Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[BreathlessTao]

I know the special task force works hard, but the situation on many servers just hasn't improved at all in a full on year. Can we please have better means of dealing with this? The available methods suggested to us thus far just aren't effective or sustainable.

^ this. So very much this. We still only have the one /busy to "deal with it", really, and I don't think it was meant as a countermeasure to RMT spam, to be enabled permanently when one's online and playing. (And let's not even mention how utterly horrendous the in-game Support Desk is to use.) While on the other hand, there are methods suggested by us, many times over, at least some of which I'm pretty sure are completely rational and wouldn't be hard to implement either. Yet SE doesn't seem bothered to even acknowledge any of them. It's very frustrating.

[Khalithar]

Looking forward to the tells from people on friend list only. Having to play with my tells/whispers turned off isn't very fun. Nowadays to chat with someone privately I have to invite them to party, it's rather irritating.

[vigioX-Sun]

I remember back in 1.0 the way to destroy RTM was if certain amount of ppl report the user name of the rmt(was done from system settings but i dont remember too well),for example if that person got about 50 reports that account will get block ,was something like that i cant be sure was long time ago,i think a system like that can work pretty good.

[Zeonx]

Seems they are at it again with the spamming invites to friends list.

I cancel they re-invite up until I black list them, this is a form of harassment I think SE should really do something about this problem already.
I shut off /tells they invite me, I log out I come back I don't feel like /busy they spam me anything I do they find some way to annoy me.

I wish they would add to the General / Battle and event section put a Friends/linkshell and Fc all in one section that way I can change it from general to that and they cant spam that unless they are my friend fc or LS

But SE you really need to give us a option to shut off and on friends invites cause RMT gonna spam that invite button after cancelling its a problem.

[Niwashi]

I wish they would add to the General / Battle and event section put a Friends/linkshell and Fc all in one section that way I can change it from general to that and they cant spam that unless they are my friend fc or LS

You can do that already for your FC and linkshells. (Not for the Friends part, though, since there's no chat channel associated with the Friend-list.) Add another tab and put whatever you want there. We're limited in the overall number of tabs we can have. (I think 5 is the max, IIRC.) But you can control what messages go to each of them.

Personally, I removed /tell from my "General" tab, leaving system, advancement, loot, etc. messages as well as the chat channels I'm more likely to be interested in (Party, FC, linkshells, Shout, Yell, and Say). But then I added another tab, which I just called "Chat" which includes all the player chat type messages (including /tell there). I usually stay on the General tab, but can switch to the Chat tab now and then to to check /tells just in case someone sends a non-RMT tell.

Some people have asked for the ability to allow /tell only from those on their Friend list. Personally, I don't see how that accomplishes much. None of the real and legitimate /tell messages I've ever gotten have come from people on my Friends list. They've always been from strangers. So blocking /tells from strangers isn't much different than blocking them entirely, which we can already do.

A more flexible version that achieves the same goal as that request might be to separate out /tells from Friends and /tells from non-Friends as two different categories in the configuration of which messages go to which tabs. That could allow things like /tells from Friends going to the General tab (or whichever you usually watch) while /tells from non-Friends get relegated to another tab you only check occasionally. Or you could assign the sound associated with them to only occur if the /tell was from a Friend. (And for those who want to, this would also allow leaving out /tells from non-Friends entirely, so they don't appear at all. It's not the way I'd use it, but some people might.)

But SE you really need to give us a option to shut off and on friends invites cause RMT gonna spam that invite button after cancelling its a problem.

This should still be added. The frequency of the problem dropped off quite a bit when they restricted free trial characters from sending Friend invites, but it doesn't seem to have stopped it entirely. And anyway, we should be able to choose whether we want invites of various sorts (Friend, FC, LS, Party).

This isn't just an anti-RMT tool, though that's certainly one of its purposes. It should be available in general. Some players who don't want to join an FC yet, for instance, get annoyed by blind FC invites which might be coming from well-intentioned players recruiting for good legitimate FCs. The invites can still be annoying to someone who doesn't want them.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

words

Having tells set to friends only CAN help. Not every single friend of mine is in my FC or linkshells and sometimes I want to talk to a specific friend in private.

[Niwashi]

Having tells set to friends only CAN help. Not every single friend of mine is in my FC or linkshells and sometimes I want to talk to a specific friend in private.

That's important and I wouldn't want to block it. The reason I said making it Friends only wouldn't help is because I also wouldn't want to block private conversations with other people I'm playing with, helping, or who are helping me.

Separating it out into two categories lets us keep both while just displaying those from Friends more prominently.

[AeraLure]

There's really no excuse given that it's a paid subscription game. They need to start banning the IP addresses. There's only a few sites that they use. There's now a bot standing at most marketboards and the newest problem, as mentioned above, is friend invite spam.

[Maxipep]

One way to help speed things up would be an auto fill, I.E. the time, the world your in, your name etc, and before people say that wouldn't work because you're not always where the incident happened I say this, you have to edit it anyway so you may as well start with all the fields that can be filled in filled in and edit the rest.

[Laraul]

No -- they are NOT a necessary evil. I should not be constantly bombarded with unwanted private messages.

I think they meant RMT, not the the /tells. RMT itself isn't bad unless done in excess.

The gil spammers use bots for farming mats and artificially manipulating marketboard prices -- flooding the economy with gil to those with cash and making players staying within the rules poor.

This is just stupid. RMT don't have the power to manipulate prices. Even if they we're able to, it would be counterproductive to drive the prices down on materials. They want prices to be HIGH, making it more likely players will turn to them for gil. People I suspect whom are most likely to buy gil are the ones who don't want to spend the time doing mat farming to begin w/.

And I doubt RMT use bots to earn gil. Most likely they get it from buying gil from players willing to sell it them for real money in return. A google search will show that there are plenty of places willing to exchange your gil for cash! It's these type of players who probably are the ones who use bots.