Exactly how obvious do RMT need to be SE?

[loreleidiangelo]

You can delete names in your blacklist

Don't forget, characters don't get deleted on banned accounts. Delete the older 50 names in your list.

Or they could, y'know, give us handy QoL tools like a "Delete All" feature for blacklist so that we don't have to right-click--->Delete 50 times.

[BreathlessTao]

And what exactly would you have SE do to "stop" RMT? The one thing these threads have in common is no one ever gives a realistic, tangible solution to the problem. It's always knee-jerk, stop-gap, band-aid fixes that would do more harm than good. Or worse, giving no real feedback at all and instead just screaming "fix it!" while they foam at the mouth.

Completely stopping RMT is virtually impossible just by its nature. Not without taking such aggressive measures that you hurt your players. The only thing we can ask for is an easier way to ignore and report RMT accounts.

Here, just on the previous page, an excerpt:

3) The problem is the fact that so many suggestions have been made so many times, it boggles the mind to even try to keep up with - either of the numbers of those.
- private/invisible mode to hide from /search
- limit receiving tells from LS/FC/friendlist members only
- limit sending tells either by account or character age
- word filters, word filters, word filters - the amount of times I myself have seen the same character strings over and over again, I can't believe they can't instate any sort of filter to prevent such messages (not to even mention character names!) from being sent
- actually remove the characters (heck, the accounts) from the game, I can't believe I don't see the reported names turning into "(Deleted)" on my BL - I know they block them, but they are still somehow there, and yeah I understand they want to prevent the same names to be used again, but gods, build a database for it instead of actually keeping dead characters on any server?
- automatically clear the deleted ones from our blacklists, or at least give us a batch-delete feature?
...and these are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

[Kaedan]

snip.

There wasn't a massive RMT increase long before HW. Shortly before, sure.

The Task Force does a great deal. You're simply an ungrateful and acting like a tantrum throwing child.

As I said, this isn't a F2P game. That means every account they use for RMT was either paid for or stolen. Which means those thousands of accounts that have been banned either A) cause RMT to lose a lot of money or B) sees the account returned to it's owner.

Yes, there is an "ocean" of RMT, but eventually the drain is going to be pulled. It happened with FFXI, it will happen with FFXIV too. The problem is that if they attempt to get more draconian in their measures, there will also be thousands of false positives that ends up punishing honest players.

It's not like old FFXI when RMT was being spammed so fast you couldn't even see what anyone else was writing. These are tells that you can instantly ignore and mails that you can delete. Sure, your list might fill up, but you can delete the characters that have been deleted/banned.

I will say it might be nice to have a "delete multiple" option and an instant report feature, but not essential.

[RentisB]

LMAO

Yeah, the special task force does nothing. SE certainly hasn't banned thousands of accounts, nope.

You do realize that FFXIV isn't a F2P game, right? That means every account they ban is lost money for RMT. Sure, some accounts are stolen, but those accounts are then returned to their owners, yet another plus.

Armchair developers like you really should just stop trying to fix problems they know nothing about. Leave it to the professionals.

People who know better like you? On a JP server that doesn't even experience these issues, or on Balmung where the RMT can't even create characters? Yeah you're just a troll, or incredibly ignorant. Put your money where your mouth is, go create a char on a low-mid pop server for even a week then come back and say it's not a big deal.

The task force does ban thousands of accounts a month, and you know what, it does nothing. That makes it even worse that doing nothing. They're wasting their assets instead of addressing the problems. I dunno why you care so much about RMT accounts being banned. I pay the same amount of money those stolen/bot accounts do, but I am not breaking the TOS which you seem to think is not a big deal and shouldn't be dealt with HARSHLY.

If you break the law, you go to jail. SE should be banning with reckless abandon at this point because what they're currently doing doesn't amount to squat. Yes RMT costs them money, but you know what, so does losing legitimate people who get sick of the RMT spam and just quit. But as long as we don't punish the poor RMT accounts, right?! Yeah...

I'm not a developer, I don't know the exact numbers but I do know it's not working, saying the bans are working is a lie so stop. I did not say do this and this and this and the problem will be fixed. I suggested what HAS worked in the other MMOs, as have MANY others who've suggested the same things. This is fact, not some wishful thinking on my part. Even F2P MMOs have a better grip on RMT than this subscription based one does, and that's just sad. Blacklisting does not work, it's pointless, and you're being super ignorant for suggesting "oh just ignore them, they'll go away!" That's stupid, I'm sorry. It's not getting better, this is not me projecting some agenda. Everyone who's making suggestions isn't trying to bash this game, we want it to be better, to suggest otherwise is a lie. The reason we're angry is because we obviously care more than SE apparently does.

Your ignorance is sickening. Stop defending Square Enix. They have done nothing to be defended for.

[DragonFlyy]

No.1 is part of the problem. With WoW when an account gets enough reports it's automatically silenced and then sent to review. No weeks of waiting, and bots are even less time. RMT bots stopped using the tell function in that game because it was too quick.

I don't know what World of Warcraft you were playing, but last I was there (for the beginning of WoD expansion) there was no such thing. RMT bots where still rampant and I still would get mass tells every few minutes. At least Blizzard had the report and ignore account feature, but when you log in the next day and get the spam tells from the same name (because the ignore account feature was only for that logged in session) then you know nothing is being done. Blizzard would mass ban every few months but stopped reporting about it after awhile.

[KisaiTenshi]

Stop defending Square Enix. They have done nothing to be defended for.

If you ever get the chance to work in customer service, you'd completely understand why stuff isn't done "right now", a lot it has to do with the fact that customers/players report less than 1% of the bad activity they see, because it wastes their time.

I used to work for "the worlds largest online auction site" at one point in time when it was still #1. You know what the most common complaint is "<site> is not doing enough to get rid of fakes/counterfeits/keyword spamming/etc"

But what goes on during the day is only maybe 300 reports from users come in per day, and of those 300, maybe 2 of those will be for the same item. That's how little customers actually bother to report bad listings. The rest is done through data mining things like keywords that don't belong together (Eg using "like" in the item name is a red flag for either a counterfeit, or keyword spamming,) or certain brands that counterfeiters go after. I was there when the iPhone, Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360's were all released, and you would not believe the amount of fraudulent listings ordinary people would put up, just because they thought people were stupid. During days when hot items were released, we manually data mined the site and reviewed -every- Wii and PS3 listing that was put up.

The RMT people and bots in online games assume players are stupid, and hope we will just ignore them instead of reporting them.

And SE could improve the situation by having ANY mechanism to 1-click report players engaged in spamming, and leave the more complex reporting up to players and GM's who actually see non-spamming RMT activity. Spamming accounts take up server resources, even if they can just be ignored, they are still logged in.

The only thing SE has done, or rather hasn't done, that isn't defendable is not providing a tool to report accounts and game-wide block spam. The Blacklists are useless, because even if you block one... the next tell comes from another bot with a different name.

[Tuathaa]

No.2 It's not OUR JOB to police the game. I pay SE money every month for them to take care of these issues, and they're just not.

No you are paying them to access a server and play the game. RMT may be an inconvenience but it in no way impacts you ability to play the game.
Your not even paying then to access a server of your choice just a server.

[Tuathaa]

I don't know what World of Warcraft you were playing, but last I was there (for the beginning of WoD expansion) there was no such thing. RMT bots where still rampant and I still would get mass tells every few minutes. At least Blizzard had the report and ignore account feature, but when you log in the next day and get the spam tells from the same name (because the ignore account feature was only for that logged in session) then you know nothing is being done. Blizzard would mass ban every few months but stopped reporting about it after awhile.

But you at least had that feature and it could be easily implemented.

[Doki]

The only positive about this is that Gil is already becoming largely useless. Excalibur has several FC that have maxxed out gil both in FC bank and on retainers... 2 BILLION GIL+ for a small group of 8~16 players.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

I never understood why people need to hoard so much gil when there's nothing meaningful to spend it on.