Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[xXRaineXx]

you just need 1 single GM to log in and start banning those shouts/tells. Wow So hard to do. mindblowing huh?
now ask urself why they dont do that.

1 GM? How many servers do we have? Can 1 GM really monitor tells 24/7 and get every single tell to ban em? In ALL the servers?
I'm on Gilgamesh, one of most populated servers in NA and I only get 1 or 2 tells per hour. Now I won't say that's the norm as some others may get more. That means tells are inconsistent depending on the player, probably based on a map script or something to locate players. Or simply they just tell whoever they see.
If that was the case that means you gotta have GM's in every map, banning every single tell staring at their monitor 24/7. To do something like that manually by hand using HR, ain't easy.

So yeah, it's 'wow hard' to do. Before you say even 1 GM will make a difference. No. It won't. Eventually people are gonna start coming back to cry more. ONLY 1GM!?

Now let that sink in for a moment...

People forget the core issue of RMT. The problem isn't the gil spammers, it's the players who buy them and continue to buy them. The problem is 2-way, the players themselves and the RMT business.

[Niwashi]

1 GM? How many servers do we have? Can 1 GM really monitor tells 24/7 and get every single tell to ban em? In ALL the servers?

As the software stands now, it would take more than that, though I think you're underestimating how much one GM could do. They have access to more than we do as players. In particular, they have access to the chat server, so can see tells that are being sent to anyone and don't have to wait for a tell to be sent directly to them. Or even if they did just log in like a player does, monitor for an hour or two per shift, gathering the text of all the spam they get, and then update spam filters to block messages with that text from going to anybody, we'd see a big drop in the rate of spam that gets through.

If they'd add the reporting feature we've been asking for since the game came out, having just one person on 24/7 to handle those reports would probably be enough to handle the ongoing load, and that would get all of it. (They'd need extra help temporarily when the feature is first released, though. At that point they'd have a huge surge of reports getting rid of the current crop of spam bots. But that would slow to a trickle as soon as the RMT companies find their bots are being banned before they have time to become profitable.)

People forget the core issue of RMT. The problem isn't the gil spammers, it's the players who buy them and continue to buy them. The problem is 2-way, the players themselves and the RMT business.

Both are issues, but I disagree as to which is the core issue. The spam is the part that's driving people away from the game, and making the game less social for those of us who stay in spite of it. Those are the biggest issues with RMT. There are effects on the in-game economy as well, but they're secondary.

On top of that, eliminating the spam would go a long way towards eliminating the RMT itself. (Not entirely, of course, but it would reduce it dramatically.) The whole reason RMT companies (or legitimate companies for that matter) advertise is because it brings them more customers. That means that without the RMT ads, there would be fewer customers buying their gil and less economic effect of RMT. Stopping the spam is probably the most effective way SE has available to limit the number of gil buyers. It would certainly be a lot more effective than trying to identify and track them down individually like they're doing now.