Report an RMT directly from Chat Log

[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.

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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.