RMT Imitating Legit Players with Names

[Arkista]

In FFXI they was doing the same thing to some people was pretty funny.

[Symphie]

Why would they impersonate possible customers? This sounds something more like a troll would do instead of a business.

By impersonating people they tarnish said people's reputation by the similarity of a name. People of course take this serious(why wouldn't they?). And I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to contact the RMT person about it w/ the name, they'd tell you they gladly dump it... if you pay for their service. I suppose we could call it a form of blackmailing. Perhaps might not be their intent but believe it or not, I've seen this sort of behavior happen in F2P games. Just not in relation to RMT.

And since there are people who do buy from RMT, I'm sure some would also pay to make this sort of problem go away.

[Astrus]

By impersonating people they tarnish said people's reputation by the similarity of a name. People of course take this serious(why wouldn't they?). And I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to contact the RMT person about it w/ the name, they'd tell you they gladly dump it... if you pay for their service. I suppose we could call it a form of blackmailing. Perhaps might not be their intent but believe it or not, I've seen this sort of behavior happen in F2P games. Just not in relation to RMT.

And since there are people who do buy from RMT, I'm sure some would also pay to make this sort of problem go away.

That's interesting, it's a side I didn't see until now.

What I figured was happening is that SE is doing something behind the scenes that's actually hurting the RMTs so in retaliation they adopted this new behavior to

a) make investigations more annoying for the people following up on reports as now they have to check if the report was for the actual bot or the player it tries to impersonate.

b) hurt the game. It's pretty much inevitable that some people will misspell the bot's name and write the legitimate player's name when filing a report. If any false positives slip through and innocent players have actions taken against their account the people affected will be angry at SE (and rightly so). Fixing those mistakes, once again, takes time and resources.

It's a pretty clever defense mechanism but it can be somewhat countered by giving us an easier way to report RMT bots, that being right-click-reporting.

[Molly_Millions]

It doesn't matter really, when I report them, I copy and paste their message and their name from the log into the report. If they spam 15 times in a minute, I copy all 15 shouts into the report with the name on every single one. They could be one letter off from my own name, I'm still gonna report them.

[lord_naarghul]

I actually haven't seen much of the RMTers lately on Balmung. I even made a new character the other day and have only needed to blacklist one person so far. My main has nearly 50 names blacklisted. I get more whispers from aggressive FC recruiters than RMTers and I haven't seen spammers in a while.

[Amberion]

To OP:

Obviously you need to retaliate. Do this by imitating a RMT char!

[Boohiss]

It wasn't me, it was the one-armed RMT!

[Nyan-mi]

it will be great when they start selling Titan runs etc lol.....i have a feeling not only will they NOT beat Titan but probably wont even queue for some people that give the money before hand, or even half before half after... they will still make out with something . If there is money to be made trust me they will evolve!!!

[FayaAOP]

Last night i found a new type of bots..in other games i guess you can call them multi boxer...with SEVEN different characters, controlled by 1 person (maybe 8, i have a blind spot for lalafells).
They were aoe icing in south shroud in the ruins with the 35+ mobs..later i found them moving to north shroud.
Luckylie, after i asked for assistance, some people came and helped killing them by locking them.
But SE need to do something very fast.

[Syrellaris]

Multiboxing is however not against the rules as far as I am aware. Is it annoying? of course it is and to my opinion it should be a bannable offense, however right now, i doubt it is. Multiboxing and botting at the same time.. yeah that is an offense, but only due to bottin.