Petition for a Realistic Solution to RMT's

[Mahri]

Right click > Report for > Spam
10+ reports: GM ticket generated, chat logs saved.
25+ reports: Reported account muted, possibly temp banned.

I'd say more but honestly the more I think about the subject, the angrier I get.

SQUARE-ENIX. WE ARE BEING HARASSED. DO SOMETHING. AND SAY SOMETHING.

[SongJoohee]

Right click > Report for > Spam
10+ reports: GM ticket generated, chat logs saved.
25+ reports: Reported account muted, possibly temp banned.

Yes this seems like a perfectly safe and non-abusable solution.

Some of the "solutions" on this thread are genuinely laughable and it's good that you aren't in game design.

Ban people or restricting their chat when they black listed by a certain number of players? Lol. I know an entire FC of people on my server that hate me because I named & shamed them as Triple Triad tournament cheaters on the forums. Really think the same kind of people wouldn't abuse these kind of systems? Any kind of system that let's an organized group of players cause mutes/bans on people they don't like is an awful idea. Players have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted with any system that can be abused easily.

The suggestion by Dillia is just amazing /s. Let's not only promote RMT - by literally encouraging players to buy from the websites, but also cannibalize our own business model, all to ban one account! Freakin' genius. I wonder why no game has ever done that before, there's absolutely no way it can backfire.

Taking on the websites - lawyers aren't cheap. These websites also tend to have many websites run by the same group under different names. You take one down, they make another.

One of the few good ideas is to add an option to only allow friends to whisper you. I've been after that for a while.

It's really amusing that people on this thread seem to think SE do literally nothing to combat RMT. You really think that? You do know why they're so quiet when it comes to fighting botters/rmt right? Because it's fucking stupid for a dev to publicly post about what they are doing to fight it. It makes it even easier to RMT to avoid being caught. Every MMO I've ever player has issues with these kind of issues. If you think SE are gonna come out over night with an efficient and permanent solution I'm afraid you're very, very wrong.

Other games have literally changed the entire back-end of how a game works, and you know what happened? The bots were broken. For a week or two. Then they fixed the bots to work on the 'new' version of the game and they were back in action. It is not a 1-2-Fix.

And btw, PSA: Characters aren't deleted when an account is banned. Just because the RMT you blist aren't becoming (deleted)s doesn't mean the accounts aren't being banned. Characters just get deleted after a while in order to free up space to create a new character that isn't blisted by as many people.

[Avenger]

It's really amusing that people on this thread seem to think SE do literally nothing to combat RMT. You really think that? You do know why they're so quiet when it comes to fighting botters/rmt right? Because it's fucking stupid for a dev to publicly post about what they are doing to fight it. It makes it even easier to RMT to avoid being caught. Every MMO I've ever player has issues with these kind of issues. If you think SE are gonna come out over night with an efficient and permanent solution I'm afraid you're very, very wrong.

It would be somewhat mean-spirited to laugh at the people in this thread, who are genuinely frustrated by a very visible lack of progress. SE is certainly doing something (after all, they ban lots of accounts) but what they're doing isn't working particularly well - for example it seems that /shout spam is making a comeback and the rate of /tell spam is increasing.

I wouldn't consider it completely stupid to publicly acknowledge some of the players' concerns, or to announce anti-spam features such as single-click-report-message-and-blist, whitelist/communication preferences, personal filters or filter add-ons, preventing friend requests from blocking blacklisting, a feature to note (or automatically delete) banned characters on blacklists, larger blacklists, etc..

Moreover, they could also comment on how well or how badly they think the anti-spam effort is going, and apologize for the measures that haven't worked so far; they could say that they're working on additional measures and whether we could expect to see them deployed before the expansion. They could say that they appreciate our suggestions and to keep sending them in, that they are expanding the anti-spam task force, developing more anti-spam tools, sharing information and technology with/from other MMOs, allowing players and GMs to help with anti-spam efforts, implementing an in-game jail for any players who bot or buy gil, etc.. They could even share some data about spam reports over time as well as abuse of various communication mechanisms like /shout, /tell, and friend requests, and the effect on use of /busy, and what they think about it.

[Mahri]

Yes this seems like a perfectly safe and non-abusable solution.

This is pretty much literally how it works in World of Warcraft, sweetie. The success rate is pretty high -- spammers still show up now and then, but for the most part, they are crushed hard.

To make it work, mind you, there's an infrastructure that includes GMs who can review each case as they come up and uphold/overturn/modify as necessary.

More often than not, the spamming account is a stolen account, at that, so it also helps people get their stuff back.

I know this because I am one of those GMs. I've worked there for six years and never once seen a case of Right Click > Report Spam auto-mute/suspend happen on a legit non-RMT player unless they were actually, abusively spamming. As the devs for that game like to say: working as intended.

EDIT: By the way, you want to see one way a company can make a clear statement about RMT? Right here, click me. Short, sweet, upfront, and if you wanted to know more, a WoW player can just put in a GM ticket and ask. Any would be happy to explain what the deal is what's being done about it, at least to the extent possible without giving enough away to help the spammers find ways around it...which they do anyway, and in turn are squashed once more by newer measures. It's an ongoing battle, but one gladly fought, because nothing destroys the enjoyment of a game quite like this garbage.

This is not by any means an easy problem to deal with, but SE needs to make a better showing, because what we have here is a flat-out infestation. What Blizzard did to combat this, and still does, took years of careful implementation and heavy modification to the game client to allow these anti-spam systems to work (like the changes needed to prevent some RMT from "spawning" corpses in the middle of town to spell out their site's URL...hoo boy...) but it was worth it. So, so very worth it.

[giantslayer]

This is pretty much literally how it works in World of Warcraft, sweetie. The success rate is pretty high -- spammers still show up now and then, but for the most part, they are crushed hard.

Thank you so much for your post. I put the same idea as the OP up on the forum almost a year ago and I have known this is the way to solve the problem.

[Mahri]

Thank you so much for your post. I put the same idea as the OP up on the forum almost a year ago and I have known this is the way to solve the problem.

I'm glad! It's a topic that's kinda near and dear to me, and the more I think about the RMT spam situation in FFXIV, the more I go straight-up cartoon steam-out-the-ears-locomotive-whistle.

(Tangentially: Thank YOU for the guide in your sig, because I'm leveling SCH now and was actually looking for that kind of info. )

[LandricFrey]

Some of the "solutions" on this thread are genuinely laughable and it's good that you aren't in game design.

And to just rage about it and do nothing is else is so much better?

Because it's fucking stupid for a dev to publicly post about what they are doing to fight it. It makes it even easier to RMT to avoid being caught. Every MMO I've ever player has issues with these kind of issues. If you think SE are gonna come out over night with an efficient and permanent solution I'm afraid you're very, very wrong.

I just want them to admit its a problem and that they are trying new ways to combat/restrict RMT. Yes, RMT are in every MMO, but none have been so bad as in FF14, so consistantly. I never asked for a solution overnight either. Hope that clears things up for you. If you're just trolling, then I thank you for the thread bump.