Gil Spam

[Kosmos992k]

Consider for a moment that if I started advertising gil for cash deals on THESE VERY FORUMS, that I would be locked and banned in a matter of minutes. Not days or weeks. MINUTES. Now consider that this isn't happening in the game that these forums officially represent. THAT'S WEIRD.

Is it? SE's practice on dealing with RMT in the past has been to allow bots to continue operating while they use their activity to trace the network of RMT accounts. That way they not only remove the spam bots and farm bots, but also the bankers, transfer accounts and command/control accounts. That's the reason those bots don't always die.

It's like people who get angry because such and such a spam bot hasn't been removed - because they can still see them in their black list. Except, permanently banned accounts are *not* deleted from the game and so will not say 'Deleted' in your black list. Why is that? Because it prevents RMT from re-using the same character names. This is pretty well known, but even so, you'll still see people on this forum every week complaining about RMT and pointing out that some spambot they reported six times 3 weeks ago is still on their blacklist. If farm bots are allowed to live longer, and the RMT group reactivates them using different command/control and banker accounts. SE can more quickly identify and remove those accounts.

RMT enforcement differs from game to game and operator to operator. It also differs based on the internal market conditions with each game. Comparisons with other games are not really like for like comparisons.

I am by no means saying that their approach is perfect, nor am I suggesting that more could not be done, for example, one-click/button spam reporting with automatic inclusion of the reported tell and user information, account based blacklist, not character based (this has other benefits, so should be a no brainer), regular expression filtering worth a damn, off-line log parsing to identify spambot accounts automatically. There are also innumerable suggestions about restricting tells/shouts/friends requests in some way (I don't favor these methods since the impact innocent players).

Stricter enforcement against players who participate in RMT, a visible indicator on the player search information to show that the parent account has been temp banned for cheating (including RMT activity) that goes away once the ban is served (would actually impose a lasting consequence on people that cheat. As an FC leader, I would immediately remove any FC member shown to have participated in RMT, it's already against our rules to participate in RMT or cheating of any kind. But it's kind of hard to catch someone who remains silent about it. A visible indicator on a suddenly absent player would enable me and other FC masters to take action - if they deem it appropriate.

That doesn't even include firing off legal action against the legal entities behind RMT in the real world (although this would be like fighting a Hydra while blindfolded), it might at least have a chilling effect on future RMT activity.

But the number one way to stop RMT activity is to stop players from buying crap from these people. While we are at it, let's stop calling it RMT or gil buying and call it what it is, cheating. The community has a part to play, if you know someone who buys gil, do you treat them with the scorn they deserve for contributing to the spamming of players?

I'm not saying SE is perfect, but let's at least give them the credit for what they do, and let's not push out any crazy theories or accusations, especially ones so easily debunked.

Same here. RMT definitely picked up the slack since the relic quest.

It's a rather vicious cycle.
Inflated prices feed into people buying gil, people buying gil feed into increasing prices because they are willing to spend more.
Crafters/Gatherers just grin like Ferengi and collect the profits, no questions asked. Guilty of that myself. Also sold basic crap for prices where I wondered how people could afford them.

Yep, and you'll see an uptick in permanent account bans for RMT advertising and illicit/RMT activity, as well as temp band against players who were found to have participated in illicit/RMT activity.