Game needs more ways to deal with RMT

[Aerowaffle]

Yes, I know we can already report RMT through support and that GMs are doing their best to ban these bot accounts for both RMT advertising and/or bot farming, but some more options really need to be given to the player.

RMT bots are always going to outnumber the GMs trying to handle things, giving some better options to the players would both make it easier for the GMs to locate and ban the bots, but also alliviate some of the annoyance to the players that don't like to be spammed by RMT ads.

1. Give players an option to turn off prompts for friend invites. Allow friends to still pop up on each other friend's list if both parties add each other as friends.

Reason: These friend invites from bots are probably one of the more disruptive advertising, since it takes several steps just to remove the message, and you can't add the bot to the blacklist until you deal with the friend request.

2. Have a right-click "report RMT related" option. This option would file a report on the person, and set the person to be forever-blacklisted from the player (not on the standard black-list).

Reason: The reason is three-fold. Making the process to report an RMT would help out the diligent players that report the advertisers. Making it easier would also increase the number of players that actually report these bots, giving the GMs larger signals to investigate the players with high number of RMT reports against them. Finally, adding these RMT advertisers to a separate black-list would free up the first black-list for real players. The 200 limit on the standard blacklist forces players to clean it out every so often if they use it for RMT advertisers. And while it's safe to assume that almost all these RMT bot players don't exist anymore, the real players that you've added still do. It's annoying that real-players that I've added to the black-list (because they were dicks, etc) are also removed.

3.

I really hate having to go busy all the time as it blocks people that are on my friends list that I wouldn't mind them contacting me so maybe they can create a filter that allows tells from people on your friends list. Another drawback with busy is if I forget to turn it off when I enter a duty I can't participate in ready checks and there is no way to turn busy off when you are in a duty(at least no way that I know of)

Another idea that I have seen being tossed around is have a global blacklist for rmt

Post any other recommendations (or discuss the ones posted). But I believe square-enix needs to add some more options directly into the game, rather than only dealing with a small percentage of the RMT manually.

[OlyverW]

Yes it has gotten out of hand there needs to be better ways of dealing with them. I was finishing the 2.5 story quest and I got non stop spammed while I was in cutscene that was very annoying.

I really hate having to go busy all the time as it blocks people that are on my friends list that I wouldn't mind them contacting me so maybe they can create a filter that allows tells from people on your friends list. Another drawback with busy is if I forget to turn it off when I enter a duty I can't participate in ready checks and there is no way to turn busy off when you are in a duty(at least no way that I know of)

Another idea that I have seen being tossed around is have a global blacklist for rmt

[Aerowaffle]

Yes it has gotten out of hand there needs to be better ways of dealing with them. I was finishing the 2.5 story quest and I got non stop spammed while I was in cutscene that was very annoying.

I really hate having to go busy all the time as it blocks people that are on my friends list that I wouldn't mind them contacting me so maybe they can create a filter that allows tells from people on your friends list. Another drawback with busy is if I forget to turn it off when I enter a duty I can't participate in ready checks and there is no way to turn busy off when you are in a dungeon (at least no way that I know of)

A little bit of a work-around for turning off tells would be to go into the configuration settings and turn off the notification sound of tells, and either remove tells from showing up on your main tab, or make a separate tab for tells. The disadvantage would be, of course, it blocks all tells.

The ability to restrict tells to just receiving them from certain groups would certainly help.

[Risvertasashi]

A little bit of a work-around for turning off tells would be to go into the configuration settings and turn off the notification sound of tells, and either remove tells from showing up on your main tab, or make a separate tab for tells. The disadvantage would be, of course, it blocks all tells.

The ability to restrict tells to just receiving them from certain groups would certainly help.

There's an easier way: /busy

But it's still not ideal as, yes, it blocks *everyone*.

[Aerowaffle]

There's an easier way: /busy

But it's still not ideal as, yes, it blocks *everyone*.

/busy also has the disadvantage of your status being "busy" when you're really not busy.
If they implemented an identical status called "blocking RMT tells", then it wouldn't confuse my friends who are trying to guess if I'm actually busy, or just trying to avoid the spam.

[KaedrianLiang]

Yes it has gotten out of hand there needs to be better ways of dealing with them.t

The best way to deal with them. Ban the gil buyers. No market no rmt.

Gil buyers are more likely to buy something at a high price than someone who legitimately earn their gil. This causes extreme imbalance on activities that require a substantial amount of gil.

I digress. a good share of those website spam bots are directing players to sites with malicious software that dl onto your pc without you knowing and compromising your account.

[Miakisu]

I would hope for a report RMT option, where, on the backend, it also copies the last tell they send me to the GM. Easy-peasy.

[Darske]

I would hope for a report RMT option, where, on the backend, it also copies the last tell they send me to the GM. Easy-peasy.

I was going to reply to this thread, but this is exactly what I was about to say. From a programming standpoint, it shouldn't be terribly hard to implement this either. In the year or so since I started playing FFXIV, I'm stumped as to why this hasn't already been done.

[Aerowaffle]

I was going to reply to this thread, but this is exactly what I was about to say. From a programming standpoint, it shouldn't be terribly hard to implement this either. In the year or so since I started playing FFXIV, I'm stumped as to why this hasn't already been done.

My theory is that RMT is essentially a PR problem, not something that the programmers or game testers directly notice. It's something that the PR department has to communicate to the programmers that these options/additions are desired.

And from a business standpoint, it doesn't pose enough of a problem. There isn't an overwhelming amount of people that are demanding something to be done. Square-enix is reluctant to set a programming task to mitigate RMT spam, when it doesn't directly cost customers, and the programmers could have been creating new content.

Which is why the bigger fuss we put up about how the customers want something to be done, the more likely it is that it will be pushed up the priority. Too many people have become accustomed with the annoyance of the RMT existence.

[dejavutwo]

I like the idea of a secondary blacklist that is supposed to be used for RMT. The secondary blacklist could be a lot smaller, but when it fills up it could automatically drop the oldest name off the list, so you will never have to clear it out, and it won't get bloated with tons of names of banned bots.