Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Crescent_Dusk]

I would also like to point out every feature they implement to combat RMT also affects the legitimate player base, it is the biggest drawback of implementing more security. Furthermore those chat filters do exist but you are unaware of them why do you think the gil sellers spam comes through as such unintelligible garbage. Also any feature you implement will be circumnavigated by someone given enough time and will. The true problem is the market that exists for it in the first place, Phoenix doesn't seem to have anywhere near the problem some of the other servers do, now I don't know if that is down to server population or if its a case that there is no market for them on Phoenix but it is interesting. I agree that SE could implement a few of the requested features but to truly solve this problem the market would need to no longer exist.

Actually, it's pretty simple. They can have a status option where you can only receive whispers from friends, free company/linkshell members and people in your group, and then in order to send friendship requests, have such a feature require lv15-20 and the story steps up to that point done.

The issue people don't get with RMT is that RMT only exists in games with heavy gold grinds, and FFXIV is one of them. The tier IV materia cost 400-500k a piece, craftman ones 200-400k a piece. ilv100+ gear costs in the vicinity of 1 million gil.

To give you some perspective, you can chain run dungeons and raids for an entire week or two and still not come close to making 500k-1 million gil. So your income is solely tied to gathering/crafting professions. Except there's a problem, because gathering/crafting professions only make money at high gear levels and when you're among the first in the market. So the new guy coming into the game, hits a crafting profession to 50, finds out he needs to spend more than a million gil to just gear that crafting profession on, and then he needs to repeat the same time consuming and costly process on several other professions because in order to do high quality crafting you need cross class skills and good enough gear.

So, yeah, don't expect people to stop buying gold because the game makes the gate to entry or time investment to afford relevant items/crafting proficiency such a juicy incentive for people to resort to third parties.

This is the flaw with market games, always. The combat portion of the game outside selling raid runs always gets the shaft in money making and people are forced to craft/gather when they might not be interested in neither just so they can feed their goddamn chocobo some stat food that costs 20k gil a piece and a single dungeon run may at best yield 4-5k gold in rewards.

[Niwashi]

Actually, it's pretty simple. They can have a status option where you can only receive whispers from friends, free company/linkshell members and people in your group, and then in order to send friendship requests, have such a feature require lv15-20 and the story steps up to that point done.

That's actually a pretty bad solution. It completely blocks legitimate new players from joining their friends (which may be their whole reason for starting the game in the first place), while providing a trivially simple obstacle to RMT bots, which can already level clear up to 50 easily if they have any reason to. (They're already doing it for their gathering/farming bots. They'd just port the first bit of that bot script onto their spam bots as well.) There's lots of other features that SE could add which make RMT harder without disturbing legitimate play at all. They need to start with those, leaving disruptive features as an absolute last resort, which hopefully they'll never need to use.

The issue people don't get with RMT is that RMT only exists in games with heavy gold grinds, and FFXIV is one of them. The tier IV materia cost 400-500k a piece, craftman ones 200-400k a piece. ilv100+ gear costs in the vicinity of 1 million gil.

Actually that problem doesn't come from too few gil sources, but from too many, and from a lack of corresponding gil sinks. You're talking about costs that come when players sell things to each other. The going rate for goods is whatever people will pay for them, and with loads of players sitting on millions of gil that they have virtually no use for, people will pay a lot for just about anything they want to buy.

The only major expense the game itself has is if you want to buy a personal house (but due to the number available, most players won't be doing that anyway). Besides a house, what other game expenses are there? There are gear repairs if you don't craft, but those don't cost much. You could spend money on teleporting or flying around if you don't like traveling, though that's almost entirely optional and still doesn't cost much even if you do it a lot. And that's about it. We've got lots of gil coming in, through quest/leve/FATE/dungeon/challenge rewards, and very little going out, so the result is inflation. The prices you're dismayed by are simply the result of that inflation.

[Sicno]

That's actually a pretty bad solution. It completely blocks legitimate new players from joining their friends (which may be their whole reason for starting the game in the first place), while providing a trivially simple obstacle to RMT bots, which can already level clear up to 50 easily if they have any reason to.

Yeah, but maybe with some tweaking a more convenient solution could be implemented. Maybe an option (that you can disable at any time) to only allow friend requests and tells from characters above a certain lvl. Something like at least 1 hour worth of playing, bot or no. Sure, their script will have no trouble lvling up, but think about it: how long does it take to create a character, skip the initial cutscenes and start sending tells already? Literally nothing. If it took them at least 1 hour the number of tells/friend requests would be diminished A LOT. As it is right now they can shuffle through new lvl 1 characters to spam at the speed of light. And what about adding the spam script to their farming bots? well, with proper reporting tools (like on chat window right click on name -> report message) those bots wouldn't get very far before having to start again from lvl 1. Not very convenient for them that way.

As for "what about new players wanting to join their friends?" well, the friend who already plays and that would have a higher lvl character already could send the friend request. There wouldn't be anything stopping low lvl chars from receiving friend requests, they just wouldn't SEND them. And as I said, this could just be an option that you could tick off at any time and after you added someone to your friend list you can tick on again. The beauty in this is that it would be something completely optional that may be disabled by default, so that if you can't bear RMT advertising you voluntarily turn it on.

[Crescent_Dusk]

That's actually a pretty bad solution. It completely blocks legitimate new players from joining their friends (which may be their whole reason for starting the game in the first place), while providing a trivially simple obstacle to RMT bots, which can already level clear up to 50 easily if they have any reason to. (They're already doing it for their gathering/farming bots. They'd just port the first bit of that bot script onto their spam bots as well.) There's lots of other features that SE could add which make RMT harder without disturbing legitimate play at all. They need to start with those, leaving disruptive features as an absolute last resort, which hopefully they'll never need to use.



Actually that problem doesn't come from too few gil sources, but from too many, and from a lack of corresponding gil sinks. You're talking about costs that come when players sell things to each other. The going rate for goods is whatever people will pay for them, and with loads of players sitting on millions of gil that they have virtually no use for, people will pay a lot for just about anything they want to buy.

The only major expense the game itself has is if you want to buy a personal house (but due to the number available, most players won't be doing that anyway). Besides a house, what other game expenses are there? There are gear repairs if you don't craft, but those don't cost much. You could spend money on teleporting or flying around if you don't like traveling, though that's almost entirely optional and still doesn't cost much even if you do it a lot. And that's about it. We've got lots of gil coming in, through quest/leve/FATE/dungeon/challenge rewards, and very little going out, so the result is inflation. The prices you're dismayed by are simply the result of that inflation.

Gil sinks are hardly a solution, because they're not proportional to the wealth of the user. Gil sinks similarly are terrible deterrents to late adapters. The guy making 2 million gil or more from crafting will hardly feel the cost of a 100k-200k gil sink. The new player or the non-crafter will feel it.

Moreover, let's not beat around the bush of the endgoal of any videogame, and that's aesthetics. If you introduce heavy gil sinks in order to try to shed wealth, it's more vanity items that players who don't corner the markets will not get. Locking vanity items behind non-combat content is pretty crappy for those players who are bored to tears by non-combat content. And as far as we are concerned, the vast majority of vanity items are locked behind non-combat content, which is pretty annoying.

The prices we see on items are not just a product of a large flow of gil, but a scarcity of materials or gating items behind crafting thresholds that require heavy spending to achieve. Shiva's barding would plummet in price from its 1.8 million asking price if more people could craft it, or hell gain it via means outside crafting.

P.S. The low level player would be barred from sending invites, their higher level friends however would not. Moreover, if two players are low level they can simply join a linkshell or FC and get their friend invited and then they can enjoy the privilege of maintaining contacts.

[Avin00]

Saseal weird we both work in QA and I feel your pain under staffed and over worked is a constant phrase.

As for chat filters that have been suggested, I assume you would filter specific phrases out key being gil. So then the seller changes his tells to g!l you filter that which then goes back and forth for all eternity, bleieve me I used to play Xi when this first started becoming a problem and it started as English and gradually degraded into the mess you see in XIV. You are right killing the market is nigh impossible and other companies have tried and SE in the past during the days of Xi even went after a few of them directly. Sadly most of them are oversees where jurisdiction gets iffy.

Its a difficult problem one that has no real long term solution in any game that has a currency. restricting new players to no tells seems like a good idea until you realize this just slows the problem as the sellers would then just level the characters up and believe me they have the time and manpower to do it very rapidly. Every solution has potential drawbacks and time needed to implement with none being an end all be all to this problem. I also suspect that they will be looking at implementing a few of these features in the near future or possibly ones that are even better but every implementation takes development time which means time away from additional content.

[Saseal]

Saseal weird we both work in QA and I feel your pain under staffed and over worked is a constant phrase.

As for chat filters that have been suggested, I assume you would filter specific phrases out key being gil. So then the seller changes his tells to g!l you filter that which then goes back and forth for all eternity, bleieve me I used to play Xi when this first started becoming a problem and it started as English and gradually degraded into the mess you see in XIV. You are right killing the market is nigh impossible and other companies have tried and SE in the past during the days of Xi even went after a few of them directly. Sadly most of them are oversees where jurisdiction gets iffy.

Nice! Fellow brethren! You deal with Automation or Manual? Or hybrid 50/50 (more than spot checking)? My co tried to get automation going with manual spot checks but that didn't fly for what we do (site testing - multi-variant + A/B testing and analytics). Soooo... manually testing a client's site a million times on a million browsers and devices it is. z___z *will cry tears of joy when IE8 is completely abolished from the browser testing standards*

One of the suggestions was to give the option to block tells from people not already in your friends list - somewhat like the option to auto-skip cutscenes you've already seen in dungeons. It somewhat alleviates the filter issue since there's only so many things that can be filtered out before it starts blocking players entire sentences with way too many flags. WHile this may not fly well for some who like to branch out to strangers, they do have the option to turn that protection off.... but then still receive the tells. I for one would die happy and would never complain again. lol

I'll certainly agree - it's a difficult problem to get to the bottom of. Others have mentioned, however, that other MMOs had spearheaded similar RMT issues (I don't remember the titles), so it is possible. I guess it just matters as to how well the same tactics jive with the code they use (I guess using the example of my co's attempts to code/write automated test scripts turning into complete failures with false fails because it just didn't work with our current tools and code as simply as one would assume) or if they're willing to employ it (I just don't see why not, other than making money off the foolishness of the bot account owners to keep subscribing >.>)

[SummerSkye]

Please stop this thread. SE is doing all they can to stop the RMT situation

Hyperion is overrun.

[/hb]

That's what Zalera looks like.

No, they are not doing enough.

The time stamped screenshot is exactly what I personally know new players are facing as soon as they GET OUT OF THE VERY FIRST CUTSCENE IN THE GAME...and arrive at their town. New players will not take this game serious/pay money to play it when met with this on day one. RMT is the biggest issue in game currently.

[Tiggy]

stuff.

To be fair considering right now they have a hard release date on the expansion and have all resources trying to finish it they like ARE doing "all they can" at the moment. Doing all they can and being successful at halting the RMT are two different things.

[Avin00]

Saseal I mostly deal in manual stuff autmoation is nice but when you are looking for bugs nothing beats getting your hands dirty,

back to the topic at hand, any implementation that relies on level will only cause a brief window where there are no or little gil seller tells/friend request. think of it like this you build a dam on a river, so you can plant a garden perhaps some potatoes maybe a few radishes. Problem is you haven't stopped the river flowing all you've done is raise the bar for entry, once the water on the other side of the dam reaches over the top of it you have a flooded garden and there go your radishes. The point is that all it would cause is a short delay before you and everyone else was flooded with tells again. Furthermore you might say that you would get a break when the latest round of automated bans went out, unlikely as the gil sellers aren't stupid and would likely stagger the tells so as to have a near constant stream of ads directed at you.

Like many have said before this is a complex problem that mmos have been dealing with for at least a decade now.

[Zabuza]

Saseal I mostly deal in manual stuff autmoation is nice but when you are looking for bugs nothing beats getting your hands dirty,

back to the topic at hand, any implementation that relies on level will only cause a brief window where there are no or little gil seller tells/friend request. think of it like this you build a dam on a river, so you can plant a garden perhaps some potatoes maybe a few radishes. Problem is you haven't stopped the river flowing all you've done is raise the bar for entry, once the water on the other side of the dam reaches over the top of it you have a flooded garden and there go your radishes. The point is that all it would cause is a short delay before you and everyone else was flooded with tells again. Furthermore you might say that you would get a break when the latest round of automated bans went out, unlikely as the gil sellers aren't stupid and would likely stagger the tells so as to have a near constant stream of ads directed at you.

Like many have said before this is a complex problem that mmos have been dealing with for at least a decade now.

If SE stayed on top of bans, the RMTs would have to level to a certain level everytime they wanted to send /tells to people. They would have to continuously repeat this cycle. It certainly wouldn't stop the process, but it may slow it a bit.