Why can't they auto-block RMT posts?

[SamSmoot]

Seems that my main activity is reporting RMT spam when in main cities, and I constantly see the SAME text in them all the time, like "Gil & Eukera level & Gear 390"

Seems to me that Sq Enix could write software to monitor player reports, and once ten reports have been submitted on ads that contain the same text, start blocking all that contain that text.
Yes, the spammers will just change the text by one character, but they'll have to identify what part is triggering the block to change it, and eventually, they may run out of ways to get their message across.

[Hugowulf]

What’s to stop someone from abusing it and getting someone blocked for something frivolous?

[MorbolvampireQueen6]

Seems that my main activity is reporting RMT spam when in main cities, and I constantly see the SAME text in them all the time, like "Gil & Eukera level & Gear 390"

Seems to me that Sq Enix could write software to monitor player reports, and once ten reports have been submitted on ads that contain the same text, start blocking all that contain that text.
Yes, the spammers will just change the text by one character, but they'll have to identify what part is triggering the block to change it, and eventually, they may run out of ways to get their message across.

since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

Yes, because vpns are definitely not a thing they are using to get past the great firewall of China already, so why wouldn't they use one to bypass region blocks.

[Blackbird1]

What’s to stop someone from abusing it and getting someone blocked for something frivolous?

exactly there are people who use shout and yell chat to advertise there crafter skills or items if they did that then they'd get banned for trying to make money the legit way

[Bacent]

Seems that my main activity is reporting RMT spam when in main cities, and I constantly see the SAME text in them all the time, like "Gil & Eukera level & Gear 390"

Seems to me that Sq Enix could write software to monitor player reports, and once ten reports have been submitted on ads that contain the same text, start blocking all that contain that text.
Yes, the spammers will just change the text by one character, but they'll have to identify what part is triggering the block to change it, and eventually, they may run out of ways to get their message across.

Do you not see the weird characters they use in their posts? They could use anything from any language out there that remotely looks like a letter for their advertisements

Beta - β
Eta upper case/lower case - Η / η
Epsilon lower case - ε

What you're suggesting could only add problems to the game if they start using normal text players use all the time.

[hynaku]

I was on a mmo that they blocked all IPs from china and Russia. After that it wiped out 99% of the rmt bots. It was very rare every seen one spamming after it. Maybe they should do samething here. They can always trace your route.

[manamoppet]

My guess is it would probably take resources SqE don't have or as a company gain very little (to them) to use. It's a machine learning problem where someone / a group will have to first sit and manually flag several millions/billions of examples of chat messages as RMT or not, to train and run a Bayesian network or support vector machine algorithms (or RNN, FCN, etc... i.e. different AI neural network archetypes) on.

(I realize by writing this that it can be misused) If the bots break up the lines it becomes much more difficult for an algorithm to recognize and block the text real-time, same with adding spacing b e t w e e n characters, symbols, and adding non-printable (invisible) characters. Human read-able, but more difficult for algorithms that build up/use dictionaries from the training. Then again, one could design the algorithm to look at the full chat history (with/-out spacing) after being reported for RMT. Then the botters would have to figure out how much they could spam before being banned, and such, and in some cases have to intersperse with other text than spam. At Google they regularly change the algorithm up to prevent misuse of the search ranking. The developers could do the same e.g. each maintenance day, but compared to Google, they don't risk much by having the bots, and the botters sadly lose little by being blocked. Maybe they already do something like this when doing their ban-waves, but who knows...

[KageTokage]

They ought to come up with a way to shadowban them instead of banning them outright.

IE, put them on a DC-wide blacklist if they get reported too many times so they can keep spamming away without actually knowing that nobody can hear them.

[Krojack]

since most rmts are china just ban all chinise mac address and no more rmts in game
proplem solved

You can spoof a MAC address easier than logging into a VPN these days.

Also there is no way to get a list of MAC addresses in China. You don't assign MAC address to a country like you do an IP address.