Exactly how obvious do RMT need to be SE?

[BreathlessTao]

If you ever get the chance to work in customer service, you'd completely understand why stuff isn't done "right now", a lot it has to do with the fact that customers/players report less than 1% of the bad activity they see, because it wastes their time.

See, that's one of the points. In this particular game, that too would be a much better use of assets to be allocated to. I mean the fact that the Support Desk and the report feature as well as clearing away new reply notifications - they all are absolutely clunky and cumbersome to work with. Half a minute to load, IF it loads (if not, even more, switching back and forth between tabs), and then copy-paste/type everything manually, in a text field that can't even be scrolled with a mouse wheel. Even when reporting specific issues. Yeah, improve the means to actually do the reports and when it's not a complete waste of time, people will be more likely to do it. As it is now, the sheer amount of spam we get is enough to have driven people to simply "quarantining" the /tell channels to a separate tab and muting it, or just simply going /busy, and not care about anything at all.

Excalibur has several FC that have maxxed out gil both in FC bank and on retainers... 2 BILLION GIL+ for a small group of 8~16 players.

...I'm genuinely curious about how on earth so few people can do that. O_o

[LineageRazor]

On the subject of ignore-and-report...

I strongly suspect that blacklisting DOES cause a player to be reported. Even when I don't use blacklist, I don't think I've EVER received a tell from the same gilspammer two days in a row. The average lifespan of a spammer is less than a day. Whether this is becuase that spammer is being banned, or has been removed by the gilsellers themselves to hide their efforts, I can't say, but if the former then it seems likely that SE is being informed somehow that the character has been blacklisted by a ton of people.

Here, just on the previous page, an excerpt:

The request was for anti-RMT measures that aren't band-aids, and don't harm the legit playerbase. The list you posted addresses neither of these requirements.

Band-aid:
- Word filters: These DO exist. Why do you think gilsellers are constantly spamming things like, "Visit X.Y, replace X w/ goldfountain and Y with com!!1!"? Word filters are in place, and gilsellers instantly defeat or work around any new filters that are added. notafix
- Limit tells: If tell is limited, there will be an increase in shout and say. This also does nothing to actually stop RMT, just hide them from you personally. notafix
- Hide from search: Same problem as Limit tells. RMT will simply use other channels than tell and, again, this doesn't do anything to stop their business. notafix
- Actually remove the account: Not even a band-aid, let alone a fix. As long as the player can't act, it doesn't matter if they're "immobilized" rather than outright banned. notafix
- Auto-remove from blacklist: Again, not a band-aid or a fix, just a convenience. Not one that I'll argue with, since I'd love a more convenient way to clean my blacklist, but doesn't help the problem. notafix.

Harms players:
- Limit tells: Harms newbie players who want to make new friends, or ask about the game. They can still use say, but unless they understand how friending works, they may quickly lose track of the helpful folks they find.
- Hide from search: Makes it difficult for legit players to find other legit players. Even with just the current "busy" status, I once ran into the issue where I couldn't contact a player who'd expressed interest in joining my T9 run the week before, becuase I hadn't yet friended them and they had "busy" on to avoid gilseller tell spam. While I managed to eventually get through to them with help from their FC comrades, with hide from search I wouldn't even have known they were online.

Players think they are way more clever then thay actually are when it comes to "solutions" to the RMT problem - every so-called solution that I've seen has been easy to punch countless holes through. They also are WAY too prone to wearing rose-colored nostalgia glasses when comparing the RMT problem in this game with that in other games. The grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence.

Could SE be doing more? Sure. Their RMT task force is apparently quite small (only three people, if the game's credits list them all). Hiring more people could help, or diverting other staff to the job - but hiring means that we pay more, and diverting means that game content suffers. Is it a worthwhile price to pay? Depends on who you ask.

Personally, I'm more-or-less content with the state of things as they are. RMT tells are annoying, but I can blacklist them quickly, and if I miss one they're gone the next day anyway. Cleaning the blacklist is annoying, and could be improved, but I don't have to do it more than every couple of weeks. RMT aren't destroying the economy, like they did back in FFXI in Christmas 2008, when SE FINALLY sat up and realized RMT were an actual problem - and, since the economy in this game is mostly pointless, there's only so much harm they can do even if they do get out of hand.

I'd like things to be improved, but I put RMT on a MUCH lower priority than, say, balancing Machinist or giving us the ability to use items within macros.

[odie]

There are RMT in balmung which is probably why WE can't make new characters because they are taking up all the room by making theirs. Myself and someone else caught them leveling or farming or whatever they were doing in central thanalan so we aggro ed mobs and let the aoe kill them off. Instead of returning to their home point they just warped right back to the spot they died at. They died repeatedly for about an hour.

[AlphaFox]

Ignoring doesn't help because it fills up so quickly, I've taken to moving Tells to its own tab and ignoring it, which sucks cus I get people who message me asking questions too. Would like the option for Tells from friends to be a different color to help that but regardless. As to the mention of less than 1% reporting, its cus the system takes to long. I have to fill out a farm to report someone for botting? No thanks, I'd be busy majority of my time reporting spammers and the few bots I find. Another thing is its hard to see the "mass bans" working when they are replaced so quickly, if we actually saw people being banned on the spot or making announcements from time to time saying X people have been banned for botting/rmt, least then we can see they actively seem to be working on it just put it in the same category as the server maintenance tabs.

[WinterLuna]

Yeah, I have a character on Balmung. Your example is hyperbole in the extreme.

Make a character on Mateus and then tell us it's hyperbole. I'm on Cerberus now and I haven't had ONE RMT since I've been on here, but Mateus was absolutely awful. I shouldn't have to clear my blacklist of 200/200 every day because of RMT. Some servers are absolutely bombarded with the RMTs and people shouldn't have to spent their play time clearing a full blacklist to add even more RMTs to it.

[Doki]

...I'm genuinely curious about how on earth so few people can do that. O_o

When they do merc runs of Coil/EX primals/etc at 7mil a pop, it adds up pretty fast.

[Tuathaa]

I never understood why people need to hoard so much gil when there's nothing meaningful to spend it on.

It's because there isn't a whole lot to spend it on.

[Sirfoxeh]

I just want this problem to go away, #sqex come on, a powerhouse company shouldn't let stuff like this happen to its community....

[IzzyData]

I probably average 1 whisper a minute on Siren. Why is there no limit to the amount of whispers per second you can send? They are selling 10's of thousands of whispers to every player and somehow the systems till lets them do this. On WoW they would get auto silenced and auto reported for mass spam.

[BreathlessTao]

The request was for anti-RMT measures that aren't band-aids, and don't harm the legit playerbase. The list you posted addresses neither of these requirements.

Well if you're so clever, why don't you suggest something that's not "notafix"??? I clearly said that wiping them out is an impossible goal. I clearly said I'd just be happy for some proper tools to help battle them, to make our in-game lives more bearable. And that's what I've suggested - features to make the situation less annoying. I've never for a minute believed that it's a situation that can be solved, but (and excuse me) those things go beyond being "band-aids", which is what the mass-bans are, which bleed through the moment they're applied. But go ahead, share your ideas of proper solutions then.

So bloody fed up of people complaining that nobody ever suggests anything and when someone does, it basically just gets shrugged off as stupid. At least some of us are trying here. And if you think RMTs aren't hurting the economy, you need to wake up, because gatherer bots say hello. All the checks that SE does to ascertain average wealth for prices like housing - they all include the massive amount of gil these traders deal with, since their characters are as much part of the game as anyone else's. But whatever, glad you're happy with the few thousand accounts being permanently or temporarily banned on a (bi)weekly basis.