WHY IS THERE STILL RMT SPAM!?

[Rhindas]

First, it's not as simple as "block that IP." Second, it is *impossible* to completely remove it until money buying stops. WoW still has them. They're still in FFXI...sorta...and I'm sure games older than that still have them. They are, unfortunately, VERY good at what they do. Their talents may be wasted, perhaps, but they're good.

[Doo]

Yeah it's really annoying in this game. More annoying than F2P games like DCUO and Neverwinter. I don't think I even got spammed once when I was playing SWTOR trial.

[HumsterMKX]

(>...> Why are you guys complaining....

Think of it as a value added service.

That is what I told myself to prevent me going rage mode.

[Freyar]

RMT spam just means the game's still doing well.

[Sub-Xero]

I've had maybe one tell in the last week. Dunno what it's like on your server but it's hardly what I'd call "spam".

I came from Ragnarok and it wasn't that bad there. It's TERRIBLE on Gilgamesh.

[Pikken]

I've had three different gibberish names /telling me the same copypaste text five times a minute simultaneously. A tell every thirty seconds is pretty much average.

Also, you'd think SE would have figured out by now that they all have completely unpronounceable garbage for character names.

Being a software developer this made me giggle. You think its easy or even doable to develop an software solution that figures our if the name of a character makes it a gold seller?

However, crowd power is a perfect solution for this problem. It has been suggested on the forums before and been implemented in other games. Add a "Report gold seller" command when right-clicking a character name. And if a certain number of people report a person within a certain amount of time, block them from chatting, create a report with their latest chat messages, send it off to someone who decides what to do next.

[Zaels]

They'll go away if people never bought from them. The sad reality is that a lot of the people that buy from them are using that gil to buy carries for boss fights :\

[Shirai]

However, crowd power is a perfect solution for this problem. It has been suggested on the forums before and been implemented in other games. Add a "Report gold seller" command when right-clicking a character name. And if a certain number of people report a person within a certain amount of time, block them from chatting, create a report with their latest chat messages, send it off to someone who decides what to do next.

Yes, a faster way to report them is necessary.
While the current tool is an awesome tool for reporting individual cases of harassment, using it to report tell spammers is cumbersome.
There is no need to fill out a detailed form for this, it should be clear to a GM team that when the same character is being reported by 10 or more players simultaniously that there is something amiss.

I must say that Sarg is pretty quiet when it comes to tell spam, but I do notice that it takes a while before they are banned and I think this is because nobody bothers to report them anymore.

[Ksenia]

There is a bit of a myth going here. Gold Farmer sites don't farm their own gold more often than not if at all. Most of the currency that sites sell, they purchased from people at fractions of what they sell for. When you see a character in a game spamming, the assumption is that person purchased gold from a site when they more likely sold gold to that site and may have even sold the account to the site. The account is now a mule for the site to spam with. The accounts the site house all their currency on, never spam you. They don't mule buyers either, they mule the accounts that sold to them. Even the stolen accounts that we feel bad for, the guy who stole it sold it and all assets to said site, likely for very little money. They actual site didn't steal the account, they bought it.

I block the spammers by blacklist or ignore options because I know the account holder has already lost or unloaded the account to said site and it will expire in a few days or a week anyway with no assets on it. They were all transferred to a holding account and those are the ones SqEnix ban or try to. It's why banned accounts don't impact the spam and unfortunately the amounts a site buys and sells for has mark ups in the thousands of percent so the companies need to lose massive amounts of asset to feel pain.

The sites also learn to hide their currency in true asset, having gold 'at the ready' for a buyer so finding gold seller nests isn't as cut and dry as you might think and the spam is the tip of the iceberg. It's a royal pain in the ass for SE and other companies to remove this poison from their game.

tl:dr, figure out a way to block the spam, carry on. It's a dead end for SE to focus on it.

[Seif]

Honestly I've blacklisted everyone since launch and now I hardly get even one RMT tell in a day. It really is not that big of a deal.