SE losing war versus Bots and RMTs

[Teliopas]

It is a difficult process weeding out RMTs especially in a new MMO and even more so with one that has been hyped up for release. I think they could be doing a better job but knowing SE they are working on it. One thing I do know is after this most recent series of bans and gil freezing the spammers on my servers advertised prices increased by nearly 400%. I see this as pretty successful, as if SE continues with their no tolerance policies the RMTs would have to eventually charge so much nobody would be interested in buying from them and they would move on to a more wiling community.

One thing that really upsets me though is people come into the forums and complain about it insulting the company for not preventing RMTs. You need to remember, this isn't SEs fault this is OUR fault. If people never bought gil then RMTs wouldn't be here because their wouldn't be a market for them. RMTs ruin the in-game economy, hack accounts, control prices on the markets and spam our chat systems. I see them as the scum of the earth and the governments of these people, specifically china actually support these forms of virtual crime. Yet we turn a blind eye and just blame the companies that spend their lives actually legitimately creating something that we love.

SE is pretty strict with their no tolerance policies with RMT so I would say sit tight and wait for them to smoke them out and ban them from our community. There is no 100% effective way of locating and removing all RMTs from a game but SE in the past has done pretty well with making it less worth while for them to plague their communities. However there is a sure fire way to make it not worth their time bothering us, and that is to never buy in game currency with real money, we only have ourselves to blame and SE is trying to make our in game experience better in spite of that, so give them a break and do what you can to help them help us.

[Mixxy]

I wouldn't say they're 'losing' the war. They just started taking action very recently. Things won't be perfect overnight. But they are getting better already.

[Hulan]

Good or bad, this is just the way the STF works. They focus on the product rather than the client or the suppliers. From the STF's perspective, the 367,700 million gil taken out of circulation was much more important than the 6,154 accounts banned for solicitation. If they make it so that gil is prohibitively hazardous to sell, the prices will rise to the point that no one will buy gil, eliminating the clientele. Once that happens, prices will have to rise more to make up for the lack of demand, further driving gil buying into a niche.

On the other hand, with botting, they seem to prefer a silent tug of war between their programmers and bot programmers. This is a fairly classical approach in computer security. Bot creators are just as clever as the original programmers, and they have the advantage of numbers. There is no such thing as an air tight solution (at least until black-box encryption hits its stride), every program has predictable memory behaviors, and those behaviors can be exploited.

Let's look at the solution proposed for teleport bots. This solution says that there is some distance over time ratio that is deemed unacceptable by the server and slaps the user with a ban. Such a solution would have to take into account lag, so the ratio would have to be fitted with enough slack to give some wiggle room for users with a slow connection. Lag spikes can still go anywhere between 0.3 to 3 seconds, depending on the user's connection (some may go even higher, but I'll limit this to users with at least urban level Cable connections). From the server's perspective, the aforementioned user suddenly jumped from point x to a point 3.0(v) + x away, where v is the average running velocity of a player. Here's the kicker though, it did it in a single packet exchange. That means any teleportation banning program would have to allow for sudden jumps of space 3 seconds of regular movement apart. If you extrapolate that concept, teleportation bots could easily determine the period of detection (probably 0.3 seconds, since that is how often movement is measured), and limit itself to the tolerance of the teleportation banning program. That would still allow 9 seconds of travel in 1 second of time.

[Jahaudant]

The constant and un-winnable battle with RMT is present in every single MMO period. It's impossible to fully eradicate the problem and unfair on Square to expect a bot or RMT free online game.

[Airget]

If they aren't banned yet they are most likely trapping them to find out how far the chain of command goes since in the end they can easily remove the gil as needed.

It's like an undercover agent working for drug peddlers, their target isn't to get the people they are working for but to stay on the scene long enough to find out the mastermind behind it all, sadly in those cases it can take years just to reach that point but the point is not to find the pawns doing the work but to find the queen bee and take them down.

[Jynx]

Funny you mention that, because I heard XI never got it resolved?

No MMO has ever "Resolved" RMT activities just like no police station has ever "Solved" crime.

[Mixxy]

The constant and un-winnable battle with RMT is present in every single MMO period. It's impossible to fully eradicate the problem and unfair on Square to expect a bot or RMT free online game.

This is very true. I've never seen an MMO that didn't have at least a handful of gold sellers. Although, it is still possible to wipe out the vast majority of them, and I'm sure SE will. I remember back in the early days of WoW, I could expect to get at least one PM every 10 minutes from an RMT. By the time I stopped playing last year, such things were unheard of. You had to go to the most desolate, uninhabited areas of the game to even have a chance of finding a bot. But this was the result of years of diligent effort. We have to give these things time.

[Ryios]

Personally I think the main problem is people getting their accounts hacked. And 90% of the time that's because players are reusing their SE username/password someplace that's been compromised. SE should force every player to use a Security Token, including mailing one with the boxed copy of the game. If they resolve that I think the problem will die down a bit when subscriptions kick in.

RMT have to level to 20 and do the main story line to be able to sell anything on the AH (which includes running 3 dungeons and a lot of running around). The only way around that is with their hacked accounts.

I think SE should prevent anyone without a GC from trading gil or even using the auction house. Getting to 20 isn't difficult, and you don't need the auction house till level 20. Dye is sold in vendors and there is nothing on the AH you absolutely have to have prior to level 20. All the gear you need till 20 is sold in vendors or given from quests. And the 15-20 dungeons drop gear.

I think doing that, with subscriptions active, will make RMT such a pita they won't be as thick.

[Vagrant-0]

RMT have to level to 20 and do the main story line to be able to sell anything on the AH (which includes running 3 dungeons and a lot of running around). The only way around that is with their hacked accounts.

Sorry to burst your bubble... But this isn't the case. I've already seen a few groups of characters with randomized names following around a single controlled character who was doing all the quests and killing in Thanaland. This would let 4 characters be brought clear to level 20 just by raising one. After that, most of the instance fights can be scripted very easily. As these users are not operating alone, they can rather easily just churn out many instances of the same class to level 20 and have it taken over by a scripted server that handles the rest.

Those level 30+ characters botting fleece on the legacy servers didn't need to be hacked... They have a script to get them there.

Quite frankly, the fact that these characters persist on a legacy server, day in, day out only proves the point that SE has no real capacity or interest in fixing this problem. Atleast on NA servers.

[LunarEmerald]

Square should hire people to monitor the main cities on every server and instantly ban anyone that spams RMT.

Another thing. Put a limit on how many shout/yell messages you can send per 30 secs. That would help with them completely taking over the chat log.