SE, how hard is it to eliminate the bot spam?

[ElHeggunte]

Putting a band aid on a sucking chest wound will not stop the wound from sucking air. Blocking the Gil seller spam directed at individuals will not stop the Gil seller from sending that spam out.

If you want to get rid of the spam, you *have to make selling Gil an uneconomical proposition*. You HAVE to remove all profitability from the sale of Gil in order to get them to leave. Anything less will not solve the problem. The tells are not the problem - the people controlling the bots sending the tells are.

And how would you do that? Even games like Black Desert where there is no player-to-player trading and the system controls the market price of all items they still have regular RMT spam. Of course they also give you the ability to make your own chat filters, but that doesn't stop the RMT and bots from existing.

There's no surefire way to get rid of RMT that doesn't also involve completely screwing over your players, and even then the RMT are sure to find a way around whatever measures you put in place. Unfortunately as long as you have lazy players who have more money than sense you're always going to have RMT in some capacity.

[Laurima]

SE should start selling gil, cut the RMT bots prices in half at least. would solve a few problems tbh

Employ people to scan transfer logs and I'm sure they have logs for character transfers, large gil transfers from a very low level player to any other player, ban, boom job done

in worst case scenario, start permabanning the people buying the gil 1 strike out.

[Destous]

So u wanna restrict the communication capabilities of new players when the game is the most confusing(subjective).

Do u hear urself?

Since when do you need to spam /tells to level 60 players sitting in Foundation and Idleshire as a fresh character? I want to restrict that intrusive type of communication until after a certain level attained in-game, because it's completely unnecessary below a certain progress point while leveling. New players will still be able to communicate with people they meet along the way, and respond to /tells sent their way. Try to think.

[StrejdaTom]

Considering no other MMO has achieved it, I would say pretty hard.

The only way would be to restrict normal players (a few tells a day, a few shouts a day etc.) and I personally don't want that at all.

[Destous]

Considering no other MMO has achieved it, I would say pretty hard.

The only way would be to restrict normal players (a few tells a day, a few shouts a day etc.) and I personally don't want that at all.

Uh, nope. WoW so successfully prevented bots from using /tell spam that botters resorted to using scripts that would cause the bots to leap to their death outside of Orgrimmar in a pattern that spelled out the gold selling site's name with the corpses.

[NaesakiAshwell]

Uh, nope. WoW so successfully prevented bots from using /tell spam that botters resorted to using scripts that would cause the bots to leap to their death outside of Orgrimmar in a pattern that spelled out the gold selling site's name with the corpses.

Thats some strange dedication on the Botter's part.

[Destous]

Thats some strange dedication on the Botter's part.

Yes, and Blizzard did it by using the same chat restrictions for low level characters that I'm suggesting. While it's true that botters will always find a way to advertise, it's also true that means can be taken to make the advertising less intrusive.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

I'd be happy if we just got the ability to set our own chat filters. I am unable to use tells or respond to ready checks in the game because I must use /busy to prevent intrusive rmt spam. The blacklist is an ineffectual method of combating rmt spam when they periodically just make a new character to replace the old. If the blacklist was account wide that might be more effective but as it stands /busy is the only truly effective means to block rmt but at the cost of rather vital chat/game functions.

[ElHeggunte]

Yes, and Blizzard did it by using the same chat restrictions for low level characters that I'm suggesting. While it's true that botters will always find a way to advertise, it's also true that means can be taken to make the advertising less intrusive.

And none of your ideas will do that. All they're going to do is screw over new players for no reason because arbitrary level restrictions don't mean anything to RMT who will easily bot their way to the required level anyway. We already have anti-RMT restrictions that don't work and only make life for players a hassle (I'm looking at you, friends-list-only mailing), we don't need more. If you want SE to add a meaningful way to limit RMT spam you should be asking them for something like custom chat filters instead.

And last I checked WoW still has RMT spam too, not sure why you think Blizzard eliminated them. They simply spam Trade chat instead of sending whispers since most players hang out in cities. Unfortunately, unlike most other games FFXIV doesn't have any kind of global chat channel (Novice Network notwithstanding) and I would assume it's inefficient to post spam bots in every single zone so the RMT inundate us with tells instead.

[Felis]

The WoW Token option was something Yoshi mentioned as well - HOPEFULLY he's still looking into that =\

So long you don't pay playtime with it and you have to farm them ingame to buy untradeable stuff.
Like instead of 5m gil you buy a house with tokens you get from 700 expert dungeon runs (or with 10k red scripts for the pure crafters)