Idea - How to finish with the RMT.

[Zaero]

But how can you make a system to punish those who are RMT spamming WITHOUT affecting the legit playerbase as a whole? Locking down features like /say or /tell kinda does that.

Plus, since a majority of RMT are either stolen accounts (which might have a 50 for all ya know), wouldn't this just circumvent that?

Plus, captchas can be broken (heck, Google accidentally wrote a program that broke their own captchas). Once the RMT folks know how the quest works, they'd just program around this. I work in software development for a living, so I'm used to this kinda thing I guess, haha.

That said, yes bots are an issue in EVERY MMO. But, if you restrict /tell to level 10, then new players are going to be upset. Even level based chats are kind of restrictive too, which might put people off the game. It's all a big issue, but I don't think the solution will be as simple as everyone seems to think it could be. Good idea, yes, but I think there's some details to flesh out too.

[Amnesia]

But how can you make a system to punish those who are RMT spamming WITHOUT affecting the legit playerbase as a whole? Locking down features like /say or /tell kinda does that.

How does limiting the number of people/minute that you can send /tells to affect the "legit playerbase"? Let's say the number is 20. How many real people would be affected if they can't send /tells to more than 20 different ppl in a minute's time?

Or if the restriction were on numbers of /shouts. Let's say the restriction were 2 /shouts or /yells per minute. If any "legit" player is /shouting that much, they're spamming as much as the RMTs and they deserve to be locked down until the next minute...

[Adrian74]

First off, this adds a layer to the game that isn't needed, players will feel strange having to to any of this. Unlocking the ability to send a message in the game is rather unintuitive for the MMO experience, and would never be approved as a viable way to stop the RMT.

Now, let's say that this was to be added... guess what would happen? The bots would just do the quest automatically, now you say "oh but what about my foolproof plan to avoid any of that". If you are given text and expected to come up with an output based on it, a bot could easily read this and interpret the answer. If not, the bot would just log down the response and queue it up for a human to answer to finish the quest. This would just delay the stream of bots initially to get the new system up in place and line up the bots to be made, but other than that, it would just run same as always....

Even a delay is worth of doing... Do you think that it should remain so easy as it is now? Because I don't think so... If someone has to go see the report of his bot and starts manually logging them and doing the quest... It is a pain... And it is slow, slower than like it is right now. So, yes, would work, it is better than surrender and let it be like it is right now.

So, for all this work to implement a feature that just makes things hard on actual players when it can still be bypassed easily is a waste of time and money for Square Enix to bother to implement, and it makes things worse for the user base.

1- It is not really such a hard work, waste of time and money... Editing quests or making them is awesomely easy... Or at least it was for me, of course I aknowledge which kind of motor or programming language SE uses in FFXIV. But adding such a thing would cost me three hours in my former game, in lazy mode.
2- Seriously, I still don't seeing what's the problem in having limited the communications until reaching a certain level, people RARELY TALK their first hours of game, they are rather discovering the world, learning everything that the game gives them in an already well explained information and support help... And they just want to be alone. But, okay, we could reduce even more the level of this and just do the quest to fool the botts and make it so the ones behind bots would have to manually activate things, that's the important stuff.

Not to sound like an asshole, but I think your idea is completely flawed in every way possible.





I don't know why people come up with these solutions. I commend you for trying to think of a way to combat the RMT problem, but honestly, Square Enix would have already implemented this if it was a viable method. Don't you think it's a bit ridiculous that an entire staff that is employed to work on an MMO couldn't come up with this idea but one random player can? Yeah, that's because it would never work, and it's not a good idea.

I appreciate your commend & comment in this thread, but... Think on this, that "entire staff that is employed to work" bla bla bla, are... Yes, are humans, they are humans too, maybe their work is to think on ideas, but what's true is that not everyone can come always with ideas, we will always need the help of others, that's why we can put suggestions in the forums after all... Many of the things I managed to do was thanks to ideas that players told me in the forums, even, if their ideas were not accurated, I reformed them and made my own, but still, it was a help I appreciated. As I said, I had to work alone in an environment where whatever I did could be exploited by players and I had to think a lot and realize the pros and bads of everything I was about to do, or to quickly fix whatever I could forgot, or to directly comment with the community.

I'm not telling them what to do, neither telling them what they need, my will is just to help and try to ease their work a little, at least however I can help or contribute to this, because I understand how damn annoying is to work in this and have damn spammers trying to mess up all what you are working and have spent hours working for.

The only true way to stop RMT /tell messages is to.
1. Constantly stay "Busy" so they can't send you them.
2. Hijack the way messages are sent to you before they reach the client and filter them yourself by some matching system that you would still need to update yourself, as this is a feature SE would not implement into the client themselves.
3. Convince everyone in the community to not buy from RMT sellers.

Your idea 1 is surrender and do nothing but block a good feature of the game... I think that it is worse than block it from level 1 to 10 and do a quest... But, uh, okay...

Your idea 2... Would be even more complicated than making a whole quest, and useless because they could easily change the messages as they often do.....

Option 3... Utopia, whatever that includes as option "Try to convince everyone" is a really worthless and almost impossible thing to do, of course, this would indeed end with RMT, but what's more difficult? Trying to prevent it and battle or trying to convince people to ignore it? It ain't happen, this is like trying to convince all the people to don't commit crimes.. Would it work? Yes, if you can really convince them to stop commit crimes.... Do you really think your ideas are more worth than the others explained in this threat?... Well, it is only opinions right now...

I think people tend to think some things are too difficult and that's what don't let them advance.

[LeonBlade]

...

It's not just as easy as adding a quest, and even if it was, if it's not good for the players, they're not going to add it... Period.

My comment about you vs them wasn't about you telling them what to do... it's that you assume that a highly trained staff capable of making this entire game wouldn't come up with this idea already and have already implemented it.

The point was to say that people come up with these "solutions" all the time, and to me it's just funny... if they worked, we'd already have them in the game.

[Adrian74]

Eventually, I came up with another thing, I'll add it to the main topic as post edit, buy would be this:

Instead of doing a quest at a certain point. Detect if someone does too many tells every 5 minutes, if that happens, activate the verify protocol for fooling the boots, doing some captcha or code, or something that would require human intervention... I think this is even better than the whole idea I just made before because it is not expected... Unlike what happened with the idea before... I realized that the persons behind the bots would just go and activate the tell commands and so, then they forget until the bot is banned, it reduces a little the thing... But this way they'd have to be actively checking bots... And that's really a bothering for them, this one would reduce it even more and it wouldn't suppose such a nuisance for the players.

It is like if you put 7 fishing bots. Maybe some of you noticed it or not, but when you are fishing in the same area too much time, a strange message that I don't remember appears, and it is clearly made for avoiding a bot fishing 5 hours or more nonstop, so someone have to go there and move the bot. With the tells it could be the same.

Every certain tells per minute, send a prompt. The time that it takes to reply this prompt will be the time needed for use tell again... so if a bot takes 5 hour because the person behind noticed it failed, 5 hours will have to wait again for sending a tell... If a player replies in less of a minute to this prompt-captcha-whatever you want to call it... Player will be able to continue replying and a new prompt won't appear until next 24h...

Of course, as I said, this won't exterminate RMT as long as they are winning money with this, but highly, efficiently reduce their activity because the need of having to do manual things all the time.

PS: I put the fishing example because was a good idea by SE, but the 'prompt' they use is not a proper one and could easily be bypassed, idea would be to do something similar to that with the tells, but really requiring of an intelligent response or of rationalize.