Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Zabuza]

Sometimes i just want to copy their RMT cr*p and paste spam them back with their own vomit. I wonder i'll get myself banned that way

It'd be pointless, it's run by bots. Half the time they're not even there. But I share in that desire. I've wished I could spam their telephone, or spam them in some other way, every minute like they spam me, so they could see how annoying it is.

[DoctorPepper]

People keep saying ban the buyers.. but it won't work as well as you think.

SE tried taking action on buyers shortly after launch by removing gil from their accounts. According to them they essentially removed a digit from their gil, if they had 10 mil they went down to 1 mil. The sheer outcry about it on the forums was unreal, tons of people came here claiming they got their gil legitimately and the overall mood was anger against SE for doing this. I can pretty much guarantee that it will be the same situation if they ban those people as opposed to removing the gil so I can't really blame them for not banning buyers (I don't think any mmo does that to be honest).

What really needs to happen is more intelligent chat filters, currently the chat filter that's in place is fooled by only changing a few letters each time. That's why you typically see random strings of changing letters on the end of their tells.

A lot of other games with addon support have user made spam filters that work surprisingly well so I'm personally hoping that addon support comes sooner than later and they let the community handle this situation on their own. I don't think SE has a lot of options that wouldn't inhibit legit players quality of life in some way. What works for one user might not be good for another user.

[Risvertasashi]

People keep saying ban the buyers.. but it won't work as well as you think.

SE tried taking action on buyers shortly after launch by removing gil from their accounts. According to them they essentially removed a digit from their gil, if they had 10 mil they went down to 1 mil. The sheer outcry about it on the forums was unreal, tons of people came here claiming they got their gil legitimately and the overall mood was anger against SE for doing this. I can pretty much guarantee that it will be the same situation if they ban those people as opposed to removing the gil so I can't really blame them for not banning buyers (I don't think any mmo does that to be honest).

What really needs to happen is more intelligent chat filters, currently the chat filter that's in place is fooled by only changing a few letters each time. That's why you typically see random strings of changing letters on the end of their tells.

A lot of other games with addon support have user made spam filters that work surprisingly well so I'm personally hoping that addon support comes sooner than later and they let the community handle this situation on their own. I don't think SE has a lot of options that wouldn't inhibit legit players quality of life in some way. What works for one user might not be good for another user.

Seems like you get it. Killing the supply (and their advertisers) removes the temptation. If one can't get millions of gil for a few $, spending a little time grinding it out doesn't seem as intimidating. And they might actually try, say, crafting, and find out it isn't as intimidating as it seems. As for that controversy early in the game's life... that's because they didn't actually target gil buyers. They targeted everyone over a certain amount of currency. There's a rather notorious case on the FFXIV reddit, where they eventually admitted to him they didn't have the resources to investigate each case individually.

Such spam filters exist for FFXIV, but as they're not official we can't talk about them here on the official forums. It would be great to get official addon support.

[Naliee]

People keep saying ban the buyers.. but it won't work as well as you think.

SE tried taking action on buyers shortly after launch by removing gil from their accounts. According to them they essentially removed a digit from their gil, if they had 10 mil they went down to 1 mil. The sheer outcry about it on the forums was unreal, tons of people came here claiming they got their gil legitimately and the overall mood was anger against SE for doing this. I can pretty much guarantee that it will be the same situation if they ban those people as opposed to removing the gil so I can't really blame them for not banning buyers (I don't think any mmo does that to be honest).

But still you would think SE is able to track on how the person got the gil. I say that if you earn 10m overnight, you're buying it.

But RMT problem doesn't go away itself just blocking them. We do need some punishment to buyers aswell! They're just as bad.

[Edellis]

SE tried taking action on buyers shortly after launch by removing gil from their accounts. According to them they essentially removed a digit from their gil, if they had 10 mil they went down to 1 mil. The sheer outcry about it on the forums was unreal, tons of people came here claiming they got their gil legitimately and the overall mood was anger against SE for doing this. I can pretty much guarantee that it will be the same situation if they ban those people as opposed to removing the gil so I can't really blame them for not banning buyers (I don't think any mmo does that to be honest).

^ This. No matter what solution SE comes up with, i'm positive that it will find some way to deeply offend a corner of the community, who would have some nuanced privilege of theirs stripped away. Stuff like this always does without fail in MMOs.

What really needs to happen is more intelligent chat filters, currently the chat filter that's in place is fooled by only changing a few letters each time. That's why you typically see random strings of changing letters on the end of their tells.

This is what needs to happen, but again, something that isn't as easy as it sounds. Teaching a computer to identify specific intent through text isn't necessarily easy, and again, it would likely result in some restrictions on chat macros or whatever, and people would complain. Not to mention RMTers would undoubtedly find a way around it, and we're back to square one, except now the innocents are suffering for it.

But then again, i can't say i'd miss the large text-image macros people come up with.

[Risvertasashi]

But still you would think SE is able to track on how the person got the gil. I say that if you earn 10m overnight, you're buying it.

But RMT problem doesn't go away itself just blocking them. We do need some punishment to buyers aswell! They're just as bad.

I believe SE has such measures in place. Sudden spikes in gil will likely get their attention. They won't tell us about these measures, however, because well...


I wouldn't say buyers are just as bad precisely. It's more like Satan vs Sinners. One is beyond redemption, the others are not. But it looks like SE is temp banning them (going off the lodestone posts) which seems appropriate.

[Ophie-Mio]

But still you would think SE is able to track on how the person got the gil. I say that if you earn 10m overnight, you're buying it.

Except that that's not the truth in the slightest? I have friends who have alts. I -and numerous friends- have been asked to trade alts to help them pass items and gil over from the main for as long as I've been playing. It's been as low as 200k and a Valentione cake and as high as 4 mil to get their Supra. My husband and I are 4 star crafters and have decently sized gil accounts but even so, we trade to each other often whenever we need something quickly and need to pool our gil.

Our FC house? A combined effort that saw 10 mil from one person and 5 mil from another and 2 mil from another, all hitting me.
According to your post, because I have large amounts of gil hitting me in that situation, I buy gil.
I don't buy gil though. I just experience sums of gil passing through my hands.

Crafters who make commissions for full sets of armor and robes have large sums of gil passing through their hands. Guess what? According to your post, they also buy gil.

Let's say this: Should an account that's used to seeing 200k receive gil from their friend be subject to such a rule? 200k isn't a lot but when they wanted Supra and knew their other friend had it and asked for it, BOOM a large amount of gil just transferred into their hands and OMG THEY ARE BUYING GIL!!

The system that you're saying (which is just you assuming that people can't gil jump without it being suspicious) would kill any trade of gil, even between friends or customers of their favorite crafter.

[Edellis]

But still you would think SE is able to track on how the person got the gil. I say that if you earn 10m overnight, you're buying it.

What constitutes a flag? A large gil trade? Someone receiving a whisper and then getting a large gil trade? How do you prove they bought the gil? Or don't have rich caster friends? Or that one player wasn't just really generous? Or it's for any plenty of reasons other than illegal RMT?

As for RMT whispers....even if they're able to track all the whispers and identify them as bots, they have to not only have a system for generating this flag (which is priority #1 for RMTers to circumvent), but also try to stop players from receiving these tells, which again requires them to have some system that identifies the tells as RMT-related, and even then you have to implement this system in a way where it itself doesn't become annoying to the player.

May not be rocket science, but it's not as easy as people think it is, obviously, seeing as every MMO has to deal with it.

[Lucke]

What we should do is ask nothing but questions about RMT for the next Questions for the producer thing. That way if SE doesn't answer any of the RMT questions, we know they either don't care, or censor the event and come up with their own questions to answer while making us believe they will answer ours, or they just don't care about the non-JP community at all. That let's them know it's more important than anything else.

[Ophie-Mio]

What we should do is ask nothing but questions about RMT for the next Questions for the producer thing. That way if SE doesn't answer any of the RMT questions, we know they either don't care, or censor the event and come up with their own questions to answer while making us believe they will answer ours, or they just don't care about the non-JP community at all. That let's them know it's more important than anything else.

Except that would become counterproductive. If everyone here ganged up on the question section of the live letter and demanded answers for the RMT situation, the most known response to it will be silence because that would be escalating a situation even more out of control. The worst case scenario would be that they see it as destructive, angry out lashing and decide that they don't want our questions over in the NA section anymore.

I'm 100% sure that there were more questions asked in the last live letter than just about the packaging of the expansion...but lo and behold, nothing but the details of the packaging of the expansion.

I'm sure the next live letter question selection will include even MORE things than the expansion but we'll still see the same questions that we always do. Housing stuff, expansion stuff, and ilevel stuff. Stuff that's already been answered here and will be answered two or three more times to come.

Just because they don't take every question doesn't mean that they don't see it or care. It just means that the question can't be used to hype a group of people over something, as the live letters are supposed to do.