Suggestion: Eliminate RMT advertising by empowering the player community

[giantslayer]

Square's current methods of combating RMT are ineffective because reporting RMT is too inconvenient for players and taking action is too time consuming for Square. By providing the player community the right tools to fight RMT, the problem could be virtually eliminated overnight.

1. Create an option in the chat window to "report," right next to the option to "blacklist." The system then automatically imports all pertinent data with the report.

2. Once an account has received a certain number of reports, it will automatically be frozen by the system. To unfreeze an account, the player would have to contact Square.


The beauty of allowing the community to self-police RMT is that it is inherently a smart system, unlike restrictions or filters on tells and player searches.

If this were implemented, every RMT spammer in Eorzea would have their accounts frozen within 5 minutes, and every new account they start spamming from would be frozen in seconds.

[giantslayer]

As a safeguard, the "report" link should pull up a report page to ensure no accidental reports. Reports should also contain the text of the message and who submitted the report, to provide proof of the activity and recourse against wrong accusation.

[giantslayer]

In the interest of staying one step ahead of the spammers, their next move once they are effectively shut out from anything that can be reported via the chat log may be to spam friend requests and then send mail messages to those who respond. This approach would be drastically less effective advertising but it would be infinitely more annoying than tells.

To prevent this:

1. Prevent players from initiating friend requests if they already have, say, 10 requests pending.

2. If someone has a certain number of declined friend requests in a certain time period (say 10 within 24 hours, for example), then they are blocked from initiating (but not receiving) friend requests for 24 hours and any pending requests they have outstanding are cancelled. The block should be on the entire account, not just the character, so that the spammers can't simply delete and make a new character to get around it. Even if it could only be done on a character level, it is still worth doing, though.

[Mashashi]

I am Mashashi, approve of this message

[Will96blanco]

Agreed, square definitely needs to do something about the spammers, and this method seems nearly perfect. (Its not even this bad in swtor,and that game is ftp, js)

[giantslayer]

One other thing I want to note here from Square eventually reads this:

It is CRUCIAL that the new "report" tool sends the reports to the computer system, which keeps a tally and freezes the account instantly once it reaches enough reports. The reports MUST NOT be automatically sent for manual review like the current forms are, because you do not have the manpower to deal with the volumes of reports you will receive.

Currently, hardly anyone does the "Report Cheating" form because it is too much work. If I had to guess, I figure less than 1% of the players use that form. If you made it as easy as blacklisting, then almost everyone would do it. You have 2 million players. They aren't all on at once, but when they are, they are getting multiple spams per hour. You could receive millions of reports a day if they were easy to submit. That is why the process of identifying and freezing the reported accounts MUST be automated. Manual review by a Square rep should be the exception, not the rule for these.

[TMjolnir]

Thanks that there are more of these threads. Seriously it feels like there are more RMTs by the minute as accounts being deleted or given a warning. In fact I think none of them should be given warnings. Legitimate RMT is cheating period!! It needs no second chances, auto-ban it!! I know this harsh considering some accounts may be hacked but come on if your character name is "Ffes Ghorabja" LOL it's an RMT character. Just the other day in Excalibur I happen to wake up at 4AM EST to continue my atma grind for 2nd weapon...I chance upon a train of lalas stuck to one character. Made me angry "Lala abuse!!" At the same time "wow just like 1.0 when Rmt freight train passing thru" But on a serious note please increase the blocklist capacity to more than 200 'cause unless this "RMT issue" is fixed quickly, I need more space to blist!!

[coldreactive]

Force the /shout command to not be able to be used in user macros, then I'll accept report spam button/etc.

[RavenCB13]

My free Company got together and reported on one Gil Spammer to see how long it would take for them to remove this RMT Bot... Well it has been 3 weeks and he is still spamming away, that is with a total of 27 confirmed reports by our members alone. Therefore it is my belief that Square Enix has found a way to make additional money on the side and they are the RMT Spammers themselves.

[giantslayer]

Force the /shout command to not be able to be used in user macros, then I'll accept report spam button/etc.

My idea is to have the option in the chat window, right next to blacklist, and should work for shout, yell, and say (in addition to tell). If they start shouting, people will report them and they will be frozen in seconds. Giving players the ability to collectively identify and freeze RMT advertisers eliminates the need to place restrictions on macros, player searches, tells, shouts, etc.