Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Chibilidawg]

From this interview:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen..._yoshida_this/


From this interview:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen..._yoshida_this/


Yoshida Regarding RMT Spam

"We actually have a special task force dedicated to control and get rid of much spam, and control it within the game and not only the incidents that are reported by our players. Internally we have a special group always checking, allways researching, allways going after RMT spam and trying to find them and strike them and make sure to removed this incidents as much as possible. We also are going through with like an undercover investigation where we try to find out larger groups of people who are doing the RMT spam and try to control it from there as well. Also from a daily basis we are banning a few thousands accounts and tens of thousands of accounts per month so on the players inpoint it may not seem that the incidents have reduced but we are doing that best to control it, there is a lot of RMT spam thats happening so we have to be continously vigilant in order to stop them and avoid those incidents."


I don't think he or they know we want solutions to significantly reduce the /shout & /tell spam from gil-sellers...

Which makes me seriously frustrated & has me wondering... do they not understand that the bans mean next-to-nothing if the spam remains roughly the same?

All we see is RMT /tell spam every minute of every hour.


I don't get what's so hard about implementing:

1) a /tell filter for FC Members & Friends Only.

2) an auto-blacklisting, right-click report RMT feature.

3) a /shout & /yell restriction until after "Call of the Sea" has been completed.

Among other fantastic ideas...

Speaking of #3, they could make it to where the feature doesn't unlock until after having beaten Sastasha in the MSQ.


Bans won't solve the problem, they'll just keep coming back stronger & multiplying.

We, the players, care most about not having our chat pinged every 30 seconds with a huge wall-of-text gil sale promotion.

[SummerSkye]

Why are they all level 50 Black Mages? Each of those black mages in those pictures are active, paid accounts? or are they paid for by the players they stole the accounts from? As much as I hate RMT and am very vocally against it, I really do not understand how it works.

[Riepah]

Why are they all level 50 Black Mages? Each of those black mages in those pictures are active, paid accounts? or are they paid for by the players they stole the accounts from? As much as I hate RMT and am very vocally against it, I really do not understand how it works.

Considering that you can't even log in from a different device with a different IP without confirming the e-mail address associated with the account and changing your password, I very much doubt that the accounts are stolen. So unless they have a way to generate valid CD keys, those accounts must've purchased the game from somewhere.

[Fenral]

Or here's a horrifying thought: this three-man army is all that stands between us and... total RMT bot domination of the entire server farm.

These STF members are true heroes in our time. Maybe.

[slml320]

lets get something clear here obviously SE eu/na have no power nothing they may as well be poorly trained monkeys.. the buck starts and stops in japan.. if they what to do something they will if not bah its not going to happen.. clearly this is the case you want proof biddy yarrrr on brynhildr has been standing near the limsa lominsa aetheryte spamming rmt messages in general chat for 3 days solid .. doing everything they can my arse!!! there has been so many great ideas in thread after thread on these forums bigger blacklist no tells for low lvl characters easier reporting systems to name a small few.. this has not been days or weeks or months of these ideas these have been nearly a year and a half plus not long after there drag millions and millions gil out of players accounts disaster..i can't help but wonder if they care more for there subs being as at least 500k plus must be rmt than actually fixing this problem.. as every passing week month and year it seems to be getting worse not better.. wait till just before 3.0 wow its going to get much worse!!

[Tagihi]

From this interview:



I don't get what's so hard about implementing:



1) a /tell filter for FC Members & Friends Only.

2) an auto-blacklisting, right-click report RMT feature.

3) a /shout & /yell restriction until after "Call of the Sea" has been completed.

well they should do this but nr 1 maybe would be better if all the free account's can not send any friend request and neither whisper other player untill certin level like 10 - 15 when finally can enter dungeons w/e.
Iknow that can upset legal players but since player who selling wanna destroy oppertunity for others then there is no otherway.

get rid completely of RMT is not easy, Even if we report that shout 1 min later he deletes the character and remake new.

[Tiggy]

I don't think he or they know we want solutions to significantly reduce the /shout & /tell spam from gil-sellers...

Of course they do. How ignorant do you think they are? They have said in the past, and have acted in ways that support this, that they see what happens here and the forum mods take concerns to the dev team. They even have a guy on reddit that does the same. Also, considering the ways they've made RMT adapt over the last year due to changes to the game to suppress them, and the rmt task force bans supports the fact they are aware of the problem.

Are they as effective as people would like them to be? No, of course not. However, that doesn't suggest what-so-ever that they are ignorant of a problem that plagues every mmo ever. That's just not realistic.

[slml320]

Of course they do. How ignorant do you think they are? They have said in the past, and have acted in ways that support this, that they see what happens here and the forum mods take concerns to the dev team. They even have a guy on reddit that does the same. Also, considering the ways they've made RMT adapt over the last year due to changes to the game to suppress them, and the rmt task force bans supports the fact they are aware of the problem.

Are they as effective as people would like them to be? No, of course not. However, that doesn't suggest what-so-ever that they are ignorant of a problem that plagues every mmo ever. That's just not realistic.

ahh tiggy we meet again let me ask how ignorant are you to think they will or are going to do something.. when its been near on 2 years as I'm sure you are aware problems still there but more so its getting worse not better!!

[Tiggy]

Please read what I said. I never insinuated they will or won't do anything or how effective or ineffective they've been. Simply pointing out that OBVIOUSLY they are aware of the problem.

Here is a reality for you. They are less than two months from releasing their expansion that has a hard dead line. RMT is a problem, yes, but anyone with expectations of serious change before the 3.0 launch are quite honestly going to remain disappointed. Delaying the expansion pack release just to move resources to the RMT problem would lose them more money than simply waiting until 3.0 to deal with the RMT. Getting the expansion out with as few issues as possible has considerably higher priority and is definitely the wiser business decision. Nothing will change until after 3.0 launches and stabilizes. This thread could get to 500 pages and that reality will not change. There are only but so many developers working on this game.

It's also an unsupportable argument to suggest they've done nothing up until now. Was it ultimately very effective? No, but they HAVE done things to improve it. Specifically off the top of my head I know they've incorporated a degree of text filtering and throttled tell rates. That qualifies as something regardless of how effective it was. You can objectively say they haven't been successful in the long term at curbing RMT (They've had occasional short term successes until RMT adapted), but you can not objectively say they haven't tried. The evidence simply doesn't support such a claim.

At some point you are just mad and being negative regardless of the accuracy of the claim.

[Zabuza]

Please read what I said. I never insinuated they will or won't do anything or how effective or ineffective they've been. Simply pointing out that OBVIOUSLY they are aware of the problem.

Here is a reality for you. They are less than two months from releasing their expansion that has a hard dead line. RMT is a problem, yes, but anyone with expectations of serious change before the 3.0 launch are quite honestly going to remain disappointed. Delaying the expansion pack release just to move resources to the RMT problem would lose them more money than simply waiting until 3.0 to deal with the RMT. Getting the expansion out with as few issues as possible has considerably higher priority and is definitely the wiser business decision. Nothing will change until after 3.0 launches and stabilizes. This thread could get to 500 pages and that reality will not change. There are only but so many developers working on this game.

It's also an unsupportable argument to suggest they've done nothing up until now. Was it ultimately very effective? No, but they HAVE done things to improve it. Specifically off the top of my head I know they've incorporated a degree of text filtering and throttled tell rates. That qualifies as something regardless of how effective it was. You can objectively say they haven't been successful in the long term at curbing RMT (They've had occasional short term successes until RMT adapted), but you can not objectively say they haven't tried. The evidence simply doesn't support such a claim.

At some point you are just mad and being negative regardless of the accuracy of the claim.

At this point I think that is debatable. Think of how many potential subs they will lose from new players who buy Heavensward and quit over the RMT spam. Also, why does being able to implement these QoL features and being able to release HW on time have to be mutually exclusive?