RMT: Time to start banning IP addresses

[IzumiRaito]

Fight fire with fire (use illegal methods, while backing them up in ToS)! Problem solved.

[Sheer]

Fight fire with fire (use illegal methods, while backing them up in ToS)! Problem solved.

Egging on the types of people who make their living off of such sleazy and leech-like methods by purposely trying to tick them off via illegal methods is like asking to go through the rest of your life with a headache.

Banning IPs is impractical; all it does is start to overflow onto innocent players who don't know how to fix the problem, and even then, they shouldn't have to worry about it. "Elminating" RMT is far from practical simply because the people who do it will not give up. They're persistent. In the meantime, the best that can be done is banning accounts convicted of RMT while anti-RMT measures are implemented and for us (the players) to take proper measures to avoid engaging with RMT.

[Shirai]

"Elminating" RMT is far from practical simply because the people who do it will not give up.

^
This, absolutely.

No matter what you try, they will find ways to go around it.
As I said earlier in the thread, these people don't RMT for an extra pile of money, it is their income, their daily bread and rice and they will stop at nothing to keep their business up and running.

The most effective way to handle them is to keep banning them, their banks, their farmers and the buyers they can connect to them.

[Niqote]

No matter what you try, they will find ways to go around it.

*nods*

I suspect there is more RMT on NA servers as they seem to be the biggest customers, so logically the RMT would target the servers with the biggest turnover.
(People saying they are 200/200 on blacklists are all from NA servers it seems)

No profit, no business... please don't buy services from RMTs ... if they have no customers they will leave right? ^^;;;;;

[Sheer]

No profit, no business... please don't buy services from RMTs ... if they have no customers they will leave right? ^^;;;;;

It will help, but for John Doe who lives in Imaginary Land, to simply update a script that creates bots and launches tens if not hundreds of them into the game, it's not a problem. Developers can only have so much hindsight as to what bots will do and how they will perform. Past that, it's all a game of tug-of-war. Each time one side pulls, the other has to pull back, and it's unfortunately the case that developers tend to fall on the reactive side - this isn't their own fault, it's just that there's so many different ways to execute a script/program and mask it that it's nigh on impossible for them to fully prepare for whatever bot programs are thrown at them.

Of course, if every single legitimate account didn't get involved in RMT, then of course the numbers would decrease. But let's put this in perspective as to how fragile the balance is: Yoshi-P recently talked about how there's 500,000 daily active users each day. If eight of those 500,000 buys $20 worth of gil from a particular bot vendor, then the the person behind the bots has had a pretty good work day. So imagine getting "To Crush Your Enemies VI" on ten different accounts in a single day, and then imagine just eight of those MoBs. That's how many it takes to tip the balance in favor of the bots. Not to mention - I doubt they're doing this just for ARR, so it doesn't even have to be just eight people. If they have bots on two games then it takes just four people. Or if they're on four games, then just two people.

It's a difficult issue where, if every single person who plays the game was actually innocent, it would be much less of a problem if one at all. But unfortunately, it's not the case.