RMT Out of hand

[Ashkendor]

The mass bannings have done nothing to stop the frequency of spamming. It's only gotten worse as time goes on. An account wide blacklist where you blacklist an entire account when you blacklist somebody would go miles to make this more tolerable. Nobody implies that SE is doing nothing. People imply that what SE is doing is doing nothing. There's a pretty obvious difference there.

I've seen plenty of people say flat-out that SE is doing nothing about it, which isn't true.

An account wide blacklist would definitely be nice, and might actually help some.

This kind of shit response is infuriating. You think people don't know this? You're telling people who don't buy gil that they shouldn't be buying gil to stop the tells. As if they have any control over the people that buy gil. How about at least trying to be constructive.

The fact is no matter what SE does, RMT will stay in the game as long as it's profitable to do so. As long as people are buying gil, it's profitable. I'm not saying the people complaining about the spamming should be doing anything about this at all. It's an observation, nothing more. There's obviously nothing they can do about it.

Indeed, so, since they leave the accounts active to allow tracing the gil and the "bank characters", I have to wonder why there are not harsh penalties for characters who are on the receiving end of gil for cash transactions from the "bank characters". Action against players who actually buy gil would send a message to others considering buying gil.

When they say action was taken against accounts involved in RMT, it's pretty safe to assume that that means buying as well as selling. They can't tell us details because of privacy reasons, though. If it's anything like other games I've been on, typically the first penalty is a temp ban and the loss of the gil. They don't want to lose accounts to permanent bans if they don't have to, but obviously some punishment has to be meted out. I'm sure with repeated offenses, accounts do end up permanently banned; the thing is, even if 20 people are temp banned and then never buy again, that's all profit to the gil sellers. They don't care if you get banned or not; there's always new suckers that are perfectly willing to try to pay to get ahead.

[Kosmos992k]

When they say action was taken against accounts involved in RMT, it's pretty safe to assume that that means buying as well as selling. They can't tell us details because of privacy reasons, though. If it's anything like other games I've been on, typically the first penalty is a temp ban and the loss of the gil. They don't want to lose accounts to permanent bans if they don't have to, but obviously some punishment has to be meted out. I'm sure with repeated offenses, accounts do end up permanently banned; the thing is, even if 20 people are temp banned and then never buy again, that's all profit to the gil sellers. They don't care if you get banned or not; there's always new suckers that are perfectly willing to try to pay to get ahead.

That's the problem though, it's not spelled out how many actual players have been temp or permanently banned for participating in RMT transactions. You can't deter people from a course of action without there being a clear indication of the consequences of being caught. I'd like them to find a way to spell out those consequences, without listing names or servers of course, no naming and shaming, but something that makes it crystal clear that players do get banned for this.

[Amenian]

snip

Are you honestly insinuating that buying gil isn't considered socially unacceptable? I'm not sure what type of people you hang out with, but in the 10 years or so that I've been playing MMOs I've met all of one person who didn't want to hang gil buyers from the rafters by their toenails. And it turned out that one person who didn't was a gil buyer and as soon as it came out that he was he was universally shunned.

I've seen plenty of people say flat-out that SE is doing nothing about it, which isn't true.

I try to give these people the benefit of the doubt and assume this is hyperbole.

[Kosmos992k]

Are you honestly insinuating that buying gil isn't considered socially unacceptable? I'm not sure what type of people you hang out with, but in the 10 years or so that I've been playing MMOs I've met all of one person who didn't want to hang gil buyers from the rafters by their toenails. And it turned out that one person who didn't was a gil buyer and as soon as it came out that he was he was universally shunned.

If it's so socially unacceptable, then why are so many doing it that the RMT can justify all the time and effort they put into botting and spamming the living daylights out of us? I agree that if asked, the vast majority of people would say that it is of course socially unacceptable. But when push comes to shove, I think many, many of those same players are pretty apathetic when it comes to dealing with someone who bought a bit of gil. It's amazing how quickly people can rationalize things away.

I'd like to agree with you 100%, but sadly my faith in people has been shaken too many times because of their apparent apathy.

[Zanarken]

I just started playing within past 2-3 months & within my first few hours of playing this almost caused me to quit my free trial. When I started I was having a very difficult time navigating my way around Limsa & then to get spammed with RMT tells every few minutes nearly broke me. Had it not been for a friends intervention, I would not be playing right now. This needs to be resolved immediately for the long term health of the game. If SE needs to hire additional staff to resolve this, make it happen because I promise you hundreds if not thousands of potential players have been turned away by this.

[Amenian]

If it's so socially unacceptable, then why are so many doing it that the RMT can justify all the time and effort they put into botting and spamming the living daylights out of us? I agree that if asked, the vast majority of people would say that it is of course socially unacceptable. But when push comes to shove, I think many, many of those same players are pretty apathetic when it comes to dealing with someone who bought a bit of gil. It's amazing how quickly people can rationalize things away.

I'd like to agree with you 100%, but sadly my faith in people has been shaken too many times because of their apparent apathy.

It's not like gil buyers are shouting in the streets that they're buying gil. I'd guess that they are probably very careful about who they tell. Most people might be suspicious, but won't do anything without proof, nor should they. That's how tumblr witch hunts happen.

[Kosmos992k]

It's not like gil buyers are shouting in the streets that they're buying gil. I'd guess that they are probably very careful about who they tell. Most people might be suspicious, but won't do anything without proof, nor should they.

Agreed, no action should be taken without proof. But rather like a civil court case, the standard of evidence needs to be carefully evaluated. There will likely be no direct proof or admission from someone, but, that does not mean there is no evidence.

In a previous game I had to kick people who had cheated by modifying their save file to give them infinite items. That allowed them to craft top level end game gear. They could have completely modded their gear, but the smart ones didn't, they simply gave themselves the resources to suddenly synthesize the absolute best gear, fully enhanced, even more sneaky were people who did not show their ill-gotten gear immediately, but phased it in over a couple of weeks. However, to anyone who had played the game for a long time, and knew the systems and drop rates, it was possible to see the statistical likelihood of someone having all the gear that some had was effectively zero. In other words, these players had "impossible gear". Literally in every case, the player later admitted privately that they had cheated (or were caught via screen shot with modified gear).

In Eorzea, since there is no way for people to modify their save data, buying gil would facilitate buying end-game crafting gear with full melds, or BiS crafted battle gear, again fully melded. So one week your friend who has just been scraping by has barely 100K gil, and the next has gil dripping from their richly appointed and well melded gear.

What then?

[Lufkin]

I've been reporting all RMT tells I've gotten for the past two weeks. On average, it is about 16 a day. This takes forever.

What would be nice: right click a tell, mark is at RMT

I know SE is doing their best but PLEASE set up a competent task force to fix this problem.

[Deathcharge]

Limit the amount of "Tells" a level 1-5 char can send per hour is 1 good and fair fix. Second make a database of "Blacklisted" people in the server and if lets say 10 or more level 50 add you to that database automatically send that char to a prison where a DM can further investigate the situation. Improve the PS4 report feature . If ANY on this thread thinks the PS4 feature doesn't need fixing then they should just avoid this thread. LASTLY 200 people are not enough I took 1 month vacation and within 2 weeks i was already at 150 Blacklisted individuals.

[TouchandFeel]

As many others have said many times, please please please give us a right-click "report RMT" function!
The current system is far too cumbersome and time consuming for the amount of rmt tells that can be received, so it is much easier and quicker for people to just blacklist them which leaves the gil-selling spammer unreported. In a ways, the current system is sort of hurting the attempt to squash rmt in the game.

Outline for RMT auto-report function .
- Player sees a gil-seller spamming shout chat or is sent a tell by one.
- They right-click or equivalent function on console and choose the option "report RMT action".
- The spammer is then added to the blacklist and an auto-generated report gets made.
- The auto report grabs all the relevant information (reporter, server, person being reported, chat text that was being reported, time stamp, etc.) and then sends it to be investigated.
- If enough reports against a single player are made within a certain timeframe then a red flag is raised and a GM investigates quickly in game to verify the reports and if the person being reported is indeed a rmt bot, then they instaban them and begin an investigation as to whether the account was stolen or created to be an rmt bot.
- If the reports are false and someone is trying to grief actual players by reporting them as rmt, then that person will be dealt with accordingly for harassment.

Not new ideas, but were worth reiterating.

In fact a system like this would be excellent for reporting all forms of bots.