I'm done reporting gil spammers.

[HyoMinPark]

Right after they added the 'Report RMT Activity' option to the chatlog, gil spammers retaliated with scripts that would send out party invites instead. Which was really annoying if you were trying to trade or teleport or pretty much interact with anything.

Personally I'd rather have the chat spam because at least I can switch that to a tab. Random party invites can't be avoided unless Busy status lets you ignore them, and I think that just keeps you from sending Tells.

I remember when they used to send you random party invites. Players would summon their Chocobos back then—because the game counted you in a party if you had your chocobo out (until they changed that). It was so annoying. I’m not sure which was worse: the tells or the party invites. At lease the /shout spam can be avoided by chat filters or just not going to the 3 starting city-states.

[AduroT]

They need to let players make blacklists of phrases that will hide messages.

[Vnolan]

The real shocking part is that it’s full grown adults with functioning brains that buy gil.

Not at all shocking. Same premise behind jump potions. Pay real money so you save time.

There is no reason to be lenient with players who fuel this.

Money. How many subscribers do they miss out on because of the RMT? How many subscribers would they gain if they spent additional money to attempt to get rid of the RMT? How many subscribers would they lose if they permabanned for buying gil?

[Saefinn]

They could ban players from making accounts where the names are a jarbled mess of vowels and consonants but people like playing Roegadyn characters.

Joking aside, I'm not sure how they'd solve it, they made reporting it super easy, but I know that can get tiresome and doesn't really stop it because they return under a different account. Heck, making gil in the game isn't that hard either, so not like making it easier would solve it, giving 500k gil with jump potions doesn't seem to have killed their market either. I hope they are banning players who buy gil too.

There is the GW2 option of selling gil themselves, but that's also not a good idea here for other reasons, and GW2 seems to have a different economy anyway where it'd be less of an issue.

I guess weird nonsense names can be flagged automatically as suspicious to GM's and investigate, but even then I get the feeling gil seller's would catch on and find a way to use no-nonsense names and then take up legitimate character names. They can also parse strings of shout text but everytime there is a hit for keywords and automatically flag them as suspcious, but then gil sellers can obscure the string to avoid detection logic, I've seen some really creative ones in the past.

[KageTokage]

I feel like they should be targeting how they go about creating their accounts in the first place if anything.

I can only assume they're likely buying dozens of copies of the base game using the same few credit card numbers and realistically no normal player is going to doing that to the extent they do.

I don't think it would be unreasonable to place a limit on how many times a particular card number can buy a game code within a given period of time at this point.

[Chrisnetika]

People buy gil because they believe it ok to if they keep seeing the same ads over and over and after reporting nothing is done some can even assume it's actually okay.If SE actually did a better job to prevent them and make it easier to get rid of them then it would not be such an issue.Even a theory that it is SE employees themselves that have a hand in running these sites, that the reason they are doing nothing about it.Same goes for buying codes outside of mogstation as one those sellers was caught saying they have an agreement with SE to sell so yea.As long as money is involved rules do not mean crap.

[Saefinn]

I feel like they should be targeting how they go about creating their accounts in the first place if anything.

I can only assume they're likely buying dozens of copies of the base game using the same few credit card numbers and realistically no normal player is going to doing that to the extent they do.

I don't think it would be unreasonable to place a limit on how many times a particular card number can buy a game code within a given period of time at this point.

Nowadays you can even circumvent that approach, with services like Revolut offering features like virtual credit cards for safer online shopping, they could just generate new credit card details for each purchase or subscription. Though if they are simply buying in bulk and not from SE, they could do it through a retailer, which SE would have no control over or they can pose as a shop and purchase in bulk from a distributor.

And with subscriptions, could be they're on their initial 30 days or again, using something like a virtual credit card.

[Bacent]

They need to let players make blacklists of phrases that will hide messages.

Sounds simple enough in theory. But it's not. They use too many special characters (Go look up other languages and look at all the letters that look like other letters, even just accents over letters gives you another 30+ characters alone). All they have to do is change one thing, and you're back to square one.

The 'best' they could do it make it where people with free accounts can't talk at all, but that creates a problem for people wanting to try the game out and wanting to ask anything to nearby players. And if they did keep free accounts from talking outside of dungeons, all the spambots have to do is roll a heal/tank, and then queue for the first dungeon and spam the chat for the 5 min there before they could be kicked, only to possibly be refilled by another bot.

Again, if people never bought gil, it'd never be an issue. There's only so much you can do when some people are being huge lazy idiots.

[Nemmar]

I don't really know what Square can do to end the problem in its entirety. I will say that Ive personally noticed less sellers/bots overall, but the akdksfsh sdkfsdkf's will continue to rise up.

This is not rocket science. It is not a problem that only FFXIV has. They need to fix their back end so bot programs can't be run. Just like every other MMO did.

But yes, the bans have reduced numbers. But it has not stopped it. That requires them fixing their game structure and takes longer, if they can be bothered to do it.

[gsil6374]

I don't really know what Square can do to end the problem in its entirety. I will say that Ive personally noticed less sellers/bots overall, but the akdksfsh sdkfsdkf's will continue to rise up.

I do: they can sell Gil on the Mog Station to undercut these people. I've considered buying Gil before and still do to this day. I just don't want to get scammed out my money. If Square offered this, I would gladly pay.