Well, I reached out to the Japanese Community in regards to RMT issue...

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Unless the number of people that quit are in massive droves (like a few hundred thousand or more), Square has no reason to care. People quit the game all the time and when they quit fluctuates.

[Skivvy]

I'm a bit baffled by all the posts regarding RMT. Is this the first MMO for a lot of you? As the JP player stated, this is common in all MMOs, and definitely not specfic to just XIV. Since SE is constantly trying to stay a leg-up on the RMT, it would make no sense at all for them to inform the public what measures have been put into place and what exactly gets your account flagged, otherwise it would be incredibly easy for RMT to side-step these things.

Another thing, I'm not sure if all MMOs handle them the same, but from the handful I've played, they tend to do mass bannings for RMT at a single time. They will toss their net, collect what they can, and then ban them all together. Yes, that means that you'll have to endure a few things for a little bit, but we'll all survive.

And lastly, as pointed out earlier in the thread, Gil Buyers. The community itself is a huge part of the issue as we are the ones who provide the RMT reason to be here in the first place. Good luck getting people to stop buying gil though. (no, I do not buy)

[Iromi]

Yea I know quite a lot of my friends who got sick of the tells and never came back lol. Then messaged me on fb why they quit and said it was cuz the rmt tells and constant friend requests. Then compared it to wow and went back to wow.

Its weird, but it happened :x

[Nyalia]

Then compared it to wow and went back to wow.

It doesn't sound like the real reason they quit was RMT, it sounds like they just wanted an excuse to go back to WoW :P

[Riepah]

I'm a bit baffled by all the posts regarding RMT. Is this the first MMO for a lot of you?

It isn't. And that's exactly why the RMT issue in this game stands out as the worst ever seen in any P2P title. And that's rather pathetic.

[Kallera]

Yea I know quite a lot of my friends who got sick of the tells and never came back lol. Then messaged me on fb why they quit and said it was cuz the rmt tells and constant friend requests. Then compared it to wow and went back to wow.

Its weird, but it happened :x

I remember doing this in MMOs I was less situated in too. It is not that unusual for people to do.

[Nyalia]

Since SE is constantly trying to stay a leg-up on the RMT, it would make no sense at all for them to inform the public what measures have been put into place and what exactly gets your account flagged, otherwise it would be incredibly easy for RMT to side-step these things.

I dunno about other people, but I for one don't care in the slightest what they do to actually catch and stop RMTs themselves. I just want a few simplistic QoL changes so I can avoid their advertising spam, like the ability to decline friend requests from the friend request pop-up. Refusing to make changes like that one and refusing to give a reason for that refusal makes no sense to me unless they either want people to see the spam or just don't care about their NA customers.


On a totally separate note, SE's customer service on the NA servers is wonderful at responding to reports of harassment. Sure, I don't actually know if anything has ever come of such a report, but they're really quick to respond when I report someone for doing stuff like making racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or transphobic slurs. They gather info from you so they can look at the encounter in their logs, they are sympathetic, polite, helpful, and really make you feel like they're going to do something about it (there's no way to know if they do or not since they obviously can't tell you the results of their investigations or the actions they take for totally sensible reasons).

Report actual harassment, they care. Report RMT, they might send you a canned message saying to blacklist the RMT (because that works SO WELL) and otherwise ignore them.

[Gemma]

Most of the blame can be placed on people who buy gil, and the lack of punishment for cheating. It makes them think its ok, so it continues to happen and encourages others who wouldnt out of fear of punishment, to go out and buy. If someone gets a temp ban for buying gil I would love to see a small symbol by their name, it doesnt have to be permanent, but just something to shame people out of buying gil. The only way to stop it is by making it socially unacceptable.

This^

I feel if SE doesn't want to permanently get rid of the gil buyers then give us as a community a way to see who is doing it so we can choose if we want to associate with them. Even if someone from my own FC that I was friends with had this symbol you're damn right I would boot them.

It's only going to get worse in Heavensward SE, better do something soon..

[Parodine]

womp

My first MMO was FFXI. The botting and NM camping the RMT did sucked, but there was a period of time where I was getting persistent RMT style tells for a month and it was terrible. Then, the team did something magical with /tell filters (whatever they did, I dunno) and I never (key word, NEVER) got another RMT /tell again.

I don't care if they don't ban all the gold sellers. I don't care about the bots as much. I care about the /tell spam. That is something absolutely fixable.

[MageBlack]

Umm, how do we know people arent receiving perma-bans for gil purchasing? Last I heard they have and continue to do that. Not every single case, sometimes its removal of said gil. IIRC some time after launch of ARR people who sold stuff on the market that was bought with Gil seller money were being docked those funds. It was illegitimate money so it was removed, even the people who just innocently sold things on the market were targeted.

I get the frustration with RMT people but if SE were to publicly detail their plans to deal with RMT all that would do is give them the heads up to counter it or work around it. "The government publicly announced their secret plans to attack ISIS." It frosts me how people get so uppity about it, just put yourself in SE's shoes. Not only do you have RMT screwing with their economy in the game causing them a crap ton of extra work to remove, block, prevent, etc them but you also have the people buying the gil that perpetuate the problem, then to add insult to injury, the playerbase constantly tearing into them and blaming them for "not doing enough", as well as the corporate people who are also breathing down their necks about it.

I'm pretty sure SE is even more unhappy about RMT than you are.

Just my 2 gil.