Quote Originally Posted by Laraul View Post
Here are all the SPAM tells I've received over a 12 hour period while I was AFK.
Didn't there used to be a rule that you couldn't get tells while AFK? I wonder what ever happened to that.


Quote Originally Posted by Laraul View Post
I think the only way to stop these is to restrict /tell to players above a certain level. Or those who have amassed a certain amount of play time.
Neither of those would have any effect on it. The spam bots will be whatever level they need to be to send their spam. It doesn't matter to them in the slightest what level that is. Currently, that level happens to be 1, so currently the spam bots are level 1. If the level to unlock full chat access were 10 or 15 or even 50 for that matter, then the spam bots would all go to that level. It wouldn't make there be any less of them. The same goes for play time. If they need to be online for a certain amount of time before they can start their spam, then they'd simply log in that much in advance. Again, that wouldn't have any affect on their numbers.

I've seen this and numerous similar ideas suggested often. People need to give up on the notion that making the game harder for newcomers would help stop spam. It wouldn't. All making it harder for newcomers does is make it harder for genuine newcomers, with characters being directly controlled by real players who are trying to learn the game. Bots don't care what it is they have to do, as it'll all be just part of their script.


The only thing that will stop the RMT spam is making it unprofitable. There are costs in setting up new accounts. (Even if they're stealing accounts, it costs them the effort of stealing them, as they can only manage that for so many.) They're only going to continue doing it as long as those accounts are making them more money than they cost. Given that only a very tiny fraction of players getting these annoying tells will respond by going to their website and buying gil from them (and that in most cases they only make a small amount of money from each of the ones who do), an account has to be able to send out lots and lots of advertising spam messages before it gets banned — enough for even that tiny fraction resulting in sales to bring in more money than the account cost.

The only reason RMT spam is so bad in this game is because SE isn't doing anything to stop it. Sure, they do a sweep once a month or so and ban a bunch of accounts, but a month is plenty of time for the RMT companies to make money from them, so these occasional sweeps are nearly meaningless. The bans have to come immediately in order to have any real effect. If we got that "Report RMT" option and, most importantly, SE had GMs monitoring them real-time to ban them real-time, then the spam bots wouldn't be able to get more than a handful of messages out before their whole account is blocked. With their low sale to ad message ratio, most spam accounts wouldn't bring even a single customer to their site. As soon as that happens, all the RMT companies would quit trying to advertise in-game and move their whole advertising budget into ads on third-party sites, simply because the in-game spam would be losing them money. Now, by itself, that wouldn't stop the actual RMT, but it would immediately and completely eliminate RMT spam.

(Stopping the RMT itself is a different issue because the farming bots are far harder to identify than the spam bots. Real players farm stuff in pretty much the same ways that bots farm stuff, and SE has to do a thorough enough check of a character's background to determine which it is before banning them. The one second glance to say "yes, that's RMT" only works for the spam messages.)

Of course, implementing a "Report RMT spam" option and needing to respond immediately to all the reports that come in from it would create a flood of work for the GMs the first few days after it comes out. Even if the reports only take them a second or two to process, there would initially be a lot of them. But as soon as the RMT companies figure out that this is no longer profitable and they quit trying to send in-game spam, the corresponding reports would dry up as well, letting the GMs get back to all the rest of the stuff they need to be doing. So if that initial rush is too much for their regular GM staff to handle, SE could just hire a few temps or temporarily reassign a few people from other areas to providing the GMs with some backup during maybe that first week or two. It's not like it would continue to be a ton of work on an ongoing basis.