RMT Friend Requests. *le sigh* SQUARE DEVS {Help me out!} {Thank you.}

[Perusa]

Are there any plans at the moment to help with the onslaught of RMT messages/ friend requests? I went afk for less than an hour and came back to 2 whispers and 4 friend requests from RMT's...
Would it be hard to put in a system where until a character is lvl 15, they cannot send friend requests or whispers... But they can receive and respond to those sent from characters lvl 15+?

[Perusa]

Also, when I decline a friend requests from one of these RMT's I have to actually decline it twice, and then blacklist from the chat log... Is there any way to implement a "Decline friend request and add to blacklist"?
It is getting beyond annoying that I either have to put up with the requests, or put myself on busy so they don't bother me, which keeps me from being able to receive legit whispers from people on my friends list / LS / FC. Would it be possible to have a setting under busy where you can block anyone who is not on your friends list?
I'm not sure if I'm the only one wishing for this QoL change, but I'd be one happy Miqo'te if i could enjoy the game without the onslaught of friend requests and whispers from lvl 1 characters who either log out or get deleted before i can blacklist them.

Thank you for reading my rant... Hope you all have a good day, and may RNGesus be with you!

[Lamentations]

Also, when I decline a friend requests from one of these RMT's I have to actually decline it twice, and then blacklist from the chat log... Is there any way to implement a "Decline friend request and add to blacklist"?
It is getting beyond annoying that I either have to put up with the requests, or put myself on busy so they don't bother me, which keeps me from being able to receive legit whispers from people on my friends list / LS / FC. Would it be possible to have a setting under busy where you can block anyone who is not on your friends list?

Not to worry Perusa, plenty of other people feel and share in your pain.

I always have my chat shut off now, still have to double decline those friends requests however, at least for me anyway they have lessened in frequency as of late.

Two likes from Lamentations.

[sciondar]

When you get one of those requests just open the friends list and do the decline from there then blacklist. Going straight to the friends list to decline closes the request window. This way you only decline once.

[Callinon]

When you get one of those requests just open the friends list and do the decline from there then blacklist. Going straight to the friends list to decline closes the request window. This way you only decline once.

Still raises the perfectly reasonable question of why declining it once isn't enough.

[KayoZ]

Good luck... a lot of players have been asking for better common sense features to help block, deny, and ignore RMT spammers since the game released and SE has done next to nothing about it. The "task force" consists of about 3(?) employees who periodically ban accounts ... thats about it.
Still cant stop friend requests, still have to decline friend requests multiple times, cant right-click report/block from chat window, blacklists is still filling up because banned/deleted names stay there... it just boggles the mind. These things are common features in a lot of MMOs and relatively easy to implement. They seriously dont care about RMT spammers. A lot of players (myself included) even stopped bothering trying to help report them ... what the hell for?

You'd think their #1 profitable game (according to recent IGN article) that has pretty much brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy, along with their loyals fans, deserve better than this neglect ... but alas, RMTers also make SE money so..... fat chance.

[Yumi_umi]

Busy status the only temp work around for rmt spam.
U feel more secluded from ppl but its the price to pay if u want 90% less rmt spam except for city shouts which u'll need to turn off shouts etc.

[sciondar]

I wasn't saying the process isn't flawed, just sharing the method I've adopted to compensate for the situation as it currently exists.

[mbncd]

The double denial of friends irks me a lot too.

I wish we could have filters so no one with Cheapgil/Sellgil/Site-name in their name could contact us with friend requests or anything else and so that we could add common repeated phrases to an easy to update chat filter too. If it was in the players' hands to deal with these issues, we could get rid of the vast majority of the spam in a minute or two, at least to ourselves. Common filters could get forwarded to the GM's and they could make some of them official to protect others as well.

Unfortunately, filters require infrastructure changes so I doubt we can look forward to them any time soon.

The denial thing should be an easy enough UI change though so maybe when the add-on creating feature sees the light of day (yes, I still have a tiny glimmer of hope...) someone will be able to add an RMT button to the friend confirmation pop up that'll remove them from our friends list, add them to our black list and maybe even report them.

[Gralna]

but alas, RMTers also make SE money so..... fat chance.

This actually isn't true, majority of RMT accounts are bought and paid for with stolen credit card information. Part of Visa/Mastercard agreement to use their services, is that any fraudulent charges have to be paid back to the account, these are charge back fees. The lead dev for SWOR reported that in 6 months, charge back fees had cost them over a million dollars. RMT are actually hurting SE a lot more than us players. Which is why I'm really baffled they haven't done more to proactively stop them.