Unceasing, relentless daily harassment [RMT]

[Reynhart]

They'll just friend you again, and if you take away the right to friend people for new players people who start playing as a group will be turned away by having no means to communicate.

Same here, how often do you befriend complete strangers without having exchanged words on chat or by being near them ?
The options you have when clicking a character, a name in the chat, a name in the search results, or by typing the command are already different. It's not that difficult to remove /tell and /friend to some of those.

I can't believe the amount of people suggesting players to disable functions of the game just to deal with RMT and being perfectly fine with it.

We're not disabling it, we could restrict it to what usage normal people do of them. Only RMT spam randoms tells to the whole server at once.
For example, if we restrict so that you can't send /tell to more than 20 different people on a 10 minute window, would it really hinder your means of communicate ? Do you really have that much people on /tell at the same time ?

[AlphaFox]

For those of you saying "I rarely get RMT" I don't know which servers are considered the full but of course largely populated won't have as much if any. On Coeurl I get them every few minutes and I've had to ultimately resort to removing tells all together, its on its own tab and silenced. Only time I ever look at it is if I /tell someone else.

[AnaviAnael]

I can't believe the amount of people suggesting players to disable functions of the game just to deal with RMT and being perfectly fine with it.
We should not need to disable BASIC functions (yes /tell is a basic and very useful feature) of the game to deal with a problem that shouldn't even be ours to deal with.

The only games i've seen with RMT/bots being a major problem is where the developers are neglecting the game or letting it die, other big titles i've played don't have this issue or they've dealt with it already. FFXIV is a big title game in the MMO industry, i can't understand how this problem has been up for so long...

I think you may be misconstruing "Here's a way to make things tolerable," with "Meh, deal with it." Everyone agrees it's a problem that the devs seriously need to address. Yes it sucks and we shouldn't have to deal with it, but at the current moment in time we have to work with what's available.

[Theodric]

I'll never understand why MMO's don't hire people specifically to deal with bots/spammers as soon as they arise. The tools to detect them no doubt exist - and it's often very predictable as to when and where they'll show up. It's not so bad on servers such as Balmung that are consistently full - but I feel sorry for those who play on smaller servers were it's a consistent issue.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Part of the problem with some of these solutions is they ignore one fact. An RMT spam bot will log in, send tells to as many as it can within a few minutes, log out, delete, create new char, repeat. Its much harder to track these down, the bots they use to farm w/e it is they use to make gil are easier to spot, ban, and control, and that is generally what we see being banned in their weekly updates.

SE has updated their filters, algorithms and such, but the RMT simply adjust to a new pattern and continue.

Balmung has its share of RMT, but they are a lot quieter, due to the difficulties of building back up their horde of bots due to the creation lockouts.

[Veilqa]

Sadly this seems to be the staple of mmos today. Take for example Blade and Soul. Now known as Bot and Spam. BnS was hyped to extremes and rightfully so with a fresh take on combat and arena PVP. The reality of course is that the game became in less than a month a bot circus. Bots in the forums, bots in arena, bots in tag matches, bots gathering, bots crafting, bots doing dungeons, bots in raids, etc.

I'm not saying we should accept bots for what they are and just shup up and play. I'm saying that it is a difficult issue for developers. Some take it more seriously than others and I believe SE does take the problem seriously unlike NCSoft with BnS.

In BnS a majority of the bots have premium accounts (pay monthly) so this does create conflict when the player base cries for results and NCSoft remains silent. Bots gone = money gone.

And for ffs, I make like a million gil in a week or two. Why the hell would you buy gil from these parasites?

[greyfurr]

It doesn't help people who play on PS3 or 4 but guildworks has an add on that you can download that has a filter that you can customize to block out RMT messages. I use it and almost never get them now (in /tell, /shout, or /say) and never have to put /busy up.