Losing the RMT spam war SE?

[Elim]

Starting? That's how they started originally, the progressed to using /tell and other tactics, but shouting in zones was their original M.O.

I remember when I first started playing. No one could talk in the starting zone chats, because there was so much spam. You'd BL one only to discover there's 100 other ones spamming at the same time. Needless to say, it wasn't the best first impression. If my friends hadn't asked me to say, I wouldn't have. I'm happy I stayed, but the game I came from did NOT have nearly as much of an issue. SW:TOR is a p2w now, and a f2p, but it's spam is hardly ever an issue. And free accounts can use /tells. I know FF14 is a lot more popular than SW:TOR, but damn. Even at SW:TOR's prime it wasn't this bad.

[Kaaylryn]

I think it is the sound that is the most annoying. I turned it off and created a channel where I only get chat information that I choose, FC, LS, etc. General chat I left as is in case I want or need to see shouts or yells for some reason, but with the sound turned off for /tell it seems less bothersome. Friend invites is the only thing I can't get around, but I don't get many of those.

I stopped reporting spam a while ago because it took up too much of MY game time and doesn't seem to make any difference anyway.

[Sandoria]

I remember when I first started playing. No one could talk in the starting zone chats, because there was so much spam. You'd BL one only to discover there's 100 other ones spamming at the same time. Needless to say, it wasn't the best first impression. If my friends hadn't asked me to say, I wouldn't have. I'm happy I stayed, but the game I came from did NOT have nearly as much of an issue. SW:TOR is a p2w now, and a f2p, but it's spam is hardly ever an issue. And free accounts can use /tells. I know FF14 is a lot more popular than SW:TOR, but damn. Even at SW:TOR's prime it wasn't this bad.

I remember this. I had shouts turned off for several months. Didn't turn them back on till sometime in 2014 when someone informed me they had subsided. Back then I religiously reported RMT tells. I thought I was doing my part in making this game better by reporting spam even if I just got an automated response in turn. After awhile, the /tells increased. By the time I would fill out one ticket about an RMT tell, another one would crop up. I could literally spend all day drowning in RMT reports and it felt like my efforts were wasted. So I put /busy up and have kept it up for almost 6 months now.

One day I forgot about it and was running fates leveling. I made a friend that day; A guy sent me a tell to thank me for healing him through something and we just started chatting about game stuff. It reminded me of all I was missing out on by blocking out the community with /busy. For awhile I tried to stay away from the /busy status but the tells were bombarding me every minute. Lately, I've felt kind of lonely in-game. While I can still interact with my linkshells and fc, /busy has really narrowed my world a lot. This is why I want them to look into alternatives like account wide blacklisting or limiting the character creation/deletion a person can do daily.

[Riepah]

Give us a status that blocks incoming whispers only from people who aren't in any of our linkshells, our friendlist or our FC. This would go a TREMENDOUSLY long way towards making the game environment so much more bearable. It's really not rocket science.

Busy is overkill. Most of us don't want to block whispers from friends, FC members and linkshell mates, and we don't want it to block party invites and trade requests. All we want to filter out is the crazy RMT spam.

SE, either get your RMT issue under control and fast, or give us this new status as a safe haven in the ferocious sea of spam.

[Ecks007]

The RMT problem is way out of hand. I know SE bans a lot of them but even so they still don't ban enough.

The 'Taskforce' isn't big enough to handle the mass of RMT effectively, quickly and efficiently.

I like the OP suggestion, who knows, it might just work.

Today I logged in and within the first 6 minutes of playing I received 5 RMT tells each from a different character and advertising a total of 4 different RMT sites. This is within the first 6 minutes of logging on for the day. I blist every single rmt that spams me while I am playing exactly as I have since it first started happening. I've been playing since the Closed and Open beta/rollover/Launch. When my Blist gets full I dump the oldest 100 names. It used to take a couple of months to fill up my Blist, now it takes less than a month to get 100+ names. About 2 weeks ago I deleted about 120 names (80 left), today right now, I am back up to 188 names.

At first I used to send reports about them, this is when I'd get maybe a handful a day at most through several hours of playing. I don't report anymore because if I did I would be doing nothing but writing reports all, day, long, and would never actually get to play the game. Not to mention the support center is severly lacking. Only a small handful of reports that I have submitted about non-RMT issues even show up in my History after I've completed them. The last one my history even shows is one from Janurary 2014 and I know I've sent at least 2-3 since then but it's like they just disappeared after I sent them.

Even the the response from GMs is basically "Please just Blist them." Lot of good that does.

You know what the most frustrating thing is? When you realize your Blist is full when you go to blist a rmt spammer and the option isn't even there, and you accidentally send the RMT a friend invite because that's the option that appears where you usually click to blacklist them. And then you keep getting spammed by them, and new RMT while you have to spend 10 minutes or longer deleting enough names so that you don't have to go through this same effing process for a good while.

I really hate /busy. It's a solution, but a piss poor solution. You can't receive tells from anyone, you can't receive party invites, you cant be teleported to with the wedding ring, you can't receive trades. It's very annoying and not at all helpful, but it's the only way to currently avoid being bothered by RMT.

A better solution needs to happen and it needs to happen fast. I honestly can't even imagine being a new player to the game and dealing with constant bombardment from RMT, it would be a huge deterrent to even playing the game since there aren't any option to avoid them other than /busy, which a new player might not even find out about before they get annoyed and angry from all the unwanted /tells they are getting and just quit the game.

[ValkyrieL]

guess ff14 getting more popular, after getting home from work i got 9 RMT from 7 different companies within 13 mins of been login.
SE needs to do something, Nothing is more inviting to a NEW PLAYER, that just starts the game than been harass by nonstop RMT, before his character even spawns to a city, just sad.

[MugenMugetsu]

What I don't understand is why SE employees don't just log into as many servers as possible, considering the number of employees who have an active account, and if they get an RMT tell why not just immediately ban the player who sent the tell? If there are not enough SE employees to have one on every server, just have each available employee spend one hour, per server, until they have spent at least an hour on each server simply banning players who send RMT tells as they receive them. Simple fix. There's no reason, other than wanting to get the sub fees from the RMT, that they can not do this as the RMT are in direct violation of the ToS by attempting to lure players to gil selling websites and promoting gil buying.

This is simple. There's no reason why over a year into ARR's lifespan we are still inundated by RMT as much as we are. I do understand that even banning each account as the /tells come in may not completely prevent the RMT /tells, but it would seem to me that my suggestion would ban RMT at a rate that would make it much less profitable, and potentially not profitable at all, for RMT to invest their time, or money, into attempting to sell gil to us.

Also, it seems to me that this would be something fun for the SE employees involved in banning the RMT. They would have the benefit of knowing that they are making our playtime much more enjoyable as well as knowing that new players would receive no, or far less, RMT spam so that the amount of new players just getting into ARR wouldn't be as put off by the RMT spam. The vast majority of us are understanding that this is something that comes along with playing a MMORPG, but for a lot of people they will be very put off by the amount of RMT spam and lose interest in the game very quickly thus causing SE to have a much lower player retention rate.

I really, or shall I say "sincerelely", hope that a community Mod will see this and pass this info along to Yoshi P and the Dev Team. However, considering the slow banning of RMT, it seems that SE aren't as interested in this problem as we might hope, or like, them to be.

[Lexxuk]

As I've stated, there are very simple solutions to the problem, banning 600 accounts per week, that's not a solution, there are 64 servers (I just counted) so it averages 10 accounts per server, per week. Even if 1/2 those servers have no spam bots, that's only 20 accounts, per server, per week.

What we need is control over our own chat interface, not a "oh look, we banned a whole 20 accounts from your server this week, the other 450 can still spam you though"

[darkendfaith]

Just kinda want to throw my two cents in here. RMT's in the past couple months have been running rampant on my server, wasnt so bad a little before christmas, but now I get a message almost literally every 5 seconds I am logged. I am forced to go /busy 95% of the time to avoid being spammed by them constantly.

Can anyone take a guess as to why they are going all beast with the /tell's? People on the servers are actually BUYING the gil. If people wasnt buying it, then they wouldnt be doing this so much. Know how many people's accounts are "temp banned"? 11...11 out how probably hundreds, maybe thousands.

[darkendfaith]

If SE actually does what they need to do (ban the people who are buying the gil from these websites) things would gradually get better. But they only banned 11 people in like 6 months. Nice work there.

SE logs everything in the game, including mail, trades, Marketboard etc. Also /tells, free company, linkshells, say, shout also. Why is it that only 11 accounds where "temp banned"? Knowing very well that WAY more than 11 people have bought gil.

Like I mentioned in another thread, they should start maybe banning IP's of the "bots", they are more than likely using VPN's to access this game in the first place, there's a very limited amount that they can use to get into the game if it is actually region locked. Doing something like that would stop at least half of the /tell's. Another thing is to start actually doing something to the accounts with ludacris amounts of gil being sent via mail.