Report an RMT directly from Chat Log

[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?)

[Niwashi]

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!

The time between bot-character creation and that bot beginning it's spam would increase, but the rate at which new bot-characters are created wouldn't change. The bots just beginning to spam people might be ones created a couple hours ago and the ones being created now wouldn't start their spam for another couple hours, but if the same number are being created at the same rate, then the overall amount of spam stays the same. The time they spend online before beginning their spam wouldn't be an offence they could be banned for, nor would it get them on anyone's blacklists, so that extra time simply doesn't count towards the time needed to eliminate them.

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!"

What they're doing is what I directly referred to, in the very next sentence after the one you quoted. Those bans occur far too late to prevent the spam from reaching RMT customers. As long as that remains the case, they're not going to work. Bans have to come immediately, so that the spam doesn't make the RMT companies enough money to be worth continuing. Only when it becomes unprofitable will it stop.

And as to your solutions and mine, I did offer a real solution. (Or actually, as far as this thread goes, the OP offered it and then I elaborated a bit on it.) They just need the proper tools. It's a solution that we've been asking for since the game came out, because it's the one (and probably only) solution that would actually work. If SE would implement it, then there would be no more RMT spam. There spam exists because SE hasn't given us or the GMs the tools needed to stop it.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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 )