Square Enix - You okay bruh?

[TrajanVerus]

Dear Square Enix,

As a player who has just started recently, I would like to make a simple suggestion. As I read the forums, I have found that little to nothing has been done to aid the player in combating RMT spam in an efficient way. It seems that it was once much harder to blacklist RMT's but, in the case of friend invite spam, it is still torture to go through the steps to blacklist somebody who has sent you a friend invite. If you didn't already know, this is exactly why the RMT's use this tactic... (yes, dot dot dot because I feel like you guys aren't really taking this seriously) My suggestion is to give us a way to swiftly blacklist somebody who has sent us an invite. My suggestion is very simple and should not require quantum physics level coding.

Signed,
Trajan Verus

[Buff_Archer]

I think the high number seen above isn't indicative of how many gil buyers are on the server so much as the availability of open character slots, and the low cost to high profit margin ratio they seem to earn where they can just keep generating new characters to bug us at an insignificant cost to themselves. That's what would make this stop, if SE can make it where it's no longer profitable to do what they're doing, they'd allocate their resources towards RMT in other games.

My server Diablos isn't that high population. Last week there were like 2500 weekly Cactpot tickets sold, if that gives a rough indication of how many active players there were last week. If only 1/2 of people who played that week bought a ticket, that means around around 5k people playing or so... not a perfect way of gauging how many people are active in a week on my server but it's the only info I have to work with. So based on 2500 weekly tickets sold should be safe estimating 5-10k actual players that week at the MOST.... so then if you think about what the actual number of people who bought gil in that same week... even 1% of players seems too high, but I'll use that as my worst case estimate... so say out of 5,000-10k players last week, 1% bought gil, that's less than 100 customers spread out amongst the various RMT companies... if they spent a few dollars each, that isn't much money an individual RMT company actually would have made from my server. Except you have to consider that this is practically free money to them because they can do this on multiple servers at no cost, and if they had to actually spend money to create all these accounts, the profit margin would be gone and so would they. Far more RMT accounts exist on my server than the number of actual gil buyers, and if they could just make it cost a damn dollar to set up each new trial account and implement a system that fast tracks banning them, the economics of this will change drastically. The numbers above are estimates as I said, but I don't think they're unreasonable estimates.

[KremlinDusk]

Getting banned for asking that SE properly ban people who break rules. That would be meta.

Well, then here's where I look forward to getting a meta ban and I go down in history as Lord Done Goof'd. But no, honestly I think it needs to be talked about because it really is ruining the game. We don't even have addons that were supposed to be out 5-6 months after release which is what we were promised, which would have helped combat constant spams from these people.

[CYoung187]

Not to be that guy but, you're going to have to remove all those names from that screenshot or remove the screenshot entirely. The admins will ban you for player shaming, even is it's RMT. D:

Edit: Unless of course, they changed their stance on that matter. If so, carry on. Nothing to see here. >.> <.< :>

Go away, nobody likes that guy. Let the mods be the forum police.

[Felis]

Not to be that guy but, you're going to have to remove all those names from that screenshot or remove the screenshot entirely. The admins will ban you for player shaming, even is it's RMT. D:

Edit: Unless of course, they changed their stance on that matter. If so, carry on. Nothing to see here. >.> <.< :>

I think it is not about the names, but that OP want something against friend request spam. But seeing that the names are also URL address for the RMT site, OP should edit that picture.

SE should realy give us a "Reject all active and coming Friend Requests" option. Also a "Reject all Friend Requests from players lower than level #"

[StouterTaru]

The Gilsellers just don't care anymore, they even have it in their character name that they are selling Gil

This isn't anything new, a different website did the same thing about a year ago. It made it easier for a mass ban.

[Firepower]

I didn't really mind the /tell spamming since they added an easier way to Blacklist from the chat box and the fact that auto AFK means I don't get any tells while waiting for duty finder anyway, but this friend list adding bugs me a LOT, first you have to decline it, then decline it again to remove them from the list, then blacklist them. Not to mention it gives them their own little popup on the side of the screen because it's a friend request.

I'm not sure how you could fix this so easily, perhaps just making so people can't send friend invites until over a certain level. Allow them to ACCEPT invites from higher level players but don't let them invite people until level 15, considering the game is pretty much completely solo as a new player from 1-15 anyway. Running from fetch quest to fetch quest and killing 5-10 of X monster all done solo it doesn't seem likely that most people will be sending friend requests until that point anyway, unless they have specific high level friends that can send them the invite in the first place. 1-15 on your first job with the main story and class quests is very fast anyhow and takes no more than a few hours, so shouldn't inconvenience or discourage any legitimate new players but, Gilsellers are unlikely to waste a bunch of time to send friend requests on an account likely to be banned quickly.

[Gunspec]

So many things SE can and should do, but there will probably never be fixes to this stuff.

1. Make friend list and blacklist account based rather than character based. Blacklist them once, don't see them again until they buy a new account.
2. Make RMT spam an offense that receives immediate punishment. Any account identified as sending spam gets an immediate lock, owner cannot play until "investigation" is finished. No waiting around for monthly wave of RMT bans, just lock the account immediately and move on.
3. All names associated with banned accounts should automatically be purged from friend and blacklists. Why should I clean out my 200 name blacklist everytime there is a mass ban of these clowns?
4. Apply more reasonable post limits to player /tell and friend invites. Yes, within a month of 2.0 release there were limits added to how many /tell and /shout a player could do each minute. These limits are still so incredibly generous, however, that within 10 seconds myself and three friends all receive a /tell or friend invite from the same RMT spammer, despite being different classes and in different zones. He must have sent several hundred tells per minute to hit all of us at once. The only /chats that shouldn't be given post limits are /party and /linkshell.

We probably won't see any of these fixes, however. While hard working devs such as Yoshida are constantly utilizing game design ideas from outside the normal Japanese game industry, the account and server side of FFXIV is still firmly rooted in the "we don't understand the problem so we won't fix it" corporate mentality that seems to plague the industry. I've had to create three separate SquareEnix accounts (mogstation, members, store) just to play the game, NA server space has constantly been short due to company suits not foreseeing the high demand since day one, and RMT spam is being ignored due to a Square executive thinking it is normal to have a million pop-up windows on his yahoo.com homepage. It's literally a blind guy saying "I don't see the problem" while hundreds of awesome developers under him are working to make the best game possible.

[AdamFyi]

But seeing that the names are also URL address for the RMT site, OP should edit that picture.

That's true. Now that you've pointed it out, OP should really blotch out part of the names if they want to keep the picture. Otherwise they're going to have to remove it on the grounds of RMT advertising. D:

SE should realy give us a "Reject all active and coming Friend Requests" option. Also a "Reject all Friend Requests from players lower than level #"

I'm still waiting for this. SE please deliver. kthnx.

[DarkDedede]

You'd think they would be able to detect which characters are sending out an unnatural amount of tells or friend requests, or detect those accounts that are being blacklisted by enough players, withing a given period of time.