The #1 Question Asked For The Letter From The Producer:

[LunaHoshino]

I just turned off the /tell sound. Problem solved.

[tocsin]

Accounts cost RMT spammers at least $15-$20, so getting the entire account locked after one wave of spam would make it impossible to profit from randomly targeted spam. That would effectively remove these /tells from the game.

Just saying, but new accounts don't cost RMT a penny. They just charge it to a stolen credit card, and then issue a chargeback as soon as they finish spamming with it. They can literally create 100,000 accounts a week, and the only person who will lose money is SE, in chargeback fees.

[Gyson]

Lol cancelling your pre-order because of tell spam? Do you blist and report each one? I only get maybe one tell a day on Balmung, when i do /blist add <ctrL+R>.

Er.. I'm on Balmung also, and there are times where if I'm getting only one RMT tell per 10 minute window I'm thanking my lucky stars.

Half a year ago it didn't seem this bad, but lately those tells are coming in really often.

[Gunspec]

I just turned off the /tell sound. Problem solved.

Gee, what was that item I just looted? Let me just scroll up 26 lines of text to see what I got 5 seconds ago. Whoops, I thought my friend was going to ask me to tank a dungeon for him. Guess he asked an hour ago, but I didn't see his /tell in the middle of 300 lines of /tell spam.

This is like silencing your cellphone because you've gotten too many telemarketer calls.

Just saying, but new accounts don't cost RMT a penny. They just charge it to a stolen credit card, and then issue a chargeback as soon as they finish spamming with it. They can literally create 100,000 accounts a week, and the only person who will lose money is SE, in chargeback fees.

I hear the "they just steal credit cards" argument a lot, usually listed as a reason not to purchase currency from the scum bags. While I wouldn't put it past them, I doubt stolen data is the key source of any of their actions. I mean, why use stolen money to earn money illegitimately in a video game? Why not just USE the stolen money? And considering the enormous number of RMT accounts, if this really was a matter of thousands of accounts with stolen credentials being created each week, I would assume SE would be better about stopping it for financial reasons. And even IF what you say is true, rapidly banning accounts that spam would still be a deterrent, since creating accounts would still eat up the RMT company's time and resources. Other mmos do it, it works for them. FFXIV isn't doing it, and here we are.

[LunaHoshino]

Gee, what was that item I just looted? Let me just scroll up 26 lines of text to see what I got 5 seconds ago. Whoops, I thought my friend was going to ask me to tank a dungeon for him. Guess he asked an hour ago, but I didn't see his /tell in the middle of 300 lines of /tell spam.

This is like silencing your cellphone because you've gotten too many telemarketer calls.

Yeah, I can see how it could be more of an issue if you keep your tells and LSes and other general chat all in the same window. I have a separate chat window for tells because my LSes tend to be very talkative and thus I had the "scroll up 26 lines of text" issue even without gilsellers being involved.

[tocsin]

I hear the "they just steal credit cards" argument a lot, usually listed as a reason not to purchase currency from the scum bags. While I wouldn't put it past them, I doubt stolen data is the key source of any of their actions. I mean, why use stolen money to earn money illegitimately in a video game? Why not just USE the stolen money? And considering the enormous number of RMT accounts, if this really was a matter of thousands of accounts with stolen credentials being created each week, I would assume SE would be better about stopping it for financial reasons. And even IF what you say is true, rapidly banning accounts that spam would still be a deterrent, since creating accounts would still eat up the RMT company's time and resources. Other mmos do it, it works for them. FFXIV isn't doing it, and here we are.

The thing is, they cant use the stolen money. it isn't really there. We are talking credit cards, not debit ones here. you don't just "withdraw cash" from them that simply. the card gets charged $20 for an account, and then the bank charges wherever the money went to, to get the money back. that means that if RMT directly used the stolen money and just withdrew it, whatever institution they withdrew it from would be on the hook for the money, and if there is anyone more tenacious about getting back money, its financial institutions themselves.

They just buy the account, use it until either SE bans them for RMT, or until SE bans them for chargebacks, then moves to make the next account in much the same way. In this way, SE gets charged more for each account that they ban, so it makes sense for them to wait for ban waves to make sure that RMT'ers Get the least effectiveness, out of the least accounts per time period. that way, less accounts made, less chargebacks.

This is also one reason why MMO RMT is one of the most popular forms of money laundering. it turns stolen money into good money.

Its one of the reasons that SE seems to be almost complicit in RMT. its disgusting. I'm personally in favor of IP bans for any countries that FFXIV is not supported officially. it may have a bit of collateral damage (a couple thousand players suddenly cant play) but it would eradicate RMT near completely.

I mean, even just banning all Chinese IP's would even make sense. SE has official Chinese servers for a specific reason, with very different rules. Chinese players use the other servers as a means of bypassing their national restrictions, so SE would even be taking the "legal" action by IP blanket banning.

[Morbid]

I would think a large amount of chargebacks would raise a red flag with the institution from which the card is issued from.

Account blocking instead of just character blocking would be a small start and something that should be implemented. I block people because of the person themselves not because of a particular character they might be using.