New Goldseller spam, Square please fix

[Remina_Garamonde]

I just had to deal with this now too.
+1 to the idea of having "Add to Blacklist" bypass the friend request and blocking the gil seller.

For the "Report" Function:
It could be set up that if "X" amount of players report someone, that account is looked into.

[Aylis]

Unfortunatly RMT will always thrive in games like XIV because of no alternative solutions. They can ban and ban and ban true, but in this day in age the only way to beat the RMT is to beat them at their own game. Several companies have adopted business models where, okay in essence you're buying currency directly from the game's company to put it bluntly.

Guild Wars 2 did this with the GEMS system. A player will walk into Walmart or any other place. Plop down $25 for a GEMS card, go home and apply it to their account. Said player can spend the gems on the cash shop OR opt to convert the GEMS to in game currency. Arena Net employs a real world economist to control the gold exchange for GEMS depending on how much gold is in the economy. Some days the exchange is higher, other days are lower. RMT can't act fast enough to adjust prices. RMT can't make a profit because its cheaper to buy from Arena Net and no risk what-so-ever because its buying from the game developers company. RMT leave the world.

Wildstar does something similar with its C.R.E.D.D system. A player goes to Carbines website and plops down $22 to buy a C.R.E.D.D (one month paid subscription item) said player logs in the game and sells it on the market place. Due to limitations by Carbine where C.R.E.D.D can be purchased every 22 hours. The players themselves control the costs. Some weeks the price is lower because the economy has too much of it. Some weeks its higher because the economy has too little of it. Same as Guild Wars 2. RMT can't adjust prices fast enough to make a profit, zero risk because players are buying from the company. Player A can buy whatever goodies they want from the game, Player B gets a free month subscription off someone else's dime, Carbine makes more money, RMT can't make a profit and leave. A win for honest players and the game and the company.

I've played both games since launch and granted the first month was RMT spam everywhere. Now? I can't remember the last time I got a RMT mail, whisper or shout in either game. Since I probably already know people are going to scream "Pay to Win" at this model, Pay To Win is something completely different then this :P

[Niwashi]

I agree. There's no reason a Friend Invite that we haven't accepted should block us from being able to Blacklist someone. SE should fix this so it doesn't get exploited any more.

There was one point of the OP I did find a little odd, though. It was this bit:

I had to go into my Friend's List, decline the friend request, and ...

Why would you take the extra step of opening your Friend's List? If they've sent a Friend Invite, it should be right there on your screen already. You can decline it from there quicker than opening your Friend's List and finding them just to do the same thing.

[Niwashi]

Why would you take the extra step of opening your Friend's List? If they've sent a Friend Invite, it should be right there on your screen already. You can decline it from there quicker than opening your Friend's List and finding them just to do the same thing.

Ok, found the answer to this part. Apparently, declining a Friend invite from the friend invite itself doesn't work. It still remains in that pending state of awaiting approval even after you've declined it. That part is clearly a bug, and SE needs to fix it. (That's in addition to needing to fix the rule that currently blocks blacklisting when there's a pending friend invite.)

Oh, and yes, I found this out when a gilseller did the same to me.
They send both a tell and a friend invite, and in the time it takes you to decline the invite they have a chance to disconnect, so you can't blacklist them.

[Pantz]

Maybe they can add an option to deny all friend requests? That way, if we check it, it will block the gil sellers. And if we do want to add someone, we can talk to them first and then enable friend request for that instance. Kind of troublesome but it's better than nothing I guess.

[Pyreflye]

It could be set up that if "X" amount of players report someone, that account is looked into.

As much as I'd like to see an easy way to report gil spammers, this sort of thing is almost always universally abused.

[Surian]

Looking at this thread i'm so happy my server is currently closed off to new accounts.

As much of a pain as this is, doesnt this also mean that they can only message a maximum of 200 people thanks to the friendlist cap?

[TravelerX1]

I got three of these yesterday, it's just going to get worse.

Hell it takes them a month to kill an obvious bot (who then starts a new account and starts right back in.....
Nothing will be done about this new tactic.

[WellFooled]

When I played WoW a gil selling website used some sort of third party hack to teleport dozens of their characters in the sky, which dropped them to their death. They used the corpses to spell our their URL. I am 100% for any countermeasures SE can implement, but somehow I know gil sellers will always find some way around it

[kidvideo]

Same! I don't understand the logic behind this new tactic. Why would they want to make themselves more annoying? That's the opposite of good salesmanship.