How to eliminate Real money gil sale spammers

[Lollie]

From a mechanical point of view your review system is flawed in its current form.
Most rmt transfers are now performed by selling bulk items of various types to someone, cloaking it from your suggested method. Watch the prices of copper ore or c3 vs the sales the currency jumps are small to the eye but huge all figured in.

From a personal stand point your system is flawed also, the below services I provide at a reasonable exchange of favors, or fees(on loans). Snowflake or not these actions happen, and they are detrimental to rmts, because they eliminate the need for them. Your system would affect people who truly care about eliminating rmt, and are doing something about it, be it silently or vocally.
I have to date successfully taught over 150 people how to maintain a steady reliable Gil flow for free usually including supplying the initial seed Gil.
I have assisted my fc and 2 other of my LS with purchasing a house. I have financed 3 other houses.
I have called in favors to help people through under serviced instances.

Closing this tl:dr post the true way to reduce rmt, is to reduce the need for it. I'm a pragmatist, I know we as the player community are not going to be able to solve this problem. I know if you do the above examples you will be burned on occasion. I know even if everyone does this rmts will still exist. The fact remains there are a hech more of us out there in the player community then rmts and se staff combined. Se has done their part by making Gil for all practical purposes useless, if we do our part and not drive others to need rmt funds, they will learn they can make a better profit else where. They might not close shop but there will be less of them, one day maybe even to where se can handle the quantity to review individually on a quick timeframe.

[lukesneeringer]

Eh, they're being banned fast enough.
It's pretty rare to get two or even three tells from the same char before it is banned.

Yes, they are annoying. No, we can't stop them, stop thinking we can.

I don't share the frustration levels of others over the spam tells, but I do agree that there are algorithms that would solve the issue.

A sampling of thoughts:

(1) Make it so that once a character is blacklisted X times over the course of an hour, that character is either auto-banned or globally muted.
(2) Make it so that no more than 1 /tell can be sent per, say, 0.5-1 second. Possibly allow a small number of "freebies" that return at the rate of one an hour, to make it such that in the rare cases where players do send tells in quick succession, it's allowed.

Now, that may or may not be the best use of finite subscription fees. But it is possible.

[Rex]

sry, too long, i used to report, i do not do it any more.

reporting should be an entry under "add to blacklist" when you click on a player's name in the log, selecting "Report RMT" should bring up a "Do you want to report, Y/N?" dialog box and you hit yes or no.

Any more than that is too much.

lol...but they need more information than just "report." I'm sure for sorting purposes.

But if that's too much effort for you...then stop complaining about RMT...

[Meimei]

Perhaps that 'avoid restricting communication' attitude would best be directed somewhere else. Oh, say....instances.

Whehehe, so much this.♥

SE's always been lethargic and apathetic about dealing with RMT - honestly they put more effort into dishing out excuses to give to the playerbase as to why they cannot, etc.

I've been in F2P games where the RMT presence is virtually nil. I'm sure they're there, somewhere, hiding underground like little ugly mole rats. Yet you NEVER see them monopolizing resources, nor do you get spammed. It's very refreshing, to be completely oblivious to the RMT presence, when they're banned regularly and are thus, abysmal.

The spam in this game is the worst I've experienced since FFXI. Why, if I were a paranoid person, I'd even go so far as to suggest SE has some kind of business deal with them...but that's just silly!♪

...Right?

[therpgfanatic]

From a mechanical point of view your review system is flawed in its current form.
Most rmt transfers are now performed by selling bulk items of various types to someone, cloaking it from your suggested method. Watch the prices of copper ore or c3 vs the sales the currency jumps are small to the eye but huge all figured in.
.

It's not about eliminating RMT.

It's about eliminating the spam that they do to players who have no interest in purchasing gil and constantly have their gameplay interrupted by bots spamming them with PMs.

So yes my proposal would be effective at getting rid of the spam.

And since the bot spammers advertise in-game, it must be effective to do so. They are businesses, so they only engage in activity that is profitable. So as a side-bonus the amount of RMT that occur would go down; how substantially I don't know. I would need to know hard facts.

What I do know is the in-game spam would go away.


And your proposal to eliminate people wanting to do RMT is unrealistic.

You're never going to reduce the desire of a significant part of the playerbase to want to buy gil.

What you can do is make it economically disadvantaged to be a RMT seller in FF XIV.

Right now the RMT make money because the developers have allowed their methods of acquiring gil and selling it to be very profitable.

All they have to do to advertise is make a bunch of lv1 characters to spam other players all day, on an assortment of accounts (some stolen, some newly regged).

If they implement changes so they spend more money trying to sell gil than they make selling the gil, the RMT will leave for easier prey.

Both the money of account subscriptions and the time spent running bots, dealing with customer transactions, etc need to be more than the return on the investment.

[Callence]

SE could easily combat the RMT by implementing several features - some have already been discussed on this thread.

1. SE can and should implement the report option as part of the friend / blacklist option. This should be programmed to produce a list of flagged accounts on whatever form of spreadsheet that the moderator team could use to investigate and ban.

2. SE seriously - You have heard of Wireshark right? You could go into your own servers - search for said player by grep or awk the player and looking in the chat logs - you DO have the ability to do this. Simplistic. And here is the fun part - you can snoop for said traffic - chat - etc - transfer the data to a pcapng file, load it up to wireshark, set your filters up and bam - instant packet read. All the proof you need.

3. SE you can monitor AH sales - it would be a perfect indicator if copper ore goes up from 10gil to 1m gill that there may be some RMT action happening. Again its not rocket science to prove.

[nitewing]

i'd thought i'd point out that a SE does not delete characters and after chatting with a gm they said most deleted characters are done by the account holder and also after you blist and report someone for being a RMT that the next day you can remove them

[Kuroyasha]

Eh, they're being banned fast enough.
It's pretty rare to get two or even three tells from the same char before it is banned.

Yes, they are annoying. No, we can't stop them, stop thinking we can.

I dont know where this rarity is, but it's not on Mateus. Over the past two periods where SE has notified of actions taken against RMT, I've seen maybe 5 out of 200 on my blacklist deleted. Every day i get tells from multiple chars with Rmt spam. I have to remove char to add char to blacklist. If I don't they spam me non-stop. One spammed me 4 times within 60 seconds I kid you not. It's like Mateus gets ignored for the most part.

i'd thought i'd point out that a SE does not delete characters and after chatting with a gm they said most deleted characters are done by the account holder and also after you blist and report someone for being a RMT that the next day you can remove them

Edit: Oh? So wait we never actually know if they've been removed then? I think at least there should be something like (removed) or (bannedRMT) in place of the name in the same vein as (deleted) is seen sometimes. This way we know on this side that they are banned and feel more encouraged to report people who RMT spam.

2nd Edit: On a side note, it's pretty annoying trying to include the RMT message on ps3 when we want to report. Can we have an option to Copy/Paste a message by selecting the name next to message in the same way we can select "Add to Blacklist?" Would make things much smoother.

[Zaels]

They should give players an option to ignore tells from people not in their friends list, linkshells, and free company.

[ValkyrieL]

Can't they add a filter likePlayer set the filter, not mandatory imposed to all)
A) Denied all chat from Level 15 or below characters
B) Add exception to FRIENDSLIST and FC.
This removes the concerns SE has on restrictions. Problem solved.
Could any SE staff respond how viable this is? Or is it too demanding on servers.