RMT - Some Ideas

[elisis]

Since Gil buying and selling seems to be ok to Square Enix, I'm not sure this will be heard by someone who can actually make a difference. Tried in-game reporting several times, only to be met by a canned response, and no changes at all.
So, here are some ideas to help deal with RMT:

1) There's only selling because there's demand for it. As soon as people start having characters either perma-banned or seriously punished, and word spreads, people will think twice before buying. They only buy because they are 100% sure nothing ever happens.

2) Since the blacklist fills from 0 to 200 in a couple days - in Ultros, I get a spam message every few minutes, then just get rid of the 200 limit.

3) Along with #2 above, why not have some sort of semi-automated system for banning? Like... if Mr. Asdasd Goldahceo, a lv.1 pugilist is suddenly blacklisted by 500 people, there's a very good chance they are just bots. Ban them temporarily, and send for review by a GM.

4) Throttle /tells. Normally, players don't send/receive tells from lots of people in a short amount of time. I do communicate by /tells frequently, but mostly with 1 or 2 people. Throttling would make spamming much slower: like, you can only send /tells to 3 different people per minute, or so. Adjust this so there's few false positives.

5) From my full blacklist, I can see after a few weeks that there are perhaps 5 or 6 (Deleted). So, account deletion isn't being treated seriously, I guess.

6) Make RMT reporting easier, as adding to BL is. Right click >> Report RMT Spam. Having to fill a long form for it is not nice. And after reporting, seeing the same spammer there after 2 weeks discourages future reporting.

7) Some RMT spam I receive claim to send gil via in-game mailing system. I guess they use Moogle delivery? If so, messages with large amount of gil could be screened by some semi-automated process. It's ok for a lv.50 everything friend of mine to send me 5M gil for something I did. It's probably not ok for some half-leveled random person I just added to send me 5M gil. There could be manual screening as well.

8) Actually do something when reports are filed. I've met and reported people who doesn't have any crafting classes leveled (so, can't earn gil from crafting), who haven't cleared T5 yet (so couldn't earn gil by selling runs), and still have bought a 100M house, with furniture exceeding 150M gil. Where did that much gil come from? Yet, he's still there, fully geared, melded, and so on.

8.1) Met another guy who had clearly bought gil, and he admitted doing so, because he started playing recently and had to catch up somehow. Reported again, and nothing happens.

9) "Legit RMT" seems in fact to be ok with SE. By legit, I mean buying items in MogStation just for selling in-game. Met people who bought tens of marriage stuff, selling in-game. Made like 40M gil. I don't know about you, but RMT is "Real Money Trading", so, Real Money is Real Money, no? If this is ok for SE, then why not just start selling "gil packs" ?

10) Isn't this illegal in some places? Why not start filing lawsuits where they are? The game economics and ecosystem should be top priority.

Going for the sellers won't work, if the buyers continue buying without anything ever happening to them. And believe me, they are completely confident nothing will ever happen.
I'm not claiming RMT solutions are simple, but despite the "actions taken against rmt" post we see every now and then, what SE says they do and what we see in-game are completely different. Have they tried just staying logged in to see the utter mess the spam situation is nowadays?

That's it for now. The game is awesome, but dealing with spam every minute, and seeing people cheating all the time is just very hard to take.

[elisis]

How nice.
Complain in-game, get a canned response asking to post in the forums, and nothing happens.
Actually come and post in the forums, get ignored and still nothing happens.

Way to go, Square Enix. Thanks for showing us customers you don't care about us. Thanks for letting the worlds' economy ruin. Thanks for showing cheating is the right way to go. Thanks for making this MMO (second "M" is for multiplayer) essentially a single player game, after having tells disabled.

I don't know about the rest of the community, but for me, every single time I asked for support, the experience has been the same.
Perhaps, me and others should start to show our disapproval with our money, and go play something else.
The game is great, but the company attitude towards the player base totally sucks.
And judging by the number of posts complaining about spambots, I'm not alone here.

[Kyouki]

I doubt we will ever get an answer from SE... I am totaly pissed about being /busy all f*cking day long. This game already feels like a single player game to me :'(

[Wulfyn]

A thought I had earlier today while getting spammed >.< was why don't names in /blacklist wether they are character/account deleted or banned just get automatically removed? That would make it easier for everybody.

[stroh68]

I am done reporting them, it seems to do no good at all since, as was stated earlier, out of my list of 200 only 2-3 a week actually end up deleting the character. Today was the straw that broke the camels back though. I apparently reported someone yesterday just before I logged off so the notification came through while I was offline. When I logged on today I was greeted with that utterly annoying flashing support notification. I cannot dismiss it today though since the support server seems to be down or something and I cannot access my recent actions or history tab. So, for trying to do my part I am left with a horribly annoying flashing support ticket thingy all day while I try to enjoy the game, not to mention the RMT spam that I couldn't even report if I wanted to right now. Either give us some option to turn of support notification or just get rid of it, because it is nearly as annoying as the RMT spam itself. At this point I can only assume this "feature" was implemented to DISCOURAGE RMT reporting.

[stroh68]

To update I solved the support notification problem by moving the server status/time to the opposite side of the screen on my HUD and pushed the flashing support notice off the edge.

[Avenger]

I've had the same support reply unstoppable blinking notification icon problem since ~patch 2.5 or so. It's really annoying. Sometimes I can get rid of it by going through every single reply and re-closing it, but not always.

I can also confirm that after hundreds (thousands?) of spam reports that I've submitted since launch that:

1) Nearly every spambot on my blacklist is still active when I have to delete them to free up more slots (sometimes they spam me again after I delete them)

2) I always receive the same pointless boilerplate response telling me to blacklist the spambot I already blacklisted (said blacklisting being included in my report!)

3) Recently I've been receiving new spams from new spambots before I receive a response to my last spambot report

4) Recently spambots have taken the brazen step of moving back to /shout spam in cities

[aresgodofwar30]

The only way this problem will stop is to treat the root cause not the symptoms. SE needs to disable the ability to trade gil between players and the mailing system.

[Felghanna]

First of all I'll repeat what I said in the other topic.

These spamming bots seems to be a problem, at least the most "shallow" from those that was mentioned.

You see... Blocking them is not like could solve the problem itself, the bots will continue to exist and also the main cause of them, the RMT site.

Another concern is we can only report them in-game, to get an idea this forum has no support for reporting players (also bots). And the GMs seem not know how to react to problems that doesn't consists in technical issues. We are seeing this on first hand here, this is theme is one of most viewed and replied topics in this forum and yet we have no answer from any community representative.

And the way that those bots spread makes blocking/reporting having no actually effects towards the source of the problem.

So if the Square-Enix itself will not do anything to change this, maybe we can find a way to shut down all these websites...

[EZ5902]

They need to bann the players permanently that are caught breaking ToS, hell, delete their god damn account for god sake, they accepted the ToS but choose to break them? why should they get special treatment......