Ultimate RMT Spam Killer.. Us.

[KisaiTenshi]

Rather than coding in more and more regex to flag/block RMT spam.. Why not leave it up to the players?

My idea is rather simple and in my opinion, ultimately, fool-proof.

Add the option "Report as RMT" to the right-click menu for incoming /TELL and Friend Request names, but limit reports against players to one per person.
Again, this clickable-option is only available to /TELL or Friend-List Request recipients.

I assure you that pretty much everything has been suggested, but the only thing that has changed since launch is throttling of spam into the shout/yell.

No absolutely not. All people would need is some of their friends to use this to harass people.

This would be used to bully people it wouldn't do any thing for rmts since they would just creat a spam bot to replace that bot.

Only way to combat rmt is to ban their ISPs and people to stop buying Gil.

No, the only way to combat RMT is to have equal copyright laws in all countries. As long as data isn't seen as being "stolen" in China, nothing will stop it. They can do it with impunity because all SE can do is ban and delete accounts. If they were doing it from the US side, they would be charged with copyright infringement easily. The ToS states that SE owns ALL the data, including the user data. Therefor nobody has any right to buy or sell any part of the game except SE itself.

The people who buy from RMT often end up with their credit card numbers stolen, game accounts stripped (used to send spam,) and all the money drained from their accounts if the card or Paypal is attached to a real bank account. RMT is used to launder money from the proceeds of crime, nothing less.

But by the time any charges could be brought against anyone participating in RMT, they've long since disappeared under the radar. Sure the website may still be up, but if you go look at the WHOIS information for these gold farmer sites, they are behind sites like cloudflare (which is also used to hide the origin of a lot of other highly illegal-everywhere criminal activity) with contact information in mainland china. That's like every box on the "you can't do anything about it" bingo card.


You can avoid the trolling problem by pretty much using the same karma mechanism that sites like Newgrounds, Slashdot and Reddit have had for nearly 20 years.
1) You only get to suggest a ban once per player
2) Every time you correctly get someone banned off the server, you score a karma point
3) Every time your action is wrong, you lose a karma point.
4) Players who have the highest karma points (eg most right) are prioritized and scrutinized less
5) Players who have the lowest, or negative (eg most wrong, trolling) deprioritized and scrutinized more.

So lets say someone is a jackass, in the beginning, everyone is at zero, so the spammers that are reported the most heavily will be investigated as if they were the same weight as everyone. After a few people score a few correct points, the ones reported by those are trusted the most.

If someone is accidentally (or maybe purposely) reported, banned, and then they come back because their ban was overturned, whoever was responsible for it in bad faith (eg lying) would have their karma reduced or reset to zero.

More importantly, players with NO karma reporting a player with lots of karma, would be considered questionable and no automatic action would be taken.

But as anyone can see, the obvious problem with this solution is that it's interstitial in nature. If the people who do all the reporting and have all the karma are being the shield against the community, they should be being paid for it. And not a token month of free service. Like right now to do a "correct" report, often involves spending an hour carefully documenting everything... which is why nobody does it for spammers. By the time the report is filled out, the spammer has long since disappeared. On some servers, those "friend request" spammers are in the hundreds, is that per day or per month? We may never know.

All SE has to do is screen the highest scoring karma people for accuracy and how "engaged" they are in the community. Like any other community, the loudest dogs have the weakest bite.