Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Zabuza]

Most of the time when I am playing with a friend in a new game we use Teamspeak or Skype. We hardly use the chat function at all. If I am meeting new people naturally I will want to text with them over Skype as I don't know them. I have been in MMOs with a tell gate of at least level 10 I've seen some with a tell gate of level 20 to combat the RMT spam. Often times in order to get rid of a disease you need a cure with some side effects.

Heh, well said. It's just a shame that RMTs make this something that's had to be done in certain MMOs...

[KisaiTenshi]

Alternatively a straight up "decline all party, friend, and FC invites" tick-boxes would go a long way to culling the harassment in the game.

This could be useful. The FC invites because people aren't generally going to join an FC who invites them unless they're actually looking for an FC. The Friend invites because anyone genuinely trying to set up a Friend connection is going to talk to the person first, so it could easily be allowed only when needed but blocked from these RMT bots the rest of the time. And the party invites just because otherwise they'd likely become the RMT's next haven once Friend requests can be blocked.

I mentioned it because I have seen it in other games and it certainly cuts down on the obnoxious things that both RMT and nuisance players do. However the "right click report" also exists in another game... but in said game, it doesn't work from the chat list, only if you can see the character. So it's much the same argument we are having here about how to prevent bots from spamming.

If you look when bots send a spam, they're usually level 1 and standing somewhere inside Ul'dah (at least on my server.) The "correct" fix for this is to have deletion cooldowns. If I ignore a spam for about 10 minutes, and THEN try to blacklist it, it will say the character is not found. So they're obviously doing something along the lines of either deleting the character and re-creating it, or just cycling through all their stolen RMT buyers accounts.

Increasing the blacklist size is actually rather useless because you can delete the blacklist every sunday morning and you'll still never see a spam from any of the bots you previously blocked last week. So this is barking up the wrong tree.

Level gating tells just doesn't work because instead of the bots hanging around somewhere easy for GM's to see like cows ready to be slaughtered, they will instead run off and kill stuff until they hit the necessary level. I assure you this is a worst situation than just letting them stand around. If you level gate tells, then they will just create 100's of bots to grind through the easy monsters until they get over the level gate. That is a much worse problem, as at least the spam bots aren't killing all the quest mobs needed by new players. As it is, the RMT bots do this already. You'll see two dozen bots teleporting underground killing everything in a 50 yalm range faster than any human player will even get a chance to blink. Fortunately (or unfortunately) they seem to only do this until a dungeon is available and then they spam that instead, rendering most of the game accessible.

A more correct mechanism is having an actual tutorial for chat mechanics that pushes the player or bot into an instance so that any would-be spammer can't tell before they get it, and can't tell during it. So instead of a level gate, you use this as a deletion timer flag. Once the tutorial is completed, the character can't be deleted for 24 hours or something like that. That gives the GM's the opportunity to actually deal with the bots rather than seeing a lot of spam-and-delete that is the current trend for RMT spammers in every MMO recently.

[LandricFrey]

I mentioned it because I have seen it in other games and it certainly cuts down on the obnoxious things that both RMT and nuisance players do. However the "right click report" also exists in another game... but in said game, it doesn't work from the chat list, only if you can see the character. So it's much the same argument we are having here about how to prevent bots from spamming.

If you look when bots send a spam, they're usually level 1 and standing somewhere inside Ul'dah (at least on my server.) The "correct" fix for this is to have deletion cooldowns. If I ignore a spam for about 10 minutes, and THEN try to blacklist it, it will say the character is not found. So they're obviously doing something along the lines of either deleting the character and re-creating it, or just cycling through all their stolen RMT buyers accounts.

Increasing the blacklist size is actually rather useless because you can delete the blacklist every sunday morning and you'll still never see a spam from any of the bots you previously blocked last week. So this is barking up the wrong tree.

Level gating tells just doesn't work because instead of the bots hanging around somewhere easy for GM's to see like cows ready to be slaughtered, they will instead run off and kill stuff until they hit the necessary level. I assure you this is a worst situation than just letting them stand around. If you level gate tells, then they will just create 100's of bots to grind through the easy monsters until they get over the level gate. That is a much worse problem, as at least the spam bots aren't killing all the quest mobs needed by new players. As it is, the RMT bots do this already. You'll see two dozen bots teleporting underground killing everything in a 50 yalm range faster than any human player will even get a chance to blink. Fortunately (or unfortunately) they seem to only do this until a dungeon is available and then they spam that instead, rendering most of the game accessible.

Deletion CD's is another easy to throw in thing that would help. 3 every 24 hours or so won't really hurt the newbies. I agree that level gating isn't the answer, that only hurts new players. I mean, they are bots, they don't mind having to grind a few levels to use chat, but I'm sure a fresh player looking for help from friends or other players would.

[DreadRabbit]

A more correct mechanism is having an actual tutorial for chat mechanics that pushes the player or bot into an instance so that any would-be spammer can't tell before they get it, and can't tell during it. So instead of a level gate, you use this as a deletion timer flag. Once the tutorial is completed, the character can't be deleted for 24 hours or something like that. That gives the GM's the opportunity to actually deal with the bots rather than seeing a lot of spam-and-delete that is the current trend for RMT spammers in every MMO recently.

I did not think about the monster grind, and I have to say your idea is definitely better. A lot harder to program a bot to get through a precise tutorial than it is to just put a level gate. Also, I agree with the deletion timer on characters. That alone would slow things down significantly.

[KendraNomura]

/signed
Kendra Nomura (Adamantoise)
i think the option to recieve tells from cetain sources is a good idea. like friends only.

[Zabuza]

I have noticed there are quite a few people whose very first posts on this forum are to sign this petition. That should be a rather telling sign. Are you listening SE? This is a huge problem that affects a large portion of your players, and it's NOT going away with your current model. This isn't something you just brush to the side and ignore. We want answers. We want action.

[Tristamwolf]

/Signed by Khloe Zhwan of Ultros

I really support the idea of a Regular Expression Chat Filter option. I've seen a lot of evidence that points to the fact that a RegEx chat filter would be able to filter about 95-98% of all annoying gil-spam messages.

[Zabuza]

/Signed by Khloe Zhwan of Ultros

I really support the idea of a Regular Expression Chat Filter option. I've seen a lot of evidence that points to the fact that a RegEx chat filter would be able to filter about 95-98% of all annoying gil-spam messages.

I believe chat filters provides a good combination of ease of implementation plus the least intrusive method against players. I still highly favor this idea. Most of the other ideas present a downside. For example...

-Level gating /tells.(Can stop two friends under the level gate from able to whisper each other if implemented.)
-Go after the gilbuyers(Not as easy to do as it sounds.)
-Adding a right click report option.(The RMTs will simply come back on another account and resume the spamming, little would change.)
-Increasing blacklist capacity.(The RMTs will simply come back on another account and resume the spamming, little would change.)
-Go after the suppliers(I actually don't see too much of a downside to this either.)
-Account wide blacklist(This will do little, as RMTs jump from account to account anyways after bein banned.)
-Allow /tells only once every 5 seconds or so.(Doesn't hurt players too much, but would be a minor annoyance for people who type fast for sure.)
-Allow /tell filters only between friends.(Would hurt crafters, and people in general like sending /tells to strangers sometimes.
-Implement custom chat filters (No downside that I can see. Unless the filters were not implemented properly and filtered out legit messages as well.)

[tocsin]

I believe chat filters provides a good combination of ease of implementation plus the least intrusive method against players. I still highly favor this idea.

My only concern with a "chat filter" is that, unless it is allowed to be user-defined, it is going to be bypassed quickly. Remember, RMT is run by hundreds, if not thousands, of thinking human beings, primarily in Asian countries. Unless each players chat filter is different, its only going to be a matter of minutes before RMT can bypass any regular expression.

[Zabuza]

My only concern with a "chat filter" is that, unless it is allowed to be user-defined, it is going to be bypassed quickly. Remember, RMT is run by hundreds, if not thousands, of thinking human beings, primarily in Asian countries. Unless each players chat filter is different, its only going to be a matter of minutes before RMT can bypass any regular expression.

Yeah, I assumed with chat filters that it would be user-defined. It would only make sense imo. But knowing SE if they did implement chat filters they wouldn't allow it to be user defined, lol.