Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[Risvertasashi]

One way to help speed things up would be an auto fill, I.E. the time, the world your in, your name etc, and before people say that wouldn't work because you're not always where the incident happened I say this, you have to edit it anyway so you may as well start with all the fields that can be filled in filled in and edit the rest.

Even when you do all that, it can still take days for a spammer to be banned. Not even a suspected bot, actual several-tell-a-minute spammers... which I would think would be pretty open and shut.

I think they meant RMT, not the the /tells. RMT itself isn't bad unless done in excess.



This is just stupid. RMT don't have the power to manipulate prices. Even if they we're able to, it would be counterproductive to drive the prices down on materials. They want prices to be HIGH, making it more likely players will turn to them for gil. People I suspect whom are most likely to buy gil are the ones who don't want to spend the time doing mat farming to begin w/.

And I doubt RMT use bots to earn gil. Most likely they get it from buying gil from players willing to sell it them for real money in return. A google search will show that there are plenty of places willing to exchange your gil for cash! It's these type of players who probably are the ones who use bots.

As you seem to have noticed, RMT tend to be the bogeymen for all a game's ills, especially economic ills.

That doesn't mean they have no effect, however. Also, their sources are varied. Lowly paid chinese workers is common (but the pay is good for them). In some worst cases, prisoners have been made to do it. Some also do run bot farms. The taboo and witch hunt-inciting nature of the subject makes it difficult to do any kind of meaningful breakdown and analysis, however.

[Nadirah]

It's big money in wow, and they don't even send tell spam.

They've started friends requests again.

Just add a chat filter already. Sheesh.

[Niwashi]

There's really no excuse given that it's a paid subscription game.

This part I agree with you on. The subscriptions mean that it will stop entirely as soon as SE makes it difficult enough to no longer pay for the cost of their accounts. All it really takes is banning them more quickly, before they have time to make enough money off the account to justify its cost. This can be very hard to do in a F2P game where the costs of setting up new accounts are minimal, but should be easy to do here.

They need to start banning the IP addresses. There's only a few sites that they use.

That might have worked 20 years ago, but it's been a long time since most computers have actually had their own IP addresses. Now, having your own IP address is a special feature you have to pay your ISP extra money for. It's generally only done for web hosting servers, and would certainly not be done for the machines the bots are logging in from.

As for their only using a few sites, they're only advertising a few sites, but those sites are on their web servers, not on the machines they run the game client and bots off of. One of their spam bots could be using the same address today that you'll be on yourself tomorrow as the ISPs shuffle addresses around every time a computer or router re-connects. (In fact, RMT bot farms may well change IP addresses even more often than the rest of us, if they periodically reset their routers in order to do so.)

[Khanscott]

Was just told via copypasta message from in game support to make a RMT suggestion thread on the FFXIV forums. I responded with a link to this thread, followed by more copypasta responses. S-E could add dozens of people to the STF with the money they spend replacing keyboards due to moderators wearing out the CTRL, C, and V keys.

[OlyverW]

Well it was good for a long while I was able to stay off busy but yesterday the rmt friend request bots started up again on Coeurl -.-

[Mycow8me]

Why not just end the free trials already? Hasn't it been going on long enough?

[OlyverW]

Free trail accounts can't send friend requests anymore and there are a bunch of other restrictions too

http://support.na.square-enix.com/ru...&tag=freetrial

[BreathlessTao]

So...

Incoming RMT /tell - I go to open Support Desk to report, which of course takes ages - waiting to be able to click that File Report button - here I get another RMT - report both in one go because suffering the Support Desk clunkiness once is more than enough - barely even actually send the report when I get a third tell.

...can we have some damn tools to prevent random tells already please???

[Lambdafish]

definitely agree with all of this, this NEEDS to be improved

[AlphaFox]

If they really want to combat it they need to simplify the process to report. We just need a simple right click > report > Spam/Gil selling. Let it auto fill with a name and chat log or most previous tell. They want us to fill out that form every single time to report someone but for some servers we would be there all day filling out every name that popped up. If we could simplify it to a simple two click process I would like to assume everyone, myself included, would be more inclined to actually report them rather than just ignoring, removing tells from sight or just going /busy.