A curiosity on RMT spam

[SCUBA_Instr]

Hi Nutz,

The RMT harassment situation is getting progressively worse on Adamantoise. Yesterday a RMT spammer continuously repeated his "friend request" harassment for nearly 45 minutes. During this time, my blacklist capability was rendered useless, since a new friend request was in the queue before every attempt to blacklist the RMT bot.

Probability is high that the offender's RMT corporation is using 3rd party software to capture and modify data stream packets. I posted remedial suggestions to a non-Square Enix website and I was flamed by others who argued that implementation of best security practices would crash the game's source code. If this were true, then e-commerce would not exist.

[Tayolynn]

I've been getting RMT tells/yell/shout in populated cities, mostly in Limsa and even at Mor'dhona. Also, I noticed I get them when I participate in fates such as fates in Coerthas and places where a bunch of people gather, like hunt marks and Odin/Behemoth. It's like they have a normal player around, but they are actually scouts, and I get a tell/friend request from the usual noticeable RMT character name. Makes me wonder if some normal players are scouts for RMT activity, since I get them when I'm alone in The Goblet. This is on Exodus btw, dunno if it's better or worse on other servers.

Now that you mention that lower leveled characters could be a target, I have been working on leveling my classes, and I may or may not have specifically noticed, but now that I leveled all my DoW and DoM classes, maybe I will see a decline in RMT crap. We shall see.

[Violyre]

I received a tell/friend request when I was going through the intro cutscene in Limsa. Not even a chance to move my character.

[SCUBA_Instr]

Hi Violyre,

Thank you for bringing this up. Having endured the insidious RMT spam-houses for a year, this is way to frequent to be considered coincidental:

Anytime I perform an action which causes the hotbar to temporarily disappear (blacklist macro is on my hotbar) the giant HK based RMT corporation sends spam into the / Tell chat. Examples are usually when the retainer is summoned, or use of market board, or any other action that disables hotbar.

I submit that RMT spammers detect user actions, and program their bots to send spam into the victim's chat box upon any action that disables the hotbar [containing the blist macro}. Spammers are likely to be intercepting and modifying the network data-stream packets, given that ordinary users have no way to detect another users login or other actions. Hope is that Square Enix personnel will mitigate any vulnerabilities that allow RMT employees to hack into their network.

[Snugglebutt]

I think the friend request ones are for the purpose of hacking your account, like maybe logs on the client account info in some way because only once did I accept friend request from one once when first started playing because did not realise that's what RMT sellers do and thought was just normal person who sent it. I then got locked out of my account by Squeenix and had to change my password as Squeenix thought my account might have been compromised according to them.

When RMT sellers target me they never seen to stop too in the sense I had one few days ago message me spamming his RMT selling information and I ignored it but kept sending me friend requests and messages for over 30 minutes before I realised ignoring alone doesn't work so I blacklisted and reported.

One thing I will say though is Squeenix does seem to ban RMT spammers but never seems to ban RMT funding bot accounts or people who bot for self gain, I was shocked how Yoshi said in an interview he actually doesn't mind botters and instead of telling people not to do it he just asked them not to get caught. Goes to show the mentality of the developers when they are trying to help botters cheat in this game by giving them advice and never banning them.

[Bixby]

I was shocked how Yoshi said in an interview he actually doesn't mind botters and instead of telling people not to do it he just asked them not to get caught.

He said that about DPS parsers, not about botting.