Square's new RMT solution. Will it work?

[Welsper59]

Friend requests are a problem. I have played on two very different servers, and on one, friend request spam was absolutely insane. This will definitely help servers which have this problem. Remember that just because you don't experience it doesn't mean that nobody else does.

However, for the servers that experience a lot more /tells, /shouts and /says, this isn't going to help any. They could certainly do more about the RMT's but I'm glad they've acknowledged them and taken a first step.

I never really liked the idea that people consider this the "first step". I agree with what you say otherwise, but it's important to remember that RMT is hardly a new problem (referring to SE's acknowledgement), nor is this the first move/step on SE's part to make "an effort to curb RMT activity", as the patch notes worded it. They've done many things to do that... they were just, mostly, half-assed. For anyone around during the first few weeks of launch, they'd probably recall that insane amount of /shout and /yell spam that happened. I'm not talking about over a long period of time neither, but rather a couple hundred /shouts or more per minute. It hit every server, I think, which forced SE to action. They stopped it for a short while, but only by apparently adding in a simple filter that detected the "www" spam, among some other minor things. RMT then resorted to /tell, which were FAR worse than it is now... imagine those hundreds slightly condensed and transitioned to /tell. They added in a few more chat filters and detection tools. Then we were left in a rut for a very long time. Enduring tons of Friend Requests and /tells, most of which were a result of the free trial liberties, when action was finally taken... involving simply removing the FR ability from those trial accounts. Again, after enduring it for a very long period of time for such a basic elementary level fix. Now, we're back to square one it seems, with only minor improvements and less flooded spam.

My point is that SE needs to do more than the "first step" approach. Their efforts also involved the monthly RMT report, which to anyone who has experienced or noticed how RMT operate, literally does nothing for the problem at hand. For us in this game, our experience is one involving socializing. Chat logs and things related to it (like FRs). This isn't like FFXI where their presence literally interfered with you playing the game. Imagine if Hunts were claim based and RMT wanted to monopolize them as a means to sell kills. Unless pos hacked like them, you weren't going to get claim. Or if endgame were open world, claim based, and it dropped sellable items (like the items to make craftable goods that are currently possible), you'd be competing against a non-stop flood of hacks and bots. None of that is a problem here, just the social part. Removing their accounts is part of the process, but it doesn't amount to anything for us at a user level, unless they managed to monitor and issue bans daily. This results in consistent pressure on RMT so that they DO NOT have the time to make their sales, both in-game and IRL. If you cut them off before they can achieve their goals, they'll never profit. Honestly though, while that's possible, it's just not realistic to do for many reasons.

We're not asking or needing something on par with developing something on such a grand scale that it would take the same amount of effort as creating a new raid. Adding simple options like chat filters is not the equivalent of adding new meaningful content, in terms of effort and time spent on it. They probably don't have to go through multiple channels to do something like that. If they did, their entire structure of development needs review for better management. How many times are we/they going to be accepting of such half ass methods to "curb RMT" when an actual meaningful fix has been brought up over and over since the very beginning? To SEs lame benefit, as I noted, the RMT impact does not affect us on an actual playing stance, so they likely don't really find it very important as a QoL effort. Especially when you consider that it's not consistent with all servers on how bad it can be, particularly with how JP ones tend to see less than NA/EU. English is just much easier to market to since they can sort of speak the language, compared to how many can speak Japanese.