How to eliminate Real money gil sale spammers

[Mcshiggs]

how they don't do something like this with the current blacklist just baffles me. i looked at my blacklist a few days ago, and only ~4 or 5 of them had been deleted...

They don't do it because they don't have the time, they had a huge issue with RMTs in 1.0, and they knew they would with ARR, that is why we have things like not being able to mail things to your alt. They had to rush the game, they didn't have nearly everything they wanted to have finished by launch, so a lot of things got put in half done. Now instead of being able to work full time on things like moving forward, half their team is still trying to play catch up with what they didn't deliver to begin with.

[Remilia_Nightfall]

The only reasonable way to kill goldsellers is:

Legally sell GIL yourself.

People will most likely buy legal GIL at a higher price if that means no risk of getting banned.

Of course, this solution requires SE banhammer to work properly.

[Chihaya]

Whatever dude.

First off, "Westerners" isn't even a thing. There's like 100 countries on the West hemisphere of the planet, who speak different languages and have different customs.

Secondly, there's no need for PMs for most of the game, let alone below lv15. If you want to talk privately with someone you just met, add them to your friend list or form a party!

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_world how people usually accept as "westerner" and "easterner" though that doesn't really matter on my server we only got 2 type of people, 日本人JP　and 外人gaijin.

2) Keep your own play style to yourself. Some people actually try to make friends from low level and would actually want to know the person a bit more before adding them to flist.

By limiting PM is not going to do anything, you are just going to see shouts/say/yells in the starting cities/mor dhona/coerthas, anywhere where people are going to gather. Nor is botting to level15 or whatever is hard. There's already bots out there that runs FATES, you can even try to youtube some of these. SE is pretty notoriously bad at banning these bots, I don't see much teleport harvesting bots on my server anymore but spiritbinding bots is rampant. Got these people with 1 level 50 class - everything else 0 and no job, but class that just sits in the same spot killing things that is within their attack radius, never moves. Once in awhile goes back to town and literally spends over 5 minutes converting all the bound gear. Same bots been around for many months, nothing been done.

You're not going to get rid of RMT if there is demand for what they are selling. You can hinder them at the cost of possible collateral damage to the legit players, but they are not going to go away, they will find new ways to advertise.

However, if there is no demand, you aren't going to have much RMTs. Here on Mandragora, my blist is empty and I haven't received any RMT tells in at least a month, they don't have much business here and leave.

As for people saying to legalize gil selling... gil is already relatively worthless on XIV, selling it would just make it worse. For now, the only thing that you actually need a lot of gil are the FC housing... might as well sell the house? While we're at it, going down a slippery slope, let's sell tomestones? Make this into a pay to win game (with subscription since Yoshida says it's never going to be f2p)

[therpgfanatic]

Exactly why your idea of 'just form a party!' fails on that account? o.O Are you for or against, I don't know anymore. Maybe you should take your own advice and reread.

Actually I don't need to re-read anything. I'm not the one arguing it would inconvenience new players; I'm very sure my suggestions would have little to no impact on legit players, but do a lot to diminish the bot spamming everyone is subjected to.

You're the one that has to prove it would somehow hurt the pre-lv 15 gameplay experience, not me.

2) Keep your own play style to yourself. Some people actually try to make friends from low level and would actually want to know the person a bit more before adding them to flist.

First off, don't quote Wikipedia in a debate, it's not a reliable source. "Westerners" is nothing but a derogatory term used by people ignorant about geography and other cultures.

Secondly, my suggestion doesn't have any impact on people able to use the local chat to talk to someone in their immediate area. It doesn't stop them from using party chat either.

There is absolutely, positively no legit reason for a pre level 15 character to need to send a PM to anyone not willing to first add them to a friend list.

None, zilch, notta.

The early quests tell the new player everything they need. There's nothing a pre-lv 15 character needs from another player, at all.

And you're not a new player, so this change would have no impact on you anyway. Maybe you're a gold farming spammer and that is the real reason you're so adamantly opposed?

There's already bots out there that runs FATES, you can even try to youtube some of these.

Unless you spend all day monitoring the bots, you have no idea how long the botted accounts last until they are banned.

From what I have seen in-game and read on various forums, a lot of these accounts are low lv and try to harvest low lv items to sell before the whole account is banned. Gil is so hard to make in this game that a lot of the RMT gil comes from people who got scammed in power leveling services. All their items get materia converted and the rest sold as vendor trash for whatever tiny bit of gil its worth.

In the quantities the RMT merchants sell gil for and the cheap, cheap price they do it as, hacking other legit players is the only efficient way to do it.

The point isn't to stop RMT sales. It's to dramatically reduce the constant spam legit players receive from lv1 bots trying to sell us gil we don't want, or offering to hack our accounts for $15. The only accounts they'd be able to efficiently use are the accounts they got by scamming power leveling services, but when they can't make an army of lv1 characters the number of people getting scammed will be reduced, too.

[DMooseJ]

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_world how people usually accept as "westerner" and "easterner" though that doesn't really matter on my server we only got 2 type of people, 日本人JP　and 外人gaijin.

Could you possibly keep your own personal bigotry and over-inflated nationalism off the boards? It's not alright when I've seen my fellow Americans do it and it's no less disgusting when people from other countries do it.

[Chihaya]

None, zilch, notta.

And this is exactly banning PM going to do to RMTs, you replied before I finish my edit to get past the character limit.
You can go ahead and call everyone in the thread that's against your "method" a RMT, but it just sounds like you're losing and resorting to name calling.

Could you possibly keep your own personal bigotry and over-inflated nationalism off the boards? It's not alright when I've seen my fellow Americans do it and it's no less disgusting when people from other countries do it.

Though I originally posted that more of a joke, especially the 2nd part of that, I guess it didn't come off as that.
I'm just stating that there are what people consider Western and Eastern cultures, not saying either are good or bad, but just different.

Though nothing could match this phrase

our xenophobic anti-Western buddy up there

[Shirai]

1. Characters on brand new accounts cannot send a PM or use Shout until level 15.

2. Exception: if another user has added that new account character to their friend list, the character can PM the character they are friends with.

Problem solved.

Aion tried this. They raised the lvl requirement twice. Guess what? didnt work.

^
This, a level requirement is not going to stop them from being able to send mass tells.
A regular player can get that level a couple of hours, it should be no problem to program a bot to do the same, faster.

At the same time, as others have said, this will disadvantage any new player in the game.
Not everyone that starts the game does so with already playing friends.

[Chihaya]

Ok... since when "Westerner" is a derogatory term...
I guess FOX, CNN, BBC and almost all major news network out there must be pro-Russia since they are calling all the European and US countries Western, the West, etc... in the Ukraine crisis right now.
It is not a derogatory term unless YOU make it out to be. To me and hopefully most people out there, calling or being called Western/Eastern does not devalue them in anyway.



Back on topic, I can't speak for everyone, but this is how I started out in ARR.
I deleted my 1.0 characters as I wanted a fresh start then I made multiple characters on different servers to chat with people that I know from before and also people that I might be interested in playing with and finally decide which server I wanted to play on.

On Typhon server, there was a Taiwan FreeCompany, I sent PMs to the leader so they can invite me into the FC so I can get to know them. It would be relatively difficult for a low level character to go across the world to hunt down someone just because I need to talk to them in say/shout/whatever. And I don't know... would you accept random friend invites? Never knowing the person before? What if they are RMT? Because that's how they used to send stuff, they ask to be added to flist in their shouts.

Another case on Mandragora server, some of my friends from FFXI is playing on the server and have already joined an FC. I chatted with the FC leader in tells for quite some time before deciding not to join their FC. He/She is out doing their own thing (running FATES, doing quests, who knows what) and I'm just sitting in town asking questions.

Majority of my AION friends on Behemoth, and my linkshells from FFXI is split between Balmung and Hyperion. My 1.0 server was Trabia which was also incorporated into Hyperion. I would log on and chat with them through PMs occasionally though much less and less after I decided which server to play on. I don't know if I would really call them friends, but rather acquaintances being in the same large legions/linkshells from previous games.

You are right as this does not impact me anymore as I am not new nor does it effect you. Who it effects are new players looking for a place where they want to play, and not everyone have friends playing this game already. They are the collateral damage by banning PM for characters under 15 just because you want an army of level 15 RMT bots spamming you instead of level 1 RMT bots.

[Themis]

1. Characters on brand new accounts cannot send a PM or use Shout until level 15.

2. Exception: if another user has added that new account character to their friend list, the character can PM the character they are friends with.

Problem solved.

Considering that I've seen RMTs levelling up on FATEs on Archer, all the way to lv50, I don't think any kind of level requirement will actually help out. It's not hard for a legit player to get to lv15, and it certainly isn't hard for RMT to do the same in order to use the chat commands.

These RMT are usually only trying to make a living. The only way to discourage them is to make it impossible to actually sell gold or accounts, or to provide any kind of service in exchange for some real money. I think the only way to really achieve this is to not have the game in the first place. Otherwise, where there is some potential (which in the use of bots, is always almost positive), it will be found and used.

[JemC]

Everyone is blacklisting gold spammers. Just ban and IP block anyone whose name appears more than 100 times in black list. Yes, some of them will find a way around it. But it would be the biggest detour yet and without touching the real players.