Petition for a Realistic Solution to RMT's

[LandricFrey]

My solution:

Target the buyers and come down on those like the hand of god. Put the fear of the ban hammer into the buyers to destroy the sellers market. If the sellers arent able to sell their gil then it wont be profitable and they will move somewhere else.

I agree, though I believe they already are banning buyers when they actually catch them. You'd think there would be some alert that would go off when several million gil exchanges hands.

[Nanaho]

I agree, though I believe they already are banning buyers when they actually catch them. You'd think there would be some alert that would go off when several million gil exchanges hands.

They would be constantly being alerted then because people sell runs etc. for multiple millions of gil.

[LandricFrey]

They would be constantly being alerted then because people sell runs etc. for multiple millions of gil.

Wow I never realized so many people were so desperate to clear content that would be obsolete in three months. Really goes to show how much of this is a problem created by players; I mean so many people must be buying from RMT sites, and then you have players advertising clears for obscene amounts of gil, further tempting people to buy gil. Still I know it is possible to reduce the amount of spam and RMT's. Plenty of other MMO's have reduced them to a small presence, why can't FF14?

[DefendPopPunk]

My solution:

Target the buyers and come down on those like the hand of god. Put the fear of the ban hammer into the buyers to destroy the sellers market. If the sellers arent able to sell their gil then it wont be profitable and they will move somewhere else.

I kind of agree here. I saw someone giving advice about making gil to a newbie earlier. It went something along the lines of "get high level enough to unlock a gathering class to sell materials, level leatherworker to craft from the drops you've gotten, or you can buy gil from one of the many sites that advertise in-game." Obviously, I don't know if they were joking or serious or whatever. And I'm not saying everyone or even very many people think this way, but for those that do, they need to be shown that buying gil isn't tolerated.

But come on, that's not going to happen. Those are paying customers. Still, whatever is being done isn't deterring these sellers from their aggressive marketing strategies nor is it preventing people from buying the gil so something more needs to be done.

[Rhas]

We are serious about severely reducing the amount RMT's in our beloved game! Show SE with a /sign, "Like!", a supportive post below, or all of the above!

There is a single reason why SE will never do something permanently about RMT. Money.

Every time you are sent a tell, that means that RMT either paid for the game or hacked someones account. Since many (but not all) RMT companies aren't interested in that, that means they are paying SE money. When SE bans them for messaging, they go out and buy the game again (using money they made from people buying the currency)

This is also a consistent stream of income for SE and they are not going to permanently remove income by making it totally impossible for RMT to operate. They are a business after all and everyone has the means of blocking people by using the /busy to block tells.

They are doing the minimum of showing they are banning players for RMT but still allowing those people to repurchase the game again which also helps pay for your new content/expansions. To SE it is like a "win/win" situation. Banning an appropriate number of accounts for RMT while still allowing situations for RMT to not totally give up and find a free to play game to spam instead of paying SE money.

[LandricFrey]

Somehow I highly doubt RMT's are buying many copies. Its more likely they are hacking accounts and/or using Key generators.

[kyuven]

There is a single reason why SE will never do something permanently about RMT. Money.

Not really. A LOT of these accounts are compromised, or purchased with stolen credit cards.
Ever had to deal with doing a chargeback? Yeah, SE has to do one of those whenever someone reports their card stolen. They not only have to refund the money paid for the account, but they have to pay a penalty many times.
And in the case of stolen accounts, they don't gain money but have to expend resources when the person attempts to reclaim their account.
Basically, SE doesn't actually make money off RMT accounts. The only thing they "gain" is padding their account...counts. That's it.

[Edeline]

Like I posted on other threads:

You can't stop gilsellers. The only thing you can do is restrict their actions, making it harder for them to the point it's not profitable. Now it comes to the part where you have to carefully choose those in order not to hurt your legit community. One suggestion taken from other games was the options to block incoming tells from certain levels range. Spammers are lv1 chars that get deleted every few mins and remade after, even reporting them is useless because they'll no longer exist. Give people the option to block them directly at Lv1. This would force spammer bots to either give up or level up. Leveling up means time lost for them, and then getting banned after spending time in leveling up, not profitable.



Some say this is very newbie unfriendly. But truth is, the way it is going right now, we have the Busy status, which basically works the same but it punishes us, not being able to be traded, tells from friends, invited to parties or whatever. So far I've never got a tell from a newbie asking stuff, they usually ask on Shout. Also in the hypothetical case I don't want to be whispered or "bothered" I would ignore those newbie tells anyway, so this wouldn't really hurt them, but it would help the rest as we're not obliged to reply.

-- Also --

Adding a right click "RMT report" button. If a spammer gets reported via this button a certain amount of times, said reported player gets a pop up with a captcha to enter something to verify it's not a bot. If captcha isn't entered correctly within 1 minute, that player or account gets suspended. If a legit players is abused through this, ticket verification would work for this, with GMs checking logs from the reported/suspended character.

[giantslayer]

I'm getting a little tired of people saying that nothing can be done and the solution is for people to stop buying. Yes, that is the ideal solution. It also happens to be the same ideal solution to every problem in society, such as theft, murder, rape, drug use, etc: "If people stop doing bad things, then the bad things won't happen!" For those of us in the real world, this is not referred to as a "solution," but as "wishful thinking."

Furthermore, this is not a discussion on how to eliminate RMT altogether. It is just about how to reduce or eliminate the annoyance of RMT advertising in-game. That is a whole different ballgame and this is an achievable goal.

I am also tired of hearing people say that SE won't do anything because they get money from RMT a account subscriptions. Just because you are frustrated does not give you the right to assume the worst motivations. SE has taken steps to combat RMT. It is one thing to say it has not been enough. It is another to ascribe a foul motive to them.


People who ask for restrictions on various forms of communication mean well, but do not realize such restrictions would put the game on a slippery slope towards eliminating communication in general. Say we restrict tells. Now the spammers use shouts and yells. We ban those. Now they use say. We ban that too. Now they use custom emotes. We ban those. They use friend requests. We ban friend requests. They start spamming applications to FCs in hopes of spamming on FC chat. Players don't let them in. Then they start using real names on their characters. Meanwhile, new players are left out in the cold. When you propose a solution to RMT, you have to think it through to the end.

The idea put forth by the OP is one that will actually shut up the spammers as the community flags them, rather than restricting everyone's communications and forcing spammers into alternate channels. It will be extremely effective. As long as the process is dependent on SE employees manually flagging accounts or filtering certain words like it is today, they will not be able to keep up with the RMT. By contrast, how long do you think it would take for 100 players to hit "report RMT" on one gil spammer? Probably less than one minute. Leveraging the player base for manpower to fight RMT advertising is the smartest move they can make.

[MrPliskin0]

Well I think everyone agree's that SE needs to do something, even if it means stopping ALL work on everything else to fix this issue first and foremost.

I'd like a Mod to chime in on this, is the right click/Square button idea of marking RMT something SE would consider doing?

Reality is, if they don't do something soon, I'm going to cancel my pre-order of Heavensward, and not renew in June; it's just not worth my time to MacGyver ways to talk with people in the game when we're being hit so hard and fast, by RMT.

Nate.