Idea - How to finish with the RMT.

[Lord_Zlatan]

shouting for a res and responding is hardly going to clutter the chat for others. the chat is already cluttered with rmt, emotes, trolls, and normal shouts, so I don't really think that argument has a leg to stand on.

It IS bad for crafters, though.

[Phe]

I can - bad for crafters:

1. (future) customer shouts for meld / craft / etc.
2. You're unable to /r if (s)he is not standing next to you ...

hmm... maybe tell & respond can be allowed when starting a tell with right click on the name in the chat window.

[Cairdeas]

Why not make a system where if someone randomly /tells atleast five random people and those people black list them within a minute, they get 'muted'. While Muted their messages fail to go through to other players. But don't tell them they are muted. This way RMT's will continue to try and use the system in question, but once muted they'll be wasting their time.

[Fireseen]

So much time spent writing this post for nothing, skimmed = TL;DR. Gil spammers are good for revenue. How many servers are there? I personally have countless "active" gibberish named characters that I blacklisted on just my one server, and I don't blacklist every single one (I don't pay attention to it sometimes). If each one of those is a $30~ dollar account, straight cash! And I know some of them have been on for over a month = sub paid, more money.

[Adrian74]

I still thinking that the idea is good because you'll rarely need a tell until level 10. THE QUEST could also be before it... But the idea is to make something that requires of an human intervention... So if the big guys behind the bots want to keep their business they'll have to take the nuisance of manually do the quest, and of course, banning them will really make a trouble with this.

But there have been good ideas in the replies too that I'd like and also good!... Such as the option to temporally block chat to someone if that person receives too many advises by RMT (Right clicking them and reporting).

Btw, captcha is not so easy to surpass if it is not easy accessible the data of the server that is providing it...So in this case, if the quest generates something random, but you and your program have no clue of how to obtain that random value to match with the one of the quest and make your bot do it.... You won't rarely do it.

Stop them or not, it will clearly delay them if they have to manually unlock things. A stolen account as someone said there is a 0.01% of the bots, the big majority are being created every day, thousand of thems, with a supreme ease, so easy that it is a super good business.

Another good idea would be make it in SE's code of the game so it detects how many tells we send. RMT are selling tell to different person all the whole time so they can easily exceed 50 tells per minute or even more... If that happens... MUTE them and send a report for checking that account. Won't finish the problem, but will delay it, and we will always appreciate receiving 10 messages of this per day than 100 of these.


But please, Square Enix, there are things you can do, effectively one, just do it!.... Right now... The actions you are taking for combat the RMT spamming is useless, futile. It is like standing in a river and try to stop the flow of water doing punches, you have to actually think cold and make a dam.

[Amberion]

But there have been good ideas in the replies too that I'd like and also good!... Such as the option to temporally block chat to someone if that person receives too many advises by RMT (Right clicking them and reporting).

This can easily be abused.

As for the suggestion of OP. Do you really think RMT will vanish? People will still know about it. Just a search on google for the game will give you ads for Gil sellers.

[LeonBlade]

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



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...

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.

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.

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.

The only reason to keep the spam up is because they make more money off of selling Gil/stealing accounts for more bots is because they are making a PROFIT. There would be no reason to spam people if you were losing money, RMT would have died a long time ago. That means, people are buying.

Another good idea would be make it in SE's code of the game so it detects how many tells we send. RMT are selling tell to different person all the whole time so they can easily exceed 50 tells per minute or even more... If that happens... MUTE them and send a report for checking that account. Won't finish the problem, but will delay it, and we will always appreciate receiving 10 messages of this per day than 100 of these.

This is most likely already in the game... but guess what... it doesn't stop the spam still because that means (in this case) 50 messages get sent out and they use another bot, so the spam didn't really stop, did it.

[LineageRazor]

Gil spammers are good for revenue.

If you're implying by this that SE tolerates gilsellers because of the money their accounts bring in, you should know that this is not true. SE releases reports all the time talking about the anti-RMT actions they've taken - just look at the Lodestone main page and you'll see there are seven such notices up at this very moment!

SE learned from their mistakes in being lax with RMT in FFXI. The economy of that game crashed hard after an enormous gil sale back in, I think it was, 2006? 2008? Whenever. It cost them a lot of customers, because the prices of items that normally sold for hundreds of thousands of gil were suddenly costing tens of millions due to the huge influx of gil into the economy during an especially vigorous Christmas sale. It hurt their reputation as well, and no matter how money-oriented a company is it still wants to look good to potential new customers.

So, no - the money gilseller accounts bring in are not worth enough to SE to leave them be.

As for the original topic of this thread, I'm not sure how I feel about it. Certainly, when I started playing I never had any need to send anyone a tell prior to level 10. The game is REALLY GOOD about tutoring you through early game content, and leveling to ten happens ridiculously quickly anyway. Even so, there's no way that this will "finish" RMT, and I'm not even really sure that it will significantly slow them.

Creating bots to level characters to 10 should be pretty easy. It would all come down to the quest, and whether it will be complex enough to require human interaction to pass. (Maybe an actual Captcha image would be involved?)

[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...

[Tharian]

There are no whispers in ARR :P

Yes there are, a Whisper is synonymous with a /tell, its just a different form of terminology to reference the same mode of communication.