Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Aerowaffle]

They need to either disable shout, yell, tell, and friend requests for trial accounts or place restrictions not allowing these on new accounts until they have at least 1 level 10 character, I have seen this work great in other games.

*in monotone*
Trial accounts cannot send tells, shouts, friend invites, etc. Any RMT spam you get is not from a trial account.

Where does this misconception that trial accounts are the problem keep coming from?

[Kleptobrainiac]

/signed

Acha-cha-cha

[Kalzar]

Just filled up my blacklist with these spammers... And they still persist!

Definately /sign!

[KisaiTenshi]

*in monotone*
Trial accounts cannot send tells, shouts, friend invites, etc. Any RMT spam you get is not from a trial account.

Where does this misconception that trial accounts are the problem keep coming from?

Because the spammers are level 1 accounts. And often disappear in less than 15 minutes. It's far more likely those are characters on stolen accounts (idiots who bought gold,) burner accounts paid with stolen credit cards, or prepaid cards.

Like there isn't a good solution.

If you make it so that only US/CA/EU credit cards can be used, then anyone else who wants to play, can't. If you make it so that prepaid cards can't be used, then you prevent people from being able to pay cash as well. Cash is how illict funds are laundered. These people running these RMT racketeering spam are criminals that are laundering money, and MMORPG's are just a super-convenient way of doing so. Think about how much of those messages are really meant for players.

If you have money you want to disguise the source of, you buy game content that can be re-sold. In freemium games, this is done through gachapon and "PLEX" types of things that can immediately be sold to players through burner accounts, and then you take the gold and sell it to the gold buyers to cash out.

[GazaelNoxlucis]

/signed

These RMT's are real frustrating to play through. It's annoying to keep cleaning up the blacklist and always have very little (Deleted) in the pile.

[Zabuza]

/signed

These RMT's are real frustrating to play through. It's annoying to keep cleaning up the blacklist and always have very little (Deleted) in the pile.

As far as I know an account only shows as deleted unless they themselves delete it. Not if they are banned. Even so, the constant spam makes it apparent SE's measures are not working. Also ignoring any cries for help, no reassuring the players, nothing whatsoever. Doesn't bode well, really.

[TinyMonster]

/sign

I'm really tired of all these RMTs. I can't even get out of busy mode now therefore I cant talk to a lot of my friends. This has to change.

[SpiritMuse]

Did I sign his yet? Even though personally I don't really get many of them at all, maybe a couple of times per week, it still sucks, and especially for those people who have to deal with it constantly, so...

/sign

[Havenae]

this is a 100% player problem, if players didn't buy gil then prices wouldn't be so inflated. ppl gotta have their stuff now...

This ideology of "if no body buys they'll just go away" is so naive. They won't, not just because you will NEVER stop every player that buys currency from buying it completely. But because RMT companies KNOW there is potential profit that can be made. I don't know how many betas and launches any of you have participated in but let me assure you RMT is always there first. So it really doesn't matter if players buy or not because ultimately if you launch it, RMT will come. And they will continue to stay there until they are 100% convinced that no profit will be made. Which to be honest I doubt theres really a lot of overhead involved in setting up a bot to spam a game's chat system.

Also like it or not, economic design inside of games is partially responsible for giving rise to RMT (no it's not just this game, its various games in the past who never seem to have gotten the memo that most players no longer want to grind for hours on end to accomplish anything). Because developers have made in game currency exceptionally difficult to get in some case or require too much grind unless you just happen to get lucky with RNG. There are several factors and issues that contribute on that end, and I'm not going to waste time here listing all the ones I can think of let alone speculate on the ones I haven't. Yes players play a significant part but to sit and claim it's all 100% player created simplifies the problem far beyond ridiculous, its like saying two people have a conversation, said hello, answered each other questions, said good bye but then saying one never took any part in it to begin with. I'm not saying give players boat loads of gil/gold/isk/credits/ect and you won't have RMT, but if there is not a perceived need to consider measuring time over effort in terms of earning the currency as opposed to buying it, then RMT wouldn't occur. It is a multi-faceted dynamic that drives this particular section of the business. It is NOT as simple as "well if players would stop buying it..."

It's more along the lines of, "If players would stop buying it or if 'X' game developer would stop giving us turnips to squeeze blood out of and if players would stop buying it..."

[Kuwaitum]

This ideology of "if no body buys they'll just go away" is so naive. They won't, not just because you will NEVER stop every player that buys currency from buying it completely.

You are correct. We cannot root them all out, corruption is everywhere. Yet, least we should eliminate as much of them as possible.
The situation now is unbearable with the spams, RMTs/BOTs “thief” have no shame to go using /shout(s) and /yell(s). They know SE ”police” won’t do anything arrest/punish/penalty... This will imply:

-RMTs/BOTs keep doing the same (not being stopped/arrested by the SE “Police”)
-Players will feel free to buy stolen goods from them. (seeing the policemen doing nothing but eating doughnuts and drinking coffee while the thief is acting under their noses)
-Players will be sure that compared with the BOTs/RMTs, they will not be penalized nor punished if they also do similar acts of cheating.

In short: “if the Cat's away the Mice will play”