Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[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.