Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[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.