Take a cue from Elder Scrolls Online re: RMT spammers

[EllemEnopee]

I appreciate reading the occasional posts on the launcher where SE points out how many accounts have been banned for RMT activities in their latest round of crackdowns. All the same, with Gil Spammers hitting us at a rate of about one spam every two minutes it's obvious that SE is performing at the level of the little Dutch boy: only so few fingers to plug holes in the dam, and the water's coming from too many spots.

One of the most annoying features of The Elder Scrolls Online could be used here to great effect, however, is taking action on ACCOUNTS, not on CHARACTERS. In ESO, if you friend someone, you friend their account. If you join a guild, your account is what joins. All future characters of yours are automatically on people's friends lists and automatically placed into guilds whether you want that or not. As I said, annoying.

However, if someone is hassling you and you /ignore them, you ignore the ACCOUNT.

[EllemEnopee]

Tie that in with a daemon on the server counting /ignores against the same account. Should the same account receive, for argument's sake, /ignore requests from 50 different players, then the account is banned from communication on ALL servers temporarily until SE can further investigate the matter.

What SE could do with such a system would be to automatically ban RMT accounts within a few batch /tells on a few servers before those accounts got silenced.

Sure, RMT companies can just buy more accounts. But if an RMT company can only send out only one or two batch tells before an account gets banned on all servers, will they have any sort of profit margin left? Even if they could manage to make money under such a system, their profits would surely drop considerably compared to the situation now, where they can create as many characters per account as they can add then delete, knowing it may be a month or three before SE gets back to banning them.

[Gardes]

Sure, RMT companies can just buy more accounts. But if an RMT company can only send out only one or two batch tells before an account gets banned on all servers, will they have any sort of profit margin left?

But then how would SE make money from RMT buying new accounts?

[blowfin]

I haven't seen RMT spam for ages on Tonberry. In fact I only have a handful of them in my blacklist. Must be different from server to server.

[Cid_Grim]

I haven't seen RMT spam for ages on Tonberry. In fact I only have a handful of them in my blacklist. Must be different from server to server.

You are soooooooooo lucky.

/jealous

[Freyar]

Spam isn't anywhere near this big of a problem on Balmung. I get at most two a day now.

They immediately get /blist add <r>

[Lyrinn]

GW2 does this too.

[EllemEnopee]

But then how would SE make money from RMT buying new accounts?

1) RMT companies would try, I imagine, to see if it was still profitable for them to send batch tells. If they could make enough to justify buying new accounts left and right, then SE would actually make a lot more money by doing this.

2) If you're not quite so jaded, however, and believe that SE is actually trying to cut these nuisances out of the picture, you might think that SE could be quite happy enough with the 1.8 million accounts they now have and not at all concerned about losing 0.03% of their business to make the other 99.97% of their customers more happy.

[ In the various launcher posts about RMT accounts banned, the number is usually around 500 per action. 500 accounts out of 1.8 million comes to 0.0003 or 0.03%.]

[DerpyCubone]

Spam isn't anywhere near this big of a problem on Balmung. I get at most two a day now.

They immediately get /blist add <r>

That's not the case on Adamantoise. If I don't blist, I get spammed roughly once every 2-3 minutes. 5-15 if I do blist. It's insane that SE is letting this crap go on.

[Cap75]

The simplest system, which a lot of MMOs use, is one that was basically mentioned above and works quite well. If an account hits a set number of ignore/blists in a short period of time that account loses the ability to communicate with anyone outside of thier friend list until the account is cleared as being legitimate or is banned. It has to be at the account level though, not character. RMTers basically lose thier forum in short order.