Why not defeat RMT the quick way?

[Astralos]

I don't think the Task Force is doing a good job, to be honest. And not all offenders are met with permanent bans, despite what is being mentioned. I've been reporting names of characters who have been sending me /tells with RMT advertising since the beginning and the vast majority of them have not been "(Deleted)". I've already filled up my blacklist once, decided to empty all the names, and started blacklisting names again - and I'm seeing a lot of the same names.

[DarkJack]

To be honest all they'd have to do is properly staff the task force with people checking the report queues around the clock and being ready to go onsite, check the situation, and immediately banhammer when needed. If the time between account creation and banhammer becomes short enough, the business model for RMTs becomes less and less profitable, forcing them to raise prices, causing a drop in demand, eventually causing it to die out.

It's not like RMT are hard to spot anyway... the random names are a dead giveaway. "keyboard smash" name + standing in front of adventurer's guild + level 1 + sending lots of tells = RMT. Sure there's some who have adopted the method of imitating "real" names, but those are still a minority.

For bots they'd have to physically come onsite to check out the situation of course, but GMs can shadow observe as it is (ie: be there but you can't detect them), so everything that is needed is there, they just have to put the money in it to staff appropriately.

[DarkJack]

damn 1000 character limit

If they're smart they could even do what Wikipedia did to counter malicious edits: use an AI that monitors activity and picks out "suspicious" activity, often taking automatic action (in Wikipedia's case this is reverting edits). When using neural networks they can learn and adapt themselves even when the malicious players themselves adapt.

The advantage of using AI for "first line filtering" is that you don't have to spend money on "expensive" people to handle all the work. The AI does most of it himself and passes the things which it cannot safely identify on to humans (to minimise false positives), which identify it and take action, and that identification itself serves as input for the neural network again.

[itschowda]

I agree the only way to really thwart RMT is by not buying from them, but this message has been told and ignored for years. Somehow there are always going to be people desperate enough to make the whole business worthwhile to them.

What's funny is that many people realize that in order to stop RMT is to make it so that there's no money for them to be made in a game. The problem though, is that while many people realize this fact, it doesn't stop them from selling Relic clears, Extreme clears, or (these days) crafting power-leveling. I don't think anyone brought this up in this thread yet, but how about making "selling" difficult content clears against the rules? Bring on the flaming because I know there's going to be at least one person that's in an FC that makes money doing this but doesn't want to admit to adding to the RMT problem.

[Lucke]

I don't think the Task Force is doing a good job, to be honest. And not all offenders are met with permanent bans, despite what is being mentioned. I've been reporting names of characters who have been sending me /tells with RMT advertising since the beginning and the vast majority of them have not been "(Deleted)". I've already filled up my blacklist once, decided to empty all the names, and started blacklisting names again - and I'm seeing a lot of the same names.

Again, [Deleted] will only show up the RMT deleted their own character. If they are banned, their name will still be on your Blacklist. SE does this in case the account is hacked. Then the original owner can get their character back. SE does not delete characters, just bans them.

[KagatoAC]

instead of deleting the account, they need to burn the whole game / dvd key that the acct is registered too, make them buy another complete copy everytime.