200/200 Blacklist - All Gil-Sellers

[Enkrateia]

Thank you for the response, kidvideo. Hopefully, I can provide some explanation that may help by discussing three countermeasures.

The blacklist is a character-focused resolution, preventing messages and other interactions from that character. Advertisements from another character would require an additional blacklist entry to prevent, and possibly additional reports to the Game Masters, so that we can investigate additional accounts that may be engaging in RMT solicitation.

Suspension, when issued by a Game Master, is an action against a single account. This should remove that account from continued RMT solicitation; however, if a single group is using multiple accounts for RMT solicitation, additional reports would help us find those accounts and issue actions against them for RMT solicitation. Game Master countermeasures against RMT solicitation accounts tend to be more noticeable, since they are reactive in nature. To specifically address your reply, a suspension prevents the account in question from continuing their solicitations, and is a sufficient method of doing so.

Finally, the Special Task Force and Account Admin review these account actions to determine if an account should be terminated and work towards preventing future RMT solicitation. These countermeasures do not tend to be noticed because they are proactive and preventative, mitigating future RMT issues. Relating this to your reply, we are constantly working on improving the speed of resolution and effectiveness of actions against RMT behaviour, so that the experience of our customers is as positive as possible.

There have been many strict or severe suggestions made to prevent all RMT solicitation in the game. These ideas, however, need to be implemented while balancing game mechanics with trying to eliminate this type of harassment, and requires constant work, since changing tactics and methods mean coming up with different countermeasures. These solicitation concerns comprise a lot of the tickets we get from customers, and we treat them seriously since they are the most common concern reported to us.

I hope this provides a bit more insight for you.

Lead Game Master Enkrateia

[Jonjon]

snip

Hats off to you for responding back so quickly.

However I think the primary concern is the inefficiency of clearing the black list as well as not knowing which accounts are already disabled.

While the methods employed are most likely sufficient on your end, on the players end we are left with a guessing game on which are safe to remove.
After all is it much faster to add to the Black List rather than remove from it.

Perhaps modifying the window so that you can go into a "mass remove" mode would be beneficial. For example toggle a mode that would make check boxes appear next to the names so that you can click each one and remove a batch at a time. Or even a "clear" command so one can start fresh.

EDIT:

They can't manage everyone's individual blacklist for them. Think of it like the evil version of your friend list. It's up to you to manage it.

In general after a few days you're usually safe in deleting any name. I prune my list regularly. I've even written down names I'm deleting to see if they pop back up. They don't. Just go through your list and delete the names at the top. Worst case, all that can happen is you have to add a name back on to the list again.

I am not sure where I asked them to manage them for the players. I suggested ways to make it easier for the players to manage them for themselves, which is not an unreasonable request I would think.

On another note. I always wondered how EQ2 went about it. When I first started playing in 07-08, I got RMT spam often. However at some point they implemented a spam filter. Anything caught by that ended up marked as spam and displayed as such with the option to view it. It had its own chat category as well. I simply unticked the box to not show that type of message and never saw one again in 5 years.
There is a commonality in all RMT spam. While such a filter would no doubt be complex it certainly was and is doable.

[Naberrie]

However I think the primary concern is the inefficiency of clearing the black list as well as not knowing which accounts are already disabled.

They can't manage everyone's individual blacklist for them. Think of it like the evil version of your friend list. It's up to you to manage it.

In general after a few days you're usually safe in deleting any name. I prune my list regularly. I've even written down names I'm deleting to see if they pop back up. They don't. Just go through your list and delete the names at the top. Worst case, all that can happen is you have to add a name back on to the list again.

[Xayoc]

Thank you for the response, kidvideo. Hopefully, I can provide some explanation that may help by discussing three countermeasures.

The blacklist is a character-focused resolution, preventing messages and other interactions from that character. Advertisements from another character would require an additional blacklist entry to prevent, and possibly additional reports to the Game Masters, so that we can investigate additional accounts that may be engaging in RMT solicitation.

Suspension, when issued by a Game Master, is an action against a single account. This should remove that account from continued RMT solicitation; however, if a single group is using multiple accounts for RMT solicitation, additional reports would help us find those accounts and issue actions against them for RMT solicitation. Game Master countermeasures against RMT solicitation accounts tend to be more noticeable, since they are reactive in nature. To specifically address your reply, a suspension prevents the account in question from continuing their solicitations, and is a sufficient method of doing so.

Finally, the Special Task Force and Account Admin review these account actions to determine if an account should be terminated and work towards preventing future RMT solicitation. These countermeasures do not tend to be noticed because they are proactive and preventative, mitigating future RMT issues. Relating this to your reply, we are constantly working on improving the speed of resolution and effectiveness of actions against RMT behaviour, so that the experience of our customers is as positive as possible.

There have been many strict or severe suggestions made to prevent all RMT solicitation in the game. These ideas, however, need to be implemented while balancing game mechanics with trying to eliminate this type of harassment, and requires constant work, since changing tactics and methods mean coming up with different countermeasures. These solicitation concerns comprise a lot of the tickets we get from customers, and we treat them seriously since they are the most common concern reported to us.

I hope this provides a bit more insight for you.

Lead Game Master Enkrateia

tl;dr RMT are like Drug Cartels and the STF is the Border Patrol. RMT find new clever ways of spamming, and the STF finds new ways of banning in a never-ending cat and mouse game.

[Taruranto]

You can probably delete everything but like the last 10 names and still never get a tell from the previous 190.

Yeah, pretty much.

Honestly, I hardly BL RTM, most of the time it's not worth.

[Tagihi]

igot 20 on my list most already reported end of the weak usely i delete them beacuse they are 90% already suspended.

[Gazille]

I never get whispers from gold sellers.

[Shneibel]

I have only 2 in blacklist and those are 2 player. Otherwise I blacklist and remove RMT everyday

[Seirra_Lanzce]

I never get whispers from gold sellers.

majority of the JP Worlds never get RMT whisper, occasionally shout is stil happening but very rare sights.

kudos for those who never buy it on JP server. because RMT is dead in JP.

[Shirai]

kudos for those who never buy it on JP server. because RMT is dead in JP.

The Japanese RMT just as much as us westerners but they use different companies.
Companies that don't do ingame advertising, if you are in Japan and visit a FF community site not hosted by SE that allows advertising however you will be swarmed by banners of Japanese RMT sites.