Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Avin00]

Saseal weird we both work in QA and I feel your pain under staffed and over worked is a constant phrase.

As for chat filters that have been suggested, I assume you would filter specific phrases out key being gil. So then the seller changes his tells to g!l you filter that which then goes back and forth for all eternity, bleieve me I used to play Xi when this first started becoming a problem and it started as English and gradually degraded into the mess you see in XIV. You are right killing the market is nigh impossible and other companies have tried and SE in the past during the days of Xi even went after a few of them directly. Sadly most of them are oversees where jurisdiction gets iffy.

Its a difficult problem one that has no real long term solution in any game that has a currency. restricting new players to no tells seems like a good idea until you realize this just slows the problem as the sellers would then just level the characters up and believe me they have the time and manpower to do it very rapidly. Every solution has potential drawbacks and time needed to implement with none being an end all be all to this problem. I also suspect that they will be looking at implementing a few of these features in the near future or possibly ones that are even better but every implementation takes development time which means time away from additional content.

[Saseal]

Saseal weird we both work in QA and I feel your pain under staffed and over worked is a constant phrase.

As for chat filters that have been suggested, I assume you would filter specific phrases out key being gil. So then the seller changes his tells to g!l you filter that which then goes back and forth for all eternity, bleieve me I used to play Xi when this first started becoming a problem and it started as English and gradually degraded into the mess you see in XIV. You are right killing the market is nigh impossible and other companies have tried and SE in the past during the days of Xi even went after a few of them directly. Sadly most of them are oversees where jurisdiction gets iffy.

Nice! Fellow brethren! You deal with Automation or Manual? Or hybrid 50/50 (more than spot checking)? My co tried to get automation going with manual spot checks but that didn't fly for what we do (site testing - multi-variant + A/B testing and analytics). Soooo... manually testing a client's site a million times on a million browsers and devices it is. z___z *will cry tears of joy when IE8 is completely abolished from the browser testing standards*

One of the suggestions was to give the option to block tells from people not already in your friends list - somewhat like the option to auto-skip cutscenes you've already seen in dungeons. It somewhat alleviates the filter issue since there's only so many things that can be filtered out before it starts blocking players entire sentences with way too many flags. WHile this may not fly well for some who like to branch out to strangers, they do have the option to turn that protection off.... but then still receive the tells. I for one would die happy and would never complain again. lol

I'll certainly agree - it's a difficult problem to get to the bottom of. Others have mentioned, however, that other MMOs had spearheaded similar RMT issues (I don't remember the titles), so it is possible. I guess it just matters as to how well the same tactics jive with the code they use (I guess using the example of my co's attempts to code/write automated test scripts turning into complete failures with false fails because it just didn't work with our current tools and code as simply as one would assume) or if they're willing to employ it (I just don't see why not, other than making money off the foolishness of the bot account owners to keep subscribing >.>)