The Silence Penalty

[Morzy]

Jagex called this muting in RuneScape. it works.

[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.

[Kio]

There used to be an automatic log out if you idled, it was super annoying. Also, crafters often sit in one spot for a while doing something repetitive and not gain exp for it. I'm sorry but your suggestions would just hurt honest players more than the bots. They just hop onto any one of a billion alts they have the moment they are impeded. What would be more effective is GM's actively investigating reports of bots. Bots are pretty distinct in their appearance and actions it would just take a GM a short time of observation to make that determination and deal with them accordingly. To be honest I'm not certain why these reports aren't taken more seriously in the first place.

[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.

[Nayout]

The same to comment in forums Wow, this system if not checked before could fall into misuse of this as what happened expulsions system BG or dungeons.

[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

[Maxipep]

There used to be an automatic log out if you idled, it was super annoying. Also, crafters often sit in one spot for a while doing something repetitive and not gain exp for it. I'm sorry but your suggestions would just hurt honest players more than the bots. They just hop onto any one of a billion alts they have the moment they are impeded. What would be more effective is GM's actively investigating reports of bots. Bots are pretty distinct in their appearance and actions it would just take a GM a short time of observation to make that determination and deal with them accordingly. To be honest I'm not certain why these reports aren't taken more seriously in the first place.

But a crafter wouldn't be Lvl 1, as for the super annoying comment about being idle, imagine you are trying to log on to your world only to be told it's full, and when you do log on you find over 100 people AFK. It's not hard to log back on

[KitomiSaitichi]

I like the idea of community dictated moderation. 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.
If they can prevent that kind of abuse, then I'm all for it.

There is an easy way to mitigate this.
The frequency of messages, the number of users telled to, the discentrality of spammers and the number of previous interactions initiated by the player to the spammer before the first tell received are some easy factors to consider.
Further first-level passes and checks include a low account age or moderate account age with no high level or an inactive account that suddenly logs on as red markers.

From fact by observation, we know that bots consistently send messages on a periodic basis to multiple players. A normal player is more sporadic with their tells, and usually only whispers one or two people at a time at most. Spammers might use locations of cached players' names or simply an observer that parses everyones' names nearby, while players typically tell to people they met already or had interacted with on a per-frequency basis much higher than spam bots. This could be from dungeons, from free company invites, from trading - whatever the case. Spam bots are more likely to be lower level players, simply by virtue of mass creation being the more economical choice when choosing to spam messages than initiating any effort in obtaining a certain character level to seem like a 'real player'. Organic players don't just pop up one day and tell many random players. They do quests, they move around and stuff. Metrics like dungeons done, quests done, achievements done, etc can correlate to a certain player profile. Deviants after sufficient analyses of these bots can come up with a profile that just doesn't add up, creating a complexity factor hurdle that needs to be overcome with better programming to skip through these hoops and loops of red flag heuristics, effectively lessening the impact of spam bots altogether.

After a player-based 'vote', we could add an automatic test that followings through the aforementioned metrics/profile that is being weighted against, and then finally confirm it to be a 'bot' or not and quickly silence them (while having them on their screen show as spamming messages). We could also add a second metric that determines the reputability of each said player after confirming some random samples of 'autoconfirmed silenced bots', and players with low reputability, either stemming high correlation of a subgroup like [A, B, C friendship; A, B, C free company; A, B, C linkshell) ganging up on people or reporting 'organic players' could simply just have their report weights be zero.

Kicking AFK players is not a systematically sound solution. Secondly, 'spam bots' must mimic keyboard input, thereby negating the 'AFK' arguement completely. Organic players do AFK at random intervals, they do not follow any predetermined threshold or steps. However, from a probablistic perspective, people are more likely to be AFK after a certain period of time from logging in more so than when they just logged in. Since players logged in typically don't feel burned out from playing yet, and they are more likely to have less time waiting on them like going to work or having to do other responsibilities, factoring in that most people decide to block in their game time during the day when that time is a leisure block and as you progress through it - there are more likely to be interruptions like calls, and whatnot.

Curbing RMT activities is also possible. If the marketplace is a place to transfer currency, then we can infer that if we take the 7, 15 and 30-day trending prices of various items, and take the weightings of the price by each respective unique buyer, and set a % threshold over the average and median price like 5000% on item X, then we flag all these buyers who sell 10 gil priced items for 100000 gil or something like that. Additionally, a very disproportionately low amount of people would ever set their selling price to higher than the lowest going price, although people do put them at the median 50% percentile of the list (i.e. a list of 10 prices), or better - rarely do they set a price the highest of the market and over a magnitude of 10 times or more unless they're buying out the market. Secondly, it's more likely that these gil sellers are using these proxy measures because of the level of convenience and lack of tracability. Players that do more than one purchase transaction of this type, are, more than likely not by mistake, and are bots themselves.