Petition for a Realistic Solution to RMT's

[LandricFrey]

Greetings everyone! If you want further action taken against RMT please sign here. I'm giving Zabuza (Ge Ming) the reins for the petition. If you have any suggestions or personal stories, please add them in this thread. Thank you!

2.55 came without mention of the relentless spamming of RMT or even simple adjustments that could have been made. So either RMT really isn't a problem or we need more voices to be heard. Come, tell a story, "like!," troll me, anything! I'm going to push this topic until they break the silence or I get banned from the forums.

Isn't it apparent, S.E.? We are serious about our game and further reducing RMT's. In need of inspiration? Look no further because the players are here to offer you some good ideas on how to go about it. Be a boss, take action!"

My suggestion: SE implements an automated account banning method.

1. Enable right click>Report RMT
When a RMT Report is submitted; it logs the player name and the message that went with it. This effectively records indisputable evidence against the RMT while protecting players from RMT Report abuse.

2. Enable Auto Account Ban when an undisclosed amount of reports are made.
If there's no text from that player, there is no ban. (Obvious abuse reasons)

That's it. This would reduce awareness and flag RMT accounts while not destroying the economy and doesn't include restrictive actions that would affect new players.

Positive Suggestions will be added here. Thank you for your valuable contributions:

Right click > Report for > Spam
10+ reports: GM ticket generated, chat logs saved.
25+ reports: Reported account muted, possibly temp banned.

One click "No" friend request.

As for solutions, the dev's should follow examples made by other games. In the instance of [That Other MMO], they made it so that if you are a char under a certain level, or a new char you may not send tells to other players unless they FIRST send you a /tell, this is how friends can still communicate while circumventing the RMT spam bot problem.

I think they should look into the matter when a person is blacklisted by an undisclosed amount, but not necessarily auto-banned. I would like to mention account wide blacklisting would be pretty darned helpful as well. If we had account wide blacklisting, an RMT would have to buy a new account each and every time they wanted to /tell me. As is, they are off making a new character to spam the world with by the time I've got their first character on my B-list.

Concerns of abuse are overblown for two reasons:
1. This should be a chat log based option like blacklist so people can't just use it on someone out of the blue.
2. Players who abuse this can be subject to disciplinary action. This is not an anonymous report. It has who submitted it and what the actual text of the message linked was. When abuse occurs, there is recourse available and solid evidence.

That said, I think the first triggered action should be a temporary muting for all forms of communication to anyone not on friends list and a restriction on sending (but not receiving) friend requests. GM gets prompted to review and can swing the ban hammer. Should only take a matter of seconds for them to determine if it is RMT or not. They could also automate the ban hammer but make it take multiple instances of triggering the threshold within a certain amount of time.

I can see it going like this. SE posts an RMT "Sting" ad on the forums where people can sign up to help out. Player A gets an email from SE and is offered a free 30 days for participating. SE provides the player with a prepaid credit card and directs them to a specific RMT website where they buy XXmil gil. After the gil is delivered, they report the name of the character that delivered it to them, the time it happened, and then turn the gil over to a GM. The player gets a free 30 days, SE gets a head start on tracking down the RMT gil-flow, and the RMT companies get to try to figure out how to combat these kinds of stings without losing lots of product. It would likely push them out of the realm of "affordable" by the standards of most players, and in turn reduce the sales pressure from spammers.

I would do the above without a reward! I'd already have the satisfaction of taking down at least one RMT.

could ease up on the personal spam if you can convince SE to incorporate an option; that can be turned on/off at the players discretion, where people who are not on your friends list cannot whisper you.

I think the best long term solution would be to make it where it's no longer profitable for them to keep it up. How about a lengthy character creation cool down (24 hours per character for example).

As of late, I've been noticing the amount of gold sellers has been constantly increasing in amount of whispers and friend requests that come from them, even to point of blatant spamming of the same message.
So, I thought one good way to dealing with them would be adding function to hide player from Player Search.

There's a certain 3rd party tool that allows for user managed chat filters. Can obliterate RMT spam with a good filter. This should honestly be something included officially, just let us create some custom word filters.

Automatically remove permanently banned characters from our blacklists.

In addition, RMT characters send far more tells than the average player does. SE could implement some kind of back-end script that calls attention to accounts with disproportionate /tell activities or unusual /tell patterns such as sending just one /tell to one person, another to another person, another to another person, etc., in tight sequence and without any follow-up conversation.

Rather than ban flagged RMT accounts, SE could basically mute them so they can't interact with other players. However, do this so that RMT don't know whether they've been muted... like don't have their /tells appear to be rejected by them. This way, at least SE can continue collecting their monthly fees while making their efforts less financially productive.

Communications preferences/whitelist

Permit /tell from: √ (friend list, linkshell(s), free company, people in party) x (people in other zones, spammers)
Permit /invite from: √ (friend list, linkshell(s), free company, people in zone) x (people in other zones, spammers)
etc.

But what about using a Captcha system? I mean, it's used to prevent automated account creation in the internet browser, why not use it to prevent automated character creation?

I would really like it if they introduced a similar method that [Other Game Company] employs when it comes to reporting. Right click > Report Spam > Screen shot is taken at that moment, sent off to the team of RMT Fighters & flags account for suspicious activity > Temporarily mutes the reported character for as long as you are logged onto the character that you made the report.

SE needs to go after the websites that sell the gil and shut them down. They not only violate the game's ToA, but it's a phishing scam to steal accounts.

I think instead of a blacklist, have /ignore and /report gil spammer buttons. No list to keep ingame, just 2 simple buttons. Report gil spammer for the actual spammers that sends a report to SE, and an Ignore for those players that are just jerks.

make it so you can't spam /tell

Insightful Quotes:

I cancelled my subscription tonight because of the gold seller spam. Completely ridiculous.

I have maybe two weeks left till my account expires and my primary reason is because I found another mmo that's just as fun that I'm not being spammed to oblivion on.

The real life equivalent of this would be if I received a call from a telemarketer every single minute of the day. Imagine if I told them I wanted to be on their do not call list but they kept calling me anyway. The only solution left to me is to take the phone off the hook, but then I can't receive calls from other people either. I'd be completely cut off from possibly important calls. That is essentially what I and many others have done setting ourselves to permanent /busy status, to keep our sanity. What is happening to me and others is actually blatant harassment, pure and simple.

I think a lot of people suggesting that stopping the spam will have zero effect on the RMT are pretty short-sighted. Demand has a serious effect on sales, and if you can curb demand by limiting awareness of the product, you can indeed curb sales.

It's pretty depressing that I have to be /busy all the time. I like chatting with friends in tells, and I can't do that because I'm busy and they're busy and everyone is busy.

The silence from any SE representative is deafening.

I feel this deserves a place in here as well:

I'm all for being Against RMT, but please don't spout False and ultimately just straight up Derogatory banter ^^ Thanks.

The majority of your paying customers are being harassed by these RMT's, and our only current solution is to /busy or turn off tells, which is completely unacceptable!

Show S.E. that we are fed up about our beloved game being infested with RMT's by signing the petition in the link above. You're welcome to share a personal story, "Like!", or make any supportive post below. Thank you!