Report an RMT directly from Chat Log

[Hohoz]

Tell people to quit buying gil and they will go away .... RMT is a business and if no money was to be made they wouldn't be around period ~ problem solved

[Kyouki]

If it was that easy i would... I only know 1 person who bought gil in the past... not sure if he still does.

[Avenger]

Although I don't object to the blacklist/report button, a whitelist might be much more effective. For example:

Friends can: [√]tell [√]invite [√]invite to alliance [√] invite to FC ...

or

Allow /tell from: [√]friends [√]party [√]fc [√]linkshell ... [√]whitelist [ ]spammers [ ]anyone

[fixitfelix]

SE could implement a honeypot character or characters in the game that can batch and flag accounts it receives tells from. Don't think it would be too difficult to implement something of that nature and it would certainly automate and act upon RMTs fairly quickly. This along with the report RMT spam feature that after 30-50 unique people report it the account is flagged and silenced for an hour for a GM to scrutinize it and make a determination based on the reports. The honeypot strategy can also work in conjunction with the unique report as further confirmation of a illicit account, if its reported on both sides something is DEFINITELY not kosher,if two or three honeypot characters receive tells from the same account then that already should be suspect already. Those accounts can be pretty much removed without even glancing at them.

[ArtemisMobiusetti]

SE could implement a honeypot character or characters in the game that can batch and flag accounts it receives tells from...

Fighting fire with fire. Make bots to fight bots. I like it. I also really like the idea of a Whitelist as opposed to a Blacklist since there are far more RMTs than there are people I want to get tells from. The downside being that this option would not reduce the amount of Friend Requests the RMTs send as well.

A reminder that the goal of this suggestion is NOT to find a way of stopping the RMT problem, it is a suggestion on how we can better MANAGE the RMT problem with easier reports for players and GMs alike. I am not sure how to grab the attention of an official in order to get their feedback on this, and the folks are /r/ffxiv were less than welcoming to the idea for some reason (they like RMTs?)

[Jas710]

SE should give Turbine Inc. a call. When they first launched their Lord of the Rings Online mmo , for the first few months there were gold sellers spamming all over the place, even in the in-game mailboxes.

I don't know how they did it, but the dev team had completely annihilated gold spamming during the 5 years I spent playing that game. Never got a gold spam ONCE DURING THAT ENTIRE TIME. It was damn impressive.

[Avenger]

SE should give Turbine Inc. a call. When they first launched their Lord of the Rings Online mmo , for the first few months there were gold sellers spamming all over the place, even in the in-game mailboxes.

I don't know how they did it, but the dev team had completely annihilated gold spamming during the 5 years I spent playing that game. Never got a gold spam ONCE DURING THAT ENTIRE TIME. It was damn impressive.

When FFXIV 2.0 launched, there was a plague of spam in /shout and /yell - it would start scrolling up your screen as you logged in or entered a region. They do seem to have put a stop to that, somehow, but it is now a big problem in /tell.

[Tristamwolf]

Why can't we at least get a patchjob that searches for the strings ".com" ".net", ".org", ect and automatically filters tells with those strings in it out? That code isn't even hard to write.

This would affect a very small number of players in normal game, but would essentially shut down any gil spammers in /tell, and you could expand that code to also take chat modes outside of /p, /fc, and /ls if desired. The code could also be altered to filter whitespace characters (spaces and tabs) and to replace 0's with o's in the checks

I mean, this seems like it would be the bare minimum of service that we should get for a game that we are paying for. Filter out what could be reasonably a spambot message. I am certain there is a programmer out there who could make this in 1 day, and have it tested and in our hands in time for Golden Casino. Please, PLEASE Square Enix, make this a thing!

[Nyalia]

Why can't we at least get a patchjob that searches for the strings ".com" ".net", ".org", ect and automatically filters tells with those strings in it out? That code isn't even hard to write.

This would affect a very small number of players in normal game, but would essentially shut down any gil spammers in /tell, and you could expand that code to also take chat modes outside of /p, /fc, and /ls if desired. The code could also be altered to filter whitespace characters (spaces and tabs) and to replace 0's with o's in the checks

Such a solution would do nothing. How would it catch people who do something like ". Ç Ø M" or whatnot? I've seen RMT use such things all the time. They obfuscate the web addresses with various extended characters to confuse parsers, but a human can trivially figure out the web address from what they see on the screen. Hilariously, it's essentially an anti-anti-spam captcha XD

[OlyverW]

After my own 19 hour experiment I had 114 tells and 5 friend requests from the same bot ( they would rescind and rerequest )