Petition for a Realistic Solution to RMT's

[Ophie-Mio]

I have another idea. How about the people running the RMT and gil farmers get actually jobs instead being a waste of humanity.

Have you ever stopped to consider once that these "wastes of humanity" are working jobs where they get money for their time? >_>
What may be annoying for you is their income. "Real" jobs is a matter of perspective that may not even be available for them. So you don't have to like what they do and how it affects you but calling them (including the people who work and actually farm all the stuff) wastes of humanity is a HUGE escalation that's unnecessary.
It's disruptive but it's a /tell that you're complaining about.

An actual suggestion for this thread:
Friend requests needing to be reworked because of RMT.
If you click "No", it should just leave it at that. No, clicking no and then having to go to your friendslist to also Decline the request there.

One click "No" friend request.

[Sandoria]

I think they should look into the matter when a person is blacklisted by an undisclosed amount, but not necessarily auto-banned. I would like to mention account wide blacklisting would be pretty darned helpful as well. If we had account wide blacklisting, an RMT would have to buy a new account each and every time they wanted to /tell me. As is, they are off making a new character to spam the world with by the time I've got their first character on my B-list.

[Dillia]

I really wish it was this easy. There are no easy answers for RMT spam, and quite honestly, the spam is the easiest part for the RMTers to do.


First of all, making a new lvl 1 character to spam RMT ads costs the RMT company $0. The will use stolen credit cards, probably from previous customers, to buy the account for spamming. They will burn through all the characters they can create and then ditch the account. The account will be locked when the owner of the credit card files a chargeback. So banning spamming accounts is really a moot point, it happens anyway. The lvl 1 spambots will touch 0 gil, making them effectively not part of the problem.

The problems are the mule accounts and the farming accounts. Once the gil is farmed it gets transferred to a mule who holds millions of gil at a time and distributes it to people who buy gill from them. Those accounts are not the ones you see, they are quiet and hard to detect. Any automated system to block farming or gil transfers could potentially harm legit players, so all these things must be researched by a live person. What SE will do is look at the gil trail. Lets look at an example

There are two cases of one character transferring 20mil gil to another character. In one case, the research finds that player A crafted and delivered several 3&4 star items for player B, player B gave player A 20 mil gil. In the other case, player C has had no prior contact with player D, player D simply handed player C 20mil. Now is the second example RMT? Maybe, maybe not. What if player D was simply the alt of another character who legit had lots of gil? It takes time and effort to read through the logs to see where the gil is coming from and where it is going.

Think of it in real life terms, lets use drugs as an example. You buy a small amount of drugs from your dealer. You get pulled over and they find the drugs. You will probably get offered a deal for a reduced charge if you tell them who your dealer is. When the police arrest the dealer, they will get offered a deal if they turn in their supplier, and it goes up the chain till they find a major stash of drugs to seize. People are cheap, products are not. It does more damage to a drug cartel to take their product that it does if you arrest their dealers. You will still see dealers in your city or neighborhood, but that doesn't mean your local police don't care if they are there. They are looking up the supply line to find the point where they can actually hurt the boss of the operation.
This works the same way with RMT. Banning the spam bots mean nothing to the company, they are easily replaced with little to no cost. What SE is doing is following the gil back to the source and banning the farming bots and the mules. This actually hurts the company, by destroying their product. Attacking the spammers is like fighting a fire by trying to blow away the smoke. The spammers are a byproduct of the problem, not the problem itself.

[LandricFrey]

Have you ever stopped to consider once that these "wastes of humanity" are working jobs where they get money for their time? >_>
What may be annoying for you is their income. "Real" jobs is a matter of perspective that may not even be available for them. So you don't have to like what they do and how it affects you but calling them (including the people who work and actually farm all the stuff) wastes of humanity is a HUGE escalation that's unnecessary.
It's disruptive but it's a /tell that you're complaining about.

True many of these individuals have it bad, but it's no excuse to disrupt a business. And it's not just tells, its market flooding, cheating, ect.

[LandricFrey]

long quote, good points

You're right, it isn't easy, but I'd like this thread to be about solutions, not just saying "there's nothing we can do." We can make a change; it wont rid of us them, but it may reduce what is a severe problem it is, even in MMO terms. In all my 15+ years of playing MMO's, I've never seen it so bad and so consistently as I do with FFXIV.

[Ophie-Mio]

True many of these individuals have it bad, but it's no excuse to disrupt a business. And it's not just tells, its market flooding, cheating, ect.

And as it's been stated, (and you have agreed with) it's the players that allow such disruptions.
Without a market, they will go where their time is more wisely spent. Players in this game give the RMT a foothold and therefore, aren't disrupting any business. They are assisting it. You can't really crack down on RMT until they are weeded out at the source, the source being the players themselves.

And most people who make threads about RMT (including you) don't make them about the market flooding or the cheating. Your 1. and 2. are about ways to control the spam.
Market flooding is what both real players and RMT both do. So to tell them apart must be a very interesting process. Otherwise, it's a witch hunt.
Cheating is something that is already handled by GM's when reported or the system itself discovers it. I imagine that the reason why some teleporting RMT are still about in the world is because people don't care enough to report them.

Edit:
And I agree that I do see a large number of spam on Cactuar and it does become annoying at times but I don't care to blacklist them (because there's no point) and I agree that it would be nice to see solutions. But the solutions can't be truly all from SE's side. They can only hold back the real rush. The players themselves are the ones that need to change.

[giantslayer]

This is a great idea.

Concerns of abuse are overblown for two reasons:
1. This should be a chat log based option like blacklist so people can't just use it on someone out of the blue.
2. Players who abuse this can be subject to disciplinary action. This is not an anonymous report. It has who submitted it and what the actual text of the message linked was. When abuse occurs, there is recourse available and solid evidence.

That said, I think the first triggered action should be a temporary muting for all forms of communication to anyone not on friends list and a restriction on sending (but not receiving) friend requests. GM gets prompted to review and can swing the ban hammer. Should only take a matter of seconds for them to determine if it is RMT or not. They could also automate the ban hammer but make it take multiple instances of triggering the threshold within a certain amount of time.

[LandricFrey]

And as it's been stated, (and you have agreed with) it's the players that allow such disruptions.
Without a market, they will go where their time is more wisely spent. Players in this game give the RMT a foothold and therefore, aren't disrupting any business. They are assisting it. You can't really crack down on RMT until they are weeded out at the source, the source being the players themselves.

And most people who make threads about RMT (including you) don't make them about the market flooding or the cheating. Your 1. and 2. are about ways to control the spam.
Market flooding is what both real players and RMT both do. So to tell them apart must be a very interesting process. Otherwise, it's a witch hunt.
Cheating is something that is already handled by GM's when reported or the system itself discovers it. I imagine that the reason why some teleporting RMT are still about in the world is because people don't care enough to report them.

IMO: It needs to be handled at both ends. Again, lets please keep this thread about solutions, not "It wont work" replies without counter suggestions. Thank you.

[Nanaho]

I have another idea. How about the people running the RMT and gil farmers get actually jobs instead being a waste of humanity.

Alrighty, Devil's advocate here. Are they making money from doing this? Yes? Then it's a "real job"

Waste of Humanity? Kind of Harsh, they found a Niche to feed their families, or make some money one way or another.

Im all for being Against RMT, but please don't spout this False and ultimately just straight up Derogatory banter ^^ Thanks.

[Noshpan]

I had been suggesting a Right click name > Report for spam > Flag reported account > Temporary mutes reported account during the duration that you are logged onto the character when you made the report.

And with how RMT spammers tend to delete the characters they use for spamming in a very short period of time, that temporary muting should be long enough to suffice.