The Silence Penalty

[Luxpheras]

Greetings!

Thanks for all the feedback and ideas on how to better restrict and prevent spam messages in FINAL FANTASY XIV.

Could square introduce a similar system to FFXIV if an rmt bot spaming tells or standing next to the marketboard spaming in /say is reported multiple times they are then restricted and cannot talk to any player untill investigated by square it could be a solution to the problem of rmt what do you think?

We are pleased to share that the dev. team is currently looking into a new system to address RMT advertisement spam, and we're planning to implement this in the future. Rest assured, we're making sure that this system won't inconvenience normal players.

Please continue to share your thoughts, and we will keep you posted with any future updates.

[Dumbledoremd]

Greetings!

Thanks for all the feedback and ideas on how to better restrict and prevent spam messages in FINAL FANTASY XIV.



We are pleased to share that the dev. team is currently looking into a new system to address RMT advertisement spam, and we're planning to implement this in the future. Rest assured, we're making sure that this system won't inconvenience normal players.

Please continue to share your thoughts, and we will keep you posted with any future updates.

This is great news thanks for the reply rmt is still a big problem on low/med pop servers

[TaranTatsuuchi]

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.

Part of me hopes we can use the upcoming context menu report from the player search...

All those delicious rmt bots just sitting there, all displayed in a nice list for reporting...

[Niwashi]

Part of me hopes we can use the upcoming context menu report from the player search...

All those delicious rmt bots just sitting there, all displayed in a nice list for reporting...

But what is it that you could report from there? That a character exists? I don't think even spam bots put spam in their search info message, and unless they do, there's nothing you can see from player search that would be reportable.

No, the chat box is the best place for it. For the spam bots, it's the messages they're sending that are reportable, so it's easiest to report those where they're at. And for farming bots, well, those really need to be spotted by SE themselves who have access to the server information.

You can report exploits if you see someone doing something that would clearly be impossible without hacking the software, like fighting or gathering from below the ground or something. But in that case, you have to write up an explanation of what they're doing that would be reportable. That explanation means it's not as well suited to an automatic right-click report feature. (Being able to right-click on a character or their overhead name to initiate a report filling in fields like their name as well as the server, time, location, etc, but leaving the description field for you to fill out yourself would still be helpful, but that's a different feature from just reporting them directly from the right click menu.)

[MaeIsMean]

Greetings!

Thanks for all the feedback and ideas on how to better restrict and prevent spam messages in FINAL FANTASY XIV.



We are pleased to share that the dev. team is currently looking into a new system to address RMT advertisement spam, and we're planning to implement this in the future. Rest assured, we're making sure that this system won't inconvenience normal players.

Please continue to share your thoughts, and we will keep you posted with any future updates.

Are you going to remove the entirely-too-prohibitive "You Can Only Mail People On Your Friends List" restriction? How about allowing us to mail our alts? How about allowing friends to bypass /busy? How about having FC members receive the same benefits of friends (unique nameplate color, ability to send mail, bypass /busy if this is implemented), without me having to actually friend my entire FC?

[Maxipep]

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.

[MaeIsMean]

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.

Me, all the time. Almost every day. I log in. I might step away while it loads. I might step away for up to 30 mins. I have kids. Sometimes they are keeping busy so I think I can log in. Sometimes they see me log in and suddenly decide they need a 3 course meal for breakfast. Sometimes I can get caught up watching TV or reading articles, and don't move in game for a while. Or I might be deep in a great conversation with my FC or a friend and don't move. So you're gonna boot me for that? And if I do it twice in a day, suddenly I'm a bot?

Not everyone plays this game with max efficiency. Sometimes, some of us log in, and do something for a few mins then AFK to take care of RL, then come back to play for a few mins, rinse, repeat.

[AutoWhit]

Me, all the time. Almost every day. I log in. I might step away while it loads. I might step away for up to 30 mins. I have kids. Sometimes they are keeping busy so I think I can log in. Sometimes they see me log in and suddenly decide they need a 3 course meal for breakfast. Sometimes I can get caught up watching TV or reading articles, and don't move in game for a while. Or I might be deep in a great conversation with my FC or a friend and don't move. So you're gonna boot me for that? And if I do it twice in a day, suddenly I'm a bot?

Not everyone plays this game with max efficiency. Sometimes, some of us log in, and do something for a few mins then AFK to take care of RL, then come back to play for a few mins, rinse, repeat.

I can confirm this lol

[Nuna]

Me, all the time. Almost every day. I log in. I might step away while it loads. I might step away for up to 30 mins. I have kids. Sometimes they are keeping busy so I think I can log in. Sometimes they see me log in and suddenly decide they need a 3 course meal for breakfast. Sometimes I can get caught up watching TV or reading articles, and don't move in game for a while. Or I might be deep in a great conversation with my FC or a friend and don't move. So you're gonna boot me for that? And if I do it twice in a day, suddenly I'm a bot?

Not everyone plays this game with max efficiency. Sometimes, some of us log in, and do something for a few mins then AFK to take care of RL, then come back to play for a few mins, rinse, repeat.

I can also confirm this. Kids wait as soon as you sit down to call you for something. -___-

[Anyaira]

I believe we should look at this from another perspective.

Instead of trying to find a way to recognize and ban RMT advertising characters, it would be much, much simpler to add a chat filtering option to the character menu.

This filter should allow to choose to what chats it has to be applied to, be it a single chat, some specific ones, or even to get them all filtered out.

The filter should include a number of options, I would personally like to have these:

Filter by Level (maximum among all classes) [choosing in ranges of 5 would be ideal]
Filter by Job [wether the character has none, or by specific jobs]
Filter by Newbie Status [wether they are still a newbie or not]
Filter by membership of Free Company [wether they belong to your FC or not, potentially to certain FCs we might choose/write]
Filter by presence within our Friend List [self explanatory]
Filter by Presence within our Linkshells [self explanatory]
Filter by players within the Newbie Network [self explanatory]
Filter by Mentor Status [wether they have a mentor status on DOL, DOW/DOM or DOH]

This way, not only are we able to lock out RMT advertisers from sending us whispers, but we might also be able to profit from this by being able to filter the chat conversations to what we want to, such us talking to specific players with certain jobs to which we might have some questions, or requesting crafts, or whoever knows what. I admit this can seggregate the population, so maybe some of these options should be restricted to the /say, /yell, /shout and the /tell chats, since they're the ones mainly used by RMT advertisers.

I also believe this filter should be client-side only (though some options might incur in message reception lag when selecting specific filtering options), not only would the servers not get any extra load, but additionally, this way the log is still generated and SE can analyze what the RMT advertisers try to say, and at the same time, by analyzing the different setups for the filters the users have configured, SE might just be able to directly log only the RMT messages and study how they usually write them, in order to ban them more efficiently in the future.


Well, I'll cross my fingers so that they consider my proposal seriously!