Petition for a Realistic Solution to RMT's

[Thayos]

I know this because I am one of those GMs. I've worked there for six years and never once seen a case of Right Click > Report Spam auto-mute/suspend happen on a legit non-RMT player unless they were actually, abusively spamming. As the devs for that game like to say: working as intended.

This is exactly why SE should take the easy steps of making /tell spam more difficult. As I said in my earlier post, it wouldn't be hard. Just a few steps are all that's needed. It would be exceptionally difficult for non-RMT players to abuse the system, the way I laid it out... but on top of that, I really don't think player abuse would be a problem, especially when it would be so easy to pinpoint attempted abuse and drop the hammer on offenders (again, read back to my post a page or two ago if you're unclear on the four simple steps I proposed).

RMT will still be in the game, but SE can easily nip /tell and /shout spam in the bud, and that would make the game much more enjoyable.

[Havenae]

I'm going to say this much.

1. Clearly SE does "something" to combat RMT. I dont think anyone actually suggest that SE just lets it run rampant. But here's the thing. What they're doing OBVIOUSLY is not enough. Their strategy in dealing with RMT is no effective as is clear in the fact that it is getting perpetually worse. They need help, they need our help more specifically. The problem is, we can't help anymore than we have been without the appropriate tools.

2. Auto-banning can be abused. It would take very little more than someone that's popular enough in a FC to black ball another player into a banned account by getting his buddies and fellow FC members to report you x number of times. If this type of system is used, the better option is to only allow an RMT or spam report be accessible if it is through a tell. that way the person has to actually send you a tell to be reported.

3. Blacklisting is pointless unless it is done on an account basis. Blacklisting or blocking a specific character only means they can log out, make a new character and come back in to pester you again.

4. Only allowing tells from friendslists is a fucking STUPID idea. If you think RMT is annoying now with the random friend requests, wait until they find out you have to be on the friendslist to send a tell. You might not be getting inundated by tells, but you will be constantly pestered with friendlist requests.

5. A PLEX or CREDD system will not work. The only game to ever has successfully sold game time is EvE Online. There are two primary reasons for this. First, they only primarily have one server, which means one economy which, second reason, is incredibly stable and well thoughout as well as complex. FFXIV has neither a stable or well thought-out economic system and it has multiple servers with widely different price ranges on items. One thing that costs 1.54m on one server may only cost 600k on another, when you apply that to an object such as credd or plex it makes it unstable. You';ll end up buying game time for less money on this server than another because of population or needs of that population. This essentially makes it impossible to unify the $:Gil ratio.

6. SE cannot necessarily go after the company, it would require that the company be under the same type of laws governing commerce between two different countries. Considering SE is a Japanese corporation and most RMT companies are Chinese... That would probably create a bit of an issue. What they CAN do is IP ban China from NA servers.


So then what solution is feasible?

Right-Click report is feasible, as long as the offender's account is blocked from making any further contact with you. These blocked accounts should go to a global blacklist that has no limit. That makes it so we no longer have to deal with it and it should generate a report and chat log capture that is sent to SE. This can also discourage RMT companies as one their tells are no longer getting through or they have to constantly create new accounts (which can also be combated from auto-account creation with captchas and validation questions i.e "1+5=?")

Another option that can coincide with the above is a volunteer system of moderators pulled from the playerbase to help 'investigate' RMT reports. Give them temporary ban powers that they must provide PROOF of a LEGITIMATE temporary ban, before the actual GM gets to determining if the ban should be permanent. This also needs to be handled aggressively to prevent 'volunteers' abusing their powers. Personally I think at the slightest notion that the position has been abused results in the immediate removal of that moderator and possibly him/herself face a permanent ban. These volunteers could also be given squelch powers to shut the shouters.

Third option, allow ADD-ONs for christ's sake. WoW beat this problem a long time ago with an add-on that would filter out spam tells. It wasn't something that the dev staff did, players did it. There's plenty of talent in this community so there's no reason why we couldn't do the same IF we were given the appropriate tools to do so.

All that said and done, I do support more aggressive actions against RMTs

/signed

[Ticks]

RMT tells have broken the 'tell' feature of this game. Most of our FC knows not to use tells any longer because most of us have it on another chat tab. Shame how RMT's broke a feature of this game - we are not able to use all the features of this game due to RMT's. Shame. SE - your game is broken and you seem unable to fix it

[Elmeron]

It's not even hard to make gil in this game. I don't get it! I don't even have any of my crafting jobs to 50 and can manage to make 2mil a day selling materia (and that's on the lower tier, I usually expect to make 4mil+). I wish there was a way to tell who the gil buyers were because they are just as much responsible as the gil spammers.

[eulabreakerswin]

Silence from SE is due to the no automated reply feature in forums or we would get the obligatory " although frustrating as it is know we are tryin to blow smoke up.. anywho but yes /busy in mmo ahh the sadness it states about ff14...Let me count the ways...Having report blacklist and so on gives us more work. most of us paying 15$ a month don't wanna then work instead of relaxing.. There paying people have 1 or 2 per server load in patrol.. yup in game gm's wow new concept that little noise feature works for us will also alert gm's of rmt / bot / spammer.. he goes to person reviews bans then problem gone. no I hate them will try banning.. nope he reviews it right there on spot bans ip after =) .. give or take 3 months spammers / bots / friend requests will drop

[MiniTofu]

Bots are starting to spam Friend invites like insane on Lamia.

[papichulo123]

Square should just sell gill themselves and put these rmt people out of business

[Havenae]

Square should just sell gill themselves and put these rmt people out of business

Except selling currency still causes the issue of undermining the in game economy by causing inflation as the in game currency tends to devalue when it isnt introduced naturally into the server's economy.

I'd say SE could start selling extras (kind of like they already do with mounts and so forth) on the mog station that you could then turn around and sell in game for gil but that usually turns into a greed fest for the developer.

[Krr]

regex "hello my friend ,"
regex "let's make things better"
regex "(insert gold website masked URL string here)"

basic regex isn't terribly expensive to run unless your string is an absurd recursive case, and could be used to filter tells (possibly even silently) and/or flag for suspicious activity. the impact on geniune new accounts could be made nonexistent by careful regulation of what strings are used to identify gil selling - use complex phrases or character combos pulled by examining gil seller /tells or /yells or /shouts and legitimate players are totally immune to this behavior.

we're not talking about complex predictive heuristics here. it's freaking regex on a list of strings.

[LatisFarsight]

I'm 100% agree on this. SE MUST act and do something about it. I know there is some servers were it's hardly seen (reports about JP servers and EU server not having much RMT tell spamming ) , but speaking as a player in Ultros server , it's really REALLY annoying . I will not even rant about how they ruined the final cutscene to the main story ( cause I should've known better and just /busy) .but to miss a lot of tells from friends cause I couldn't see it with all the spam, that's really shitty... atm I'm sharing LSs with friends just so we can talk but if I want to say something private I mostly invite them to a party and chat... is this how SE wanted the chat system to be...?!!