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

[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.