Gold spammers - IT'S TIME TO FIX THEM

[elisis]

Wulfyn, my thoughts exactly, and I have written a long post about it. The buyers, IMO, are worse than the spammers. Spammers only exist because there are buyers.
Unfortunately, reporting never got me anything done. I have reported people who obviously bought gil (single lv.50 class, not cleared T5, no crafters/gatherers leveled, with a 100M house + 150M of furniture), and even one who admitted having done it, "because he started playing late and needed to catch up". Nothing ever happened, and I have no reason to believe nothing ever will. It's been about a year and a half on this game, and SE has always looked the other way when it comes to RMT. I'm even starting to think SE in fact owns or is somehow affiliated some of the gil selling websites, to display such a lack of interest in dealing seriously with the problem.
Check my other post if you like: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...RMT-Some-Ideas

[Wulfyn]

Well if I was SE, I would just start auditing gil transactions on accounts making looking for common connections ie: x # of players all got x amount gil from x player and go from there. Keep digging making a list of names. As for spammers, if they are using free trial to advertise, I would adjust free trials. Make it so that free trials can't send /tells or use zone chats. Free trials have less "privledges" and are lvl capped. That would be a sneaky thing if they owned some of the gil sites lol. Hmm extra income conspiracy. Sadly it seems more and more that a portion of the NA gaming community is willing to cheat. There are more things that are wrong with these players than that, but doesn't belong in this thread. I can only guess that they currently do not have the #'s GM wise to deal with the load of reports etc that they get from the NA servers. Time will tell and it is only a matter of time when someone does get banned. We just have to be more patient I suppose.

[Felghanna]

If you check the information/general on the forum you may be able to see that they actually are taking actions against it.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-%28Mar.-26%29

It has been doing for months, one year to be exact. But there is no solution and yet no changing for the actions taken against it.

So we conclude that ban or blocking bots won't stop the source to keep creating more bots.

But if the source wouldn't be able to create more bots or if the source didn't even exist in the first place. We wouldn't talk about this today...

[elisis]

If you check the information/general on the forum you may be able to see that they actually are taking actions against it.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-%28Mar.-26%29

Yeah... I see this every now and then. I'm not saying that they don't do anything at all. I'm saying that they don't do anything effective.
Facts:
- I get spammed via /tell every couple minutes (sometimes more);
- Blacklist goes from empty to full in about 2 days (that because I only play a few hours every night);
- People continue buying gil, nothing happens;
- Blacklist gets about 1-2% deleted after a few weeks.

So, what are my conclusions?
- SE is not treating the spam situation seriously;
- SE is not punishing gil buyers;
- SE is not being the least considerate to the overwhelming number of player complaints by at least giving some reason as to why they are not acting on it.

It's very weird... if someone gets reported for using a parser, they get temp banned most of the time. Report a spambot, or a gil buyer.. nothing ever happens. I don't know about the rest of you, but I couldn't care less if people are parsing or not, as long as they aren't being a**holes to others, but I do care about people buying gil nonstop, and being spammed to much to the point of making me having to turn an MMO into a single player game.
There are so many ways to either solve the problem or at least make it so inefficient to spammers that it wouldn't be feasible to maintain, that I really can't understand SE's lack of interest.

[Felghanna]

In my vision bots shouldn't exist in a MMORPG in the first place, it changes the way that new players see the game.
I'm saying this because I didn't expect bots when I first log in the game, because bots show how failed is the game system.

In another post I saw that Square-Enix didn't react different in Final Fantasy XI, and posts like this seems to not having any attention from the staff.

Then I hope more action from the players than from the developers.

[GazaelNoxlucis]

Given the amount of obvious bots hanging around the Ul'dah aetheryte, I've taken to jotting their names down and send a report from Report Offending Players option on the Lodestone. I usually send a report with around twenty offenders on the list. Within about 10 minutes I can get around twenty bot names. Sometimes they hang around, others quickly vanish the moment they jump in. Not sure if it does anything reporting them but it at least makes me feel like I've attempted to staunch the problem.

[Felghanna]

reporting bots seems to be a good work through the lodestone, I've just made it, thanks for the advice.

But still...

We could do more than that.

[Boi777]

Lol this post is a joke. Rmt and bots exist in every mmo so stop putting the blame on SE. How would they fix it when all it takes is a whisper? Stop complaining and just ignore them in game I mean really it only takes 2 clicks of your mouse to ignore them. Please don't tell me you have no time for it becuz if you're playing this game you obviously have the time. Also why can't you treat their whispers like a random dumb msg on /shout

[Tristamwolf]

@Boi it's not the fact that they exist that's the problem, it's the sheer volume and the length of time they spend active per account before they disappear.

[Boi777]

Yeah... I see this every now and then. I'm not saying that they don't do anything at all. I'm saying that they don't do anything effective.
Facts:
- I get spammed via /tell every couple minutes (sometimes more);

- Blacklist goes from empty to full in about 2 days (that because I only play a few hours every night);
- People continue buying gil, nothing happens;
- Blacklist gets about 1-2% deleted after a few weeks.

So, what are my conclusions?
- SE is not treating the spam situation seriously;
- SE is not punishing gil buyers;
- SE is not being the least considerate to the overwhelming number of player complaints by at least giving some reason as to why they are not acting on it.

It's very weird... if someone gets reported for using a parser, they get temp banned most of the time. Report a spambot, or a gil buyer.. nothing ever happens. I don't know about the rest of you, but I couldn't care less if people are parsing or not, as long as they aren't being a**holes to others, but I do care about people buying gil nonstop, and being spammed to much to the point of making me having to turn an MMO into a single player game.
There are so many ways to either solve the problem or at least make it so inefficient to spammers that it wouldn't be feasible to maintain, that I really can't understand SE's lack of interest.

Please do tell us how to solve this haha? Stop new characters creation? Or like op said face to face tell ? Haha