Returning Player - Gil Seller Spam

[Xanikk999]

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

I'm on Diabolos as well. I have to be perma /busy to keep my sanity.

[Kosmos992k]

I'm on Diabolos as well. I have to be perma /busy to keep my sanity.

As someone else said, this may be because character creation is available for Diablos, so RMT can go there, where servers that are already very highly populated and therefore commonly have character creation restrictions have a relative lack of RMT 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.

Remember though, they do open all servers for new characters at times, it depends on the population of players in the starting zones.

[AskaRay]

Still crazy.. I mean I got my first RMT in like maybe three months yesterday...and just one.
I can count on one hand how many I've gotten since HW started.

[Noshpan]

I'm on Leviathan, which is frequently restricting new character creations and I get RMT spam a lot. I just wish that the team would add a feature similar to WoW's where I right click name> Report spam> Temporary mute of spammer for the duration I'm logged on, thus freeing up my blacklist for legitimate trolls. They're almost there, though.

Sure, it would be ideal to somehow remove the demand for RMT gil (I honestly don't think cash shop in game currency purchase would effectively work), but coming up with a solution to do that is tricky at best. Until then, fighting RMT is reactive.

[Cromi_Jobly]

Welcome back to Diablos. The new strategy the RMT spammers are using is to send a tell and then log out so you can't black list them.

[Kosmos992k]

I posted this the other day in a topic that I can no longer find. So I will repost it here;

Three points to make before the numbers.

1. SE is absolutely going after RMTs
2. SE is absolutely going after players
3. RMT have to be making a crap ton of $$ to finance the accounts they burn

which means that the biggest RMT issue is the inconsiderate idiots who continue to buy gil.

Here are the numbers (I opened every RMT action report from the Lodestone and copied the numbers of bans to an Excel Sheet for simple analysis);

2013

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 15,288
• Illicit activity : 13,655
• Temp bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 1,814

*
*- there was a wave of discipline related to content exploits, position hacks and radar apps in the first 4 months of the game's life, which accounts for a decent lump of these temp bans.
2014

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 26,735
• Illicit Activity : 37,852
• Temp Bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 59

2015

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 45,823
• Illicit Activity : 230,075
• Temp Bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 2,334

2016 (based on 1 report covering Dec 24 thru Jan 6th)

• Permanent bans
• RMT Advertising : 1,564
• Illicit Activity : 9,220
• Temp Bans
• participated in RMT/illegal activity : 2

Cumulative totals;
Permanent bans
RMT Advertising : 89,410
Illicit Activity : 290,802
Temp Bans
participated in RMT/illegal activity : 4,209

The reports always indicate whether a ban was permanent or temporary, as well as a notification accompanying the temp bans, that egregious offenders will be permanently banned.

It's impossible to conclude exactly how many of the temp bans are gil buying related, but we can see that they tend to rise and fall with the RMT activity, so I believe it is fair to say that the number of temp bans is representative or temp bans primarily handed down due to gil buying.

It's clear that SE is in fact trying to cut off RMTs. Despite the number of posters complaining of no action, SE has permanently banned almost 90,000 accounts for RMT advertising, and another 290,000 for some form of RMT/illicit activity - presumably including accounts that transferred gil and accounts used for the farm bots. That's a total of around 380,000 permanent account bans handed down by SE, or approximately 13,200 accounts a month since FFXIV ARR went live.

For every one of those 380,000 permanent bans and over 4,000 temp bans, someone within SE's team had to investigate and validate the circumstances and offence before authorizing a ban on the account. That takes time and effort. So how about we stop saying that SE doesn't do anything against RMT?

There are plenty of good ideas for further measures that SE could take, though I won't list them here. Two things remain to be said. The first is that RMT is similar to hacking in that you can take all sorts of security measures, but it's a constant battle as each new weak link in the system is exploited. The more intrusive the measures taken to combat RMT, the more negative the impact is on players. Secondly, RMT would not advertise if there was no market for them to exploit. No matter What SE does, as long as a significant portion of the community are willing to pay RMT for gil or other things - in other words cheat - the RMT groups will remain active. Until we can a community stop players from engaging in RMT, RMT will live on.

[Blood-Aki]

snip

that is there typical placebo style of doing it, RMT knows their bots will be banned, so after the 10k get banned they have 10k more ready to go and the cycle starts over again, its an ineffective method they have been using since the start of the game, and it will keep being ineffective untill they actually start trying to get rid of them, and 5 years later we will still see those "we have been banning these easily replaced bots" with no signs of spam slowing, get used to it.

If you want to get away from spam, you have to be on a server that is character locked most of the time or jp data centers.

And as you can clearly see from those numbers they just keep getting worse each year, because to many lazy people buy gill.

[BlatantPyre]

that is there typical placebo style of doing it, RMT knows their bots will be banned, so after the 10k get banned they have 10k more ready to go and the cycle starts over again, its an ineffective method they have been using since the start of the game, and it will keep being ineffective untill they actually start trying to get rid of them, and 5 years later we will still see those "we have been banning these easily replaced bots" with no signs of spam slowing, get used to it.

If you want to get away from spam, you have to be on a server that is character locked most of the time or jp data centers.

And as you can clearly see from those numbers they just keep getting worse each year, because to many lazy people buy gill.

It is hilarious to me that you both missed one of her points, and then in trying to "counter" another of her points, you instead reaffirmed her last one.

The point you missed is that SE is in fact aggressively trying to address RMT, however the gil spammers have the advantage both in player backing (sadly) and resource management (read: there are far more gil spammers than devs trying to chase them all down...due to the fact SE is one company and there are dozens upon dozens of Chinese RMT "companies" running this scam.). The amount of man-hours they would have to dump into this endeavor in order to match the time spent by gil spammers would exceed the amount of time the dev team responsible for adding new content takes to release new patches and such. Honestly, SE needs help, and who is there to do that but us?

Also, if you intend to claim that they are not truly trying to stop RMT, please give us an example of what you'd prefer them to do. Preferably one that wouldn't break the game for the rest of us...

[Blood-Aki]

It is hilarious to me that you both missed one of her points, and then in trying to "counter" another of her points, you instead reaffirmed her last one.

didn't miss any point, nor was a i trying to "counter" i did in fact reaffirm her last post as clarification, Try not to jump to conclusion so quickly next time, It may help.

The point you missed is that SE is in fact aggressively trying to address RMT, however the gil spammers have the advantage both in player backing (sadly) and resource management (read: there are far more gil spammers than devs trying to chase them all down...due to the fact SE is one company and there are dozens upon dozens of Chinese RMT "companies" running this scam.). The amount of man-hours they would have to dump into this endeavor in order to match the time spent by gil spammers would exceed the amount of time the dev team responsible for adding new content takes to release new patches and such. Honestly, SE needs help, and who is there to do that but us?

Once again, was not a point missed, (you do read, don't you?) They can't completely stop RMT, no one can unless everyone stops buying gill (impossible, unless currency is overhauled)

The point YOU missed it seems, is they aren't trying to stop rmt with any NEW method, then what they are doing, even FFXI RMT slowed down considrably after a while to the point they got angry enough to retaliate.

Also, if you intend to claim that they are not truly trying to stop RMT, please give us an example of what you'd prefer them to do. Preferably one that wouldn't break the game for the rest of us...

There have been tons of suggestions on this matter, but they don't really listen, stopping tells from low level players, serverly limiting the amount of currency that can be traded at a time, FLAGGING accounts that trade large amounts of gill in quick succession that have not been active long, instantly catching bots that use obvious programs to spam, and float/teleport/ move at impossible speeds, the list goes on, instead they just "ban these bots" and nothing changes on our end, they may be getting rid of them to the point they don't spill out like a overly full cup of water but it's not slowing them down in the least bit with the current method.

People still get tells every day, and in large numbers. on some servers.

If they truly want to hurt RMT they can simply track down the BANK accounts, that hold all the gill, that not only hurts them but makes them take far longer to get back up. Instead they seem to be only focusing on the spam bots which RMT they know full well will get banned weeks later. (that's why they come back instantly because they know they have plenty of time before that one will vanish)

There isn't a single method they can do that won't affect the playerbase in some way, that's just how it works.