a in game report function. this function would report them for spamming and would instantly block them. Also if enough players report that player it should instantly kick and Ban the player bot.

It really is ridiculous. Over the weekend I blacklisted a spammer, went to bed, woke up 8 hours later, and the watching chat, the same guy/bot was still going. And the guy had started 4-5 hours before I went to bed, so it's 12+ hours for spammers on my server, if not more. Pains me to say it, but I don't even bother reporting anymore, it clearly does no good. I still have spammers at launch on my blacklist that haven't been banned/deleted, and that was over a week ago.

My blacklist is already up to 80. Another week and it's going to be full.

I was saying this days ago and the white knights came in and ran me down for voicing this as well as many others. its especially hard to deal with on the PS3.

All i want to know is what the hell are they doing at this company. phone support busy signal. chat support HAHAHAHA, Emaill Support HAHAHAHA and GM in game support HAHAHAHAHAH. I have tickets in from 5 days ago how the F does it take 5 days to answer a ticket?

I remember in WoW they had a filter that stopped people from sending too much text in a short amount of time. This kept people from spamming solid walls of text over and over. Their spam lasted for a little bit, then was stopped before it started again, giving you time to put them on ignore.

If they are not going to do this, they need to up the Blacklist cap to something like 1000.
It is too bad that now all the people I see spamming for gil and leveling you 1-50 are all hacked accounts, as character creation is still heavily limited.

There is 4 bots standing at Momodi's desk at The Quicksand in Ul'dah that have now been there 2 days with their heads continuously bobbing as they spam shout non-stop.
These bots have been reported repeatedly, yet they are still there happily making shout unusable unless you blacklist.

I bet if you start shouting profanity in spam chat a GM would show up. They know gil seller are there they just see paid subs so they want do anything. Played 4 hrs today leveling leather and the same 5 or so people spammed non stop the whole time with no consequence I had now resorted to a heavily filtered chat log that hides /shout /yell and /tell. Its ridiculous. RMT and Spam both violate ToS those accounts should have been banned after the first report.

its possible they just dont have enough gms atm

Accounts are getting suspended and banned over this. Just look at all the threads popping up with people complaining their account was suspended after being taken over by gil spammers. People need to do more to secure themselves.

There are free software tokens out there, but people ain't got time for that.

Hey, calm down. This is a real problem but stop and think. Two per city per world? You do realize they would need to have 6 per world, for like, 50 worlds? At least 3 shifts to manage timezones and weekends. 900 GM's? To manage gold sellers? That is just.. Over the top that is larger than most games entire staff. No. What they need is to be able to feed shout/yell from all worlds to a much smaller subset who don't have to be logged into a specific server, to see the problems going on there. Chances are if they don't have such a thing they are working on it. But they are also swamped..

If you have 10 people in this special task force. And you get 1 report for every 100 people an hour, and you have 300K people concurrently, that is upwards of 300 tickets to go through every hour per person. And everyone has to be reviewed to be sure it is legitimate before you just ban someone. And it could be worse if more than 1 in 100 people are reporting..

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Originally Posted by ZohnoReecho

There are free software tokens out there, but people ain't got time for that.

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I fear you are more correct than anyone here. Too many people feel they do not have time for a free software security token then get hacked and say its everyone else's fault that their account was suspended. That is what is going on on the MMORPG.com forums today someone is complaining that their account was hacked and they didnt use the security token, but blames SE for their account being suspended and for having to wait hours on the phone to get a hold of support. Its people like this that cause more problems than the spammers because spamming wouldnt be a problem if people used the security token.

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Originally Posted by Rivienne

Hey, calm down. This is a real problem but stop and think. Two per city per world? You do realize they would need to have 6 per world, for like, 50 worlds? At least 3 shifts to manage timezones and weekends. 900 GM's? To manage gold sellers? That is just.. Over the top that is larger than most games entire staff. No. What they need is to be able to feed shout/yell from all worlds to a much smaller subset who don't have to be logged into a specific server, to see the problems going on there. Chances are if they don't have such a thing they are working on it. But they are also swamped..

If you have 10 people in this special task force. And you get 1 report for every 100 people an hour, and you have 300K people concurrently, that is upwards of 300 tickets to go through every hour per person. And everyone has to be reviewed to be sure it is legitimate before you just ban someone. And it could be worse if more than 1 in 100 people are reporting..

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GMs probably have access to any world at any time. It would be enough to have few of them rotate each town in each server every few minutes.

Yes. That would work too. But it still doesn't change the fact that at this point in time, everyone in support is overwhelmed, and even if they have staff for that, chances are they busy with backlog. At best it will take a week before we start to see improvement, unless they are able to implement smart filtering in this next rollout, and that is still only a partial solution.

You don't need 900 GMs to do better than they're doing now. You have characters spamming shout for 8 hours or more without getting banned. 1 person could visit the 3 citys in all servers and ban the shouters in less than 8 hours. The way it is now, even if they had 1 or 2 GMs to deal with these shouters, and both of them were slow and lazy, they'd be banning these accounts faster. So either they have no ingame support for these violations, or they don't care to do anything about it.
I'm not saying banning shouters will fix the problem, but it'd sure as hell be a start. As it is right now a RMT company can steal or buy 1 account and get between 8 hours and days of advertisement out of it. Do a cost benefit analysis. It's a great business decision. Start banning people after a few minutes, or even an hour, and it isn't as cost effective.

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Originally Posted by Gorlan

I have to agree I can`t even read thier names long enough to ignore them... 4-5 every 2-3 seconds spamming chat... SHAME ON YOU YOSHI!!! You are ignoring the community and this is now your fault... for letting it get way out of control. I hope you or one of your incompetent lackys reads this. SHAME ON YOU!!!!

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whoa. that's retarded.

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Originally Posted by lordjoosie

You don't need 900 GMs to do better than they're doing now. You have characters spamming shout for 8 hours or more without getting banned. 1 person could visit the 3 citys in all servers and ban the shouters in less than 8 hours. The way it is now, even if they had 1 or 2 GMs to deal with these shouters, and both of them were slow and lazy, they'd be banning these accounts faster. So either they have no ingame support for these violations, or they don't care to do anything about it.
I'm not saying banning shouters will fix the problem, but it'd sure as hell be a start. As it is right now a RMT company can steal or buy 1 account and get between 8 hours and days of advertisement out of it. Do a cost benefit analysis. It's a great business decision. Start banning people after a few minutes, or even an hour, and it isn't as cost effective.

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This all is still presuming one thing: that they aren't doing this already. I have seen people banned on a regular basis, and new complaints about being banned because their account was hacked also on a regular basis. In other words, they already are banning people on an ongoing basis. They just can't keep up yet. Why? a) not enough people b) monitoring/reporting infrastructure deficincies c) most importantly: backlog. I have been on the other side of a support system during a disaster like this and no one has time to keep up, much less improve the situation at first. You are too busy handling the many existing tickets to solve the root cause of the problem at first.

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Originally Posted by Rivienne

This all is still presuming one thing: that they aren't doing this already. I have seen people banned on a regular basis, and new complaints about being banned because their account was hacked also on a regular basis. In other words, they already are banning people on an ongoing basis. They just can't keep up yet. Why? a) not enough people b) monitoring/reporting infrastructure deficincies c) most importantly: backlog. I have been on the other side of a support system during a disaster like this and no one has time to keep up, much less improve the situation at first. You are too busy handling the many existing tickets to solve the root cause of the problem at first.

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I was banned just this morning after someone took over my account while I was sleeping. They are working on it. I just hope I don't need to get another account now.

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Originally Posted by Rivienne

This all is still presuming one thing: that they aren't doing this already. I have seen people banned on a regular basis, and new complaints about being banned because their account was hacked also on a regular basis. In other words, they already are banning people on an ongoing basis. They just can't keep up yet. Why? a) not enough people b) monitoring/reporting infrastructure deficincies c) most importantly: backlog. I have been on the other side of a support system during a disaster like this and no one has time to keep up, much less improve the situation at first. You are too busy handling the many existing tickets to solve the root cause of the problem at first.

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Out of the 50 or so blacklisted. 1 has been deleted since launch. So in my eye's they are not doing anything to fix the problem. And yes you can see if characters gets deleted if you have them in ur blacklist.

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Originally Posted by Ormathon

Out of the 50 or so blacklisted. 1 has been deleted since launch. So in my eye's they are not doing anything to fix the problem. And yes you can see if characters gets deleted if you have them in ur blacklist.

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I think that has to do more with the account deleting the toon, my characters still exsist as well as the spammer "Affa Sddd (Adamantoise)" who took over my account.

Thought the cost money?

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Originally Posted by ZohnoReecho

There are free software tokens out there, but people ain't got time for that.

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I thought they cost money?

While it's not a solution to the problem - simply removing Yell and shout from the general tab and putting them in their own can certainly make things much more manageable for the time being. Yes, I'm aware you will miss the legit /shouts going on because of this but if the spam really is that bad for you it's well worth the trade off for the time being.

On top of that I simply made a macro using the

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/blist add <r>

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command for when the /tells come through. A swift click and confirm is all it takes to solve the lack of a /blacklist button for now.

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Originally Posted by Shilly

I thought they cost money?

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Only the physical one costs money but the softwares are free for both ios and android.
http://www.square-enix.com/na/account/otp/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/squa...617970570?mt=8
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...re_token&hl=it

Just have to NOT uninstall the app after the registration with your account. It will reset it's "serial code" after the installation and would need to contact the support centre to disable it.
It's specified even on the lodestone, both the site and the game client: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...004b15d14792c8
Sadly people just ignore whatever SE tries to communicate most of the time.

There was one guy gil spamming in Old Gridania last night on a constant loop to the point you couldn't read any incoming chat because it was gone in 1 secs. I at least warned people in the surrounding zones to blacklist Sett Dda before entering Old Grindania.

You only need 1 GM with a specific task of suspending accounts that sell gil or offer leveling. This GM can teleport to any city with their endless gil or custom account set to teleport for free. They would sit in each city for 5 min suspending accounts, then teleport to another big city or small town doing the same thing, waiting 5 min and issuing suspensions. In a 10 hr day, you can really discourage some of these spammers if you do it for 3-4 days straight, some may give up if you catch them when they first start. A 2 man (or woman) team working 10 hrs shifts can get this done with a nice long weekend of leveling their GM account.

You know what SE, let me have the unlimited teleporting and the power to suspend, not ban, accounts that spam. I'd be willing to do that for you for at least 1 day.

I totally understand that it's more or less a new MMO, and they are swamped trying to put out fires. I'm one of the first to jump to their defense in most cases. Problem is, when you send 8-10 reports in a day, and 8 hours later every one is still shouting, it's clear they are too busy to even read the complaints. If that's the case, at least assign a couple of GMs to warping town to town server to server issuing suspensions. They could eliminate hundreds of these people in a single day without needing the resources they would to sift through 10s of thousands of complaints.

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Originally Posted by lordjoosie

Problem is, when you send 8-10 reports in a day, and 8 hours later every one is still shouting, it's clear they are too busy to even read the complaints..

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Well I guess. That is the problem that I was trying to state. They need both people in game do things, and people to manage the reports. They are still dealing with a backlog. This is not to defend them. They should have had such a team from day one. They messed up. But they do have an overall team now, and they are working on the problem. So, it isn't that they aren't reading complaints, it is that they haven't gotten to yours yet because of how many there are, and people keep adding more. So yeah, I am all for suggesting ideas for them to improve the process, but the assumption that they aren't doing anything (or enough) or that there is another "easier" solution is a bit naive. Even if they have the people, they need a process, and for the process they need the infrastructure. And if the infrastructure for GM to warp around for example doesn't exist, that has to be put in place too. Technical issues, Process Issues, and Resource Issues. It is never just one thing, or one solution.

Mind you I am all for people giving constructive ideas for how a system might be implemented to solve this problem long term. I think they will listen to ideas that will work. Just don't think they aren't doing anything (or working on the things you think they should be) because you personally haven't seen it.

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Originally Posted by Gerkargeo

There was one guy gil spamming in Old Gridania last night on a constant loop to the point you couldn't read any incoming chat because it was gone in 1 secs. I at least warned people in the surrounding zones to blacklist Sett Dda before entering Old Grindania.

You only need 1 GM with a specific task of suspending accounts that sell gil or offer leveling. This GM can teleport to any city with their endless gil or custom account set to teleport for free. They would sit in each city for 5 min suspending accounts, then teleport to another big city or small town doing the same thing, waiting 5 min and issuing suspensions. In a 10 hr day, you can really discourage some of these spammers if you do it for 3-4 days straight, some may give up if you catch them when they first start. A 2 man (or woman) team working 10 hrs shifts can get this done with a nice long weekend of leveling their GM account.

You know what SE, let me have the unlimited teleporting and the power to suspend, not ban, accounts that spam. I'd be willing to do that for you for at least 1 day.

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I offered my services to do this for free! These spammers are horribly out of control and the blacklist is quickly filling.

Gil spammers have declared war and SE is going to have hire more help to deal with this or something. A system that will block chat access altogether if posts reach a certain amount per minute would really cripple the spamming bots. No legitimate player would do something like spam 25-50 messages a minute. It would only hurt the RMTs. Funny thought, this forum has a strict post limit, but RMTs can post all they want in-game. Made me chuckle a bit.