How to eliminate Real money gil sale spammers

[C-croft]

I don't think many of you realize, they aren't creating new accounts as much as before. When the game first went live, you would be able to watch literally hundreds of bots being created and appearing in each of the starter cities. Once they were created, they would immediately log off. The bots are already in the game. They are sleeper agents waiting until it is their turn to be reactivated. Pretty sad really.

[abzoluut]

As much I like FFXIV and as much I like they way they handle most things, SE really needs to up their game on two points: transparency and instant action.

I won't discuss the 1st point I've made since it is not relevant for this thread. However, the instant action part, like people already mentioned: it's not hard at all to take action against these website/gilselling spammers. We don't want an auto-account ban, but a simple "you can no longer /tell or /shout for X minutes construction" would work just fine. Also, why can't we have some hard evidence people got banned other than "3 ziljon gil was taken out of the servers". 1 we don't buy that, 2 they can't prove it.

Leaves me to one reason only: they don't care that much.

[LineageRazor]

All SE needs to do is look in the player finder on a daily basis, see the line up of fftgg ddtttfff, hjggt jhhhggtt, aasst yytttrrrr named level 50 players and start the ban hammer accordingly. There is no mistaking those guys as gil farmers.....
Is that too much to ask?

Actually, yeah, that's asking for a whole lot. You're talking about thousands of bots across all servers, with an equal number being created (or activated) every day to replace those lost on the previous day. You're asking for people that are "obvious gil farmers" to be eliminated, but that means that a real, human eye is required to look at each one and judge whether a given account is a farmer or not. There's no reliable tool available to handle this automatically (and boy do people throw a fit if their account gets banned in error by an unreliable tool!), whereas tools to create, automate, and replace gil farmers are a dime a dozen.

[fixitman]

I used to send in a detailed report for every RMT I saw, which was 2-3 per hour on average. I finally got fed up with wasting my game time on these people, and changed strategies. I now have two macros on one of my action bars. One turns on busy mode, and the other turns it off. In busy mode. It stops the RMTs from interrupting my gameplay, at the expense of also blocking legitimate tells.

I would like to see a "Filter tells by level" option in the character configuration, with a slider for the minimum level that can send me tells. If we had this, each player could decide for themselves how to handle these interruptions. I would probably set mine to level 10, since most RMT will likely be below this range. The few that really worked hard enough to get through would get a well-deserved report

(The following is part of a post on the next page of this thread)

It's not about eliminating RMT.

It's about eliminating the spam that they do to players who have no interest in purchasing gil and constantly have their gameplay interrupted by bots spamming them with PMs.

So yes my proposal would be effective at getting rid of the spam. <snip>..

My proposal would also be effective, and give each player the capability to handle tells on their own terms. It may or may not affect the RMTs, but it will certainly help the players

[Valarian]

A possible solution would be to instead of targeting the seller, target the receiver. Have a script in the background that scans a player wealth and compares it to the last scanned value and it there is a large change (in the millions) then a sub routine is invoked to check for market board sales. I the players retainers have no market sales to compare to the "sudden" wealth then the system locks the account pending SE review and or the player explain how they "magically" have such wealth.

This would have locked the account of one of my FC members when I gave them 16 million gil to make our land purchase. I'm all for stopping RMTs, but I wouldn't want the RMT countermeasures to have prevented me from letting my FC member realize her mini-dream of holding a lot of money at once. That experience was a lot of fun for her. She felt empowered and important. Trusted and valuable. Making her feel wanted is worth having to deal with the RMTs, for me.

[Zplinter]

This would have locked the account of one of my FC members when I gave them 16 million gil to make our land purchase. I'm all for stopping RMTs, but I wouldn't want the RMT countermeasures to have prevented me from letting my FC member realize her mini-dream of holding a lot of money at once. That experience was a lot of fun for her. She felt empowered and important. Trusted and valuable. Making her feel wanted is worth having to deal with the RMTs, for me.

a. So you are advocating staying with current system, because of one action?
b. As I stated SE would locks pending an SE review. in your singular snowflake case SE would see that I. you are both in the same FC, II. YOUR account had not distro'ed gil to non-FC players, III. It was a one time transaction in BOTH cases.

So even if there was a hold, frankly if the systems fixes a problem for everyone .01% of the player base I say it is a better system then we have right now.

[Valarian]

I am expressing that the system you propose has potential flaws that must be considered before implementation. Locking accounts on an automatic basis, then waiting for SE support to check sounds like a recipe for a minority of players to have their accounts suspended and be left in limbo for a significant period of time. The number of accounts being locked and which would require review is staggering, and just because it takes only a few moments to review the account doesn't mean there won't be thousands of RMT accounts to review by an already overworked staff before hers. I'd deeply regret tarnishing her experience in Eorzea this way. I think that numeric justification of the elimination of evils through the sacrifice if a small number of innocents is on iffy ground. Certainly worthy of a philosophical discussion more than it is cut and dried or simple.

[zeth07]

I played a little bit of DFO and one thing it had was giving "Bad" titles to characters who were blocked by a large number of people. In DFO titles were visible but just in the way they work by having tiers based on # of people who blocked them could be useful. In DFO it would give a warning if you tried to trade with one of these people for example.

General ideas based on # of blocks:
50 blocks = Remove the ability to communicate/trade/party finder, report to GM to investigate character/account.
100 blocks = Suspension of the account until it is investigated further.

Anyone who has been blocked by 50 people can still play the game if they somehow got all those blocks by griefers, but it would eliminate the spammers messaging easily. Then the GM can look into it with whatever methods they use when people actually report them individually.

[Zplinter]

I am expressing that the system you propose has potential flaws that must be considered before implementation. Locking accounts on an automatic basis, then waiting for SE support to check sounds like a recipe for a minority of players to have their accounts suspended and be left in limbo for a significant period of time. The number of accounts being locked and which would require review is staggering, and just because it takes only a few moments to review the account doesn't mean there won't be thousands of RMT accounts to review by an already overworked staff before hers. I'd deeply regret tarnishing her experience in Eorzea this way. I think that numeric justification of the elimination of evils through the sacrifice if a small number of innocents is on iffy ground. Certainly worthy of a philosophical discussion more than it is cut and dried or simple.

I do not look at this from a philosophical point of view, I am sorry. I am looking at a mechanic that is flawed and affecting core game play from the prices of market board items to the prices required by SE to create gil sinks that push content out of reach of a larger minority then your positions minority. Consider that the price of the beastman mounts (another gil sink) is a direct result of the inflated ammount of gil in the game in large part from RMT.

From a mechanical point of view it takes less man hours to review petitions for unlock rather than the current system of hunting the RMT based on blacklists of a million (or more) subscribers, or looking at names and trying to figure out if it is real or RMT.

From a very personal point of view I do not care in fact that there is RMT going on. I have seen it other games and I adapt. But it is clear that a majority of the player base cares, and more importantly SE cares and sees RMT as an upsetting force in their game design. The OP proposed a solution that I do not agree with as it turns off communication for ALL new players. I look at this from a system administration point of view and how can SE automate the removal of something they consider disruptive. Your objection is a vanishing small percentage would have issues with my proposal, okay fair enough. What is your solution?

[DragonFlyy]

• Create bait character(s).
• Bait character(s) receive RMT tell.
• Ban RMT account.

It really are no hard for find and stop RMT that advertise through tells...

So a randomly stolen account is banned. They just grab the next one. Won't slow them down one bit. Doesn't even get the money they have out of circulation since the advertise on accounts that don't actually hold the Gil.