If I were to SPAM these forums...

[Teryaani]

There's a really, really, REALLY easy solution - immediate suspension of any account that receives a set amount of blacklists. That suspension can be reviewed at leisure to ensure it is for a valid reason. If the blacklisting was malicious the offending users would get a warning/suspension/ban as appropriate. I believe that in 99.99% of cases the suspension would be valid & made permanent. I'm not talking suspension after 7 people of a Full Party blacklist, I'm talking about 50 users or so blacklisting someone in an hour or whatever.

I think SE would still avoid a solution like this because it could net people who either got on the wrong side of a large guild or were just obnoxious (which isn't necessarily against ToS). The thing is that it would have to be specific to RMT because people use their blacklist for more than just gil sellers. That's the problem with this. A blacklist doesn't mean the person did something wrong. It just means you don't want to hear from them.

[GordonLiu]

I think SE would still avoid a solution like this because it could net people who either got on the wrong side of a large guild or were just obnoxious (which isn't necessarily against ToS). The thing is that it would have to be specific to RMT because people use their blacklist for more than just gil sellers. That's the problem with this. A blacklist doesn't mean the person did something wrong. It just means you don't want to hear from them.

Pardon the double-post.

A blacklist by, say, 30 people in 10 minutes probably means you did something wrong. And anyway, it's not a guillotine, it would just lock the account for review, and could easily be undone. If it turns out, after review, that the mass reporting was just users working in concert to be jerks to one player, then they themselves could face the banning that RMT would get after a conclusive investigation.

By the way, such investigations would be greatly facilitated by the automatic report/blacklist button that has been suggested by countless users. It would be hard to abuse an RMT report button that copypastes text automatically. Frankly, I don't think most people who just want to be mean to another player would even bother using such a system for such an inevitably failed endeavor.

To that point, is there any evidence of people using the existing system to do that to people? All I'm talking about is making something that already exists easier to do. If there is no known concern about people abusing the reporting system that way now, I don't think there is any reason to believe that making it easier to use would open the floodgates. If there is evidence of such activity, my next question would be: is there evidence that that is going on more than RMT SPAM is? Because there is an awful lot of evidence of the latter going on. If they're both abuses of SE's rules, then why not implement the framework that addresses the one that is taking place on a far larger scale? It seems like it would make everyone's life easier.

[Teryaani]

A blacklist by, say, 30 people in 10 minutes probably means you did something wrong. And anyway, it's not a guillotine, it would just lock the account for review, and could easily be undone. If it turns out, after review, that the mass reporting was just users working in concert to be jerks to one player, then they themselves could face the banning that RMT would get after a conclusive investigation.

Hold on though, I can blacklist a person for any reason. It just means that I don't want to see things that person types. You'd be changing what the blacklist is intended to be used for. Your next point is where I want to see things go.

By the way, such investigations would be greatly facilitated by the automatic report/blacklist button that has been suggested by countless users. It would be hard to abuse an RMT report button that copypastes text automatically. Frankly, I don't think most people who just want to be mean to another player would even bother using such a system for such an inevitably failed endeavor.

Yeah, the community has been asking for a right click report feature pretty much since the game started. If the report included all the relevant metadata (location, player, text of reported /tell or /shout) it should make enforcement easier.

To that point, is there any evidence of people using the existing system to do that to people?

Trolls find ways to troll. If you give someone that power, someone will use it badly.