Why can't they auto-block RMT posts?

[Mekre]

Perhaps, they could recruit players with in-game items as reward? Or maybe have GM's sit in cities. They're easy to spot as they /s and /sh all day long. On the other hand RMT have to buy actual accounts to get into the game so...

[Kurando]

Reminds me of someone that was effing and blinding on the Blizzard forums because an enemy player with a username in Chinese seemed to be hacking (or so they say) in Overwatch. Obviously because of the name it turned in to a rant that all Chinese players were hackers and should be banned, like I guess everyone in FFXIV with a Japanese name must be Japanese, silly isn't it.

In the end it just goes to show that hackers, RMT spammers, cheaters etc, can be from any part of the world, let's not generalize an entire country based on mostly personal opinion. The game just needs a better method of handling RMT, like if I report someone I expect it to be blacklisted at the same time rather than having to do both individually.

[MorbolvampireQueen6]

Reminds me of someone that was effing and blinding on the Blizzard forums because an enemy player with a username in Chinese seemed to be hacking (or so they say) in Overwatch. Obviously because of the name it turned in to a rant that all Chinese players were hackers and should be banned, like I guess everyone in FFXIV with a Japanese name must be Japanese, silly isn't it.

In the end it just goes to show that hackers, RMT spammers, cheaters etc, can be from any part of the world, let's not generalize an entire country based on mostly personal opinion. The game just needs a better method of handling RMT, like if I report someone I expect it to be blacklisted at the same time rather than having to do both individually.

u know u can search their location with what they spam right lol its not assuming and note i said most rmts a few are russian

[Halivel]

u know u can search their location with what they spam right lol its not assuming and note i said most rmts a few are russian

They often write their sites, but the issue is that if some site registered in certain country doesn't mean that RMT is from this country by himself. Thanks, but I don't want to be blocked from the game just because there is possibly one rmt jerk in incredibly low amount of Russian players, we already suffer enough. Same goes for China - I have no idea how many rmts are from there, but blocking whole country because of few jerks? It's just wrong. Or you are one of those who thinks that it's okay to punish whole class because one boy broke the window? Blocking country is not a solution.

[KageTokage]

It's unfortunate that there's no way for them to detect the modded clients that the bots are using, because they're essentially running a completely stripped down client that basically only sends out the commands needed to log in their characters and make them function

There's virtually no GPU or CPU usage involved, which means that they can multibox several hundred characters on one potato of a PC with their connection speed being the only real limiter.

If IP address spoofing wasn't so easy, they could also just block out access to any addresses being used by several hundreds accounts simultaneously since not even the busiest of net cafes are likely to have as many players connecting from the same IP as these RMT farmers do.

Tbh this is what PSO2 did. Banned all of china, bots and actual players alike.

The sad thing is that it actually worked. In the first six months of the game being out or so, it was insanely common to see piles of hacking bots trying to farm money on empty server channels and there was also some isolated RMT spam.

As soon as they went through with their somewhat extreme move to deny all service for China, this activity stopped completely and never resurfaced.

[Malzian]

Problems with automatic pattern recognition (Disclaimer - all domains are examples and not sites that I am aware of, any actual site that is included is purely coincidental):

www.buymygil.com
vvvvvv.buymygil.com
www.buymygil.(0/\/\
vvvvvv.buy/\/\¥gil.¢0/\/\

How do you plan to pattern match that? Those are just a few possible examples off of an iPad keyboard. Once you're in a PC and have access to the full ASCII set... yeah, you're not going to pattern match anything. Relying on players to report strings being used so you can block them? There's so many possible variations that no one is going to spend time reporting more than one and your average player is just going to ignore it.

The only way to stop RMT is to make it not profitable and that's a very difficult thing to do without becoming the RMT yourself.

[NessaWyvern]

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.

Considering how some RMT spam is garbled and saying stuff like |3uy G1L, I think maybe they do have some kind of auto-block or ban in place and do this to not get detected.

That being said, gil would only be sold if someone bought it. If nobody was buying gil, then the bots would eventually go away to a different game for money. Maybe we need big warnings when someone creates an account saying "Do not participate in RMT or get banned instantly!" (considering if buyers get banned after they buy gil, the gil sellers still make the money, you have to discourage people from buying in the first place), try to fight the problem on both sides.

[Dustytome]

At this point I'd just like the ability to add client side chat filters so I can block the messages myself without having to blacklist hundreds of gibberish names or wait on the devs to make a move.

[KageTokage]

I'm not sure why they can't just make the server auto-DC bots for moving too quickly using their hacks.

It's been suspected that they already have some kind of countermeasure in place in PvP zones and PotD as using movement skills like Shoulder Tackle and Onslaught can randomly DC you there, but not anywhere else.

The truth is that there are a lot of things they could be doing to lower if not stop the gil farming that's being done, but they seem convinced that repeatedly banning the bots when they instantly create replacements is actually working.

[Sandoria]

I report the spammers so much, Squeenix should cut me a paycheck for it.