Enough is enough, give us proper tools to deal with spammers

[OllieWoods]

Agreed, out with the gil spammers.

They are flies, we need flyswatters, not needles.

[Amalise]

The trick to letting players review RMT spam is not letting them review reports from their own data center. Then, they can never be reviewing a report about anyone they know. And if they can only ban players through the report that they get from another player from another data center (no direct bans), then it's even harder to abuse.

<lots of things>

I completely support this solution; however, there is one aspect that needs work. SE uses these gil-spammers as the initial point to investigate gil farming enterprises. Without this front end, how do they find the farming networks?

[Niwashi]

SE uses these gil-spammers as the initial point to investigate gil farming enterprises. Without this front end, how do they find the farming networks?

Well, they do track the gil of RMT gathering/farming bots to find where it reaches the hands of RMT buyers (which is part of why bot reports appear to go unaddressed for so long), but the spam bots are on separate accounts (deliberately kept separate because they're so much easier to identify and the RMT companies don't want their gil sources compromised).

About the only thing SE can learn from a spam bot is the website address of where gil buyers can go to purchase from them. But the RMT companies are going to be advertising that somewhere, whether it's in-game or not. If they hide effectively enough that SE can't find even their website address, then not many players are going to find it either, and not much RMT will be going on through that site. Advertising is the sort of thing that can't be both hidden and effective at the same time very well.

[ArcadiaBound]

Everyone should "Like" the post from MaeIsMean to vote it up!

[Sida]

I have to disagree with the suggested time limits for chat habits. At least such time limits should be lifted when chatting with a person either in the friendlist or FC. I culd agree them being reasonable when sending tells to people I don't talk with regularly.

[AeraLure]

The need to IP ban the addresses of repeated bot use. There's only 3-4 RMT sites I see advertised. Banning accounts will never solve the problem because of free trials and the ability of RMTs to buy another game or get a free trial.

[MaeIsMean]

This right here is why simply telling players to put the spammer on their blacklist does not work.



In the span of 12 minutes, I received the same spam message from 3 separate individuals. Blacklisting the first would have done NOTHING to prevent me getting the second two messages. Please, SE, do SOMETHING about this. Even if you don't ban the accounts quickly, at least give us the means to report them quickly, or if that is just not in the cards, allow friends and FC to bypass /busy so I can just turn that on and ignore them ALL!

[HarleySykes]

it's much simpler than that, remove the Player Search function, that's it, i haven't found any player using it but my guess is RMTs use it to /w everyone as everyone logged in appears there, --> Player Search is a RMT TOOL <-- why does it even exist? and if you DONT want to remove it, allow us make ourselves unsearchable

[Xenora]

SE does work to implement server-side filters to detect keywords from known RMT tells and automatically block them but the turnaround time on this process seems to be quite lengthy.

I would really like to see a feature extended to clients where I can enter my own filter keywords. For instance if I could filter the keyword "U'sd" which I see in the above poster's image it would block all of those tells from my client. My chat log has actually had that same RMT tell it for the past week now so such a feature would have given me a whole week of quiet :P

I know that the RMT change their tell format every so often but it is must easier to block a unique string from their new format once a week then it is to right click --> blacklist 5+ times/hr.

[Amiaze]

i... remove the Player Search function, that's it, i haven't found any player using it...

That's a very drastic thing to do. I use it all the time to locate friends when they first subscribe to the game, or to locate players whose /tells I missed for one reason or another if they've gone into a duty.

If we're to say that the Player Search function is the issue, then I would say that it shouldn't allow you to enter in a "blank" entry. I've received a number of FC invites from people nowhere near me, and I realized that they were just going to the search bar and hitting enter, allowing them to see a list of everyone online at the time. I'm not sure if RMT bots even use game functions to send out /tells, but that's certainly one way to do it.

But I digress; I don't want the function removed. Instead, give us an easier way to report bots. I used to report them all the time, but lately it's been so bad that I couldn't possibly stop to do it.