Gold Sellers

[Lucke]

You don't understand it at all.
China doesn't recognize international copyright laws. If they aren't part of the Berne treaty, there is no case. Plain and simple. Berne is an international treaty for groups to sign copyright laws and recognize it. Another problematic region is also Iran.

No, I understand perfectly. Since most sellers are untouchable, you gotta go after the buyers. SE could ban all Chinese IPs from accessing the servers, but then they'll just get proxies. SE have to do everything it can to make gilsellers access to the game as tedious as possible.

I do like the idea of account banning and not just character banning.

[Maquinna]

be a good idea for SE to watch the market for low or regular quality items being sold for obscene prices. and find who's retainer it is, than start by banning said sellers that have successful sales. as these are good ways for RMT to hand off bought gill to players with a logged trade happening. i saw it on wow, coh, rift, etc. is it so hard for SE to implement anything like this to fight the RMTs? or are they in fact getting kickbacks? bring in some QOL changes for the right click block. it's only been asked for more times and in more posts than needed to be written.

[Fiona_Amaryllis]

Hello! I saw this post under the RMT tag and wanted to link to one I put under feedback. I think it would be a good idea to add a 'Report Gil Seller' button under 'Add to Blacklist' when you right click a name. I'm sure they'd have to add a system of some kind to handle that, but more people might report them if it was a little easier and didn't take 5 minutes per gil seller. I don't know if it's been suggested before and it's possible it might not make a difference, but I'd like to hope it might! Here's the post if anyone cares to comment, support, or disagree:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...10#post2852610

[Faelandaea]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...10#post2852610

Page not found

[KisaiTenshi]

So the status filters need to be adjusted. Invisible, Away, Busy, Online.

Busy needs to be auto-disabled when "commence" is clicked on DF. In practice, the "busy" is meant for Do-not-disturb, eg "I'm busy crafting right now", as opposed to the current mechanism which is self-defeating and breaking intended communication mechanics.

Perhaps another mechanic is in order, on the order of "invisible" but just disables /tells from search options/right-click menus.

[moudoka]

The invisible thing actually sounds decent. However, the player search function is wholly flawed, as that is the primary source of the RMT bots spam. They flood tells at obscene levels, all via the player search. Disable that feature entirely, and they'll have to do something else. As irritating as it would be, they would then move on to area shouts, but prevent shouts until level 10. Many games do that. As for people buying gil, ban them. Ban their accounts, no refunds. They want to support the RMT bots, then they can beg the RMT bots for their money back and see how far that gets them. I do support that 100%. You buy off these sites, you deserve to go down in flames like the bots.

[YuuhiX]

Restricting PMs, Yells and Shouts for people under Lvl 10 is a start. I've seen this work in other games as well, at least to some degree. Blocking Player Search entirely is not going to help much, since spambot will then find other means of obtaining names. But we can still make Player Search something you only unlock after completing a certain part of the Main Story, let's say maybe at the point where you use the Airship for the first time or when you unlock Sastasha. Right now, the RMT bots have WAY too much freedom of obtaining player names and spamming the living moogle out of you. What's the only thing they have to do now to start commencing the scam routine (Yes, scam routine because most "RMT sellers" are just scamming you out of your account)?

- Step 1: Make a char (Takes around 30 seconds)
- Step 2: Go through the starting cutscenes (Takes about 3-4 minutes for them)
- Step 3: Use player search and start being the annoying git that you are

The total time they need to recover from a deleted char is merely 5 minutes at most. With the suggestions above, we can make that well over 60 mins, which will severely slow down their progress.

[KisaiTenshi]

Restricting PMs, Yells and Shouts for people under Lvl 10 is a start. I've seen this work in other games as well, at least to some degree. Blocking Player Search entirely is not going to help much, since spambot will then find other means of obtaining names. But we can still make Player Search something you only unlock after completing a certain part of the Main Story, let's say maybe at the point where you use the Airship for the first time or when you unlock Sastasha. Right now, the RMT bots have WAY too much freedom of obtaining player names and spamming the living moogle out of you. What's the only thing they have to do now to start commencing the scam routine (Yes, scam routine because most "RMT sellers" are just scamming you out of your account)?

- Step 1: Make a char (Takes around 30 seconds)
- Step 2: Go through the starting cutscenes (Takes about 3-4 minutes for them)
- Step 3: Use player search and start being the annoying git that you are

The total time they need to recover from a deleted char is merely 5 minutes at most. With the suggestions above, we can make that well over 60 mins, which will severely slow down their progress.

It actually doesn't work in any game it's been implemented in. Instead of having 5 bots standing around, you end up with 300 bots cluttering up the newbie areas to get over the level restriction, thus making it difficult for players to actually progress.

Let me find an example...



Archeage only lets you report, at most 20 times... and until the GM's process the report (could be up to 3 days), the bots have had enough time to level past the point where they were blocked from spamming/goldfarming. So a lot of bots were reaching level 50 long before they got booted.

Other games (like Mabinogi, and Wizardy Online) that I played any significant amount of time on, the problem is compounded by the number of servers/channels that exist. Mabinogi, has no yell/shout mechanic (it's a cash shop item), so the bots just constantly spam the "say" system, and the bots all campout around Uldah (the only spawn point for that continent, regardless of storyline progression.)

Freemium games however basically are screwed over by the fact that they are free to play. So there is no throttling by subscription.

Games with free trials have the same problem. http://support.na.square-enix.com/fa...245&id=20&la=1 (FFXI) http://support.na.square-enix.com/fa...5382&kid=70929 (FFXIV), https://us.battle.net/support/en/art...tarter-edition (WoW)

And they just disable everything but "say" and "party" chat without a subscription.

Which means that the accounts doing the spamming, are paying/stolen accounts.

Like the best "reasonable" compromise is to unlock /tell /yell and /shout into an instanced tutorial, which acts as a type of game-generated captcha about politeness and roleplaying. Make a dozen NPC characters appear, and have the tutorial do something like:
- emote (?) at a (specific) female NPC
- /tell the (specific, without mentioning the name) shopkeeper something nice
- /shout the aggressive monster name and location
- /yell something ...
V1.0 actually had something like this for the emotes, there's no reason it couldn't be brought back and tacked on to the emote storyline bit like before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZgcq-FMpfw&t=91

At best it would just make bots get stuck in an instance and unable to spam until they complete it, at worst, it delays the delete cycle.

Where the delete cycle needs to be fixed is preventing new characters from being created on ANY server if a character has been queued for deletion less than a day ago. With the delay being relative to the level obtained. eg a level 50 character wouldn't be deleted for 24-48 hours, while any character deleted within 24 hours of creation would put a 24 hour cooldown on creating any new character on any server if they have used /tell /shout or /yell . Another possibility is just permanantly closing character creation on the busy servers and make new character creation by invite-only (eg "Invite a friend to FFXIV! Just email this referral code, this will invite them to create their free trial character on the same server you play on!")

There's no perfect system, and there never will be short of China cracking down on RMT within their own country first.

[YuuhiX]

If we can be given the option to auto-block whispers from ppl under lvl 10, it's a start. I've only gotten 2 minutes off the Busy status and already I get about 8 different bots whispering me. It's just driving me mad

[Malgor]

One solution that worked well on a game I played long ago (can't recall atm) the solution to spamming was, in addition to a timer (no more than 1 /tell /msg every 3-5 seconds), and the blacklisting was community driven.

so if a character was blacklisted by players for sending unwanted tells, once that player reached a threshold set against the server population ratio, that player was automatically muted from /tells /shouts /msgs for a period of 8, 12 or 24 hours (depending on the number of blacklist/spam reports)

And it was tied to the account holder, if they used another alt for the same purpose, if the alt performed the same actions and received another blacklist mute, then all the characters tied to that account were muted for that cumulative period of time.

This seemed to have an eventual effect where the gold sellers were quickly running out of alts to spam with and forcing them to wait to advertise, or purchase another copy of the game, which soon made it UNPROFITABLE, and they eventually faded away.