Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Felghanna]

As I thought... We can pick one representant from each server... They can talk to each representant from each active FC in server... It may take a while, but properly organized it may be work, if we mobilize this to an important matter.

[Ophie-Mio]

As I thought... We can pick one representant from each server... They can talk to each representant from each active FC in server... It may take a while, but properly organized it may be work, if we mobilize this to an important matter.

Lol, wat?
Organize on such a scale for what? A petition that will do nothing to actually change SE's policies with how they handle the RMT? A petition will do nothing. They already know it's an issue for the NA side of things.
SE will do what it pleases concerning the RMT when they have the time and the whim to do so.

Years ago... When the "Chrono Trigger Ressurection" was announced, it didn't take long until the project being publicly closed after Square Enix issued a cease-and-desist letter to Resurrection Games for trademark and copyright infringement.

Yes, because that's their game. Of course it would be given a cease and desist order. It's someone else making off with their property.

We are all here with a threat in common, the RTM websites. These websites are the real cause of the spamming bots and illegal tradings. If we turn this petition to actually close the websites, we'll win.

The websites? Really? The ones who can operate a business as they do? RMT break no business laws with their websites. The PLAYERS break the rules by buying from them.
The ones that steal the CC info, that's bad news but even so, how can one prove anything about the companies that operate the sites?

[Felghanna]

Lol, wat?
Organize on such a scale for what? A petition that will do nothing to actually change SE's policies with how they handle the RMT? A petition will do nothing. They already know it's an issue for the NA side of things.
SE will do what it pleases concerning the RMT when they have the time and the whim to do so.

You could think outside of the box here... If we get enough signs against these websites and explain our situation, something will happen. I mean... I don't know what is blocking you from think AGAINST the fact that bots are an illness in this game or every game.
Either way I think we can change this situation with our own hands, at least there are people here willing for this change.

Anyway... If there is no business laws that these websites are breaking, then with enough people against one deed a new law arise.

And for the last don't underestimate what people can do together.

[KisaiTenshi]

If we get enough signs against these websites and explain our situation, something will happen

Keep dreaming.

These sites are all in mainland china. The people doing the spamming and drive-by-third-party-ads-on-youtube (when looking at FFXIV videos) are also in mainland china. They lie through their teeth about safety and legality.

The RMT problem seems to be hugely dependant on the server/data center. On Excalibur, there's a tiny window of opportunity for the RMT bots to delete/re-create their bots, so as such I'm blocking maybe 10 a day and that will be fine until about 2AM when they come out of the woodwork.

Most recently however they've started "adding you" as a friend, which is even more irritating, since I turned the sound effects off for Tell, now you get an obnoxious message in the middle of the screen that sdfsdfsdfsd sdfsdfsdf wants to add you as a friend. No. forget that nonsense.

Here's what I want:
1 or 2 click right-click "report". eg click report and then you get a little drop down and text box that sends a screenshot to SE.
Change the friends/tells mechanics so that you can only add friends if they are in your party, and can only send tells if you are mutually on each others friend list. 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. For whatever reason the same person "invites" me to their FC every day that they're now at the top of the blacklist. As soon as I switch to a class that isn't level 50 I get FC invites every hour or so, not nearly as bad as the tell spam, but because it puts a message across the screen that I have to dismiss manually, it's far more irritating.

And if it were in my power to do so, I'd have all these RMT sites treated the same as piracy and childporn, have ISP's legally required to filter the DNS entries so that casually curious people can't access them.

[Niwashi]

Change the friends/tells mechanics so that you can only add friends if they are in your party

So if one of my FC mates offers to send me some gear he crafted, or if I want to contribute some gil to my FC's housing fund, or for whatever reason I have a reason to send or receive something from someone, but I'm in a DF queue at the time, or maybe they are, then we can't complete the transaction because we can't create a party together? (The examples are both from quite a while ago, as I haven't added anyone to my Friends List recently. The FC housing fund, for instance, was from before we could do that through the company chest so an officer was collecting the money. But while the specifics may no longer make sense, the basic fact that there was someone I wanted to Friend so we could swap something should still hold true. That shouldn't depend on your availability to join a Party.)

and can only send tells if you are mutually on each others friend list.

I don't agree with this one either. I want to be able to have /tell conversations with random strangers. I see someone on a chocobo that I think is the perfect shade of blue to coordinate beautifully with it's rare plumed barding, and I want to be able to /tell them so. Or I was standing near the NIN headquarters dressed in black with a facemask (Mythril Mesail) and headscarf (Snow's hairstyle from the Lightning event) and another Ninja came by and asked how I got that look. Or a while back when I died far from my Home point so asked in shout if anyone could Raise me, the CNJ who answered asked in /tell for directions on how to reach my location (there was a cliff in his way, and the path around wasn't obvious from the /loc).

Sure, if we couldn't do any of that stuff in /tell there would be workarounds for some of it. The directions could have continued in /shout with the only downside being cluttering the screens of everyone else in the area who didn't really need to see the whole conversation. The more social conversations theoretically could have as well, though more likely they just wouldn't have taken place at all. These are pretty much the same as workarounds we have now if we resort to using /busy to keep the RMT away.

But that's part of why we want to get rid of the RMT spammers, so that people don't have to resort to using /busy and don't need workarounds just in order to talk to someone. We want the /tell channel freed up for its intended purpose, to be able to talk with each other, making the game more open and social. Limits on things like the rate at which you can send /tells could be set at a point that interferes with RMT spam but doesn't interfere with actual conversation. When it gets into things like who you're allowed to talk to, though, that's going to block too much of the legitimate traffic we're trying to clear the way for.

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.

[Felghanna]

Putting names on a petition doesn't do anything without actually offering a workable solution to SE. Go back to Tumblr if you wanna sing how together you'll change the world.

First: Do you realize how many players are online on your server right now? (a hint: it's more than your friend list can tell)


Second: Did you played every MMO to say this information is accurate?


Third: Let's say for a moment that most of players from every server signs a petition against RMT sites. Do you think no one will notice about it? Or only you won't notice, because I'm still not caring about how difficult this may be, I'm want to do something.

Fourth: Return to the first thing I said. I know, you are saying your prayers for a god that doesn't listen for one year. We all want the same thing, why don't we just fight for it?

[Ophie-Mio]

First: Do you realize how many players are online on your server right now? (a hint: it's more than your friend list can tell)

And that matters how? They could all sign this petition and SE still wouldn't stop everything that they are doing and implement the measures to prevent most RMT spam.
Companies have to want to stop them and implement measures to filter out the RMT. SE hasn't displayed the want to change anything at the moment.

Second: Did you played every MMO to say this information is accurate?

I've played a lot of MMOs and I've read the replies of others in other numerous RMT threads that call out other games with RMT problems. RMT and MMOs go hand in hand. They will forever.

Third: Let's say for a moment that most of players from every server signs a petition against RMT sites. Do you think no one will notice about it?

First off, I'm not saying that the /tell filters and reporting aren't good ideas. But I am saying that there can be a huge petition against an RMT site and the NA side of SE will notice it but that it will amount to nothing. You are saying RMT sites. SE cannot attack an RMT site.
Let's say that again...
You're talking about RMT sites and SE cannot do anything about those. They only hold dominion over their own.

Fourth: Return to the first thing I said. I know, you are saying your prayers for a god that doesn't listen for one year. We all want the same thing, why don't we just fight for it?

The first thing you said has nothing to do with this fourth thing you're saying.

And yea, people do want the same thing in this thread. However, signing a petition and hoping that the NA support gives it to the JP side and that fixes everything isn't going to work. Suggestions are what makes it happen, giving them the ideas needed make it happen. You are literally just asking people to sign nothing and throw that at SE like somehow it will be surprising.

Fact: SE knows about how the NA have issues with RMT. They know. They'll do things in their own time frame.

[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.