Why is FF XIV so gold seller friendly???

[Slatervonjager]

If you think these companies aren't getting a cut of the gold spammer pie you're insane.

The fact that you think Square is getting a cut from them is insane.

Square bans THOUSANDS of accounts that are owned by RMTs every week. Hell, the first 3 days of the game saw about 8000 accounts belonging to RMTs banned. Square has an entire department of employee's whose sole job is to investigate RMTs, and ban them. In fact, square devotes more energy to removing them, then any other MMO. Is it square's fault that banning accounts and blocking IPs doesn't stop it all from happening?

As long as idiots keep using RMTs, and no one takes legal action against them, then they'll always be there.

Thirdly, if you use a ps3, which I do, typing is a nightmare.

No, no it's not. It's called spend the 15 bucks at for a cheap USB keyboard. Problem solved. And Typing without a keyboard isn't that hard either. You're probably someone that probably looks at text messaging on phones that don't have a full keypad as barbaric.

If you're not willing to make things easier for yourself when the options are available, then you've no right to complain.

[Niwashi]

Square bans THOUSANDS of accounts that are owned by RMTs every week. Hell, the first 3 days of the game saw about 8000 accounts belonging to RMTs banned. Square has an entire department of employee's whose sole job is to investigate RMTs, and ban them. In fact, square devotes more energy to removing them, then any other MMO.

They may devote a lot of energy to it, but that energy isn't as productive as it could be if they'd give themselves the proper tools. Besides simplicity for the players, the real benefit of having a "report this" option in the chat box's right-click menu is the way that can be tied to the chat itself. As it is, players have to go into the report form and describe what happened, after which someone at SE has to do a search in their log files to verify whether that's what actually happened. If the reporting was done based on a particular chat entry, the tool itself could supply SE with not only a report but that chat entry itself from which someone generated that report. At that point, all it would take is a glance to identify whether the report is a valid case of RMT spam. There would be far less effort needed in investigating it and these accounts could be blocked immediately.

Of course, by itself that doesn't take care of the actual RMT, just the spam advertising it, but that alone would be a huge benefit to the game (plus put a major dent in RMT's profitability). All they need to do is make sure an account that sends this spam doesn't last long enough to make back the cost of setting up the account. At that point, the advertising for RMT would move off the game onto third-party sites. (They'll still need other, more complicated tools to take care of the rest of the RMT itself.)

[Niwashi]

if you use a ps3, which I do, typing is a nightmare.

No, no it's not. It's called spend the 15 bucks at for a cheap USB keyboard. Problem solved. And Typing without a keyboard isn't that hard either.

In all fairness, it does make sense to play through the first part of the game before getting a keyboard, and the spammers don't leave new players alone any more than they do anyone else. I played with just the PS3 controller until I reached level 18 and was going to start running dungeons. In that solo-focused introductory part of the game, the only times I had to deal with the PS3's on-screen keyboard was to log in and to blacklist spammers (and for the latter it got rather annoying). By the time I reached group content, I'd had time to decide I liked the game enough I'd stick around a while, so that's when it became worth buying a keyboard for it.

[Ofiach]

@ Slatervonjager It's obvious you're very loyal to SE and they most definitely deserve loyalty from their gamers unlike EA or SOE. However, being a dick to people for complaining about a huge issue in game just pushes you right over into the fanboy column.

Now that that's out of the way. You made the assertion that SE expends more energy than any other MMO company in smashing gold spammers. Well, allow me to retort.

Why in this day and age when the technology is already pioneered would you not add the *right click "playername" -> report gold seller* feature? You say SE devotes more energy than any other MMO to removing these gold sellers, but they don't give us the tools as players to easily report them, do you see how that argument doesn't add up?

When I started 3 days ago there were 2 gold spammers, when I logged in today those same 2 gold spammers were in the same spot. If it takes 3+ days to ban hammer a bot your system is broken or you don't care, one or the other.