so much RMT!

[LineageRazor]

Things to keep in mind:
- Gil spammers are banned (or retired by their creators) VERY quickly. If you notice, it is very, very rare that you will get an RMT tell from the same character twice. RMT have made a SCIENCE out of quickly creating characters in order to keep up the advertising as fast as SE is able to ban the characters.
- Similarly, RMT have made a science out of tailoring RMT ads to defeat any possible filters SE can put up to catch them, and these filter-defeating strategies are constantly evolving (which is why you'll frequently see different combinations of symbols, and "replace @ with 'gold'" or whatever).
- While SE DOES have part of their staff dedicated to stopping RMT, 100% of RMT staff is dedicated to promoting RMT. There is no reasonable way for SE to put together a task force comprehensive enough to counter the manpower offered by ALL the RMT in the world.
- The most effective ways to counter RMT - things like auto-banning any player who includes certain keywords in text, forbidding newbie characters from speaking with other players, or automatically blocking any shout or tell including a web URL, blocking the IP addresses of entire countries known to be notorious for RMT, among other strategies - impose harsh penalties on innocent people playing the game. Some might be comfortable playing under such limitations, but others aren't.

To sum up, RMT have pretty nearly all the advantages in this war. It speaks well of the RMT task force that things aren't much worse than they are - and if the ffxi gil inflation crisis of 2006 taught us anything, it's that things can be very, very bad indeed. Believe me when I say that SE DOES take RMT very seriously (the progress they made after the 2006 incident was VERY visable), but there is only so much they can do.

[SCUBA_Instr]

Hi LineageRazor,

Last year, I posted a suggested functional description (to a non-SE website) for the mitigation of the /tell spammer threat. It was immediately "disapproved" by another player (spammer sympathizer perhaps?) who argued that implementation of keyword triggers would completely crash the Common 3D Tools/Crystal Code (Source Code) and the servers. I also suggested a global blacklist, whereby players benefit from blacklisting done by the first person to report the spammer.

The predictable words and phrases that spambot owners use with only the last 4 characters varied, indicates that gamemasters have set their filters to filter the entire message, where they should be filtering keywords that no ordinary player would ever use.

RMT harassment can be mitigated. CCP Software did it via Unholy Rage last July.