Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[KisaiTenshi]

I'd assume cus they are still getting money from them. Why ban so many people when you know your going to be losing out on at least $13 a month per person?

I won't speak for SE, but I'll speak from a parallel experience.

Y'all know who the "first online auction site" is right? Well internally they have immunity policies for Powersellers that the regular sellers and buyers didn't have. Some of the largest Powersellers that are akin to RMT bots, eg the ones that *auction site* was selling counterfeits but could do nothing about unless a DMCA claim was filed by a verified rights owner. Basically such powersellers did so much business that "losing one" due to erroneous complaints was considered a last-resort. Because when an account is suspended, someone could literately be losing thousands of dollars an hour. So the internal policy was closer to "phone PS and tell them their account will be suspended if all of brand X item isn't voluntarily removed immediately"

Like in that case, the reason they can't get rid of accounts easily is because it becomes a PR nightmare to even have ONE mistake. That's why people continually see fakes posted to the site, because not enough people report them, and IP holders tend to just "batch" report once a week, giving many listings too much visibility before they are removed.

So in the case of SE and FFXIV, it's likely that some of these RMT accounts have been around since launch, with level 50 characters, and suspending them immediately isn't an option since there's a possibility it's not a bot. The Spammers however, are clearly abusing the free trial system, so there is no money lost in immediately suspending such.

In SE's case, it's likely we see the bots because many of us have resigned to the fact that they will never get rid of them within 5 minutes, even though SE has shown they can respond to a ticket within 5 minutes (when you report someone for griefing,) they never do so with the cheating reports, not even acknowledgement that the ticket has been worked.

Like that missing feedback mechanism is something Archeage kinda-sorta solved. You could report up to 5 bots (a lot of good that did when zones would literately have 100's of them) and as long as the ticket had not been worked, you couldn't report more. At some point they would batch nuke the accounts that were botting and you'd get a bit of a reward for doing so in your inbox. But the time frame from reporting to an email would sometimes be a week. So during that time a bot could have got to level 50. Unfortunately it was impossible to report "spamming" bots in that game because the report mechanism required 5 reports in a 24 period for the automatic anti-bot system to do anything... which it did nothing. There was also a provision in the game to allow "good" players (eg ones that weren't pirates/criminals) to kill reported bots in "safe" zones, but wasn't actually enabled.

Like the one thing I wish every MMO would do, is allow the PvP mechanism to kill bots. I don't care how much like griefing it looks like, but if you provide a "Engage PvP (Suspect bot)" mechanism, so that killing the bot forces it to respawn in a "jail" somewhere it can't teleport from, can't shout/yell/say from, makes it vastly easier for GM's to count the bot activity. Because a real player will actually respond to a PvP fight by fighting back or running away, while a bot will just stand there and die, because even if it has PvP countermeasures, I've never seen a bot win against a real human except by being overleveled or ganged up on by PvP combatants. (Which to be fair is a problem in PvP... period.) But in the case of Archeage, the bot activity was extremely out of control (same software people use on FFXIV) to the point that there were hour long queues caused by bots having a higher population than actual players.

[Amenian]

The Spammers however, are clearly abusing the free trial system, so there is no money lost in immediately suspending such.

Can't send tells with a trial account. These are paid accounts.

[Bluejay]

Even better suggestion. Add a right click "Report Spam" option that forwards reported messages to a log. Automatically disable every channel for a player except guild and party (including sending party invites) once they receive "X" number of reports. Have customer service review the logs for all reported messages for a player once they have been locked for spamming. If the message are spam, ban the account. If not unlock the player's account. Have a simple machine learning algorithm adjust the "X" number of reports required to lock the account to minimize false bans while maximizing true bans (Seriously, it wouldn't take more than 10 lines of code to write the algorithm). On top of that, the log of true and false reported messages now becomes labelled data to build an automatic spam filtering system (similar to what is used in email spam blocking).

[Bluejay]

Lastly, tell the player base that a new spam blocking system is going into effect and there might be a lot of false bans initially. I am willing to bet that the players would be MORE THAN happy to deal with the short term inconvenience if it meant dealing with the spam problem in the long run.

This would take a trivial amount of development and similar systems used in email spam blocking are about 97% effective. They would be even more effective here. Other games use similar systems and have had tremendous success (the ELO system in LOL is a publicly well known system similar to this).

[Nadirah]

Just take a page from TERAs book and ban ips out of China. Don't think I've ever seen an RMT tell in TERA.

Top RMT site for WoW, for example, is actually based out of Canada and IPs are proxies from there.

[Kaedan]

Just take a page from TERAs book and ban ips out of China. Don't think I've ever seen an RMT tell in TERA.

The sites are only hosted in China, due to the fact China doesn't respect the laws of any country that isn't them basically. The actual money is usually gathered by North Americans (US and Canada have the highest population of RMT "farmers") and most of the advertisements come from outside China as well.

[Seryl199]

The recent "Hi bro" RMTs have had populated areas like Coerthas abuzz with chatter, mostly joking thanks to the lighthearted manner of the RMT. However, with the expansion still fresh in our minds, I'd imagine SE would rather its players be hyping each other up about new skills and jobs, new battles and new areas to explore, rather than talking about their gaming experience being encroached upon by RMT. It's clear that RMT is persistent and resilient enough to withstand the banning practices in place now, it's been near two years and now we're neck deep in an expansion, and RMT still has a very visible and noticeable presence. At the very least, the right-click > report as spam function that has been requested time and again is in dire need.

[Sicno]

Yeah, the "Hi bro" spam is getting so bad, and worst part is that I don't think that's something they could filter without causing issues in regular conversation between actual players.

Just comes to show that whatever filtering and banning they're applying is a weak meassure to take. WE NEED the 1 step right click -> "Blacklist PLAYER" (not character) asap.

[aesteval]

I\\'ve had the opposite - Plenty of friend requests >_< Probably more than actual tells, as of the last two days.
It was so nice, all through early access... and then it started picking up.... T^T
And the blatant bot in Gridania, sitting at the Aetheryte spltting out RMT advertisements every few minutes. New players are going to see that, so easily... >_> Some may not know any better. At least the RMT bots I remember sitting Ul Dah\\'s Aetheryte were just tell bots -.-

:-/

And some extra text so my reply isn't too short.

I haven't spotted anyone near the Aetherytes yet. But then I don't pay that much attention to the chat window.

[KisaiTenshi]

Can't send tells with a trial account. These are paid accounts.

Trial accounts can still do /say 's since they are required to get through the tutorial.