My idea for cutting RMT.

[raela]

No, but I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them are. There's no money to be made in advertising if every new bot costs you $40. Besides, I doubt it's merely coincidence that the explosion in RMT spam happens to fall around the same date as the Chinese release.

The bots don't cost the spammers anything. They use stolen CC info (from gil buyers) or abuse charge backs to avoid actually paying sub's.

[Zorvan]

The bots don't cost the spammers anything. They use stolen CC info (from gil buyers) or abuse charge backs to avoid actually paying sub's.

So do, some don't. Many of these RMT companies run themselves just like a legit business.

[Ashkendor]

Well come Heavensward the bots are going to be largely screwed since they will need to complete the story to access any of the expansion areas and content. That means the bots will have a hard time farming anything in 3.0 and if they get banned they have to play through all that story content again on a new account.

It won't directly impede their /tell spam but it should severely harm their productivity which might scare them off a bit.

They'll do it the same way they do now. Use level 1 characters to spam tells and friend requests. Use the same characters they've been using to spam the same old dungeons and the other things they have been spamming for the gil. Pool the gil on bank characters and use mail to get that gil to the buyers. Heavensward won't change anything, aside from possibly an upsurge in activity at the release due to sellers trying to tap a new market. The old dungeons aren't going away so I don't see how the introduction of higher level content into the game would harm their productivity at all.

[Niwashi]

What they need is right click repot after so many reports the account is frozen until unlocked by a GM. If it is indeed an RMT or other spam then the account is banned.

The right-click report feature is definitely needed.

But I think they'd be better dealt with by 24/7 coverage of people monitoring and dealing with these reports in real time as they come in, rather than with an automated X number of reports = block rule. Particularly for spam, action should be immediate anyway. (For farming/gathering bots, the reports will have to be investigated a bit before a final GM decision can be made, but not for the spam.)

The team dealing with these reports can see whether a message is spam or not at a glance, just as quickly as we can ourselves, so spam reports shouldn't take more than a second to process, provided that the reporting and banning process is set up efficiently. (The only part of that process that should take human intervention at SE's end is to look at the message in the report and acknowledge that yes, that message is spam, just as it was reported to be, or no it's not. A quick glance at it, then click one of two buttons.) If, once an RMT account has been banned, the system automatically filters out any other pending reports against the same account from the report queue, it's literally about one second of a GM's time for each new spam account the RMT companies set up.

So long as the spam report queue has a higher priority than the bot report queue (since the former needs to be processed immediately and the later neither can be nor needs to be) and the top spam report pops up in real time as soon as it occurs, spam accounts can be banned moments after they begin, and long before they could become profitable.

NO IT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. It would be used by trolls and the like to harass people so no it is not a good idea to click report so many reports lock the person

Harassment is also a bannable offence. Nobody is going to send their harassment directly to the GM team by putting it in a GM report that way. Report an RMT message as spam and the spammer gets banned. Report a non-spam message as spam and you're the one who will get banned. (Maybe a warning for a first offence, to allow for the chance someone accidentally clicked the wrong name when both a real message and spam message came in one after the other. But doing it again should earn at least a temp ban.)

(As I said above, I don't think the automatic locking should be necessary if the GMs stay on top of it, but nor do I think harassment concerns are a valid argument against it.)

My solution is simple. Players stop buying the money so that the RMT have no market. Done.

The best way to limit the number of buyers is to remove the advertising. Of course, it's also important to ban buyers when possible, but as Zorvan pointed out, that's hard to prove so will only catch a small percentage. Advertising spam, on the contrary, is very easily provable 100% of the time, which makes it the easy part to eliminate entirely. Get rid of the ads, and there will be a lot less buyers. (Which the gil sellers clearly know, as that's the whole reason they're sending all that spam in the first place “—to get more people to buy from them.)

[Theonekitten]

Well come Heavensward the bots are going to be largely screwed since they will need to complete the story to access any of the expansion areas and content. That means the bots will have a hard time farming anything in 3.0 and if they get banned they have to play through all that story content again on a new account.

I dunno. I think they are preparing for this as we speak because the other day I saw like 10 level 50 black mages at the Uldah aetheryte with garbage letters for names that were constantly queuing up and doing im assuming guildhests or maybe low level trials because they weren't gone very long. They would respawn back in 4 to 5 at a time and then requeue and disappear again. This was repeated over and over while I was standing there in a span of 30 minutes. I think they are already set to go into Heavensward and are just farming gil to sell at this point.

[Alberel]

They'll do it the same way they do now. Use level 1 characters to spam tells and friend requests. Use the same characters they've been using to spam the same old dungeons and the other things they have been spamming for the gil. Pool the gil on bank characters and use mail to get that gil to the buyers. Heavensward won't change anything, aside from possibly an upsurge in activity at the release due to sellers trying to tap a new market. The old dungeons aren't going away so I don't see how the introduction of higher level content into the game would harm their productivity at all.

Simple. Inflation. In most MMOs higher level content rewards slightly larger amounts of currency and thus the goods at that level end up being worth more because the players engaging with that content that need said goods have more money to spend.

If the difference in monetary rewards between level 50 content and level 60 content is significant then the effective value of any gil RMT might farm from low level dungeons will be greatly reduced. They will also be entirely shut out from accessing any of the new gathering nodes which will cut off another source of revenue for them.

I'm not saying it will solve any problems but it WILL slow them down a lot.

[Ashkendor]

If the difference in monetary rewards between level 50 content and level 60 content is significant then the effective value of any gil RMT might farm from low level dungeons will be greatly reduced. They will also be entirely shut out from accessing any of the new gathering nodes which will cut off another source of revenue for them.

They don't make money with the new gathering nodes, though. That would require melding and such. They make money off shards. There will always be a market for shards even as crafting recipes move into crystals and clusters, because there's always going to be a market for lower level equipment. This will be especially true as new classes are introduced.

[Fortified]

Unless I'm missing something, won't Ishgard be RMT free (aside from friend requests) as lvl1 characters can't access it?

[Niwashi]

Unless I'm missing something, won't Ishgard be RMT free (aside from friend requests) as lvl1 characters can't access it?

It may be free of /shout spam, but you can send /tell messages from anywhere.

[Welsper59]

Ehhhh. I don't think Chinese players can login to US or JP servers using the Chinese client.

Indeed, but it's definitely not something difficult to get around. China in general has a very strict set of rules when it comes to the internet. So much so, that they set up what is known as the Great Firewall (of China). To get around this, practically everyone in China that is or knows of someone that is a little tech savvy has installed a VPN to bypass this whenever they have need to. These things don't always work however, as they tend to crack down on these servers, but those devs tend to find ways around it soon after. I'm not sure about today, but a long time ago (~10yrs) it was dominantly Chinese folks doing the RMT related activity. They would simply use Western domains to sell these goods, which was typically under some Western mother IP that benefits from the sales (be it that they had some connection to RMT activity starting or not). There were several documentaries at the time when this whole practice came to light.