Returning Player - Gil Seller Spam

[ArcMoon]

It's constant stream on Faerie, via tells and Say alike. I have filled and emptied my Blacklist until I'm sick of doing it. I see the same characters in cities over time, so they are not getting banned. Even if I disallow tells, I still have to see it in Say. This spam is out of control and I feel it's ridiculous it's not being dealt with. In no other game have I experienced anything remotely close to the volume I do in this one.

[Kolaina]

maybe if the GMs were more than a few people sitting in a support desk type of deal waiting for a call (report) and had characters on varying servers outside the JP data center, they could be more actively fighting RMT as they experience the annoyances some of us have to every 1-5 minutes.
i get it, they're trying to be slick and follow paper trails and all that crap. but how many advertisers do you think share an account with the mules? if people wanted to buy gil theyd visit the site because the tells we get are from bots who are very unlikely to reply back. doubtful there will be trade discussion to keep as evidence
if we had active GMs on server from time to time, they could mute accounts (which are most likely just bot advertisers and probably not mules), and maybe ban on spot. save us some grief

[Blood-Aki]

It is hilarious to me that you both missed one of her points, and then in trying to "counter" another of her points, you instead reaffirmed her last one.

didn't miss any point, nor was a i trying to "counter" i did in fact reaffirm her last post as clarification, Try not to jump to conclusion so quickly next time, It may help.

The point you missed is that SE is in fact aggressively trying to address RMT, however the gil spammers have the advantage both in player backing (sadly) and resource management (read: there are far more gil spammers than devs trying to chase them all down...due to the fact SE is one company and there are dozens upon dozens of Chinese RMT "companies" running this scam.). The amount of man-hours they would have to dump into this endeavor in order to match the time spent by gil spammers would exceed the amount of time the dev team responsible for adding new content takes to release new patches and such. Honestly, SE needs help, and who is there to do that but us?

Once again, was not a point missed, (you do read, don't you?) They can't completely stop RMT, no one can unless everyone stops buying gill (impossible, unless currency is overhauled)

The point YOU missed it seems, is they aren't trying to stop rmt with any NEW method, then what they are doing, even FFXI RMT slowed down considrably after a while to the point they got angry enough to retaliate.

Also, if you intend to claim that they are not truly trying to stop RMT, please give us an example of what you'd prefer them to do. Preferably one that wouldn't break the game for the rest of us...

There have been tons of suggestions on this matter, but they don't really listen, stopping tells from low level players, serverly limiting the amount of currency that can be traded at a time, FLAGGING accounts that trade large amounts of gill in quick succession that have not been active long, instantly catching bots that use obvious programs to spam, and float/teleport/ move at impossible speeds, the list goes on, instead they just "ban these bots" and nothing changes on our end, they may be getting rid of them to the point they don't spill out like a overly full cup of water but it's not slowing them down in the least bit with the current method.

People still get tells every day, and in large numbers. on some servers.

If they truly want to hurt RMT they can simply track down the BANK accounts, that hold all the gill, that not only hurts them but makes them take far longer to get back up. Instead they seem to be only focusing on the spam bots which RMT they know full well will get banned weeks later. (that's why they come back instantly because they know they have plenty of time before that one will vanish)

There isn't a single method they can do that won't affect the playerbase in some way, that's just how it works.

[Laurima]

Had more than usual on Phoenix today and yesterday, despite creation being locked at the moment >< reported them, got the garbage blerb back from Support, and minutes later, messaged again from the same names ><

they should be banned on sight tbh, people using these damn bots to buy gil should be banned for life too, I'm sure they have logs covering transfers, and finding large money transactions from said keyboard smash names to annoying 'players' shouldn't be too hard to find IMO.

[Felmyst]

No RMT problem on Balmung Server. Server is permanently close to character creation. We do see them sometimes but I think they tired to pay for having to transfer a character on Balmung just to advertise. If RMT are there... It is because player buys it. So the real problems are players, not SE. Gotta love to buy all those carry run huh?

[Cristiano]

So the real problems are players, not SE. Gotta love to buy all those carry run huh?

Yet, it is SE's responsibility to effectively handle the problem, which they are not. Just looking at the messages, they aren't even hiding the URLs other than replacing o's with 0's and adding a space. These could be detected by the server and blocked - but instead, it's just a stream of the same messages from two or three different sites.

Why have they never added a report spam button instead of just blacklisting? Blacklisting doesn't seem to have much of an effect - as someone mentioned earlier, you still see the same people days later in chat spamming.

[Demeos]

Personally, I've disabled /tells and their notifications sounds without looking back. Sadly, if you spend any time near the market boards, you'll start seeing advertising in /say chat as well. Even if SE were to just get rid of the in-game economy (make everything earned through questing/dungeon-crawling), the Gil-sellers would just start selling runs or leveling services.

After much thought, the only way I can see for SE to put an end to third-party RMT dealers would be for SE to deal with Gil-buyers.

Let's say someone buys Gil:

At some point within 24 hours of the character in question; (being flagged by an SE staff member) regardless of where they are; will automatically go into a cut-scene. A pirate walks up to said character and hands said character a scrap of paper and runs off. Close-up of character's hand reveals the scrap of paper with a black dot on it. End cut-scene. Piece of paper is now in quest inventory, but there's no quest in the journal. Next dungeon they enter, at some random point and at the moment the group leaves combat, a cut-scene plays for entire group. The gates of hell shoot out of the ground, slowly open, two metal hooks connected to chains shoot out of the gate and hook themselves into the character with that note in their inventory(or characters if there's more than one) and are then dragged into the gates, view of their faces horrified as they claw and scrape at the ground but to no avail. End cut-scene. Character is no longer in group or in dungeon.

That character has been deleted and the account is temporarily banned.

[Stormrider]

Quality work.

The question I have and I am sure other players do is SE current banning methods working?

They have always considered the wait till we can grab and announce X amount. While other games that seem to have less spam and bots go with the reported/banned policy. All you can see is less spam and bots. Is it because they act instead of react? Or do they have a better filter system and it is just an illusion that its better? Or maybe it is simply other games spend more money on man power that deals with instant banning. I blame SE for lots of stuff I know they are complacent about. I am not sure this is one. With out knowing why other games handle it better.

[Gunspec]

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.

It's funny how players are so keenly aware of how RMT are abusing the game in these specific and simple ways, but game moderators take no action. It would be like riding on a cruise ship that has a leak in the hull near your room, but the staff just ignore it rather than plugging the hole. They wait a few weeks before announcing how many holes they plugged, hoping for a round of applause from the patrons who are all knee deep in water.

At this very moment I could tell you exactly where a half dozen botters and spammers are doing their business without even needing to look, and yet the staff don't even attempt to solve the problem directly.

The question I have and I am sure other players do is SE current banning methods working?

They have always considered the wait till we can grab and announce X amount. While other games that seem to have less spam and bots go with the reported/banned policy. All you can see is less spam and bots. Is it because they act instead of react? Or do they have a better filter system and it is just an illusion that its better? Or maybe it is simply other games spend more money on man power that deals with instant banning. I blame SE for lots of stuff I know they are complacent about. I am not sure this is one. With out knowing why other games handle it better.

All mmos have RMT problems, but the easiest to combat is blatant spam. Many mmos lock accounts immediately upon reports of suspicious behavior, and the RMT would be forced to blow through many more accounts to keep up a high level of spam. Eventually that would cut into the RMT's profits. To stay profitable, the RMT would have to behave less conspicuously in the game, which is really what we all want in this type of thread.

Less conspicuous RMT wouldn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't have as large an effect on the in-game economy. They would still find ways to farm money, and sell to any player who thought to seek out such services on google, or who saw a random pop-up on a fan website with shady host services. Square Enix seems to prioritize fighting RMT's effect on the economy (with questionable results) so they let the scum harass paying customers constantly to make them easier to track down. It's like the police allowing drug pushers to work openly on the street, just to follow them back home and arrest their bosses.

So we get an uglier game that appears poorly managed on the surface, with the suggested but unproven benefit of less influence on the in-game economy. A poor tactic, but its all we get.

[Astral145]

SE doesn't care.... If they did they wouldn't have added a crafting part to the relic quest. 6 mil to 8 mil for crafting parts o.O seriously? What do you think was going happen when they added that? Just saying if SE really wanted to combat RMT then they should start looking at how rare mats drop and also place personal housing into instances and leave FC homes for towns..... and lower the God awful prices already.