Rampant botting and RMT..nothing being done

[Ultimatecalibur]

You may find it disingenuous, but I find it rather odd when people credulously assume this 9000 ban information were to be true.

I assume the 9k total is credible because I've done the math on the spamming.

2650 advertising accounts means means that between 2650 and 108000 advertising characters. Divided amongst 65 servers means that each server should have seen between 40 and 1661 ad bots last week. Those are rather reasonable numbers.

[Neri]

Hmm, what about checking the name of the still survived rmt shouters/tellers in your server? Are they still the same names?

[Maxipep]

One of the most frustrating issues with regards to threads similar to this is you never hear from a Dev or GM or for that matter anyone from SE. Their silence is deafening. If just once they replied to a thread, even to say "you know what guys, we are trying to sort it", but they wont, and it's that type of avoidance that leaves all of us whose game is being spoiled by RMT to question why ? Just acknowledge the situation SE, just acknowledge the situation...

[Miitan]

8/10

Yesterday botting came up and dozens of people in it pretty much admitted to botting

That line pretty much gave it away unless you're confusing parsing with botting.

[Belhi]

There are two sides to this. SE is stuck in a war which is undermined a lot by the fact its their own players breaking the rules which are allowing the problem to exist in the first place. If people didn't buy gold, no one would be selling it.

I play on a Japanese server and have never seen a single RMT ad. There are still quite a few bots but no spaming RMT. The difference to the NA servers sounds profound. Bots are annoying but RMT is what is really invasive.

The issue SE has is that the best way to stop people breaking the rules is prevention. Account security is part of this. Anyone who doesn't have single use password protection should get it. Hacked accounts are a favoured way of RMT sellers to advertise because it allows them access to the game without paying anything. Reporting people breaking the rules help as well. Automated solutions are problematic. Innocent players almost inevitably get caught. This creates a need to investigate individual cases which can become extremely cost inefficient. The other option is being more restrictive which is what WoW mainly does.

There is no easy solution to this and its an arms war. People mention WoW but seem to forget it took WoW years to get their own RMT problems under control. They literally had new characters spawning, being hacked to fly through the air to Orgrimmar and being laid out on the ground to spell the letters of gold selling websites. That situation continued for ages.

[Riepah]

The issue SE has is that the best way to stop people breaking the rules is prevention. Account security is part of this. Anyone who doesn't have single use password protection should get it. Hacked accounts are a favoured way of RMT sellers to advertise because it allows them access to the game without paying anything.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply here. You can't even log in to your own account if you're using a different device than usual, say, a laptop rather than your usual desktop. It won't let you, until you change your password via an e-mail they send. So unless your e-mail account is in the hands of RMT, you could go and TELL them your login information and it wouldn't do jack, they still couldn't steal your account. If they tried to log in with your credentials, you'd get an e-mail about it, change the password to something else, and RMT could twiddle their thumbs.

[Aryalandi]

SE works on the RMT issue, but the bigger problems are the player issue, and lack of manpower to take down multiple companies who are entirely devoted to one single thing, and the lack of communication between players and the task force. Will it get better? Yes.. but it will take a long time unless SE has more people, i wish the community could police things like i used to on XI as a blue mage (fit her rp too <3) but there is just so much more to do in this game, so many more players..

In XI you would /know/ when your report was recieved and dealt with, there was communication between the players and the special task force, i could literally stand in front of an rmt, send a report, wait ten minutes, watch them red ball and disappear as i got the thank you message and moved on to finding more. I miss that /it actually felt like i was making some small difference/

[Elusana_Celah]

I dunno... I've been able to keep busy off now on Behemoth. Except sometimes friends requests come in like yesterday I got 2 back to back from the same gil seller company then I'll just put busy back on but really it ain't anywhere near as bad as it used to be on this server.

But Behemoth player activity has greatly decreased so I'm doubting SE is getting rid of the RMT, just players are quitting the game... very hard to even get farms going anymore here unless it's during the few hours a day of peak player activity lol.

Goes to show you though, when the buyers go away, the gil sellers follow. Attack the buyers, the sellers disappear.

[BunnyChain]

"nothing?"

3 people are doing this:



Give them some credit. :/

[Natsuno]

Reported a 'friend' bot for harassment (same company name so the same 'entity' is making more chars to grief people that have already /blisted them) and had a positive reply within the hour.

Both /tell bots I reported vanished after a day tops too. I haven't seen another fill the space that these two left yet, (also saw a THM bot red ball in the same area) so I am personally seeing results of myself (and more than likely others) reporting them.

If GMs have the power to ban/freeze the accounts of the blatantly obvious offenders (which I assume they do), then that'll help ease the burden on the special task force.

Slightly off topic, but I wonder how many of the complainers (or people in general) actually go through the trouble of reporting them? Just a random thought.