Returning Player - Gil Seller Spam

[Cristiano]

I took a long break from playing FFXIV, and having recently come back, I have noticed that the constant gil seller private messages are the same as always - it does not seem to have lessened at all. Why does Square not do anything tangible to combat this? There is still not even a report spam option, just blacklisting. When I signed in today, the same gil spammer who imed me last night is still iming me. It's irritating, especially for a AAA subscription title.

[Malzian]

I took a long break from playing FFXIV, and having recently come back, I have noticed that the constant gil seller private messages are the same as always - it does not seem to have lessened at all. Why does Square not do anything tangible to combat this? There is still not even a report spam option, just blacklisting. When I signed in today, the same gil spammer who imed me last night is still iming me. It's irritating, especially for a AAA subscription title.

Yeah... welcome back to it...

/blist add <r>

[Alberel]

I still find it odd that only certain servers are affected by this. I haven't had any gil spam of any kind at all in months on Phoenix and I'm online constantly. Even over the last year I can think of only a handful of encounters with gil sellers.

[Shinsaki]

Same for Odin. It's very rare indeed that you get a /tell.

[Acyd]

On Jenova it's every couple minutes i get RMT tell spam. Sometimes i get 2-3 right in a row. Limsa ALWAYS has a RMT bot spamming /say near the aetheryte as well.

[Gunspec]

On Jenova it's every couple minutes i get RMT tell spam. Sometimes i get 2-3 right in a row. Limsa ALWAYS has a RMT bot spamming /say near the aetheryte as well.

It's funny how players are so keenly aware of how RMT are abusing the game in these specific and simple ways, but game moderators take no action. It would be like riding on a cruise ship that has a leak in the hull near your room, but the staff just ignore it rather than plugging the hole. They wait a few weeks before announcing how many holes they plugged, hoping for a round of applause from the patrons who are all knee deep in water.

At this very moment I could tell you exactly where a half dozen botters and spammers are doing their business without even needing to look, and yet the staff don't even attempt to solve the problem directly.

The question I have and I am sure other players do is SE current banning methods working?

They have always considered the wait till we can grab and announce X amount. While other games that seem to have less spam and bots go with the reported/banned policy. All you can see is less spam and bots. Is it because they act instead of react? Or do they have a better filter system and it is just an illusion that its better? Or maybe it is simply other games spend more money on man power that deals with instant banning. I blame SE for lots of stuff I know they are complacent about. I am not sure this is one. With out knowing why other games handle it better.

All mmos have RMT problems, but the easiest to combat is blatant spam. Many mmos lock accounts immediately upon reports of suspicious behavior, and the RMT would be forced to blow through many more accounts to keep up a high level of spam. Eventually that would cut into the RMT's profits. To stay profitable, the RMT would have to behave less conspicuously in the game, which is really what we all want in this type of thread.

Less conspicuous RMT wouldn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't have as large an effect on the in-game economy. They would still find ways to farm money, and sell to any player who thought to seek out such services on google, or who saw a random pop-up on a fan website with shady host services. Square Enix seems to prioritize fighting RMT's effect on the economy (with questionable results) so they let the scum harass paying customers constantly to make them easier to track down. It's like the police allowing drug pushers to work openly on the street, just to follow them back home and arrest their bosses.

So we get an uglier game that appears poorly managed on the surface, with the suggested but unproven benefit of less influence on the in-game economy. A poor tactic, but its all we get.

[Jamillion]

Servers that are frequently closed to new character creation don't have nearly as much gil spam. I'm on Lamia myself and I would say gil spam makes up at least 25-30% of all chat I see.

[Chimeric]

Servers that are frequently closed to new character creation don't have nearly as much gil spam.

I don't know that I'd say that; Excalibur has toned down a bit recently (so far as I've seen; kinda been taking a break from FFXIV for a bit), but it's one of the hardest servers to get on to, and I can remember obscene amounts of tells at points.

[Cristiano]

Since posting this thread, I've gotten 3 spam tells in under 5 minutes on Diabolos.