Gold Sellers

[Billie21]

I've reported every single person I saw boting/RMT advertising for the first month of the game. My BL reached about 150 names, then it got old.

Now I just BL and have stopped reporting. Even if some of those I've reported were actually banned, more keep comming, it never ends, it feels useless. It's been about 3 weeks now, and I've just added a 90th name to my BL since then. If I hadn't rerolled, my BL would actually be more than full by now. That's scary.

SE banned a few thousand accounts? Great, they only need to pay one guy to stand in Ul'dah's Quicksand for one week, normal working hours, and I'm sure they'll get as much done effortlessly. I mean, I stood there for 10 minutes, saw a good 30 cheaters, more even, since I couldn't report them all, didn't have the time to copy/paste them all, fast as they were to teleport.

I'm really worried about the future of the game's economy if they can't find a way to get the boting under control. A good deal of which is due to RMT. That concerns me far more than the flooding of /sh and /y channels in the Cities.

[Rosy]

You should still report them. SE is slow to respond with things like this but they do ban people for the teleporting to nodes/targets thing. Some times it can take them a couple weeks. Yes it sucks that they don't respond faster, but you should still report each one you see.

Getting the name of the botters is a chore in itself, as they are porting from node to node underground, so most of the time you can't a) target them or b) see the whole of their name, so whilst you spend 5 minutes chasing round trying to get their name and another two using the cumbersome reporting method, you could have actually been playing the game! Make it easier to report please!

[mercenarykage]

On brnhyldir the gilsellers have taken up a lost of names to spam sales in /tell. Can report them a million times, can blacklist all of them. I still receive 2 - 5 of these /tell an hour. It's making the game very difficult to play. I requested a name change to try to get around this list, I don't even care if it's a paid service. All I get in response from Square Enix is "We don't offer that service. Post on forums." So here. I'm posting on forums.

[T2teddy]

I've got nearly a full Blist and only TWO have been deleted since launch day for crying out loud...
SE only needs to let us RIGHT click the name in chat and then pick 'Report RMT and Add to blacklist'. All this nonsense about copy/pasting the darned names to an entirely new window, and then sending in a ticket is ridiculous.

I bet WE [who are complaining here] would get banned in the space of a few hours if we all posted out full black lists right here in the forum! But SE can't be bothered with the SIMPLE solutions WE have told them about.

Why should we, the paying customers, have to put up with this STILL after nearly 2 months?

Heck I offer my services to be your chat mod on Sargatanas!

[Zebyxus]

There's a quick solution, but it's a case of harming all to punish the few: Ban gil trading (save for repair costs/meld costs), place an upper limit on how much can be set for items on the Market Boards, and set limits to how much can be removed from FC coffers.

I realise that this is perhaps one of the most extreme solutions, but really, everything else hasn't even slowed down these companies who advertise gil/power levelling long enough to be noticeable. Yes I know it will most likely never happen but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would see that as perhaps one of few ways to give gil spammers pause, if not stop them outright.

[DragonHunterG]

unfortunately i have given up on even reporting them anymore. it breaks the atmosphere of the game though and seeing advertising like that makes a bad experience.

i get tells all the time. blacklist one, and another one takes their place within an hour.

[Berani]

The can't use shouts or yells doesn't need to be set that way. Otherwise newbies won't be able to use it either. The cooldown, yes that will work, but so would a rate limiter (>90wpm) The shouts/yells ability needs to be triggered by something with more substance, a level cap is meaningless to a bot who will just grind past it anyway and it does nothing for hacked accounts.

The developers need to throw a language-strip regex into the input buffers. If the game client is in english, and set to english, strip all non-english characters except for the emoji used by Japanese users. Half the stuff I report either has greek or other accented characters that aren't used in French or German, and mostly consist of fullwidth (japanese) roman characters interspersed with halfwidth/normal sized ones. But this is just a monkey wrench where we need a bulldozer. Throw error 90000 at game clients that are exceeding 90wpm, and be done with it. Also use a buffer dupe check by checking for the string to be at least 60% different from the last 5 things said. This would be far more efficient (throttle+duplicate word test) than simply trying to block 90000 variations of O's

As for killing their business. Just prevent one-sided/uneven trades and limit Gil transfers to 10000gil/day per level acquired. It's not that hard to 95% percentile check the current market to see if someone is making uneven trades.

I agree that limiting shout is a problem due to low level players not being able to use the channel, thus depriving them of assistance.

I disagree with your remarks regarding languages. My close friend in Canada has an English-language client and a keyboard that has French-language specific characters and accents on it. Occasionally, he accidentally hits one of those characters while typing. Under your proposal, he'd have issues and potentially be auto-reported (because in my extensive gaming history, I have never seen a publisher err on the side of caution in implementing bans or other restrictions--and in FF:ARR, they most certainly have not erred on the side of caution, banning accounts of active players for as long as three calendar weeks when players have reported on their own to customer service that they have been compromised, putting the burden of proof on the player rather than taking the simple action of checking the logs for the IP discrepancies--what IP is the account normally logged into from, what IP was the ticket filed from, and what IP(s) has it been logged into from and can the customer provide the IPs they know they have logged in from--and restoring the account after receiving that simple flippin' information along with the license key from the customer). The dupe check could be abused because, due to the spammers, we often have to repeat tells to folks--frequently more than once.

Preventing one-sided trades is not really an option. If I want to give gear or gil to my friend just starting to play to help them out, that's my business. If I want to loan a guildmate 20k to 50k gil for a few days, that is also my business. It doesn't make me a gil seller or spammer and to insinuate it does is outrageous.

GMs do exist in game. I have actually spoken to one after filing a ticket. They are not a myth! (I know, I'm as shocked as everyone else!) The most obvious solution is to do what has already been suggested: rotate shifts of say, one hour (so they don't go crazy with boredom), stand around in the location of their choice--fishing, mining, logging...doesn't matter what they do or look like they're doing--the gil spammers and sellers will come to them. But I recommend chilling in Hammerlea. You'll see a whole lot of teleporters and bots using third party hacks and exploits there.

[VeersMorgan]

It would seem you could effectively crowd source the banning of bots. The idea is that some players aggressively blacklist only bots. If you can identify those blacklists, you could leverage them to ban bots from chat with a very low false positive rate. Basically look at player blacklists. Correlate those with known bots. Separate out the blacklists low false positive and high bot correlation, weight them accordingly then use the resultant number as a basis for an initial ban.

[Akio77]

The current way of reporting Gil sellers is too cumbersome in my opinion. Square Enix should make it easier. Like when you get a /tell from a gil seller, put an option to right click on its name and have an option to "REPORT AS RMT or SPAM". Once that option is clicked, let the system do an internal snapshot of the last /tell you have gotten from the RMT as evidence, then BAN the account right there. Also, let the system add that player on our Blacklist automatically, when that option is selected.

[gtasthehunter]

You can Black list a gold seller real quick by typing /blist add <R> this will add the last person that sent a message. Hope this helps.

i got a macro with /blist add <r> make it really fast... doesn't help with shouts for that need to copy name off screen or click tell to get name then add /blist add "name"