Report an RMT directly from Chat Log

[Hohoz]

For now just use ../busy works like a charm ~

[Kyouki]

No, /busy is not an option cause if you go busy you cannot receive tells from your friends anymore. Its like cutting of an important part of the game.

[Nyalia]

Here are all the SPAM tells I've received over a 12 hour period while I was AFK. There was only one that got it's SPAM to me twice. None of these we're blacklisted by me (I was AFK).

Careful! You've just posted RMT advertisement, along with website addresses, on the OF, a bannable offense. You've also posted names of players you believe are RMT, which I believe is another bannable offense (part of a set of rules to prevent public shaming). I strongly recommend you remove the names and website addresses from your post before a GM sees it.

Yes, RMT is a problem, but don't do their job for them by forwarding their advertisements here!

[Nyalia]

Placing arbitrary restrictions on the /tell or /flist features will not stop RMT. RMT bots can be programmed to level or finish quests easily enough - it would just be a part of the login process for the bots, just like creating a character and generating a name. Arbitrary restrictions such as level requirements or quest requirements, unless the quests include a form of in-game captcha mechanic, negatively impact legitimate players more than the RMT bots.

Currently, the vast majority of RMT bots never send the same person more than one tell. They make the character, burst a message across to everyone they can find, and then delete their character and make a new one. Or, they just make a new one - the account will be banned before long, so all they really need to do is get the message out to as many people on as many servers as they can before that happens.

Because blacklists are specific to a character and not to an account, blacklisting an offender really don't do anything either. All it does is turn into a chore when your blacklist fills and you have to start removing everyone individually. And, in my case, it results in me accidentally blacklisting a number of legit players who sent me questions just after an RMT tell, resulting in my blist macro hitting them instead of the RMT.

Really, as players, there honestly isn't much we can do about RMT with the game in its current state. Reporting their advertising bots is ineffective because they'll just get more. Bans on one-use-and-delete characters and one-use-and-delete accounts does nothing to stop the actual RMT business. Reporting bots is more useful in that regard, but it's really hard to prove someone is botting, and player reports of bots never seem to go very far. Blacklisting the advert bots does nothing since they bot only hits you once anyway.

As long as RMT is profitable, there will be RMT spam. The trick isn't to remove the spam, the trick is to make RMT unprofitable by making money-generating tasks more difficult/time-consuming for characters with minimal effort invested in them.


To really kill RMT, SE can increase shard yields from sources other than level 1 gathering. SE can make gathering nodes behave like fishing holes - gather from the same set for too long and you are prevented from collecting anything till you switch to new nodes (would affect a very small amount of legit players but would hinder all gathering bots). SE could take other such actions that directly target the ability for RMT to make money.

[Niwashi]

As long as RMT is profitable, there will be RMT spam. The trick isn't to remove the spam, the trick is to make RMT unprofitable by making money-generating tasks more difficult/time-consuming for characters with minimal effort invested in them.

Making it harder to gather money will just drive more players to wanting to buy from the gil-sellers.

Placing arbitrary restrictions on the /tell or /flist features will not stop RMT. RMT bots can be programmed to level or finish quests easily enough - it would just be a part of the login process for the bots, just like creating a character and generating a name. Arbitrary restrictions such as level requirements or quest requirements, unless the quests include a form of in-game captcha mechanic, negatively impact legitimate players more than the RMT bots.

<snip>

To really kill RMT, SE can increase shard yields from sources other than level 1 gathering. SE can make gathering nodes behave like fishing holes - gather from the same set for too long and you are prevented from collecting anything till you switch to new nodes (would affect a very small amount of legit players but would hinder all gathering bots). SE could take other such actions that directly target the ability for RMT to make money.

These would just be programmed into the farming bot's script just like the leveling / questing suggestions for the advertising bots. If they couldn't gather from the same nodes too long, the bot script would just say "go location A - gather - gather - gather - go location B - gather - gather - gather - go location C" etc. Any pattern that's reasonable to expect from legitimate players would be trivial to program into the bot script. If the pattern gets too difficult to program, then it's gone far past what regular players are going to put up with.

[ArtemisMobiusetti]

... Here are all the SPAM tells I've received over a 12 hour period while I was AFK...

Your results are quite lucky, Hyperion must be cleaner than Goblin.

If thats for 12 hours you're lucky... Thats how life on Goblin is. They are extremely agressive spamming there.

I went ahead and did a 4 hour test sitting AFK, with one chat window set only to display tells. Here are my results (also added this to my OP):


4 Hours, 39 /tell. Winner was Laurensd with 5 tells in 4 hours.


Guys, something isn't right here, and we need to fix this. I can't report 9 players an hour (average /tell rate) with the current reporting system.I'm not looking for a cure to the RMT plague, there is no {Esuna} for it. I just want an easier system for reporting RMTs, easier for players and GMs alike.
Existence is reasonable. Let's make things better.

[Laraul]

Neither of those would have any effect on it. The spam bots will be whatever level they need to be to send their spam.

As of now, if a character is banned for spamming after ten minutes, they just turn around creating a new one. One that's instantly capable of starting where the other left off. Obviously this is overwhelming the staff responsible for keeping the servers clean of this stuff. So, putting a time wall up to slow down the flood of new RMT SPAM-Ready characters will help!

People need to give up on the notion that making the game harder for newcomers would help stop spam.

No one wants to make the game harder newcomers. But newcomers and long time players alike shouldn't subjected to this garbage we see now. Yes it's unfortunate. But I simply do not know what else they can do to stop this other than this.

The only thing that will stop the RMT spam is making it unprofitable.

RMT is a major business, and it's not going away. These RMT outfits operate their services within just about every MMO available! You can't just stop people from wanting a quick way to get some gold/gil? People are going to take shortcuts, people are going to cheat.

Personally, I could care less if people actually use these services. It's their money, and if they want to take the risk of losing their account, they can go right ahead. I, and everyone else, is sick of seeing all the RMT SPAM /tells we see now. The priority should be to stop those first!

The only reason RMT spam is so bad in this game is because SE isn't doing anything to stop it.

They are doing something about it! And you screaming any different isn't HELPPING. I'm offering a possible solution! You're just screaming "SQUARE-ENIX! DO MORE!"

[Avenger]

They are doing something about it! And you screaming any different isn't HELPPING. I'm offering a possible solution! You're just screaming "SQUARE-ENIX! DO MORE!"

Since the current approach is not working and the problem seems to be getting worse, I agree that the Report&Blacklist button is a band-aid which would at least speed up the apparently ineffective and futile process of RMT spam reporting in FFXIV.

While they are at it they could also accelerate the apparently pointless process of re-reporting botters who have been there for months.

Restricting /tell has the obvious downside of making it harder for new players to communicate. Besides that, I expect the main effect it would have would be that spambots would bot for 10 hours (or up to level 10 or whatever the requirement is) before converting to spam mode.

Spammers might end up having to make their assembly line longer, but you can bet that they will still manufacture the same number of new spambots per hour.

[Kyouki]

I logged on, deleted the top 20... only 30 minutes later i already blisted 10 new RMT's again. No matter what time it is, there are always up to 35 lvl 1 characters, most of them in Uldah. Their newest trick is to log out immediately after their spam. You cant even blacklist them that fast, so they dont even get caught anymore?

I remember SE found a way to get rid of this advertising in FFXI... Why is it not possible here?

And what makes me angry the most: Yes they do post "hey we banned so many RMT accounts these days"... but the numbers compared to the servers are nothing... And what i absolutely miss is a statement like "we are aware that there is a huge problem with advertising tells... please be patient, we are working on it"... That would give me the feeling that something will happen one day and that all the lost time blisting/unblisting/reporting is worth something :/

[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