Blacklist: More Options Needed

[niwaar]

As the title said, please give us more options with the blacklist feature.

While the Special Anti RMT Team has been doing a better job as of late (I have only gotten 5-10 RMT Spam /tells in a single day instead of the only 25+) we still have no other recourse than to Blacklist them. This becomes a problem as the Blacklist has a limited number of slots available, and no way to comment on why we added them to the list in the first place. We desperately need some changes...

1) Please allow us to make notes on each person on our Blacklist.
This option is already available for our Friend's List and is even more required for our Blacklist.

2) Please allow us to "Report Spam", "Blacklist that Spammer", & "Autocomment that player as a spammer" by right clicking their name.
Currently we can Blacklist a user by right clicking but this is not enough. The extra LONG process of reporting a spammer (and there is not even an option to report for spam, we have to use "Report for cheating" or "Report for Harassment") is annoying and few people participate in it. The number of spammer exposed would rise dramatically.

3) Please allow us to MASS remove players from our Blacklist.
My Blacklist is almost permanently at max capacity because of the number of spammers (and now people running illegal casinos). To be able to categorize and remove a large number of Blacklisted players at once.

4) Please make Blacklists cover the entire user account of a player.
Being harassed by alts created by players who can only be categorized as "jerks". There may be a process in place, but if the system worked like FFXI's Playonline friendslist things would be much smoother.

[AriaChere]

Also, I would appreciate a larger blacklist. 200 just isn't enough to cover all the active RMTs. And perhaps an auto-removal of deleted characters? It feels silly to have to manually delete those few accounts that were banned to free up space on my blacklist.

[Callinon]

The problem is that most RMT characters aren't deleted. The account gets banned but the character remains, so it never gets changed to (Deleted) in your blacklist for easy removal.

A much better way to handle this would be the way WoW does it, which is to add another option apart from just "Add to blacklist." That option is "Report Spam." Report Spam would do what it says it does, and automatically blacklist the player TEMPORARILY. The blacklist entry lasts until you log off and then is automatically removed. Because let's be serious here.. RMT characters get banned/nuked pretty quickly once they start going, so keeping them on a permanent blacklist is just a waste of your time when you have to go clean it out later, also preventing the blacklist feature from being used for what it's ostensibly for, which is ignoring real players you don't want to interact with.

[CionnMac]

Greetings!

/agree with all of the above, especially the blacklisting of entire accounts and the option to remove large chunks of the blacklist at once--or, if possible, just making the list infinite/automatically purged once a week or so.

Please do some or all of the above, as it is a real nuisance to lose the /tell function to these idiotic spammers. I put up with them for nearly a month, getting a spam literally every ten minutes or so and having to empty my blacklist on almost a daily basis, before finally giving up and disabling my /tells. To me, having to do that is a clear indication that the devs aren't doing their jobs, however harsh that may sound, and I don't appreciate losing functionality that way.

Ciao!

[Laraul]

I like Callinon's idea (the "Report SPAM" option). Though I don't think the developers really understand just how bad the problem is. RMT spam is much more focused on the English speaking servers, and there's very little of this type of thing on the Japanese speaking servers, so the Japanese player base hasn't been complaining about it like we have. I speculate that since the developers speak only a little English at most, they really don't interact much w/ the non-Japanese forum discussions.

[kisada]

These are all very good ideas and should definitely be implemented.

I think it is clear that SE's wave of gilseller account bans are not the answer to gilseller harassment tells. In fact i would absolutely bet money on the notion they'd prefer it that way so RMT's spend more money on new accounts and subs. The amount they gain from RMT's re-upping after periodic bans has to be quite substantial.

It's either that or the team doesn't find this to be a serious issue or is ill-equipped to deal with it to begin with. No matter what the reason, though, it's definitely a problem that needs a solution.

[Lemuel81]

These are all very good ideas and should definitely be implemented.

I think it is clear that SE's wave of gilseller account bans are not the answer to gilseller harassment tells. In fact i would absolutely bet money on the notion they'd prefer it that way so RMT's spend more money on new accounts and subs. The amount they gain from RMT's re-upping after periodic bans has to be quite substantial.

It's either that or the team doesn't find this to be a serious issue or is ill-equipped to deal with it to begin with. No matter what the reason, though, it's definitely a problem that needs a solution.

I think you would be surprised. Most accounts are compromised accounts. Thats how Gil sellers work- they dont continuously purchase SE accounts- they are stolen.

[Mildicant]

In addition to general blacklist improvements, I'd also like to see blacklisted words / phrases that will auto-intercept tells.

When's the last time you got a legitimate message with hearts, ".com", "USD", "$" or "hello friend" in it? Never.

If SE isn't willing to fix the problem (and it IS fixable), then let us fix it. I'm tired of having to play games like /busy, creating a tab just for tells, etc. to stop the spam.

[Niwashi]

In addition to general blacklist improvements, I'd also like to see blacklisted words / phrases that will auto-intercept tells.

When's the last time you got a legitimate message with hearts, ".com", "USD", "$" or "hello friend" in it?

That's why you'll see things like ".com" represented by "• Ç () /\/\" or any of a thousand other variations. A lot of the obvious terms are already blocked. (I do think SE could do a better job of updating their blocked phrases list to include the latest spammer workarounds, but the spammers would just keep coming up with new workarounds when they need to.)

[lordjoosie]

I hate to be the party pooper in the thread, but none of these suggestions will help.
I get 30-40 tells a day, and very few are from the same character.
It's looking at 35 tells,and not blacklisting, or looking at 30 tells and blacklisting 30 people.

The solution is simple, and not only have people been screaming for them to do it, but it was done YEARS ago in FFXI and almost completely solved the problem overnight. Limit how many tells a person can send in a certain amount of time. Make it however many you wish, as long as it's humanly possible to send that many tells. If someone sends 500 tells in 5 minutes, you can be fairly sure they're a gil seller, and 100% sure they're breaking the ToS.

Unfortunately, if they wanted to do this, it'd a been done long ago. I can only assume they see some benefit to letting these tells harass us. Maybe it's so they can brag about the 1000s of accounts they banned in their weekly RMT reports. We'll never know.