RMT spam fixes need to happen sooner then later

[Zezlar]

At the very least anyone else in the industry or in information security would of said to have put in a mandatory password change by now, but SE hasn't, even though the breach was confirmed 2 weeks ago and they still cant identify anything, while more accounts continue to be compromised every day. Would of at least either confrimed stolen information or discarded it as no longer a plausibility.

And if they hadn't of lifted the auto-block of accounts accessed from an invalid IP that had been present since 1.0 up until a post-release patch, none of the compromised accounts would of happened

What breach? The only thing they've stated recently was that people were breaching other companies and trying to use that information here to steal accounts.

[Synol]

Perhaps you should put a chat filter in place to detect if someone is sending multiple hundred tells a second and auto-ban them. Real people don't do that. RMT spammers do. I was getting 2-3 tells a second from an RMT spammer a few days ago, assuming he was doing that to more people than just me since I wasn't even in town it would be fairly easy to spot these people.

[Mistz]

There is really only one instant fix for these kinda problems, since they just keep remakeing new accounts, and use that IP changeing thing .
Hire more staff, place 3 on each server, in each main city, wich job is only to instant ban all gil selling spams they see.

tbh with the time it takes, for a report to reach SE, them to handle it, read truh the logs etc etc, there will allready be 5 new gil sellers, so as said above solution only solution.
Personally i didint use to mind them shouting evry now and then, but i must admitt at this point where the same character is able to spam 20msg pr. sek is reaching my tolerance level >.<.
god bless filters exist in this game

[Besamel]

I like the 'Coin lock' that rift used where if you logged on from a different IP, your account was limited and you could not sell anything, buy anything, trash anything e.t.c. At the time your account was locked, you were sent an email with a code - put the code into the game and your account unlocked. It'd also be good if the account could not communicate with anyone other then GM's.

If you're silly enough to use the same password for the game and your mail account, and haven't taken advantage of either the free (for smartphone users) security token app, or purchased a hardware token - SE can't do much more for you.

[Pacifyer]

I remember a day in Aion when GMs came into the game as a giant rabbits and started publicly dropping NUKES on the heads of RMT spammers banning them from the game (with accounts). This public act was sooo much loved by the community! This act started a crusade against RMT traders which had a pretty decent result.

Anyways as a suggestion to the developers.
1. Implement chat name click option to report spam. This button would both blist the player and send a report to GMs (with the message attached for GMs to be able to react fast).
2. When the player gets reported he should get the limit to the rate at which he may send messages (maybe only to /shout and /yell). When a player is reported multiple times (>10 for example) he would be blocked from /shout and /yell and maybe /tell
3. When committing a permaban on account you should remove this account's characters from all players' blists which are currently growing fast and will soon reach the limit of 200.

[ZohnoReecho]

Tonight, every city I went to was completely quiet. SE is doing something and it is having a noticeable effect.

Or more simply, the hacked accounts were mostly legacy and the hackers didn't want to start paying the bill.

[Ninjaii]

That's because mandatory password changes aren't effective solutions when the average joe ticks the "save login info" box. What SE should have done, from the beginning is ask for either a mobile phone number (to SMS one-time passwords to), a mobile app (which they now have) or include hardware token with all boxed versions of the game. MMO games are the only "services" that people are so inherently lazy about that hacks roam free. Many people who are "hacked", end up hacked because they were already up to no good.

Why is there a 1000 character limit x.x

even if they tick 'save log-in info' there's the security question answer protecting their account. it would still prove whether its just a stolen database or is a persistent issue, and they havent done it or anything else.
And Why is there a daily limit, to go along with your 1000 character one lol. Or the fact that if a moderator deletes a thread it still counts against your daily allowance even if you're not the reason the thread is deleted.

As far as saying its ppl 'up to no good in the 1st place' the few people @SE that are stuck in the middle of customers filing tickets about stolen accounts and the task force that isnt doing anything totally disagree with your statement. cause players can make all the unfounded statements they want about other players, and there's nothing these compromised accounts can say to rebuttal that nonsense, because #1 they can't access the forums (unless they still have cookies from previously being logged in) and #2 no matter what they say ppl like u would just respond with 'suuure....'. i'm sure there's 'some' accounts that 'were up to no good' but theres way too many compromised accounts and i know 'some' did nothing wrong unlike u just assuming. Always assuming the easiest answer will unfoundedly provide all the results is the reason situations like this end up exacerbated the way it has.

Best thing to do is not try to sound informative w rhetoric about things you have no desire to be informed about, or you would of already known more information than you posted. The 'moble app' is already confirmed fruitless against the account compromises, just ppl with the phone app have a security measure to more expediently recover their account when compromised. Ppl without the phone app have to wait for SE to unblock their account for 'suspicious activity' ppl w the phone app are able to over-ride the marked account directly with an automated e-mail.

Granted the forum moderators tend to delete threads where people are disclosing that their 'phone app' account was compromised, but the support tickets are still there.

I could go on more and explain how the current all-region posting warning of 'phone app' accounts securing their information has a strong probability of being related to the fact that they offer no protection against the compromise, but the moderators deleted the thread with that information 2 days ago. And unlike you, i'm not going to post information that isn't able to be confirmed, even if i know it 'should be' but since the moderators deleted it, it cannot.

[Shadowplay1981]

Even if they could just give us some kind of filter to turn on for specific words or just an infinate b-list and one click b-listing. Something ANYTHING!111 lol

Yes please! one click b-listing would do wonders for this game. It's a bit tedious to have to input someones name in the black list or type a macro just to put someone on a b-list.

[ChickensEvil]

I would also add that part of the problem is the creation of an environment where getting 1 million gil in game (which is worth quite a bit) is very difficult to do, but paying someone 20$ for that is very easy to do. As someone else mentioned using the example from EVE. There are other methods to it as well, as much as I hated SWTOR being F2P the best thing about their cash shop was EVERYTHING could be sold on the open market. So you could buy things to sell to other players. Was there still RMT spam in chat? sure. But the cost benefit to doing that was moot. You would pay the gold farmers easily 2x as much money as it would cost to buy someone off the cash shop and sell it yourself.

The real fix to RMT is removing the incentives to the player feeling like they NEED to buy gil. When I hit 50 on my first character I had 60k, others had maybe 150k-200k (depending on what you picked for quest rewards). High grade materia for some classes is costing around 80k per piece. The ONLY real option to making money in this game through "legitimate" means, is crafting. The only way to actually make money in crafting is to get it to 50 which takes a VERY LONG TIME. So of course people are going to buy gil for real money.

One of Two things need to happen, there need to be more methods in game to make money other than direct crafting (which is really just passing money around from player to player). Or second, there needs to be a sanctioned means to get money for cash through SOME method. Destroy the conditions which creates the problem in the first place, and you can fix the root of the problem instead of throwing duct tape on it, to hold it together.

[Yini_Kihn]

We are also adding more complex chat filters to the already large list we have arranged in order to further prevent RMT spam. We will continue to do so in a manner that will not affect your normal conversations.

Unfortunately, my normal conversations are already affected as per my bug report (unless the cause of that is some different form of filtering).