Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Caiera]

As soon as one of these messages comes up, I just right click and black list straight away, it is annoying though

[AlphaFox]

Thing is you can blacklist all day long and you will not do anything but annoy yourself. You block one, two more pop up and just when you think you finally have it done, boom, 3 more. Then again, I guess they don't really care, even if they are being banned I can only assume people are taking advantage of the gil bots that encourage them to keep buying the game over and thus injecting more money into the company. I don't know how they work but this is my view of it >.>

[Nadirah]

One of the biggest rmt sites is actually out of Canada.

[aesteval]

Yesterday I had a friend request from a RMT while I was still on the loading screen. Before I even had control of my character, before I could see into the room at the Inn, before I could type in /busy, controller goes CHIME and I load in with a friend request from some BS URL cheap gil random letters.

And the game could use two modes for /busy: one mode that blocks off requests from everyone and another that lets requests in from confirmed friends. If we /busy we can't invite each other to party, if we invite each other to party it comes with RMT spam.

[Magusrex]

This seems to be a complete waste of our time, although we have learned some things.

SE cares so little about the people who are being harassed that they will not even acknowledge us.
SE is very unlikely to do anything new in an attempt to fix the issue as past behavior is a good indicator of future performance.
The people responsible for stopping the RMT are grossly incompetent compared to those who do it for other games.
The problem is not getting better

The only reasonable conclusion is that SE is benefitting from our continued harassment in some way and we can expect continued silence and weekly reports of ineffective bannings.

[MageBlack]

What would you have them say? Do you want them to give detailed explanations on how they are combating RMT or future plans, so that the RMT can get a leg up and counter them right away? Would you prefer they just say "Yes, we know this is an issue"... again.... I really don't understand what people are expecting from this thread. I'm pretty sure however that SE might by chance know there is an RMT issue at this point. considering they are getting harassing comments from both Players and the RMT.

[Magusrex]

What would you have them say? Do you want them to give detailed explanations on how they are combating RMT or future plans, so that the RMT can get a leg up and counter them right away? Would you prefer they just say "Yes, we know this is an issue"... again.... I really don't understand what people are expecting from this thread. I'm pretty sure however that SE might by chance know there is an RMT issue at this point. considering they are getting harassing comments from both Players and the RMT.

I would like them to say something...anything, not just a canned we banned some people. I want them to acknowledge that we are being heard and I want this issue to stay on the main page of the forums until something new happens that shows they care a tiny bit that we are being harassed every single time we log in before we can even go busy. The silence feels like a virtual middle finger and anyone researching playing this game by looking at these forums should know about it before they try the game, it is fair.

[MageBlack]

I would like them to say something...anything, not just a canned we banned some people. I want them to acknowledge that we are being heard and I want this issue to stay on the main page of the forums until something new happens that shows they care a tiny bit that we are being harassed every single time we log in before we can even go busy. The silence feels like a virtual middle finger and anyone researching playing this game by looking at these forums should know about it before they try the game, it is fair.

I know this is an old quote but what more do you want them to say? Do we need constant updates every month with the same response?

Greetings,

We would like to apologize for the inconveniences that RMT spam has been causing. We are diligently investigating any incoming reports or sightings of RMT shouts and banning them as soon as possible. In addition, we are working on speeding up the investigation flow.

We understand that the current RMT shout/spam reporting procedure can be improved so we are working our hardest to implement a system that is faster and easier to report/block violators. With that said, we sincerely appreciate the assistance from those of you who have been submitting reports as we work towards improving the system.

We are also adding more complex chat filters to the already large list we have arranged in order to further prevent RMT spam. We will continue to do so in a manner that will not affect your normal conversations.

You can check out our progress on combating the RMT issue on the official Lodestone here and here, so please take a look if you have not already.

We appreciate your support and we will continue to put forth our best effort to alleviate RMT spam and maintain an enjoyable gameplay experience.

Source

As for combating, what seems to work quite well is character creation restrictions. I'm on balmung (ever locked down) and Have next to no issues with RMT. Maybe we should lock down all the servers?

[Zabuza]

And that dev reply is from like two years ago, so we can see how much they have improved their anti-RMT measures since then. (Hint: not much.) But hey, on the JP servers they can play without worrying about being harassed!

[Blood-Aki]

And that dev reply is from like two years ago, so we can see how much they have improved their anti-RMT measures since then. (Hint: not much.) But hey, on the JP servers they can play without worrying about being harassed!

I'm actually beginning to think this why so little is being done, Surely they know there current method of bannings is greatly ineffective yet they continue to do it this way. All RMT companies do is expect the bans, and have a new line of bots lined up and ready to take the place, and this cycle continues. But since Jp servers do not get harassed with tells they do not spam complaints, so they do not take it THAT seriously.

It baffles me as to why most other MMos have squashed out or fixed their problem entirely or to great effect, yet Square has issues even tho they have 2 games under there belt that have lasted a while (well one, FFXI, FFXIV is next to try) even tho FFXI has been up since 2002 they STILL have RMT problems. So it shows the hope this game has that has only been out 2 years. so far.