Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Zabuza]

Sometimes i just want to copy their RMT cr*p and paste spam them back with their own vomit. I wonder i'll get myself banned that way

It'd be pointless, it's run by bots. Half the time they're not even there. But I share in that desire. I've wished I could spam their telephone, or spam them in some other way, every minute like they spam me, so they could see how annoying it is.

[Lucke]

What we should do is ask nothing but questions about RMT for the next Questions for the producer thing. That way if SE doesn't answer any of the RMT questions, we know they either don't care, or censor the event and come up with their own questions to answer while making us believe they will answer ours, or they just don't care about the non-JP community at all. That let's them know it's more important than anything else.

[Ophie-Mio]

What we should do is ask nothing but questions about RMT for the next Questions for the producer thing. That way if SE doesn't answer any of the RMT questions, we know they either don't care, or censor the event and come up with their own questions to answer while making us believe they will answer ours, or they just don't care about the non-JP community at all. That let's them know it's more important than anything else.

Except that would become counterproductive. If everyone here ganged up on the question section of the live letter and demanded answers for the RMT situation, the most known response to it will be silence because that would be escalating a situation even more out of control. The worst case scenario would be that they see it as destructive, angry out lashing and decide that they don't want our questions over in the NA section anymore.

I'm 100% sure that there were more questions asked in the last live letter than just about the packaging of the expansion...but lo and behold, nothing but the details of the packaging of the expansion.

I'm sure the next live letter question selection will include even MORE things than the expansion but we'll still see the same questions that we always do. Housing stuff, expansion stuff, and ilevel stuff. Stuff that's already been answered here and will be answered two or three more times to come.

Just because they don't take every question doesn't mean that they don't see it or care. It just means that the question can't be used to hype a group of people over something, as the live letters are supposed to do.

[Intaki]

Yes, let's have SE divulge in explicit detail all of their current methods for combating RMT and bots. That will only end well, and certainly won't give those very people exactly the information they need to circumvent the system and prosper even more than they already do.

[Thayos]

It would be so easy to cripple RMT's abilities to advertise in game. You can't stop RMT that happens through third-party sites, but SE could absolutely end the annoying /tell and /shout spam.

Step 1: Make a "flag RMT" option that only appears when you receive a /tell or a /shout. Add a double-confirmation window to prevent mistaken flags.

Step 2: Make "flag RMT" option disappear after 3 minutes; this would reduce chances for player abuse and make investigating flags much easier.

Step 3: Automatically suspend accounts (pending more in-depth review) of accounts that receive 20 RMT flags in one day.

Step 4: Implement harsh penalties against players found to be attempting player abuse through the "report RMT" function. This would be easy to investigate, as SE would just have to look at player logs from when flags are made (and SE could even automate logs being attached to flag reports to make investigations super easy). If the flag option is only available for 3 minutes, then SE will easily be able to check a small enough communication log to verify whether the communication was clearly an RMT message.

Step 5: Clear our black lists of accounts that remain suspended beyond one week.

Done. Spam over, and really no realistic way for players to abuse the system or for RMT to retaliate.

[Niwashi]

This is a pay to play MMO. The gil sellers have costs for every account they set up (regardless of whether they're legitimately bought accounts or stolen, there are still costs for doing either one). SE only has to slow down the gil spam far enough that the gil sellers are unable to recoup that cost and make a profit. Once the gil sellers stop making a profit from these spam accounts, then the spam will stop.

SE has the means to slow down the spam far enough that it would end up stopping altogether. They know perfectly well how to do it. Yet for some some inexplicable reason have deliberately chosen not to, at least not for their NA/EU customers. Much as I appreciate SE's skill at producing fun and engaging games, this blatant disregard for their customers is rather appalling.

And yes, no matter how fun the game is otherwise, being constantly harassed the whole time you're playing it can ruin the whole experience. Nobody will ever know exactly how many customers SE has lost over this issue, but I'm sure it's a lot, and they'll continue to lose more the longer they allow the problem to persist.

[Zabuza]

This is a pay to play MMO. The gil sellers have costs for every account they set up (regardless of whether they're legitimately bought accounts or stolen, there are still costs for doing either one). SE only has to slow down the gil spam far enough that the gil sellers are unable to recoup that cost and make a profit. Once the gil sellers stop making a profit from these spam accounts, then the spam will stop.

SE has the means to slow down the spam far enough that it would end up stopping altogether. They know perfectly well how to do it. Yet for some some inexplicable reason have deliberately chosen not to, at least not for their NA/EU customers. Much as I appreciate SE's skill at producing fun and engaging games, this blatant disregard for their customers is rather appalling.

And yes, no matter how fun the game is otherwise, being constantly harassed the whole time you're playing it can ruin the whole experience. Nobody will ever know exactly how many customers SE has lost over this issue, but I'm sure it's a lot, and they'll continue to lose more the longer they allow the problem to persist.

Which is why this makes no sense to me whatsoever. Why, as a business, would you willingly choose to lose customers? Is that not a loss of profit? Seeing as how they've already had a pretty long time to do something about this, I can only surmise that yeah, this has to be a choice on their part. The true reason for this eludes me.

[Animarelic]

Because this seems to be a major problem on small to medium servers, not large/full servers, SE doesn't see an immediate need to fix the problem. They don't realize more people are actually leaving these smaller servers not just because of the inactivity but the rampant spam. By dealing with the problem slowly they are ruining their own servers from growing or finding balance.

SE the stance you are portraying to players on minority servers is "it's your fault for choosing the server and if you don't like it pay for a transfer because our only goal is profits."

Until the Devs actually remedy the issue these servers will remain stagnant ghost towns.

[Twivana]

I agree something needs to be done about the gil spamming. Especially since some of the gil sellers are coming from WoW. Only reason I know this is because my bfs parents play WoW (still) plus one of my fc members use to play it. It is really irritating when I am trying to do my shouts for recruitment for my fc and getting blowin up by the bleeps from gil sellers and sometimes I am unable to catch when a person sends me a tell to join my fc! The only moments of silence I get with out the bleeps/ringing whatever you wanna call it is when I go into an instance. Then once I come out it starts all over again -.-

[ZettaB]

The whisper spam should be the least of your problems if you realized their operations in gil making, they literally have 30+ blackmages teleporting underground killing things, then teleports to a crafting bot sitting in ul'dah turning things into materia. This guy has been doing laps converting materia for 20+ days 24/7 on leviathan and reporting him apparently does nothing. How is this not considered suspicious?



It's insane that the blatant cheating isn't resolved first and foremost. Here's one of the underground blackmage.