Persistent "Unstoppable" RMT Spam-Bot

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There's a 3rd party tool out there (which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) that allows you to block any and all RMT tells while having zero negative effect on legitimate communication. As it lets you set custom filters, you can also stop annoying spammy stuff, FC recruitment messages, etc.

But you know, omg 3rd party tool ban the cheater stopping RMT tells! /s

[Nakaruru]

i personally don't care if someone buys gil or not, but i do care that SE doesn't have a working filter to block tells that are non-stop, unsolicited harassment.

please devote more effort into a solution to block these tells.

[SCUBA_Instr]

Hi Nyalia,

Blacklisting someone blacklists their entire account

Best suggestion yet. Your suggestion is reinforced by the known fact
that spambot softwares constantly delete and re-create their own
spambots many times per minute.

I read somewhere, on a gaming news website, that the RMT generates over 1000 new
ffxiv bot accounts daily, using cheap stolen credit card accounts.

May I add to your suggestion?

There should be a high capacity global blacklist, whereby the first "victim" to get spammed, has the
option to add the spambot name to a global inter-server blacklist to which we can have
the option to subscribe to. Thus, we all benefit from the actions of the first person
to blacklist the spambot owner's entire 8-player account.

Last year I suggested a global blacklist on the ffxivrealm website and was
immediately shot down by a pseudo expert who argued that it would crash
the ffxiv source-code and all the servers.

[MageBlack]

I think this quote kinda sums up how these RMT people work VS the measures in place.

"The problem with making something Idiot proof is they always find a better idiot."

Meaning, no matter what measures get put in place, they will just work that much harder to find ways around it until the game is so locked down no one can play. Honestly, I play almost every day and in the last 6 months i think i could count on one hand the amount of RMT's i've seen / been spammed by, and my blacklist is under 10 people. Some of you guys must have some of the worst luck ever to have full black lists that you dont manage and constant streams of RMT bots spamming you.

I hope things get better for you.

[Buff_Archer]

Plenty of good QoL suggestions have been made over the past year so that we don't have to manually juggle an always-full blacklist full of RMT names.

None of them have been implemented.

[MageBlack]

Why is your blacklist always full? Why don't you delete the older ones?

I play almost every day and in the last 6 months i think i could count on one hand the amount of RMT's i've seen / been spammed by, and my blacklist is under 10 people. Some of you guys must have some of the worst luck ever to have full black lists that you dont manage and constant streams of RMT bots spamming you.

[Buff_Archer]

I shouldn't have to, it's an ongoing waste of my time. As it is I'm already having to delete several accounts a day, and I would have to delete about 30 people from my blacklist on a daily basis to have it trend downwards, considering I have to blacklist over 20 new accounts a day. I could delete my blacklist down to 0 people but I'd have to once again delete each new person I add or else have it fill back up to 200 quickly.

I don't give a damn about the reasons EN servers get more RMT's than JP servers because I don't buy gil and it's not my fault, I shouldn't have to deal with it any more than any other player.

[MageBlack]

I shouldn't have to, it's an ongoing waste of my time. As it is I'm already having to delete several accounts a day, and I would have to delete about 30 people from my blacklist on a daily basis to have it trend downwards, considering I have to blacklist over 20 new accounts a day. I could delete my blacklist down to 0 people but I'd have to once again delete each new person I add or else have it fill back up to 200 quickly.

I don't give a damn about the reasons EN servers get more RMT's than JP servers because I don't buy gil and it's not my fault, I shouldn't have to deal with it any more than any other player.

I'm on Balmung on the NA servers and I have no problems. Granted, from patch 2.0 to about 2.2 it was pretty bad, but Since about 2.25 i decided to write down all the names in my blacklist on a piece of paper, delete them all, then see how many came back. 2. 2 names came back out of an almost full list. Did it once and since then have only added maybe 6 more to my blacklist. I havent spent more than a few seconds thinking about it since then until another tell pops up, then i cross reference, blacklist. Like i said, maybe i'm just lucky. I cant honestly tell you why its not a problem for me. I get RMT tells Just like my email spam, I maybe get three a week, if i'm lucky. I wonder what it is about our habits that differs so much to cause such a huge discrepancy.

[Nyalia]

Mage Black, it could be that Balmung just has fewer spambots. Maybe people on Balmung don't buy gil. Maybe you're just in instances often enough that you don't get targeted. Maybe your character name is somehow resistant to whatever character-polling algorithms the spambots use to find their targets. I do know that my experience is not the same as yours. When I was blisting every spambot, I was having to clear my blist every 1-2 weeks. I've since stopped blisting most spambots (I only bother if I'm in the middle of a /tell conversation as it removes the bot from the /r list so my /r's go to the right person, or if the spambot tries to friend me). My blist is still filling up quite fast.


If you've never had to clear a full blacklist, it's a huge pain. You have to click each individual name and then click confirm. Deleted characters are not removed from the list automatically either, and each (Deleted) name has to be individually removed (each with its own confirmation window). The confirmation windows are irregular in size due to large names causing text to wrap, so the "ok" button moves, preventing you from click-spamming to delete a series of bots. So, it's click, move, click. Click, move, click. 400 clicks total, with movement between each. (On a side-note, if the EMR company I work for had an interface like that, doctors would be up in arms about it and we'd lose customers. "Click reduction" is seen as a serious performance concern here, so I cringe when I see interfaces that aren't designed to minimize clicks.)


On a side-note, I really do hate the new spam-bots that do not send tells, but instead spam friend requests (I think they're on trial accounts?). If you accept the friend request (I did once out of curiosity), they moogle-mail letters full of spam. My problem with them is that when I get a friend request from what's clearly a spambot, I hit my "flist deny <r>/blist add <r>" macro. In this case, instead of denying the friend request and blisting the spammer, I blist the last person who spoke to me via /tells (provided they're not on my friend list already).

[Niwashi]

I play almost every day and in the last 6 months i think i could count on one hand the amount of RMT's i've seen / been spammed by

Maybe there's an upside after all to the difficulty of creating new characters on Balmung. The gil-sellers must have as much trouble as everyone else creating characters there, but they're dependent on repeatedly creating lots of characters. Must be pretty hard to do on the really crowded servers.