Ultimate RMT Spam Killer.. Us.

[MashAuria]

I do agree that the current method of reporting is tedious, but I still think that by limiting the 'Report' button to incoming-tell-only, one can negate most abuse.. Any any other abuse would be handled on a case-by-case basis.

It's easy to tweak the solution into something that's no more abusable than the current 'Report Harassment' function in-game.

I submitted a RegEx to them in-game a while ago that would've caught most current-gen RMT spam, but it's still flawed because the game tells you when your message is flagged as spam, lol.

That's a sh!tty thing to have happen to you, I'm sorry.

Your answer: But for my idea to affect you in your scenario, they'd have to have a full party+2 AND you'd have to /tell each of the members.. AND each one of them would have to report you in the same manner, in less than 30 minutes. The chances of the stars aligning in such a way are slim. I'm not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE, but it'll be far fewer reports of abuse than reports of RMT spam that the STF and GMs are currently burdened with.

So you'd have to tell 10 of those people, and each would have to report you, all in less than 30 minutes, because they can't report you until you send them a tell.

[Whiteroom]

Please re-read, carefully, the OP as I stated the first time around.. This 'Report as RMT' option is ONLY available on INCOMING TELLS. no /shout, no random chat. Just incoming /TELLs and Friend-Requests.

So it's impossible to click 'Report as RMT' unless the person you're reporting has sent you a tell.

Troll 1: /tell player1 hey bud, how have you been! That coil run was awesome last week!

Player 1: /tell troll 1 sorry, you must have the wrong person

Troll 1: /report rmt


Troll2 : /tell player1 thats an awesome looking top, where does it drop

Player1: /tell troll2 thx, sastasha nm

Troll2: /report rmt


And yes they would do it. Think of all the dumb, waste of time stuff you have seen trolls do to piss people off. You need to be able to look at this from the perspective of a troll. Not "Hey, I wouldn't abuse this, so no one would."

Pretty soon, players stop responding to tells. And now we have a troll spam and rmt spam problem. Remember the rmt are constantly creating new characters regardless, so this would have little to no effect on them, while giving the trolls another toy.

Not to discourage from thinking about solutions, but if you can't look at it from all sides, it probably not going to be much of a solution.

[Dererk]

I think your forgting still the fact that said abusers cluster together.

All that would be needed is for one person to have their cluster buddy's send a few tells the victim takes the bait because their reall names not omgsell.booooo sends a tell in return then boom they have been the target of this system of yours and are locked out from doing stuff.

I'll admit your ideas are good in theory its too flawed to the point it be used to harm legit players. Wer don't live in a perfect world where we can trust people to use stuff like this as intended they will find away to twist it to make it fun for them by ruining another's time.

[MashAuria]

Troll 1: /tell player1 hey bud, how have you been! That coil run was awesome last week!

Player 1: /tell troll 1 sorry, you must have the wrong person

Troll 1: /report rmt


Troll2 : /tell player1 thats an awesome looking top, where does it drop

Player1: /tell troll2 thx, sastasha nm

Troll2: /report rmt


And yes they would do it. Think of all the dumb, waste of time stuff you have seen trolls do to piss people off. You need to be able to look at this from the perspective of a troll. Not "Hey, I wouldn't abuse this, so no one would."

Pretty soon, players stop responding to tells. And now we have a troll spam and rmt spam problem. Remember the rmt are constantly creating new characters regardless, so this would have little to no effect on them, while giving the trolls another toy.

Not to discourage from thinking about solutions, but if you can't look at it from all sides, it probably not going to be much of a solution.

Troll3, Troll4, on and on until Troll10, in less than 30 minutes from the time the first Troll clicked 'Report'? (Each individual 'Report' will expire after 30 mins, so you have to receive 10 unique reports within 30 minutes.)

Creating new characters wouldn't do anything against my idea because the reports are against the ACCOUNT.. the SE account, not the character. I'm well aware they create a toon, spam, log out, create a new toon, spam and repeat.. But this flags the SE account, not the character.

I think your forgting still the fact that said abusers cluster together.

All that would be needed is for one person to have their cluster buddy's send a few tells the victim takes the bait because their reall names not omgsell.booooo sends a tell in return then boom they have been the target of this system of yours and are locked out from doing stuff.

I'll admit your ideas are good in theory its too flawed to the point it be used to harm legit players. Wer don't live in a perfect world where we can trust people to use stuff like this as intended they will find away to twist it to make it fun for them by ruining another's time.

So 15 reports in 30 minutes. That's sending a tell to a unique person every 2 minutes.. That would take some fantastic coordination. And like I said, the harassee would simply file a Harassment report, the GM would see the people flagging the innocent player and disable their SE account from ever-again being able to file my 'Report as RMT' option.

So 1 person gets trolled, group is unable to troll again.. Unless they purchase another copy of the game, anyway.

I am looking at it from all sides, and I think it's easy to create tweaks to the system (as with any system) and punish the trolls at the same time.

There is no perfect solution, and no matter what you do, some innocent's going to suffer.. Even the current RMT /tell spam pattern-matching catches innocent people. But with what I propose in place, the rare instance of a troll first-timing an unsuspecting innocent will forever bar that troll from being able to do it again.

What's left are trolls unable to abuse the feature, while all the legitimate players report away and RMT stops as soon as it starts without ever blocking legitimate /tells.

Lastly, the harassee is only blocked from sending /TELLs or Friend Requests for an hour, unless they contact a GM (which will be fast because they're not dealing with spam reports anymore), this doesn't in any way hinder their LS or FC, /say, /shout or /party chat. They continue playing with a minor interruption in /tells until a GM clears the report.. Meanwhile trolls are forever blocked from being able to do it again.

[MashAuria]

I do greatly appreciate your guys' criticism though, as it's helping me to flesh out the concept and think of solutions which would make the game a far less irritating environment for all.

So thank you for shooting holes in it.. though I do wish you two would've helped me fix it rather than bashing

I edited the OP with a summary of the feature, with your guys' concerns addressed.. If I'm missing one, please let me know.

[MashAuria]

Shameful bump- Had a GM move this for me.

[KisaiTenshi]

Rather than coding in more and more regex to flag/block RMT spam.. Why not leave it up to the players?

My idea is rather simple and in my opinion, ultimately, fool-proof.

Add the option "Report as RMT" to the right-click menu for incoming /TELL and Friend Request names, but limit reports against players to one per person.
Again, this clickable-option is only available to /TELL or Friend-List Request recipients.

I assure you that pretty much everything has been suggested, but the only thing that has changed since launch is throttling of spam into the shout/yell.

No absolutely not. All people would need is some of their friends to use this to harass people.

This would be used to bully people it wouldn't do any thing for rmts since they would just creat a spam bot to replace that bot.

Only way to combat rmt is to ban their ISPs and people to stop buying Gil.

No, the only way to combat RMT is to have equal copyright laws in all countries. As long as data isn't seen as being "stolen" in China, nothing will stop it. They can do it with impunity because all SE can do is ban and delete accounts. If they were doing it from the US side, they would be charged with copyright infringement easily. The ToS states that SE owns ALL the data, including the user data. Therefor nobody has any right to buy or sell any part of the game except SE itself.

The people who buy from RMT often end up with their credit card numbers stolen, game accounts stripped (used to send spam,) and all the money drained from their accounts if the card or Paypal is attached to a real bank account. RMT is used to launder money from the proceeds of crime, nothing less.

But by the time any charges could be brought against anyone participating in RMT, they've long since disappeared under the radar. Sure the website may still be up, but if you go look at the WHOIS information for these gold farmer sites, they are behind sites like cloudflare (which is also used to hide the origin of a lot of other highly illegal-everywhere criminal activity) with contact information in mainland china. That's like every box on the "you can't do anything about it" bingo card.


You can avoid the trolling problem by pretty much using the same karma mechanism that sites like Newgrounds, Slashdot and Reddit have had for nearly 20 years.
1) You only get to suggest a ban once per player
2) Every time you correctly get someone banned off the server, you score a karma point
3) Every time your action is wrong, you lose a karma point.
4) Players who have the highest karma points (eg most right) are prioritized and scrutinized less
5) Players who have the lowest, or negative (eg most wrong, trolling) deprioritized and scrutinized more.

So lets say someone is a jackass, in the beginning, everyone is at zero, so the spammers that are reported the most heavily will be investigated as if they were the same weight as everyone. After a few people score a few correct points, the ones reported by those are trusted the most.

If someone is accidentally (or maybe purposely) reported, banned, and then they come back because their ban was overturned, whoever was responsible for it in bad faith (eg lying) would have their karma reduced or reset to zero.

More importantly, players with NO karma reporting a player with lots of karma, would be considered questionable and no automatic action would be taken.

But as anyone can see, the obvious problem with this solution is that it's interstitial in nature. If the people who do all the reporting and have all the karma are being the shield against the community, they should be being paid for it. And not a token month of free service. Like right now to do a "correct" report, often involves spending an hour carefully documenting everything... which is why nobody does it for spammers. By the time the report is filled out, the spammer has long since disappeared. On some servers, those "friend request" spammers are in the hundreds, is that per day or per month? We may never know.

All SE has to do is screen the highest scoring karma people for accuracy and how "engaged" they are in the community. Like any other community, the loudest dogs have the weakest bite.

[lordoftheapes79]

I posted almost this exact thing on another thread a few days ago. As far as abusing it goes, it wouldn't autoban or anything stupid like that, once the predetermined number of "RMT" reports is hit within the alotted time frame, it would automatically notify a GM, who could then look at the tells this character has been sending, THEN ban if its an RMT. Its really not hard to tell the difference between RMT and a player when you're looking at the tells they've sent.

[Cian]

i think this would work if the full rmt /tell automatically sent to a repository whether the player is online or off.
so more like a right click to forward the tell you just received.

[Windklinge]

rmt has a general rule of thumb on ALL mmos : aslong as there is a NEED for big amounts of ingame money there will always be RMT since people will buy the ingame currency rather than spend thier free time farming something they basicly farm each day at work rl. the only way to stop RMT on any mmo is to COMPLETLY remove the need for its currency for ANYTHING. thats the only way to stop it since people wont stop cheating if given the chance at all. except if there is no use in said cheating. ff 14 actually has very little gil impact on endgame maybe save for pentamelded accs and housing and of course people buying raid clears like t9 which is still a roadblock for no reason anymore.

aslong as gil gives people something they want RMT wont stop. sad but thats a plain fact.