Everyone complaining about no action on RMT, please read

[Maero]

TBH while they are doing something, tells every few minutes has got to be a bit much now. Granted it is not all the time but i do not recall it ever being this bad Pre Gold Saucer Patch

[Kosmos992k]

The reason for the topic was not so much to defend SE as it was to refute the suggestion that SE does nothing, made by players frustrated by the amount of RMT Spam. Clearly they are doing something, permanently banning 11,000 accounts is not exactly a minor ban.

Some in this topic have turned to numbers of unclear origin to justify their arguments. When RMT is discussed, people often start pulling numbers out of the air, and I feel like there is no point doing that because the only numbers we have that are concrete is the number of account bans.

It's repeatedly asserted by some that RMT abuse the free trial offer - if that is the case (and I am sure that SE has the analytics to figure this out) then clearly SE need to put a cap on the number of tells a player in the free trial period can send.

On the other hand, others repeatedly assert that RMT mostly use stolen/compromised accounts. I have to say that if that were the case, then over the course of the life of FFXIV ARR, anything up to a quarter of a million accounts must have been compromised - if that were the case I think we would all know about it because that many hacked accounts presents a real epidemic. So, somehow I think that this is less of an issue that some would suggest.

Also the recent strong increase in RMT volume did more or less coincide with the 14-day free trial offer which would tend to point to more RMT using the free trial, in which case we should cap the number of tells that may be sent.

Either way, we need to have a much easier way to report spam, via an option when you right click a player name in the chat log. That report as spam button should have a toggle to allow players to automatically blacklist anyone reported for spam, blacklists should be account wide, not single character and finally, we need a longer blacklist, or a better means of managing it.

No, personally I think SE could do more, but clearly they are doing something.

We have 3 months (almost) until 3.0 lands, that's a long time. I'd like to hope that we see a quality of life patch somewhere in the middle of that time. That would be a perfect opportunity to implement better spam reporting and blacklisting facilities.

Also, I do strongly agree that we should be punishing gil buyers, a temporary ban is simply not sufficient. An immediate permanent might work, but it's irreversable. An alternate would be for players who buy gil to have the levels and XP on their character(s) set to 1 for all their DoW, DoM, DoL, DoW classes/jobs. Either that or a permanent fixed title along the lines of "Convicted Gil Buyer" that always displays with their character name.

Oh, by the way, has anyone noticed the irony that here on their own forum a brand new player can make about 1 post a day and can't start topics, and yet in game they are able to spam the entire server with tells...love that consistency. The restrictions on the forum are designed to prevent trolling and flooding. I can't help but wonder why the same logic is not used within the game itself.

[Gralna]

snip

Trial accounts can't send any tells, can't shout, can't join a FC, and can't send friend invites. Free trial/returning accounts are only vaguely impacting RMT spam in that RMT increase their presence during comeback weekends in hopes people coming back will buy their gil to "catch up".

Also as i stated earlier, some accounts they use are hacked, but majority are accounts they bought with stolen credit card info.

While I'm not trying to defend SE, they are very much aware of the RMT problem since it is cutting into their budget due to charge-back fees on said stolen credit cards. The fact is though that the team responsible for the problem is too small if the 3 person team information is correct. I don't blame the dev team for not getting ahead of this, I blame SE for not giving them the resources they need to stay ahead of RMT.

[Kosmos992k]

Trial accounts can't send any tells, can't shout, can't join a FC, and can't send friend invites. Free trial accounts are only vaguely impacting RMT spam in that RMT increase their presence during comeback weekends in hopes people coming back will buy their gil to "catch up".

Also as i stated earlier, some accounts they use are hacked, but majority are accounts they bought with stolen credit card info.

While I'm not trying to defend SE, they are very much aware of the RMT problem since it is cutting into their budget due to charge-back fees on said stolen credit cards. The fact is though that the team responsible for the problem is too small if the 3 person team information is correct. I don't blame the dev team for not getting ahead of this, I blame SE for not giving them the resources they need to stay ahead of RMT.

Thanks, I knew that (about free trial) but completely forgot... ::senior moment::

Accounts purchased with stolen card numbers would have to be the largest source of accounts given the number being banned over time. Sorry to have missed that point in my previous post.

As far as the Dev team is concerned, I am not sure how much time it would take really to add a report as spam option, nor how much time it would take to make blacklists account wide. As a software developer, I find it hard to believe either would require a lot of work to implement. giving more resource to the task force would be a good idea, but if they do that, then I'd like to see them start perma-banning players who buy gil, since they would have the extra resource needed to properly investigate.

[Sanne]

Free trial accounts shouldn't be able to do friend request, but they can accept friend request from non free trial accounts.

Free trial accounts can only send tells on their friends list, and since only paid accounts can be friends with trial.

The report gilseller on right click, with confirm button. And put it on the ban list of the player, and be account wide as some said.

Bigger punishment of Gill buyers. first a warning, with a 2 week ban removal of all gil on all characters of their account, also deletion of any market items in inventory, retainer and what is selling on the market, also on all chars.
Next time perm ban.

[Lexxuk]

2,717 Accounts for RMT spam in a week, that's 388 accounts per day. there are 64 servers, that means that every day SE delete the grand total of 6 RMT spam bots, per day. 6. If we say that 1/2 the servers are Japanese, that's 12. Per server, per day. Numbers don't really seem that great when you boil it down like that, does it? You can say SE are tackling the problem when that 2,717 Accounts is actually 27,170 spam bots deleted... per day

[SarcasmMisser]

2,717 Accounts for RMT spam in a week, that's 388 accounts per day. there are 64 servers, that means that every day SE delete the grand total of 6 RMT spam bots, per day. 6. If we say that 1/2 the servers are Japanese, that's 12. Per server, per day. Numbers don't really seem that great when you boil it down like that, does it? You can say SE are tackling the problem when that 2,717 Accounts is actually 27,170 spam bots deleted... per day

There are like no tells on Japanese servers, it's almost all you guys. My blacklist has 28 people with over a year of playing on this server.

[Gunspec]

You know what is fun? The day after a mass ban, go to the south western part of Western Thanalan. Around where the level 15 mining nodes are on the southern wall. There are tons of spam bots, resuming their activities as they start work on new accounts. They teleport between nodes and mine from the inside of the cliff wall, so you can't see or target them. But you CAN hear the ding ding ding of their pickaxes, and you can see bright flashes as those nodes are tapped. The entire wall is flashing and chirping merrily as all of the bots get to work. You can practically hear the Seven Dwarves singing. HIGH HOOOO, HIGH HOOOOO!

When you ban thousands of people and don't follow it up by taking immediate action on the obvious exploiters in the following days, what is the point? It's like having a hole in a boat, and your only action is to pump the water out once an hour. If you don't stop the water from coming in, you still have a leaking boat.

[Dunncan]

I am aware about the hacked accounts and stolen credit cards. But I think that they would not be banned for "RMT advertising or RMT/illicit activity". Guess it should be in another category, since once you can indentify that the source of the payment is ilegal (profit lost), you could just ban / innactivate the account for that. In case of reported hacked accounts, they should work to assist the hacked player, instied of ban it as a RMT.

Is there anything about it on the terms of service?

Otherwise, they would be just inflatting numbers of that RMT bans reports, I guess.

[Chek]

I've actually noticed a slight improvement on Faerie since the patch. Pre-patch we had shouters in Lominsa and I was literally getting a tell every minute according to timestamps, but now I can actually go like 30 minutes to an hour and not get a single one. Its not gone, but its not forcing me to be /busy 24/7 either.