Why can't they auto-block RMT posts?

[Coatl]

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

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

[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

[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)

[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.

[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.

[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.