Reports do nothing

[KageTokage]

Random thought. Why doesn't the site have their own bots sending periodic reminders in shouts/yells that it's a massive ToS violation to buy/sell gil from third parties, and that it can/will cost a person their account?

Because they assume people are smart enough to read the ToS before they start playing.

SE's track record of enforcing the ToS has been horribly inconsistent in several regards (Particularly when it comes to punishing cheaters), so there's little to no fear of actually getting banned for any reason other then harassing other players (And even that isn't consistent).

[DeaconMoore]

Sadly they are never going to win the war against RMT.

Come on now that's not true. Other games have won the war against RMT. Wildstar won it recently. Warhammer online did as well a while back as did City of heroes, Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies, Matrix Online... It's totally a winnable war.

[KageTokage]

While it's almost impossible to truly win, it would be nice if they at least attempted to take some lasting measures against them.

The gil farmers shouldn't be able to get away with the basic forms of hacking they use to do their work.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

If I had the know how and authority, what I would do is:

Set up a system that detects key words (and the clever ways spammers use to bypass such filters)

If enough reports are made, the system checks the reported messages for those key words and then surreptitiously flags a spammer's account so that any and all characters that currently exist or are made in the future are phased (in much the same way inn rooms and the squadron room are).

This special phase would have npcs made to look like players running around the towns and a few automated messages in public chat channels to give the illusion that nothing is wrong.

The spammers would still be able to log and spam their messages but only other spammers would see them. Let them advertise to each other and get them out of our space while still getting their sub money. :P

[Salaru]

Another thought. Get some folks to infiltrate the gil selling sites and get their bot programs that they use to send bots/players teleporting between all the main quest points to farm gear and gil to sell with their damned RMT crap, so you can figure out how to block access to the game for those that have those programs active on their computers.

[KageTokage]

If I had the know how and authority, what I would do is:

Set up a system that detects key words (and the clever ways spammers use to bypass such filters)

If enough reports are made, the system checks the reported messages for those key words and then surreptitiously flags a spammer's account so that any and all characters that currently exist or are made in the future are phased (in much the same way inn rooms and the squadron room are).

This special phase would have npcs made to look like players running around the towns and a few automated messages in public chat channels to give the illusion that nothing is wrong.

The spammers would still be able to log and spam their messages but only other spammers would see them. Let them advertise to each other and get them out of our space while still getting their sub money. :P

It would be simpler to just shadowban the bots and permanently disable their ability to shout/trade/do whatever else is essential to their ability to conduct RMT transactions, but not the ability to farm gil, so they'd be in for a rude surprise when they do actually find a buyer.

Whoever runs them clearly doesn't spend much time monitoring them to make sure they're all functioning properly because I regularly see ones that break and stop moving, get flagged as AFK, etc, sometimes for days on end.

[Beckett]

I definitely noticed a huge decline in gil selling chat spam when they introduced the report function. It used to be teleporting to any city would cause your chat log to instantly be filled with spam, and even if you weren't in a city they would constantly send you /tell messages. After the report function was introduced, the spam started slowing down until it became virtually non-existent. These days I only see the occasional shout in Limsa (never the other cities) and I haven't received any /tells since.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only purpose of the report button is specifically to combat the chat spam, not to actually put a stop to RMT. If you report someone for chat spam, a GM can easily check the logs and see right away to see that they're breaking TOS. For the gil farmers, while it may be incredibly obvious to us when we see a group of them what they're doing, the GMs have to actually do an investigation and prove that they're doing something wrong, and not just a group of legit accounts with names like "Xcusidonnd Applef".

[KageTokage]

I definitely noticed a huge decline in gil selling chat spam when they introduced the report function. It used to be teleporting to any city would cause your chat log to instantly be filled with spam, and even if you weren't in a city they would constantly send you /tell messages. After the report function was introduced, the spam started slowing down until it became virtually non-existent. These days I only see the occasional shout in Limsa (never the other cities) and I haven't received any /tells since.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only purpose of the report button is specifically to combat the chat spam, not to actually put a stop to RMT. If you report someone for chat spam, a GM can easily check the logs and see right away to see that they're breaking TOS. For the gil farmers, while it may be incredibly obvious to us when we see a group of them what they're doing, the GMs have to actually do an investigation and prove that they're doing something wrong, and not just a group of legit accounts with names like "Xcusidonnd Applef".

The thing is that while they do clean out the gil farmers on a weekly basis it only takes a day for them to hit 50 again and go right back to their business, so it's mostly a wasted effort, particularly because the time between their bans is more then enough for them to get enough gil to conduct a sizable transaction. They need to ban them constantly or find a more lasting solution if they want to actually gain some headway in combating them.

Though there's still another problem in that there are "legit" gil farmers who resort to mass-producing/gathering items with bots and selling them on the MB instead of hacking, which is far less likely to be caught and acted against while having all the same economy-crashing effects as someone botting for personal gain would.