Losing the RMT spam war SE?

[Lexxuk]

It does seem that you're losing it, by not giving us effective controls over our /tells, the RMT companies are seeing XIV as an easy target, instead of just getting 1 or 2 companies sending us spam, we're now getting, what, ten different spam sites?

By not giving us, your customers, effective means to block the spammers, they are not going to stop, in fact, it's going to get worse, the RMT are going to see they have competition for our /tells and spam more.

You've been given, for over a year now, many, many solutions to the RMT spam, the only time you've actually done anything is when the RMT were spamming /shout. How about actually fixing this?

The only solution you have given us is to go /busy, in an MMO, a social game where people like to be able to talk to each other, so your solution is for us to stop using /tells.

Simple solution, easy to implement. Allow only 1 new character creation, per account, per day, RMT bots log out, delete, create a new one to continue to spam, remove that, and they can't.

Make /blist account wide, so as soon as their spam bot is /blisted, you'll not get a /tell from any character on that account.

Actually, a better idea. DO SOMETHING.

[BlackenedTiamat]

totally agree with you on this! make it to where if you BlackList someone, it BlackLists ANY character created with that account. i hate going "Busy" for the same reasons as you -_-. plus going busy effects ready checks and more. hopefully they do something about it soon.

[Airget]

I really do wish people would stop saying "DO SOMETING" when clearly they have.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...bec04fa173f090

This was posted today and honestly if RMT spam tells increase it's because they are close to being snuffed out by SE.

It's the way they work the closer they get to getting caught the more aggressive they become, they work hard to sell all their merchandise cause at the end of the day their objective is to just find that one person who will look at the tell and say "Hey I could use something like this"

[Taliph]

I really do wish people would stop saying "DO SOMETING" when clearly they have.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...bec04fa173f090

This was posted today and honestly if RMT spam tells increase it's because they are close to being snuffed out by SE.

It's the way they work the closer they get to getting caught the more aggressive they become, they work hard to sell all their merchandise cause at the end of the day their objective is to just find that one person who will look at the tell and say "Hey I could use something like this"

If the RMT were "close to being snuffed out" why would they bother spending money to spam?

I have said it before, and I'll likely say it again, the only way SE can do anything about RMT is by significantly increasing cost for RMT to operate. The only way to do that is by daily mass bans of gathering, leveling, and spamming bots.

[Lexxuk]

Okay, so they are deleting a few hundred accounts every week, so what? You honestly think the RMT paid for the accounts? Odds are they are either stolen accounts or they used a stolen credit card to buy the accounts so it's zero loss to the RMT, they just steal another account or use another stolen credit card. They use their spam bots knowing they will be banned sooner rather than later, this doesn't help us who have to turn on /busy.

Prevention is better than cure, be nice if SE did something and put US back in control of our chat box so we can actually use it for it's intended purpose.

[Kosmos992k]

I really do wish people would stop saying "DO SOMETING" when clearly they have.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...bec04fa173f090

One thing that might actually help is for everyone to actually report RMT advertizing. Yes it might bury the task force dealing with RMT under a mountain of reports, but I think that one thing that the frequency of RMT tells does is that it pushes more and more people to use "/busy", or simply blacklist/ignore and move on.

It's something I know I am guilty of, and I know many of my friends have tired of the two-three minutes it takes to report each spammer, especially if you're getting 5-10 of them in a 2-hour window, no one wants to spend 15-30 minutes of their 90-120 minute playing window reporting spammers, that's like spending anything up to a quarter of your time reporting spam and not playing.

*THAT* is something I would like an SE community manager to read and respond to. If I report every spam tell I get, by the time I am done, I will have reduced my playing time by a significant degree, and frankly, I shouldn't have to do that in order to assist SE in ridding the game of RMT scum.

The trouble there is that if people become desensitized or simply annoyed at the time it takes and cease reporting, it masks the problem to some degree, making it seem less prevalent than it is. Also the RMT tactic of burning accounts is a problem for all servers affected by RMT spam, since the quick turn around of creating an account, spamming others with it, and deleting it before the spam reports trigger action, causes the servers to appear more full than they are with regard to character creation. So your friend who wants to move to your server may not be able to because some dast5ardly RMT account that'll be gone 15 minutes later just took that spot.

If we as players want SE to take action, we need to do more than whine on the forums, we need to take action in game to report these scum. I have to agree 100000% with the suggestions of a "Report as Spam" option that sends the support team a timestamped notification of a /tell spam by a user when you select it.

Also something else that would be very effective (and actually a good idea in general) would be extending blacklist entries to cover an entire account. Heaven knows that if I have to block a real player for harassing me, the last thing I want to see is the same jerk bugging me on an alt on the same account. If blacklists were account wide, it would put a wrench in the works of RMT since it would cost them more accounts to keep up their advertizing effort, and it would also snuff out abusers who harass others by preventing them from switching to alts to continue the harassment.

SE, if you make it easier for us to help you catch RMT accounts, we can help, but right now, the level of spam, and the time commitment required to report all of it is just too much for many players and they opt out of reporting all together.

[BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY]

lets take action once per week and give 6 whole days to recuperate... right, because the actions they take are actually effective.

i understand this game is very popular, and that RMT activity is rather difficult to deal with. however, SE truly needs to step-it-up or start doing something different. they have done the same thing week-after-week since launch. has it gotten anyone anywhere? no! there hasn't been the slightest drop in RMT activity since launch. and unless SE starts making some changes, we will never see a decline in RMT activity.

[Lexxuk]

especially if you're getting 5-10 of them in a 2-hour window, no one wants to spend 15-30 minutes of their 90-120 minute playing window reporting spammers, that's like spending anything up to a quarter of your time reporting spam and not playing.

Sadly, it's got to the stage where we're getting 1 a minute now, we would be doing nothing but filling in spam reports constantly, add that to the fact the RMT logs out, makes a new char and starts spamming on THAT one, and we'd be reporting the same account several times a day. We need to be able to block them at source, so that we're getting zero spam messages.

[Tiggy]

So much cynicism in this thread.

[BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY]

what i find really strange... if i log in to the game, it normally takes a while to get a RMT message. also, if i remove /busy it will take a while to get a RMT message. HOWEVER, if i go AFK i will almost always receive a message very quickly. and then after that, they just keep coming at a high frequency. i don't know, but something seems strange about it to me.