so much RMT!

[Elusana_Celah]

This is what I need to endure all day every day and it's pretty steady and consistent as you can see by the timestamps. However I can't keep busy up 24/7 because I'm trying to network and socialize to meet decent / friendly end gamers to run stuff together. Eventually it starts to affect my mood in negative ways and I start getting grouchy lol =/

I now have 184 gil seller bots on my blacklist and not ONE says (Deleted) so what the hell?

[Saseal]

This is what I need to endure all day every day and it's pretty steady and consistent as you can see by the timestamps. However I can't keep busy up 24/7 because I'm trying to network and socialize to meet decent / friendly end gamers to run stuff together. Eventually it starts to affect my mood in negative ways and I start getting grouchy lol =/

I now have 184 gil seller bots on my blacklist and not ONE says (Deleted) so what the hell?

This is exactly what my chat box looks like, too

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.

So you're saying whats going on in the above screenshot and experiences just like it is acceptable? That people logging in should just accept they will get that mass of pink bullhonkey plastered all over the chat 7+ times per 10 minutes is acceptable (note my FC mate's 10 minute log in experience)? It's really not. I and so many others are not to blame. SE can only lose players/revenue, regardless - newer players seeing this and getting turned off or long time players getting fed up as it gets worse... so they should have initiative to control this explosion - rather than 'deal with it'. I would expect this spam from F2P games, but not entirely hand-waved by companies like SE. Am I new to this kind of bull in MMOs? Hell no. I've poked around at MMOs a plenty. RO has it's steroid-injected spam-bot novies stationed all over the place, to the point that you -can not- communicate with guildies/party/anyone... but those are at least escapable by leaving the area. These bots you can not escape (without causing probs with actually wanted tells/party requests/trades/etc)
Other MMOs had it in shouts that could be filtered out - but shouts were not as used for friend-to-friend communication that tells are in FFXIV.

It was bad before, but never this bad (at least on my server). The RMTs are at an all time high for Couerl atm, and I'm sure plenty of other servers.

Simple change - make 'friends only' option for busy status. I'd keep that up all day. Maybe then, everyone can, and actually be able to enjoy the experience.

[OlyverW]

This is what I need to endure all day every day and it's pretty steady and consistent as you can see by the timestamps. However I can't keep busy up 24/7 because I'm trying to network and socialize to meet decent / friendly end gamers to run stuff together. Eventually it starts to affect my mood in negative ways and I start getting grouchy lol =/

I now have 184 gil seller bots on my blacklist and not ONE says (Deleted) so what the hell?

Thats what mine would look like too if I didn't go busy :/

[Alipoprocks]

I like the idea about only being able to receive /tells from people on your friends list with busy up. And take it a little step further - people should not be on your friends list until you accept. Because there was that time when the RMT would add us to friends list and then spam.

[LineageRazor]

I now have 184 gil seller bots on my blacklist and not ONE says (Deleted) so what the hell?

Banned characters are not deleted. You can likely remove all 184 from your blacklist, and you will hear not a peep from any.

The deleted one indicates that the RMT managed to delete their own character before the banhammer came down (allowing them to reuse that account).