Everyone complaining about no action on RMT, please read

[Tigerlilley]

Monthly bans aren't enough. We need a proper spam catcher for /tells

[SarcasmMisser]

2,717 Accounts for RMT spam in a week, that's 388 accounts per day. there are 64 servers, that means that every day SE delete the grand total of 6 RMT spam bots, per day. 6. If we say that 1/2 the servers are Japanese, that's 12. Per server, per day. Numbers don't really seem that great when you boil it down like that, does it? You can say SE are tackling the problem when that 2,717 Accounts is actually 27,170 spam bots deleted... per day

There are like no tells on Japanese servers, it's almost all you guys. My blacklist has 28 people with over a year of playing on this server.

[Dunncan]

I am aware about the hacked accounts and stolen credit cards. But I think that they would not be banned for "RMT advertising or RMT/illicit activity". Guess it should be in another category, since once you can indentify that the source of the payment is ilegal (profit lost), you could just ban / innactivate the account for that. In case of reported hacked accounts, they should work to assist the hacked player, instied of ban it as a RMT.

Is there anything about it on the terms of service?

Otherwise, they would be just inflatting numbers of that RMT bans reports, I guess.

[Chek]

I've actually noticed a slight improvement on Faerie since the patch. Pre-patch we had shouters in Lominsa and I was literally getting a tell every minute according to timestamps, but now I can actually go like 30 minutes to an hour and not get a single one. Its not gone, but its not forcing me to be /busy 24/7 either.

[Elusana_Celah]

Every time someone mentions that the Japanese servers don't have these problems, I cry deep inside and another piece of my soul withers away into nothing.

NA gamers need to pay to win every chance they get so the issues of RMT are out of control here. We have rampaging pay-to-win players on the NA servers causing gil sellers to flock to us by the swarms cuz the profit to be made here is that big for them.

The real solution is to find out who is buying gil, report them and hope SE perma bans them cuz I don't want to play with people like that anymore. And please don't get mad at me for saying this but people who are selling content are giving gil a LOT more buying power which gives a significant incentive for pay to win players to buy gil from RMT... I'm sorry to say this =/

[Kosmos992k]

Monthly bans aren't enough. We need a proper spam catcher for /tells

The bans are performed on a *weekly* basis, not monthly, is that not clear? The report posted covered a 7 day period. The report isposted literally every 7 days with the ban numbers from the prior 7 days.

[Caoihmin]

Again, PERMANENT ban on buyers. You guys trying to invent ways to combat the symptom, er sellers, rather than the disease, er buyers, need to rethink logically. No offense.

[Krr]

Again, PERMANENT ban on buyers.

This is already the punishment for being found guilty of buying RMT services.

So, tell me, how will you perfectly detect all of these buyers? How will your customer support team be able to receive and respond to alleged reports of gil-buying while still being able to filter out trolls? How will players who are simply very good at hiding their activities be caught?

Logically, the returns on finding these extremely-hard to detect buyers vastly outweigh the costs. You would have to be able to detect a significant part of the demand market flawlessly and kill it flawlessly. The fact that banning buyers is impractical is why the modern MMO market, across 15 years of technological advances, hasn't killed RMT. WoW, a project with millions in profit hasn't done it yet, you expect FFXIV to?

You want to kill a buyer market? Let's talk econ.

Reducing the visibility of RMT tells makes it more difficult for the buyer market to find resources to buy. The risks of stumbling into illegitimate or irreputable sellers greatly increase when you use Google instead of in-game advertising. Most players will then think twice about giving CC information to a seller they don't know the reputation of.

Making it more difficult to send RMT tells and shouts increases the cost of operating an RMT operation in FFXIV. If you can't send /tells or /shouts till you're level 10 or 15, suddenly the process of creating spambots takes magnitudes longer. This means you're paying the same amount of magnitudes less advertising return. Guess what this does?

It raises the price of gil. What does raising the price of gil do for a buyer market? Everything! Higher costs mean less demand. Less demand means the RMT companies overall get less return, thereby denying them resources to re-invest into advertising. Eventually they'll stabilize - but at much less visibility, with a much smaller buyer market, and less profit! Which means...

At least a portion of their effort moves to other games.

[Hiruke]

So, next time you're complaining about the lack of action, consider the volume of account bans.

Pretty sure people will keep complaining until SE figures out a way to throttle tells from people who send 80% or more the same tell repeatedly and/or send hundreds of tells every minute. One wouldn't think this task to be impossible, and if it continues to go unchecked, it will eat into their revenue as new players join and then are like... wtf this game is like a giant pop-up, and unsub.

[SarcasmMisser]

Pretty sure people will keep complaining until SE figures out a way to throttle tells from people who send 80% or more the same tell repeatedly and/or send hundreds of tells every minute. One wouldn't think this task to be impossible, and if it continues to go unchecked, it will eat into their revenue as new players join and then are like... wtf this game is like a giant pop-up, and unsub.

Players have already figured out how to do this with addons, if only SE would allow them.