How to eliminate Real money gil sale spammers

[Naberrie]

The only way to ever truly end RMT is for people to stop buying gil. Unfortunately, IMO SE is going about stopping RMT exactly the wrong way. They're trying to make it so hard to get gil (making crafting worthless, low resell to vendors, low gil drops, teleport fees) that only RMT can succeed at making gil, as they're the only ones who have the time to devote themselves to making gil because they've literally nothing else to do. Meanwhile, people who are desperate for gil, whether to buy a house or get materia or level a craft, end up being the ones buying gil. They have, ironically, created a marketplace where RMT can thrive.

They're very efforts to stop RMT are enabling RMT, and they don't see it.

[LineageRazor]

Ban anyone that talks about sllling gil through /tell. Even if its some legit players trolling. ban them as well.

Easier said than done. You ever wonder why the tells often say "Visit {W}.br()s4le.c()m (replace {} with w's & () with o's and 4 with a)!!!" or some such similar nonsense? It's exactly to foil this kind of detection. There's simply no time for anyone to sort through every /tell in the game manually, and so SE uses searches to try to find evidence of gilsellers. The gilsellers know this, and so are constantly evolving new methods to avoid detection by these searches.

And that's for the gilsellers who even CARE about detection; plenty rely on brute-force spam, not caring how many accounts get deleted or ip's get blocked; they have the resources to keep up the pressure regardless.

All in all, though, the situation as it stands right now isn't that bad. I generally don't get more than one or two gilseller /tell's per day, and it takes only a second to highlight their name and block them. Blacklist fills up, just remove the first twenty or so, since those accounts are long-since banned or abandoned.

I do appreciate that SE has announced plans to add a "Blacklist and report" option to help differentiate gilseller blocks from annoying-people blocks. (Though, I'd imagine that many will use "Blacklist and report" for both types, in the hopes of getting an annoying person banned. )

[Cons]

They will sort it, just a matter of when and how

[Hanabira]

They will sort it, just a matter of when and how

no they wont, ffxi has been dealing with the exact same problem fo years. the best they came up with was a RMT filter feature, which was junk compared to the ffxi windower's version.

[Gilthas]

Real solution to eliminate RMT spam advertisements:

- Ban the gilbuyers.
- Be A LOT more pro-active in banning bots. SE only seems to ban the obvious bots that teleport between gathering nodes or mobs, they do nothing to the bots that follow game mechanics but are completely automated. On Phoenix there's two bots that have been farming wind shards/crystals for months in the Central Shroud and they've had a new friend in the last two months.

[Sunah]

People still don't understand that the reason these people are not getting banned is because they work for SE... Its the only way for them to add a "cash shop" without actually adding one. If they did add one people would whine and cry all day about "WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO PAY MONTHLY FOR BLAH BLAH".

[LunarEmerald]

How about an extra option in the settings menu?

Won't receive tells from people outside your zone unless they're on your friends list.

Checking this would cut down RMT tells almost entirely.


I really think this would be the best solution. Most RMTs idle in the starting areas. If you stayed away with this checked, it would cripple their business. There would be no way for them to get around it.

[Gilthas]

There would be no way for them to get around it.

Besides them walking their NPC to other areas? Not exactly hard to do.

[LunarEmerald]

Besides them walking their NPC to other areas? Not exactly hard to do.

Because the entire game population sits in one area. Most of the time you're playing, you'll be constantly moving around. You'd only risk RMTs if you stayed in one place that's heavily populated for a long period of time.

[Gilthas]

Because the entire game population sits in one area. Most of the time you're playing, you'll be constantly moving around.

That's irrelevant. They don't just have 1 character for spamming, they have several.