Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Avin00]

Please stop this thread. SE is doing all they can to stop the RMT situation they cannot tell you what they are doing because that would be providing information to the very sellers they are trying to stop. It is the same reason your bank doesn't tell anyone the security they have. Security through obscurity.

[Adire]

Please stop this thread. SE is doing all they can to stop the RMT situation they cannot tell you what they are doing because that would be providing information to the very sellers they are trying to stop. It is the same reason your bank doesn't tell anyone the security they have. Security through obscurity.

In addition to what tocsin said, what do you think would happen if everyone suddenly stopped complaining about RMT?

SE would not feel pressure to fix it, they'd allocate less resources to dealing with it (as if their 3 people are enough to begin with...), and it would get worse.

You should know that if companies don't have to spend money to improve their product, they will most likely not do it. And who can make them have to spend money? Customers.

So long as RMT is a major ongoing issue, customers should use their voices about it in an ongoing way.

[SpiritMuse]

Please stop this thread. SE is doing all they can to stop the RMT situation they cannot tell you what they are doing because that would be providing information to the very sellers they are trying to stop. It is the same reason your bank doesn't tell anyone the security they have. Security through obscurity.

There is a lot they could say about this that doesn't involve the exact details of what they're doing.

"We understand that this problem is particularly bad for some of you and we are working on new ways to combat it," is really all we need, just an indication that we've been heard so that we know we're not shouting into nothingness and being willfully ignored.

[Crescent_Dusk]

BUSY BUSY BUSY ALL DAY ERRR DAY.

[Niwashi]

Please stop this thread. SE is doing all they can to stop the RMT situation they cannot tell you what they are doing because that would be providing information to the very sellers they are trying to stop. It is the same reason your bank doesn't tell anyone the security they have. Security through obscurity.

That's total nonsense. If they had a proper reporting system, we'd be shown that because we'd be part of it. If they had user-configurable chat filters, we'd be given the interface for configuring them. If they had server-side chat filtering, we at least would stop seeing gil seller websites and obvious gil spam in chat. If we could block Friend requests, that option would show up as a checkbox in our character configuration window. If there was a mandatory delay between /tell messages, people would occasionally get the "you need to wait <n> seconds before sending" error message. And so on.

The reason we don't see any of this is not because SE is somehow hiding it all. We don't see any of the features needed for combating RMT because none of those feature exist in the game.

The one and ONLY thing SE is doing about RMT is what they have acknowledged doing. They provide posts on it roughly every week or so. What they're doing is investigating the gathering bots and sellers and periodically banning a few of them. That's not combating RMT. That's a token gesture towards combating RMT, doing the bare minimum to allow them to brush off complaints by pretending they're already addressing it when in reality they aren't.

"We understand that this problem is particularly bad for some of you and we are working on new ways to combat it," is really all we need

No. Maybe a year and a half ago, that would have sufficed, at least for a while. At this point, we need them to do something other than telling us they'll take care of it. They've already said they are. What we need is for them to follow through and actually take care of it, not just say they are. It's time for actually implementing all the features they need, not just making vague suggestions that they're looking into it.

[Avin00]

I would also like to point out every feature they implement to combat RMT also affects the legitimate player base, it is the biggest drawback of implementing more security. Furthermore those chat filters do exist but you are unaware of them why do you think the gil sellers spam comes through as such unintelligible garbage. Also any feature you implement will be circumnavigated by someone given enough time and will. The true problem is the market that exists for it in the first place, Phoenix doesn't seem to have anywhere near the problem some of the other servers do, now I don't know if that is down to server population or if its a case that there is no market for them on Phoenix but it is interesting. I agree that SE could implement a few of the requested features but to truly solve this problem the market would need to no longer exist.

[Sicno]

I agree that SE could implement a few of the requested features but to truly solve this problem the market would need to no longer exist.

And that's something that can't be done because for starters we don't even know who are buying. And even if we did... good luck convincing them to stop buying. Your proposed solution is something that can't reasonably be done. On the other hand adding features (that have been already suggested countless times, some of them even fall under common sense) to prevent in some meassure that players abuse the game's communication system is something that CAN be done. And it's among the minimum that I would expect from a subscription based game.

[Saseal]

Please stop this thread. SE is doing all they can to stop the RMT situation they cannot tell you what they are doing because that would be providing information to the very sellers they are trying to stop. It is the same reason your bank doesn't tell anyone the security they have. Security through obscurity.

There's a difference between 'stopping' something and 'slowing' something. Having been in the QA/analyst field for a long time - a field where being overwhelmed, abused and under-rated for never being good enough is common... which is kind of whats going on here - I feel for the three people task force that have to do this, I really do. I can only imagine how they must feel if they were to ever see some of the more acidic posts about the work. But the problem is not with the task force since their power is limited. However, with what SE has provided to deal with the RMT (the 3-man task force), it's just a 'slowing' of the RMT in spurts. It's not 'stopping' the problem. This thread is meant as a message that this is a bigger problem than they think it is. Three peeps going through and investigating thousands of accounts and then their work being completely undermined when the bots come back again week after week is insane. It's like forcing a hamster to run in a wheel forever - something the bots have absolutely no problem doing.
SE needs to find a way to cut it off at the head, not just let the wheel keep spinning.
I love this game, I love everything they've done and doing with it. I'm just really hoping there's something in the works that we truthfully aren't to know about (which I understand and respect).

[Avin00]

Saseal weird we both work in QA and I feel your pain under staffed and over worked is a constant phrase.

As for chat filters that have been suggested, I assume you would filter specific phrases out key being gil. So then the seller changes his tells to g!l you filter that which then goes back and forth for all eternity, bleieve me I used to play Xi when this first started becoming a problem and it started as English and gradually degraded into the mess you see in XIV. You are right killing the market is nigh impossible and other companies have tried and SE in the past during the days of Xi even went after a few of them directly. Sadly most of them are oversees where jurisdiction gets iffy.

Its a difficult problem one that has no real long term solution in any game that has a currency. restricting new players to no tells seems like a good idea until you realize this just slows the problem as the sellers would then just level the characters up and believe me they have the time and manpower to do it very rapidly. Every solution has potential drawbacks and time needed to implement with none being an end all be all to this problem. I also suspect that they will be looking at implementing a few of these features in the near future or possibly ones that are even better but every implementation takes development time which means time away from additional content.

[Saseal]

Saseal weird we both work in QA and I feel your pain under staffed and over worked is a constant phrase.

As for chat filters that have been suggested, I assume you would filter specific phrases out key being gil. So then the seller changes his tells to g!l you filter that which then goes back and forth for all eternity, bleieve me I used to play Xi when this first started becoming a problem and it started as English and gradually degraded into the mess you see in XIV. You are right killing the market is nigh impossible and other companies have tried and SE in the past during the days of Xi even went after a few of them directly. Sadly most of them are oversees where jurisdiction gets iffy.

Nice! Fellow brethren! You deal with Automation or Manual? Or hybrid 50/50 (more than spot checking)? My co tried to get automation going with manual spot checks but that didn't fly for what we do (site testing - multi-variant + A/B testing and analytics). Soooo... manually testing a client's site a million times on a million browsers and devices it is. z___z *will cry tears of joy when IE8 is completely abolished from the browser testing standards*

One of the suggestions was to give the option to block tells from people not already in your friends list - somewhat like the option to auto-skip cutscenes you've already seen in dungeons. It somewhat alleviates the filter issue since there's only so many things that can be filtered out before it starts blocking players entire sentences with way too many flags. WHile this may not fly well for some who like to branch out to strangers, they do have the option to turn that protection off.... but then still receive the tells. I for one would die happy and would never complain again. lol

I'll certainly agree - it's a difficult problem to get to the bottom of. Others have mentioned, however, that other MMOs had spearheaded similar RMT issues (I don't remember the titles), so it is possible. I guess it just matters as to how well the same tactics jive with the code they use (I guess using the example of my co's attempts to code/write automated test scripts turning into complete failures with false fails because it just didn't work with our current tools and code as simply as one would assume) or if they're willing to employ it (I just don't see why not, other than making money off the foolishness of the bot account owners to keep subscribing >.>)