The Silence Penalty

[LineageRazor]

It is my understanding that something like this is in the works. I can't remember the article, but I seem to remember SE announcing a planned Report-As-RMT option on the right-click menu. If enough individuals use that option, the offending individual is banned or silenced (can't remember what was stated) until they can be investigated.

The problem is that this is just a placebo. It may make players feel better, but RMT are ridiculously good at churning out new bots. SE already bans thousands of accounts per week for being RMT (just check out their biweekly "Actions taken against RMT" reports on the Lodestone), and most likely the vast majority of them are RMT bots.

Anyway, we should get our click-to-silence option sooner than later, but I'd be surprised if it makes much of a difference. And, hopefully, large FCs won't use it as a tool to punish legit players who happen to offend one of their members. ("All right, everyone, Some Body was rude to Freshie Fresh in Ifrit Hard - everyone report him as RMT. Let's get his ass banned!")

[Niwashi]

My only concern is that some might use it as a way of abusing others. For example, someone could get their linkshell to constantly report someone they just don't like.

Harassment is already a bannable offence, so not many people are going to directly send their harassment to the GM team. Do you really think anyone is going to convince a whole group of LS or FC members to all give up their accounts and access to the game just in order to attack someone who would themselves only get temporarily silenced by it? The victim gets a silence until the GMs check the reports, at which point they're un-silenced while everyone who reported them is banned. I just don't see that happening much.

The problem is that this is just a placebo. It may make players feel better, but RMT are ridiculously good at churning out new bots. SE already bans thousands of accounts per week for being RMT

They only keep churning out spam bots because the bots are profitable to them. As soon as they're not, they'll quit replacing them. The current system is that a spam bot can spend weeks sending out thousands upon thousands of ads before they're finally banned. That's long enough to bring in some sales, so replacing the spam bot is just the cost of advertising.

With this system in place, however, as soon as the bot starts sending out its first few tells, people start reporting it and it's silenced within a few minutes (possibly faster if it's using /say), with only a few messages having gone out. They're not likely to bring in any sales in just those first few messages.

As soon as it costs more to set up a new spam bot account than the amount that account can add to their sales, they're going to stop doing it. (The RMT itself would still continue, but the spam advertising it wouldn't.)

[Gramul]

Do you really think anyone is going to convince a whole group of LS or FC members to all give up their accounts and access to the game just in order to attack someone who would themselves only get temporarily silenced by it?

Well I certainly hope not, but it's not exactly unprecedented.

[LineageRazor]

They only keep churning out spam bots because the bots are profitable to them. As soon as they're not, they'll quit replacing them. The current system is that a spam bot can spend weeks sending out thousands upon thousands of ads before they're finally banned. That's long enough to bring in some sales, so replacing the spam bot is just the cost of advertising.

Weeks? Hardly. Your average spam-bot lasts only a few hours before getting banned, and pretty much never lives longer than a day. You're correct, though, in that this system would reduce this lifetime from hours to just minutes. I still believe that RMT have the resources to continue to proliferate their spam-bots at this enhanced pace while still remaining profitable. So, a placebo it remains.

Gather-bots and level-bots tend to live quite a bit longer. They do not directly harass players, and so players don't care as much about them, see no need to blacklist them, and under this new system will probably be much more likely to neglect reporting them. Which is a shame, as these bots are how RMT actually makes the gil that they sell. Getting these guys regularly banned would be much more harmful to RMT than scooping buckets of spam-bots out of the spam-bot ocean.

Of course, the BEST solution would be a punishment system directed against gil-BUYERS that is draconian enough that only an idiot would buy gil. RMT only advertise, because they have customers to sell to, after all... I don't see this happening, though, as it can get ugly when a company that gets a reputation for mass-bans of its own "legitimate" playerbase. :P

Or just remove the "Send Tell" option from Player Search > Right Click. Their job becomes much more difficult if they have to type names or use other methods. The reason they're so "efficient" is because they use tools to search/spam tells, making it harder to automate makes it harder for them to work.

As Amnesia noted, this would not slow spam-bots down in the least. There aren't any human players behind these bots, right-clicking names and choosing "Send Tell". That would be way too inefficient. These are fully-automated programs. They most likely use the Search menu to bring up a list of the names of everyone on the server and methodically send tells to each name, one by one. The only folks likely to use the right-click method are players. So this solution would harm RMT not at all, while forcing players to type out wretched Rogadyn names by hand.

[Niwashi]

Weeks? Hardly. Your average spam-bot lasts only a few hours before getting banned, and pretty much never lives longer than a day.

Well, the few times I've checked, every bot that spammed me lived a lot longer than that. If I forego blacklisting them, and instead make a note of their names to compare with later spam, then the same bots will continue spamming me throughout the day and the day after. A couple days at a time is as long as I've actually kept track of it that way before giving up and blacklisting them, so I can only say definitively that their normal lifespan is more than a couple days. (Including "more than" in that assessment is because of how trivially low the chances would be for every bot I encountered having been just created right at the moment I started keeping track of them, then staying active throughout that time only to be banned immediately as soon as I stopped tracking it.)

Plus, we know from the messages SE themselves put out that they only ban a few spam bots each week, nowhere near the number who are active. According to their last message about it, for instance, they banned 616 spam bots over the course of an entire week. That's less than 10 per server. At best guess, it looks as though it would take them a couple weeks or so to clear out the spam bots that are active at any given time, meaning that's about how often the bots need to be replaced. I think your "a few hours" estimate is just wishful thinking. The numbers just don't support the idea that they could be clearing them out multiple times per week, let alone multiple times per day.

You're correct, though, in that this system would reduce this lifetime from hours to just minutes. I still believe that RMT have the resources to continue to proliferate their spam-bots at this enhanced pace while still remaining profitable. So, a placebo it remains.

If you mean they'd still remain profitable overall as an RMT company, sure. But the spam bots themselves would no longer be profitable to them. In order to be worth using those spam bots, each bot has to attract enough new buyers who wouldn't otherwise be buying from them, for those buyers to add more to their net profit than the cost of the spam accounts and effort to set them up.

[I'm going to be making up all the numbers and percentages below, but they only need to be reasonable enough to illustrate the point, and I think they're close enough for that purpose:]

The vast majority of players won't buy gil. There's various reasons, whether it's because they're afraid to break the ToS, too principled to break agreements or do something that harms the game's economy, or the most common reason, that there's simply not much incentive to spend extra money you don't need to just for extra gil in a game where most playstyles provide plenty of gil in rewards to cover any costs you'll come across. So lets say around 1% of the population are potential gil-buyers.

That wouldn't mean that 1% of a spam-bot's messages bring in revenue. Gil buyers who have already looked into the RMT market are generally going to buy from wherever they'd already decided to buy from, so spamming them is either unnecessary or ineffective. The real target market for these spam messages is new potential gil buyers who can be persuaded to use the spam-bot's site for it. And persuading them generally takes a lot more than one message. It either takes inundating them with enough spam that whenever they think of gil-buying, your site is what immediately comes to mind, or else it takes messaging them at the ideal moment when they just decided they'd be interested in buying gil but haven't yet looked into where to do so, and are willing to just take the advice of the next message about it that they see. Since trying to hit a perfect moment like that is also achieved by repeated messaging, in either case a spam bot needs to send lots of messages to potential buyers before they'll get a sale out of it. So let's say it takes a hundred such messages to get a sale from them. (It's probably more than that, but a hundred is a nice round number to make the point with.)

Having 100 messages reach the 1% of players who might respond means the spam bot needs, on average, to send out 10,000 messages in order to generate a sale. But it still wouldn't be profitable yet at that point. To be more attractive to customers, RMT sites have a lot of low-cost deals, relying on volume rather than high prices to raise profits. If a spam bot only attracted one new customer and that customer spent $3 or $5 once and was never heard from again, it wouldn't cover the cost of the spam bot's account, let alone any of the other overhead costs. To achieve profitability, they have to either bring in a whole bunch of these small-fry customers, or reach one of those rare customers whose appetites for gil is insatiable and who will keep coming back to buy more and more of it, spending more on that than on the game itself.

So if we figure around 10 new customers is the tipping point for making a spam bot worth the cost of setting it up, that bot needs to remain active long enough to send over 100,000 messages before it gets silenced or banned. Currently, they last long enough to do significantly more than that, so they're a good deal for the RMT companies, who will continue making more of them whenever their current ones finally get banned. If, however, we could report a spammer as easily as blacklisting them and after 20 or so such reports the spam-bot's account was silenced, that wouldn't work. Even if a few people are a bit slow to report them, so they manage to eke out 30 messages by the time 20 of them get reported, that's still only 30 out of the 100,000 they would need in order to be worthwhile to the companies creating them. They're unlikely to even reach a potential gil-buyer, let alone convince them to make a purchase.

The RMT companies are in it for the money. They're not going to keep spending money on spam bots that don't bring in more in profits. As soon as SE fixes the system to prevent a bot getting out enough ads to be profitable, the RMT companies are going to move their advertising budget elsewhere (to web sites that won't kick their ads off after the first few page views). Getting the spam out of the game wouldn't end RMT (though it would cut it down a bit), but at least we'd be able to play in peace without that constant annoyance.

Gather-bots and level-bots ... Getting these guys regularly banned would be much more harmful to RMT

That's true, but it's also a lot harder to do. Spam is clearly identifiable at a glance. But the activities of a bot that's gathering gil aren't all that different from those of a legitimate player who's gathering gil. SE has to watch them long enough to verify if the patterns and timeframes involved make it clearly a bot. (And then they monitor longer after that to watch where the gil goes in order to identify buyers.) It takes a significant amount of time and effort that can't be streamlined away to something that can be done with a click, the way getting rid of the spam-bots can.

It makes sense to take the low-hanging fruit, the part that can readily be eliminated. That's especially true when, as you pointed out yourself, the spam is the part that's directly harassing players and which players therefore care the most about. Spam is a bigger detriment to the game than the actual RMT that it's advertising. (What's more, getting rid of the in-game spam would cut down somewhat on the RMT itself. The reason RMT companies go for this relatively expensive form of advertising is because it's effective at bringing in more sales. The corollary is that without it, there'd be fewer RMT sales.)



(Oh, man. I really didn't intend this message to grow so frickin' long. )

[LineageRazor]

*Statistics*

To be perfectly honest, I've always been amazed that RMT are able to make a profit - but they do, somehow. They're paying for all these accounts to do various things, just about everyone in the game knows they're putting themselves at risk by buying gil, there's no good REASON to buy gil since it can be made quickly and there's nothing to spend it on but fluff - and yet people still buy, and in sufficient quantities to pay these expenses and then some.

I don't know RMT's profit margins. However, I'm guessing that neither do you. NEITHER of us has any REAL idea how badly this penalty against shout-bots will hurt RMT. We can only speculate. My speculation is that while it will cut into RMT profits, it won't be nearly enough to curb their activities in the slightest. RMT tells will be as vigorous as ever, the only difference being the rate at which RMT deploy new bots. Your speculation is that this will hurt RMT enough that shoutbots will no longer be economically viable; that they will withdraw shoutbots from the playfield entirely and rely on other forms of advertising to get the job done.

Well, this new feature is coming, so I suppose time will tell which of us is correct. I'd be delighted if you're correct, and RMT shouts become a thing of the past - but I'm not gonna hold my breath!

If SE were serious about removing bots it would have done the following ~ any player who hasn't moved for 15 minutes would be logged out, and any player who logged back in and didn't move or progress in the game for another 15 minutes would be logged out and flagged as a bot, who in their right minds would log into a game, stand in the same place all the time and accumulate zero exp. A bot.

This is a pretty terrible idea. I, personally, have had FC and LS conversations that last much longer than fifteen minutes, during which time I don't move around much, if at all. I usually remain logged into the game when I prepare dinner, or make a quick fast food run, both of which can easily take longer than fifteen minutes to accomplish. Heck, I've stayed still for more than an HOUR waiting for FATEs to pop for relic progression - can't leave the FATE area, after all, 'cuz if it pops while you're away, the other twenty individuals waiting for the same FATE will slaughter it in thirty seconds. There are many, MANY legitimate reasons to stand in place for long periods of time in this game.

Meanwhile, if this was implemented, all shout-bots would gain a "wiggle" function which causes their character to run in a tight circle every five minutes or so, all fully automated, all inconveniencing RMT not in the slightest.