Reporting RMT Suggestion

[Sida]

Also a "delete all" option wouldn't help those people who also have few people blacklisted on permanent basis for reasons. I have also been thinking it would be nice to have locally saved temporal blacklist. Either make it timed or even just based on session, clearing itself out when you logout. That way the actual blacklist, and the space it takes on server, could be reserved to more reasoned listings. Gil sellers are near never back on same names on next login.

[needsram9]

Good suggestions, Sida.

[Jas710]

It would help if the devs actually did their goddamn homework by doing a little research on how other games manage RMT issues. So far, they are clueless. I gave up a long time ago with this shit.

[Niwashi]

It would help if the devs actually did their goddamn homework by doing a little research on how other games manage RMT issues. So far, they are clueless. I gave up a long time ago with this shit.

Well, at least they finally got rid of the vast majority of the problem. What remains is still annoying, but it's nothing like the constant flood of /tell spam we used to get inundated with back before they put in the Report RMT option.

[needsram9]

Basic Spam filtering. Not rocket science, I wouldn't think. Computer Science maybe!
Wouldn't hurt for one of the Moderators or whoever to bring this issue up with the Dev team.
Actually, I think I remember the general way to detect strings and work with text from spammers... The key is using Regular Expressions, I believe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...v=vs.110).aspx

[Valenth]

A little bit of an update: the latest trend I've seen now is that they spam their RMT in /sh and immediately seem to log off, making it impossible to blacklist them. We can't even avoid it anymore now. I mean, what are they thinking btw? That avoiding people from /bl them somehow makes them more eager to buy? It certainly isn't raising sympathy points with me if that's what they're trying to get at :P

Ps. Why can't we blacklist an offline player either? That's just weird xP

[Hasrat]

Is it really that they just log out? Here I was assuming they found some exploit or were deleting/recreating the character over and over. If they're just logging out, the blacklist definitely needs changed to let us add offline players to it. That's just terrible design.
I figure they're operating on "if they can't bl it, they'll see more messages." Obviously doesn't work for most that don't care anyway, but it's all about getting enough attention from those few someones that are willing.

It is indeed far more irritating to not be able to stop it so quickly/easily (which is again probably the goal for them). I've just had to adapt to leaving the bl prompt window open for 5-10 minutes before confirming. If they spam again, the window is already up and the bl usually goes through if you hit it near immediately. Or if you just wait a while to try, sometimes the character is back and can be added to the blist.

[needsram9]

I think one takeaway here is the Gil spammers adapt more quickly than does the game. And at present, the game is kind of putting the burden of spam filtering on players (by Reporting RMT and Blacklisting, and then some of the additional tricks mentioned above). Does this seem correct?

[Valenth]

snip

It's probably a scale tipping all the time. I mean, if the devs are ahead of the spammers, then we don't notice, right? This is usually the case with public work such as this. To make a comparison, the same goes for police work irl. If they do their job well you won't notice. It's a very ungrateful job because people often don't realise all the nastiness that is being prevented. It's a cat and mouse game with the true 'problem' laying in the fact there is obviously a market for gil-sellers (otherwise they wouldn't spam to begin with). I don't think any company has found a great answer though. Some try to combat RMT by having in-game currency sales, but I feel like this is kinda validating the spammer's existence which I'd rather not.