RMT: Time to start banning IP addresses

[Shirai]

I'm hardly a skilled "hacker" yet I program for a living and I make over 60k a year for an extremely secure job with fantastic benefits. Oh, and it's all legal and I don't have to worry about police knocking on my door at any moment. If these people had any real skills they wouldn't need to spend their time creating bots that spam whispers to everyone for a RMT site. They would get a legitimate job making legitimate money. I hardly expect anything they are doing is extremely complicated.

Flaunting around with your sallary sais nothing, while you sit safely and comfortably in your desk chair with your education and carreer oportunities the people resorting to RMT usually have nothing of that.
Most of them don't live in countries with those oportunities.

By the way, I make about the same as you doing retail automation. /notimpressed

[Geryth]

Flaunting around with your sallary sais nothing, while you sit safely and comfortably in your desk chair with your education and carreer oportunities the people resorting to RMT usually have nothing of that.
Most of them don't live in countries with those oportunities.

By the way, I make about the same as you doing retail automation. /notimpressed

I made my education and career opportunities happen. I didn't get a dime from anyone for my education. I worked two jobs for 60 hour work weeks AND going to school full time, living on 5 hours of sleep a night if I was lucky. And because of terrible college choices, I basically had to start over as a freshman after I was already a junior, and I have nothing but an Associates Degree to my name after over 120 credit hours. I worked my way up from dirt nothing and gained myself a career in the midst of a terrible economic recession where every employer wanted a bachelors degree and 10 years experience.

You can point your finger at economic "privilege" all you want, I worked damn too hard for what I have to be phased by your /notimpressed.

And if these people you're talking about had half that work ethic, they could have the same.

[Tupsi]

They would have to ban the source of IPs, much like SE swept banned Korea to get rid of a majaority of the RMT and DDoSers in XI which sadly affected legit users who played from there. (Huh Korea? Exactly, RMT is actually Korean/Japanese and American largely.)

So banning IPs does nothing - They'd have to regionally ban which could be bad.

[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.

[Delsus]

Well seeing as RMT is a huge plague on MMOs in general, they will be making a fortune, I wouldn't be surprised if the bigger companies actually have IP ranges leased and their own DHCP server (jut get a Linux install on a PC and download the DHCP package to avoid excess costs, low power but you don't need much) and they can then get around any IP bans, if they don't do this they would just use a VPN or proxy, anyone can get round IP bans.

Personally for the OP I would have mentioned MAC banning first, but anyone can still spoof a MAC address and get around that as well.

Also Geryth, your holier than thou speech is very inappropriate, try going to China, Korea etc, the places where the most RMT are and bascally say "Get a job", there would be a lot of people really offended by your attitude, the fact is you got lucky if everything you have said is true (going by my personal experiences looking for work) I remember 2 years looking for work, 2 years of "well your skills are better than what we would expect, and yes you would fit the role perfectly, however one other candidate had more experience" tells me you got lucky.

[Tiggy]

If players would just stop buying then the RMT's would have no market. The south park episode where they wanted to kill the Wal-mart comes to mind. When they found the heart of the Wal-mart it was just a mirror for them to see themselves in.

[Clavaat]

All of this

Please show some class. Lots of us have done the same thing, but many are not so lucky, regardless of how much "hard work" they put in. That's just a fact. You're being inconsiderate to not only other players, but people in general. And frankly, none of what you have said in this thread has anything to do with this topic.

OP, I'm sorry, but that solution would not be viable in any way, and would end up hurting more customers than it helps. There is no "solution". This has been a problem for years in many MMO's and they all have the same general ways of handling it. There will never be a way to stop it. I would love to see a documentary on the daily life of an RMT company employee. Seriously, it could educate people on tactics they use, and in general what their daily lives are like.

[Thorauku]

(Huh Korea? Exactly, RMT is actually Korean/Japanese and American largely.)

Add Filipino players. *Cough* Tonberry *Cough*

[Naberrie]

RMT would just adapt. It's what they do. They'd find ways around the IP ban. Meanwhile, the innocent affected by the IP ban would be the ones truly affected. You'd only slow RMT down for, at best, a day. Probably not even that.