5 months is a ridiculous amount of time to read reports and ban bots.

[DPZ2]

they need to start banning gil buyers.

fighting the bots is pointless. remove their market and you will start to see change

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

[Kes13a]

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

first rule of everything is... track the money. pretty sure that they have the capability since its THEIR SERVERS. you have one character who collects gobs of gil from easily identified farmers/crafters and the gil goes to seemingly random people. a GM chat should be able to determine if the gil was purchased. "so Mr Mi'qo, you put up a single serving of yak's milk for 50 million gil? and someone bought it? amazing...."

I dont think tracking it is as impossible as you might imagine.

[RitsukoSonoda]

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

Provided SE does the same things in FFXIV as they did in FFXI they don't take immediate action on RMT whether bot or actual person when they're reported and instead tags them as a watch target to monitor activities then tags other characters and accounts it has suspicious interactions with and repeats the process to try and get as much of the chain as possible. In the case of FFXI this often also resulted in buyers getting bans as well though I think this only happened to repeat buyers.

I've seen other online games take measures like hardware bans or blacklisting credit cards

[Jojoya]

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

They can identify what characters are bots farming gil.

They can trace where the gil being farmed by those bots goes and look for suspicious gil transactions. It's not like the bot operators are going to give the gil away for free - that's how they earn their money.

As buyers start getting banned and word spreads, fewer players will risk buying for fear of losing what they've already acquired. The fewer buyers there are, the less sense it makes to continue operating bots that aren't profitable.

The market exists because the demand exists. Remove the demand and the market dies out. Keep the demand and someone else will always move in to fill the void because there is profit for the taking.

[Kes13a]

They can identify what characters are bots farming gil.

They can trace where the gil being farmed by those bots goes and look for suspicious gil transactions. It's not like the bot operators are going to give the gil away for free - that's how they earn their money.

As buyers start getting banned and word spreads, fewer players will risk buying for fear of losing what they've already acquired. The fewer buyers there are, the less sense it makes to continue operating bots that aren't profitable.

The market exists because the demand exists. Remove the demand and the market dies out. Keep the demand and someone else will always move in to fill the void because there is profit for the taking.

exactly. a five day vacation for the first offense of buying gil (and breaking the terms of the ToS) would definitely make most reconsider the "ease" of purchasing gil when they could lose their character. vacations for buyers works, plain and simple. actions against bots never will.

people dont want monitoring additions to the software, and rightfully so. the only actions SE can do, and should be doing, exists within their database, and would be a lot easier for some version of their STF to monitor and take actions against.

[geekgirl101]

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

Also if SE manage to shut down the site (which they can't) they would just create a new one and then have a whole load of new filters SE needs to put into the game to avoid half of the spam. The spammers are pretty crafty in substituting half the letters with other things like C * M (replace * with O) and that kind of thing so filtering out everything isn't possible.