Returning Player - Gil Seller Spam

[Kosmos992k]

I posted this the other day in a topic that I can no longer find. So I will repost it here;

Three points to make before the numbers.

1. SE is absolutely going after RMTs
2. SE is absolutely going after players
3. RMT have to be making a crap ton of $$ to finance the accounts they burn

which means that the biggest RMT issue is the inconsiderate idiots who continue to buy gil.

Here are the numbers (I opened every RMT action report from the Lodestone and copied the numbers of bans to an Excel Sheet for simple analysis);

2013

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 15,288
• Illicit activity : 13,655
• Temp bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 1,814

*
*- there was a wave of discipline related to content exploits, position hacks and radar apps in the first 4 months of the game's life, which accounts for a decent lump of these temp bans.
2014

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 26,735
• Illicit Activity : 37,852
• Temp Bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 59

2015

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 45,823
• Illicit Activity : 230,075
• Temp Bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 2,334

2016 (based on 1 report covering Dec 24 thru Jan 6th)

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 1,564
• Illicit Activity : 9,220
• Temp Bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 2

Cumulative totals;
Permanent bans
RMT Advertising : 89,410
Illicit Activity : 290,802
Temp Bans
participated in RMT/illegal activity : 4,209

The reports always indicate whether a ban was permanent or temporary, as well as a notification accompanying the temp bans, that egregious offenders will be permanently banned.

It's impossible to conclude exactly how many of the temp bans are gil buying related, but we can see that they tend to rise and fall with the RMT activity, so I believe it is fair to say that the number of temp bans is representative or temp bans primarily handed down due to gil buying.

It's clear that SE is in fact trying to cut off RMTs. Despite the number of posters complaining of no action, SE has permanently banned almost 90,000 accounts for RMT advertising, and another 290,000 for some form of RMT/illicit activity - presumably including accounts that transferred gil and accounts used for the farm bots. That's a total of around 380,000 permanent account bans handed down by SE, or approximately 13,200 accounts a month since FFXIV ARR went live.

For every one of those 380,000 permanent bans and over 4,000 temp bans, someone within SE's team had to investigate and validate the circumstances and offence before authorizing a ban on the account. That takes time and effort. So how about we stop saying that SE doesn't do anything against RMT?

There are plenty of good ideas for further measures that SE could take, though I won't list them here. Two things remain to be said. The first is that RMT is similar to hacking in that you can take all sorts of security measures, but it's a constant battle as each new weak link in the system is exploited. The more intrusive the measures taken to combat RMT, the more negative the impact is on players. Secondly, RMT would not advertise if there was no market for them to exploit. No matter What SE does, as long as a significant portion of the community are willing to pay RMT for gil or other things - in other words cheat - the RMT groups will remain active. Until we can a community stop players from engaging in RMT, RMT will live on.

[Felis]

It got much better after SE removed the possibility to use /tell on a trial account.
But now the RMT buy the base game (ARR) for just $5 and are back in the /tell business.

[Chimeric]

Servers that are frequently closed to new character creation don't have nearly as much gil spam.

I don't know that I'd say that; Excalibur has toned down a bit recently (so far as I've seen; kinda been taking a break from FFXIV for a bit), but it's one of the hardest servers to get on to, and I can remember obscene amounts of tells at points.

[AlphaSonic]

I think gil seller spam only happens in NA servers. I'm on Zodiark and I rarely get a tell.

[Xanikk999]

Since posting this thread, I've gotten 3 spam tells in under 5 minutes on Diabolos.

I'm on Diabolos as well. I have to be perma /busy to keep my sanity.

[Kosmos992k]

I'm on Diabolos as well. I have to be perma /busy to keep my sanity.

As someone else said, this may be because character creation is available for Diablos, so RMT can go there, where servers that are already very highly populated and therefore commonly have character creation restrictions have a relative lack of RMT Spam.

I don't know that I'd say that; Excalibur has toned down a bit recently (so far as I've seen; kinda been taking a break from FFXIV for a bit), but it's one of the hardest servers to get on to, and I can remember obscene amounts of tells at points.

Remember though, they do open all servers for new characters at times, it depends on the population of players in the starting zones.

[Jetstream_Fox]

On Jenova it's every couple minutes i get RMT tell spam. Sometimes i get 2-3 right in a row. Limsa ALWAYS has a RMT bot spamming /say near the aetheryte as well.

That's partially because Jenova is smaller, more populated servers don't have as rmt issues because the server locks character creation.

[OlyverW]

I still get tells but I no longer see them as I muted them and moved them to a different chat log its a piss poor stopgap as I can miss legit tells but its better than the spam

[Blood-Aki]

snip

that is there typical placebo style of doing it, RMT knows their bots will be banned, so after the 10k get banned they have 10k more ready to go and the cycle starts over again, its an ineffective method they have been using since the start of the game, and it will keep being ineffective untill they actually start trying to get rid of them, and 5 years later we will still see those "we have been banning these easily replaced bots" with no signs of spam slowing, get used to it.

If you want to get away from spam, you have to be on a server that is character locked most of the time or jp data centers.

And as you can clearly see from those numbers they just keep getting worse each year, because to many lazy people buy gill.

[FOOLK1LLAH]

Look on the bright side, at least you're not one of those poor sods on Mateus where RMT spammers pop up every 5 seconds... Wait a minute, I'm on Mateus! AAHHHHHH!!!!