Why are they addressing the RMT symptom instead of the deeper causes?

[TheSmoo]

Same story as other thread. Log in, RMT tell within 30 seconds. Blacklisting is almost pointless. Banning the spam accounts doesn't work. It will probably never work.

The root problem is they they have gil to sell. Fairly straightforward thinking, I think. If they don't have gil, they can't sell it, right? And there's no point in spamming to sell nothing.

What gets me is... why don't they address that problem, instead of slapping bandaids on? Just have a script look for high-level players that do a lot of grinding and no social interaction. Compile IP address ranges. Track gil trades. Find the warehouse characters they feed.

Then, they just nail the warehouses. Cut the supply. Ban the lvl 50 grinders.

It takes a lot longer to level a character to get significant money than it does to roll a new one and start spamming people.

And for bonus points, maybe even inhibit the ability to send mass tells to everyone?

[Enkidoh]

Because the gilsellers just create new accounts - it's not an easily fixed problem sadly (it's why you see those lowbie ARC groups in Gridania all acting zombie like every few weeks - SE is banning them quickly but the RMTs just come back with new accounts.).

Really, if stupid people stopped actually buying their ill-gotten gil in the first place and actually destroy the black market for it, you wouldn't have that problem.

[Lucke]

Actually, all they need to do is ban/sue/whatever buyers. I wanna play keyboard lawyer for a sec. If the buyer is from the US (I don't know international law), would that mean SE can bring charges to them? Specifically "Receiving stolen property". If SE gets a rep for taking buyers to court, it may stop buyers from actually buying.

Recing stolen property: "The offense of acquiring goods with the knowledge that they have been stolen, extorted, embezzled, or unlawfully taken in any manner." Keyword there is "knowledge". Buyers know it's not right to buy gil, but they do it anyway, prolly because they think they can get away with it. They may not know it's actually stolen from SE.

Remember kids, you don't own jack when you play this game. Your character, actually belongs to SE. Your mega-awesome gear, that's SE's too. Most importantly, the gil belongs to SE, it is not yours to sell or buy from an RMT.

Reference: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedicti...tolen+Property

[Anova]

There are several issues preventing SE from pursuing these issues. The most prominent is that RMT is a cybercrime, and while it is possible to punish individuals within certain countries, pursuing them internationally is not always viable. The majority of RMT companies are located in China (and there are rumors of N.Korea having a special RMT military department to earn money). The main rationale is these countries have very lax laws concerning intellectual property. According to their laws, these companies may not be entirely clean, but the offense hardly warrants extradition or any possible punishment that would dissuade them from continuing business. It does not help that the relationship between Japan and the rest of East Asia is on par with the US relationship with the drug-addled countries of South America. There are trade agreements, but more force is needed to arrest a criminal you know is hiding there.

As for targeting the buyers, while I think it is possible, the actual amount bought from an individual buyer is miniscule at best. I am not certain it would be worth the cost for SE to pursue the case, much less prove financial damage resulting from the actions of an individual buyer. It's much cheaper to simply ban the buyer for breaking the EULA and hope the message gets out that if you buy, you are risking not only your own credit information but also risk losing access and progress to the game.

A second issue is the process of identifying gil farmers. Ironically though, the most fervent FFXIV players and SE's best customers look a lot like gil farmers. They have multiple accounts and multiple characters on the same server (because of myth cap, etc) and they utilize very complicated techniques to make gil and generally be the best at the game. It's not easy to distinguish them apart. If your aim is to target the actual Lv.50 farmers, it is much safer to simply follow the trail of gil from the account that sends gil to a potential buyer. None of these require you to stop the RMT spam, although I am certain SE has some filters in place considering the RMT are encoding their advertisements. Still, it only takes a little testing for RMTs to identify the algorithm and rules of the spam filters and change the message appropriately.

[Ryuko]

It's very difficult to weed out the people who have a lot of gil who aren't legitimate players. Back around the start of ARR, a lot of legitimate players were making a lot of legitimate gil... but, a lot of RMT were making money the same way. What was SE's solution? They blanket suspended every single person over a certain amount of gil (the 'cap' changed depending on which server you were on -- legacy players were allowed to have more before being flagged). These suspensions were not permanent... they were pending investigation. A lot of legitimate players were stuck offline for a while waiting for their accounts to be investigated. I remember this very vividly because when I found out that was happening, I stopped trying to make money as fast. The RMT were banned but... at the inconvenience of a lot of legitimate players just trying to make gil. It's hard to know who is RMT and who isn't from a SE standpoint. It can seem obvious to us, but I'm really wondering what SE exactly tracks regarding social activity.

[RhazeCain]

Hmm.. Some interesting ideas being brought up here. I'll add my own 2 cents.

First, for any every and all things that could be done, consider this balance:
On one hand, how much money is your displeasure at being spammed costing SE? Hard to measure, certainly greater than zero.
On the other hand, how much would it cost them to take whatever anti-RMT steps in question?

Obviously the first has to be greater than the 2nd, or else the steps in question don't make business sense. So that cuts off a lot of options, including most of what I've seen in this thread.

The things I could see maybe making sense still would be
1) Add a minimum wait between every chat message sent. 1-2 secs. Good: longer for spammers to cycle through all of the players, unless they get more accounts. Bad: legit players will be annoyed by it sometimes too.
2) The option we call blacklist needs to become "Report Spam", or add new option for "Report Spam". This option both reports the offending message and blacklists the person, with a single player action.
3) Where are all the accounts coming from? Hopefully SE is banning spam accounts eventually in response to abuse reports (if not they need to start), so any "free trial" or other way that people get easy new accounts needs to stop. Depending the situation it may not be so easy, but maybe.

[Sacred-Oblivion]

Is there a reason SE doesn't implement an anti-spam feature similar to WoW?

In WoW when you receive you spam you:
1) Right click their name and select "Report Spam."
2)
3) Profit.

That's it. Doing this prevents them from sending you any more tells, and if at least 5 people used the report spam feature on someone then that account is prevented from using the chat stream on every character until an investigation occurs.

WoW had this problem for awhile too until they implemented the above feature. RMT spams went down to almost 0% (I almost stopped receiving them entirely). I know the devs played WoW for research purposes when working on this game, so I don't see why they don't mimic this feature as well.

[Niwashi]

There's three sorts of accounts involved here.
1) The gil-buyers' accounts
2) The gil-sellers' bot accounts for gathering gil in order to sell it
3) The gil-sellers' advertising accounts for sending spam messages to annoy... err that is to entice customers

All three should be banned when they're identified, but as already pointed out, the first two of those three aren't easily distinguished from active legitimate accounts. It takes a thorough investigation to determine how all that gil was accumulated and where it went before SE can be sure whether a suspected account really is a gil seller or buyer. They are doing such investigations, but that takes both time and manpower. The manpower costs money so is always going to be limited enough that there's likely a backlog that adds even more time. The gil-sellers know that all that gives them time enough to make the profit they need, so it remains a viable business.

The third group of accounts on the other hand (the spammers) should be very easy to identify. Add a "Report Spam" option to the chatbox right-click menu. Have it send a copy of the message that was reported to the group that investigates this. Because the tool itself would be providing the message straight from the chat system, there's no further investigation needed to verify if the person really sent what the reporting player said they did. The GM who gets the report can tell at a glance that it's spam just as quickly as we can tell ourselves when we get these messages. The account could then be banned immediately.

If they also add in the rule Sacred-Oblivion mentioned, where the system automatically identifies when several such reports have been made and cuts off their chat privileges pending investigation of those reports, then it doesn't even have to wait for a GM to get to it and spend the couple seconds it would take him/her to glance at the report, verify that it's indeed spam, and ban the account.

With proper tools in place within the game software, when a gil-seller gets a spam account, they'd be able to send off maybe half a dozen tells before their chat privileges are cut off. Then the account itself would be banned within minutes, all without requiring more than a couple seconds of a GM's time to glance at one of their messages and verify that yes, it's spam. Only a tiny minority of players receiving these messages react by deciding to go to the gil-seller's website and give them money, so it takes a lot of such ads before the gil-seller makes any profit from them. If each advertising account they set up can only send a few messages, then it would take a lot of accounts before they get a single customer out of it. As soon as the cost of setting up new accounts exceeds the profit they anticipate getting from those ads, then the ads will stop. (Or at least they'd stop in-game. They'd move the advertising onto third party websites, where at least its less intrusive.)

[Naberrie]

Same story as other thread. Log in, RMT tell within 30 seconds. Blacklisting is almost pointless. Banning the spam accounts doesn't work. It will probably never work.

The root problem is they they have gil to sell.

Not necessarily. They don't need to have the product to advertise it.

A lot of what they do is hacking. There's a reason they spam these links. A player clicks on one, or types it into their browser. Maybe they're just curious about prices. Maybe they're actually considering buying gil. They visit the site.

At this point the damage is done. They've just initiated malware install on their system. Next time they login a keylogger has recorded their information. They're now hacked. The RMT takes control of their account, strips it of gil, sells what it can, uses it for more spam. Like the malware the user installed, it perpetuates itself.

They will always have gil because there's always someone stupid enough to go to the sites.

The only way to ever end RMT, and I do mean the only way, is to end the demand for gil. If there's no market to sell to, there will be no sellers. Just. Stop. Buying. That is the only way to end it.

[Hitokirinomad]

The only way to ever end RMT, and I do mean the only way, is to end the demand for gil. If there's no market to sell to, there will be no sellers. Just. Stop. Buying. That is the only way to end it.

No, ending the demand for gil means to not have an economy. As long as there is an economy, there will be a demand for gil. The BEST way to end RMT is for SE to sell gil themselves (a la Eve Online). A good (but much more difficult) way would be for SE to fix their economy by allowing actual gil fountains within the game itself, or at least reduce the heaviness of the gil sinks.