so much RMT!

[Rizon]

RMTs are a fact of life. Get used to it. Players have no one to blame but themselves. As long as there are buyers out there you will have RMT activity. SE will not ban most buyers as it would cut off a major revenue source. In most cases RMTs ply their trade in countries that turn a blind eye, if not actively support the sites for a kick back, to RMT activity. SE cannot attack them from that front. The only way to truly eliminate RMT activity is to eliminate the current economy and replace it with one strictly controlled by the DEVs. How far do you think that will fly?

[Lucke]

RMTs are a fact of life. Get used to it. Players have no one to blame but themselves. As long as there are buyers out there you will have RMT activity. SE will not ban most buyers as it would cut off a major revenue source. In most cases RMTs ply their trade in countries that turn a blind eye, if not actively support the sites for a kick back, to RMT activity. SE cannot attack them from that front. The only way to truly eliminate RMT activity is to eliminate the current economy and replace it with one strictly controlled by the DEVs. How far do you think that will fly?

But that shouldn't mean we players just bend over and bring lots of lube. This crap should NEVER be acceptable. We NEVER should say "Well, it's a fact of life, ehhhh". We fight them until the zombie apocalypse if we have to. SE may not do anything about it, or can't, whatever, but we players can then just not support SE for turning a blind eye.

[SCUBA_Instr]

RMTs are a fact of life. Get used to it.

To acquiesce, to the demands of RMT scumbags, equates to acceptance of a cockroach or rat infestation.

Abdication to RMT criminals (known for theft, cybercrime, money laundering, malware, and virus production) is the worst possible option. Getting used to RMT
harassment is unacceptable to reputable subscribers.

[SCUBA_Instr]

...SE will not ban most buyers as it would cut off a major revenue source. .....

According to postings on Reddit, ffxivrealm, and even from a bad-guy website,
If a buyer gets caught RMT, at first offense, the penality is lifetime ban
from all Square Enix products.

[Rizon]

According to postings on Reddit, ffxivrealm, and even from a bad-guy website,
If a buyer gets caught RMT, at first offense, the penality is lifetime ban
from all Square Enix products.

I have trouble believing that. Most likely they just confiscate the Gil. If SE banned as many people as they say they have server populations would be a lot smaller then they are. I am sure that they ban the sellers and spammers but with the free trials and the like it is not hard for the RMT to return

[cirby]

SE could make a start by stealth-banning some accounts and implementing filters on character names.

Leave the spammers' accounts intact - but hide all of their tells and other messages, so they they THINK they're spamming people, but the messages go into the bit-bucket... and they'd still be paying for their bogus account. Auto-filtering for retainers should be easy enough to set up, too - the spammer would still see all auctions, but nobody else would.

The second move would be to auto-flag any characters created with certain strings - like "Asdf*" as the first name wildcard. Any character created with that name would show up in a list to the sysops, with an option for the above stealth-ban.

[Aerowaffle]

I have trouble believing that. Most likely they just confiscate the Gil. If SE banned as many people as they say they have server populations would be a lot smaller then they are. I am sure that they ban the sellers and spammers but with the free trials and the like it is not hard for the RMT to return

It's hard to notice when a RMT spammer gets banned because they were never part of the operating playerbase in the first place. They were level 1 somewhere spamming tells and friend invites.

And Free trial accounts can't send tells.

[Violyre]

I looked at a couple sites for the lulz (on my tablet, of course! I trust them about as far as I can ban them, not at all.). There's one thing that I found interesting between some of them.

They seem to have a thing with the Ul'dah mail moogle. They said that they would meet face-to-face there, so I don't think it's a far stretch to assume that's where they mail it out at either.

Put some form of a tracker on that mail moogle, as well as the ones in the other cities in case they catch on (yeah, they might actually move into the wilderness, but we're talking baby steps here). If it's noticed a level 1 character is sending out a lot of gil, you should be able to track both a buyer and a seller.