How to eliminate Real money gil sale spammers

[therpgfanatic]

1. Characters on brand new accounts cannot send a PM or use Shout until level 15.

2. Exception: if another user has added that new account character to their friend list, the character can PM the character they are friends with.

Problem solved.

[Arkista]

Not fair to legit players. Sorry.

[Doozer]

If someone's a legit player they shouldn't have any trouble getting to level 15. They could even make it level 10 for people who whine about how it's not fair.

But seriously I don't see how that's not fair to 'legit' players.

[Synra]

Well, the way I see it, SE is a Japanese company. It is also a multi million dollar company. They claim to be against these gold spammers.

So I have to ask. Why don't they just hire some Ninjas to take these bastards out?

[saber_alter]

Not fair to legit players. Sorry.

not really. elsword is f2p and doesn't allow trading until you have your first job and 3 days have passed. the same thing could be done here.
it would for the most part work. most chars made (unless alt. toons or RMT) are from people with little to know background knowledge and are trying to just get through the main story.

though its a moot point anyway, i would rather live with RMT and have SE crack down on botting and fix their customer support.

[BlueMage]

I don't think people should be able to send /tells, or /shout, until they're i85+.

[StouterTaru]

That's not a reasonable method, they need to add a "Report RMT and blacklist" below the blacklist option.

With this they also need to:
-allow blacklist for players offline, to get around the tell and dash
-mute accounts from tell/shout/yell that hit a report threshold pending GM appeal
-scale the threshold up for accounts that have been around longer, more levels, progression in quests, etc
-have a GM verify the chat logs for long term accounts that hit the threshold
-have a system to punish abuse of reporting

[Lyrinn]

We need a more permanent solution and not a bandaid. If you put a level restriction on tell, RMTs will just bot their way to 15 and we'll be back to square one in a few days.

[therpgfanatic]

We need a more permanent solution and not a bandaid. If you put a level restriction on tell, RMTs will just bot their way to 15 and we'll be back to square one in a few days.

Other games have limits like this and it stops all the bot spamming. It's simply too much effort to try to bot a chara up w/o it getting caught by GMs before the needed level, just to have it banned as soon as it sends out a bunch of messages.

Right now they just make brand new characters and spam until the whole account is banned, and then just make a new account and do it again and again. It requires little effort.

And seriously. As a brand new player below level 15, what need do you have to send PMs? It's not like you're going to join a FATE party or something.

Bots making brand new characters to spam people with, and bots needing to actually level a character to 15 are two completely different things. You put enough hurdles in front of spammers and they will stop using a tactic that requires too much effort for too little gain.

Aion tried this. They raised the lvl requirement twice. Guess what? didnt work.

Then Aion's GM team isn't spending a lot of effort having the server track unusual player activity to catch the botted players before they reach the necessary level.

That isn't a problem with the method. It's a problem with Aion's enforcement of their own rules.

In FF XIV the bots literally teleport around the maps from enemy to enemy. It's very easy for the dev team to detect. But right now the spammers don't have to do anything but setup a bunch of accounts and let lv1 characters spam the rest of the server. It's too easy for them to abuse the game. Make enough hurdles where the time and money investment is wasted on trying to get a chara to be able to spam in the game, and the spamming will stop because it's not profitable.

[Shref]

That's not a reasonable method, they need to add a "Report RMT and blacklist" below the blacklist option.

With this they also need to:
-allow blacklist for players offline, to get around the tell and dash
-mute accounts from tell/shout/yell that hit a report threshold pending GM appeal
-scale the threshold up for accounts that have been around longer, more levels, progression in quests, etc
-have a GM verify the chat logs for long term accounts that hit the threshold
-have a system to punish abuse of reporting

how they don't do something like this with the current blacklist just baffles me. i looked at my blacklist a few days ago, and only ~4 or 5 of them had been deleted...