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

[balte049]

Really easy to not get banned for buying gil.

The only people who get banned are the bozos who think they can buy 100 million without being noticed.

[Orspeth]

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

This is far from my first MMO - but this is hands down the WORST I have ever played as far as RMT and botting goes. If I could at least block tells and friend requests from strangers w/o having to use busy status, I would be less annoyed. These topics need to stay on the front page, every day till something is done.

[Laraul]

The problem is RMT /tell SPAM is an annoying mess, and as of yet SE has not bothered implementing any counter measures to keep such activity under control. These could include flagging accounts that send more than five tells to five separate targets in five seconds. Heuristic filters that not only take into consideration message content, but character level, play time, etc into consideration. They only appear to rely on in game reports, which are not as easy for players to create as they should be (ie a REPORT SPAM option).

Thus, right now the only option is for people to resort to third party tools to control this garbage. And though it's clearly a violation of the ToS, SE lack of response against this SPAM would indicate they would rather turn the other cheek, then confront this issue head on.

If the only way to get their attention is to post in the Japanese forums, so be it. It would seem unlikely this SPAM would be much an issue on Japanese servers do to the language difference and weak value of the Japanese Yen compared to the U.S dollar. Why target the Japanese servers when all the customers RMT want to target are on the most populated NA/EU servers.

[Stormrider]

A few other games are proactive to reactive to rmt. Is the reactive approach more affective, I don't know. But during the crime real players suffer. Luckily in this game the only real pain is chat. They can't steal mats since mobs spawn fast enough and we don't share gathering nodes.

What I find weird in this game is most prices always go down. Games with mass rmt that we supposedly have, always have mass inflation. It is extremely noticeable when an exploit floods their coffers. But daily items are a good 1/3rd of what they were a year ago. At least on Balmung this includes high priced items to mass use items like shards.

[MugenMugetsu]

I see a lot of people mentioning, "SE doesn't want to come out and reveal their plan of action to eliminate the RMT." That's not what the point of my post in the JP forums was, and has never been the intention of any post I've made regarding the RMT situation. I'm not asking for SE to fully explain every detail of how they plan to eliminate RMT. I was just merely hoping that by making the effort to rally support from the JP community that we might bring more attention to the issue, specifically the attention of SE, and hopefully get our very first response ever from a community mod regarding the issue which I would assume to be a kind, "We appreciate your feedback and concern regarding the issue. We will be working to address the issue. Please be patient. The RMT problem will be addressed. Please look forward to it!"

Thank you to everyone who has posted in support. Your support is greatly appreciated. A VERY big thanks to Risver and Kyuven for posting in the JP forums to try to help the JP community understand what I was trying to inform them of, and ask them to help with! You guys rock!

I look forward to a day when we will no longer be inundated with RMT /tells, /shouts, and friend requests. Will that day every come? Only time will tell. Until then I hope the game retains enough subs and gains enough new subs to be very, very, successful and prosperous so that we can enjoy Eorzea and Hydaelyn for many years to come!

[MageBlack]

Thank goodness you mentioned it! If you hadnt, i dont think the devs would have ever known.

Sorry for the sarcasm but really, I'm pretty sure they know there is a problem by now. I feel for the people affected by this and hope something does get done, I posted a better reply at the bottom of the page before this one.

"There comes a point where arguing against a troll becomes indistinguishable from the troll themselves." That's how I'm beginning to feel about all these RMT posts. Fight fire with fire? Good way to burn everyone.

[Welsper59]

I see a lot of people mentioning, "SE doesn't want to come out and reveal their plan of action to eliminate the RMT." That's not what the point of my post in the JP forums was, and has never been the intention of any post I've made regarding the RMT situation. I'm not asking for SE to fully explain every detail of how they plan to eliminate RMT. I was just merely hoping that by making the effort to rally support from the JP community that we might bring more attention to the issue, specifically the attention of SE, and hopefully get our very first response ever from a community mod regarding the issue which I would assume to be a kind, "We appreciate your feedback and concern regarding the issue. We will be working to address the issue. Please be patient. The RMT problem will be addressed. Please look forward to it!"

Thank you to everyone who has posted in support. Your support is greatly appreciated. A VERY big thanks to Risver and Kyuven for posting in the JP forums to try to help the JP community understand what I was trying to inform them of, and ask them to help with! You guys rock!

I look forward to a day when we will no longer be inundated with RMT /tells, /shouts, and friend requests. Will that day every come? Only time will tell. Until then I hope the game retains enough subs and gains enough new subs to be very, very, successful and prosperous so that we can enjoy Eorzea and Hydaelyn for many years to come!

I've honestly grown somewhat used to the /tell spam... which is also partly why I'm rather anti-social as of late. I don't even look at the chat log for 90% of my time on the game anymore. Any /tell sounds I hear just get ignored, like the sound of footsteps my character makes, it's nothing but background noise now. Yeah, I could just /busy, but if I already don't notice it much at all, it really doesn't affect me to have it on or not. Plus, I tend to forget to do it, and by the time I notice, I've been hit by a hundred of them... anyone that tried to message me through any form of chat just got ignored, so oh well.

The friend requests though... I hate those. That stupid ass pop up is annoying as all hell (not to mention that saying No to accepting the request doesn't end the request... you need to do it through the friends list, so wtf is the point of the pop up asking that?), but like the /tells, maybe I'll just learn to block out that section of the screen from my notice. I will tell you one thing though, if they ever do decide to instill effective filters for players to use by choice, it'll be like playing a brand new game... since it'd be like I'm suddenly able to notice there's a chat box!

[Nyalia]

Any /tell sounds I hear just get ignored
The friend requests though... I hate those

You can turn off the sound from tells, and you can turn them off entirely if you want by making them not display in your general chat tab. I think I'm going to do this next time I get into game, after letting my friends who regularly send me /tells know that they have to use shared LSes or FC chat.

I think I have a solution to solving the friend request problem: fill your friends list with random people. If it's full, I would guess they couldn't send you requests (can anyone confirm that?). If you want to friend someone after that, they can send you a tell and you can remove a random person. Err, wait, I guess they can't send you tells if you also turn off tells... Well, they can interpretive dance in front of you. That's how you'll know to remove one of the randoms from your full friendlist so you can friend them.

Time to friend my entire FC and my three main LSes!



EDIT: Also, I was temp-banned for my previous post about the true reason SE won't take care of RMT advertising and the post was deleted. Whenever anyone points out that one little fact, they instantly delete the post and ban the poster (second time it's happened to me, and I've seen at least two other people also get that treatment). That sure makes it seem like that one little comment is quite close to the truth, and they don't want anyone to know it...

[Fortified]

All the anti-rmt posts is getting more annoying than the actual rmt spam.
Square Enix has 3000+ employees; annoying the Japanese Players is unnecessary. They're reading these posts, but they aren't going to issue a new statement every day.

"RMT spam is getting worse" I have been seeing far less spam on my server.
"FFXIV has the most RMT spam" You've clearly never played MapleStory.
"The Japanese servers have less RMT spam because SquareSoft likes Japan more" No it's because Japanese players don't buy gil and the rmt companies know this. Why spam people who don't buy your product. And Square has an American office that talks to the dev team. The dev team knows about the rmt problem. Just relax.

[Nyalia]

"RMT spam is getting worse" I have been seeing far less spam on my server.

Seriously? When do you play? In the evenings (EST), I get about one spam message every two minutes. Friend requests only come like, once every couple hours, but are infinitely more annoying. I've had five minute tell conversations that were interrupted five times by RMT spam. ... and when I accidentally send a reply to the RMT that spammed while I was typing, I keep habitually telling the RMT "Sorry, MT" before blacklisting and re-replying. <_< That's happening to me more and more frequently due to the increasing amount of RMT spam on Fairie.