Why can't they auto-block RMT posts?

[Halivel]

blocked all IPs... and Russia. ...Maybe they should do samething here.

Hey. We already suffer with no shipment from SE store, no Russian language, 13 Euro sub with 300 Euro monthly payment, can we at least play quietly without wondering about good VPN service? There is not so much of us in this game to block us by IP. :/ (I doubt there any RMTs in roughly 300 active players anyway)

[JowyAtreides]

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.

How about maybe they shouldn't?

[Fresky]

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.

I’m pretty sure all IPs from China are already blocked. They have their own region and cannot log in the NA/EU/JP version without a VPN.

[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...

[SamSmoot]

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.

The players would do the pattern recognition. After many RMT reports from different accounts, the only thing software would have to do is find matching strings in, say, 100 of the reports, then start blocking anything that contains that string. Such as: "[Ultrafast Deleviryin 10 Mins]". If they change a few characters, players will report the new ones, and they get blocked again, along with the old ones.

Example: Take this popular posting:
Ysteueqr Kejajuue: ----[SCUMBAGS.COM]----[Best Buy Gil Store]----[Cheapest Price]-----[SCUMBAGS.COM]---[Ultrafast Deliveryin 10 Mins]--[6% OFF Code;LOVE]---8qwet

After 100 reports, the blocking algorithm sees the highlighted strings in 50% of them, and starts blocking on just ONE of them.
The spammer then has to figure out which one is causing the block and change it.. Next 100 reports, and it picks a different string than it blocked on previously, and it continues. The spammers will have to keep finding and changing the blocking strings every 100 posts, and they may eventually run out ways to say what they want.

[manamoppet]

The players would do the pattern recognition. After many RMT reports from different accounts, the only thing would have to do is find matching strings in, say, 100 of the reports, then start blocking anything that contains that string. Such as: "[Ultrafast Deleviryin 10 Mins]". If they change a few characters, players will report the new ones, and they get blocked again, along with the old ones.

That's true, but can take a while (10 hotbars with different macros on them pr. bot), and after a while uses more storage than necessary when new string variations are added. Think of how many combinations words can be altered in a Twitter message, and that's only 140 characters. With machine pattern recognition you don't need exact matching strings, just be close enough when calculating e.g. cross-entropy for loss equations, and the number of parameters to learn is mostly unchanging (the values of each parameter will change). I meant that initially one would need to manually label that many chat messages, but of course after the initial training one would augment the training by adding the players new RMT reports (players doing the pattern recognition).

[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.

[DrWho2010]

yes lets just ban whole countries. that's a great way to run things. /sarcasm

look just because something isn't seen as being "instant" it doesn't mean things aren't happening in the background.

[MorbolvampireQueen6]

yes lets just ban whole countries. that's a great way to run things. /sarcasm

look just because something isn't seen as being "instant" it doesn't mean things aren't happening in the background.

the thing is without harsh choice it doesn't matter ban 1 bot 50 more spawn this is never ending and it can't be stopped by taking 1 or even 50 down will never go any were.

taking down the country that has the bots spawning non stop might seem harsh but it needs 2 be done

[Spratchet]

the thing is without harsh choice it doesn't matter ban 1 bot 50 more spawn this is never ending and it can't be stopped by taking 1 or even 50 down will never go any were.

taking down the country that has the bots spawning non stop might seem harsh but it needs 2 be done

No. Just no. It does not NEED to be done. Nor will it be. There are already well known American botters. Should we ban the entirety of the U.S. too? Don't be silly