Quote Originally Posted by Nyalia View Post
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.


Quote Originally Posted by Nyalia View Post
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.