Policy Change needed on "RMT & Services"

[Eriane_Elis]

I'm not going to argue all the points because I tend to agree that the RMT spam can be a bit extreme and reporting the player doesn't seem to be doing anything because hours later, they're still there doing the same thing.

However, your #1 item is not RMT in anyway. Mercs are offering clears for gil, in-game currency. RMT is "Real Money Trading". No real world money is changing hands in this instance. While I don't agree with the practice and won't use it, if you have nothing better to do with your gil and are willing to pay someone in game to do it for you, have at it as far as I'm concerned.

They band thousands of bots per week and do list their numbers. The problem is that they can't ban them immediately due to the policies put in place.

The solution is simple. Nobody buy RMT related stuff and they will go away. Right? :P

[SamSmoot]

The are indeed easy to ignore, but if we continue to maintain the same stance on all of this silliness, its going to get out of hand.

I constantly report them in the cities, but it's a futile effort. The same ones have been spamming the same URL for months now. They really need some automatic blocking, using players to recognize the posts.
Say, 100 players report RMT posts, software compares them, and finds 50+ with the same string, such as "Xgold.com", or "Safe & easy gil sales", then block everything that contains that matching string. This would force the sellers to keep changing their ads, until they run out of ways to say what they want.
Right now, they just ban the account, and it's back 5 minutes later on anew account, running the exact same ads.

[Eriane_Elis]

I constantly report them in the cities, but it's a futile effort. The same ones have been spamming the same URL for months now. They really need some automatic blocking, using players to recognize the posts.
Say, 100 players report RMT posts, software compares them, and finds 50+ with the same string, such as "Xgold.com", or "Safe & easy gil sales", then block everything that contains that matching string. This would force the sellers to keep changing their ads, until they run out of ways to say what they want.
Right now, they just ban the account, and it's back 5 minutes later on anew account, running the exact same ads.

Yes, they need to have a reasonable chat log monitor put in place. They could have it automatic on a separate server that queues these messages. They could use machine learning and anything that seems suspicious can be brought to a GM's attention automatically and they could spot ban them. They don't even need to design the system themselves, they could just buy existing software that yes, exist today to do this.

They would just need to have a lot of logs say, 10000 spam entries and 10000 non-spam entries and they could train the A.I. on that. There would be a % of failure but it learns through failure and success and because a GM would review the potential spammy message, no "good" accounts will be banned by accident. It's really not hard to implement. If done from scratch it would take maybe 2 weeks to do by a single developer.

[Raltar]

RMTers are bad for the game. But remember that there wouldn't be any RMTers if people weren't using their services. We need to crack down on the buyers as much as the sellers to combat it.

[blaen]

100% agree that something needs to be done. It's just blatant RMT being ignored by SE. Even certain world first groups allegedly participate heavily in these activities. We all know what these guys mean when they ask to talk only on discord.
Either officially allow this form of RMT or make advertising of sell runs that only allow communication through discord or other 3rd party programs/websites bannable and force discussion of gil payment to be in-game.

Currently this form of RMT seems to be implicitly allowed by SE.

[ElazulHP]

Anyone that buys gil or clears with real money should be outright banned from playing the game imo. I really wish Square would crack down on the players that do this. Get rid of the people supporting the parasites and they go away.

[Hawklaser]

For discussion of what goes down, Voice is simpler and more convenient i will give you that, but if you look at all (the ones I've seen anyway) of these advertisements, they don't specify a any pricing in their advertisements, that why reporting them for "RMT" does nothing, as they arn't advertising RMT.

But going through discord means they can freely talk about pricing and exchange payment details without having to worry about being banned, as there is no evidence being logged by the servers through any in game chat methods.

If they were offering these services and only wanting payment in Gil, there is no issues advertising that or discussing the basics in game would there?

Here's the neat thing... there is this thing law enforcement does, known as "Stings" to find out about things like this. I'm sure something similar could be done to root out the RMT groups that use discord to bypass the server logs. Where an authorized SE GM or Special Task Force member goes along with the advertisements far enough to get to the discussion of pay, and if an option includes RMT, there is the proof needed to conduct relevant bans. Who knows, they may already be doing something like this but without being super familiar with the legal aspects to something like that, hard to say how long it would take.

[Sythen]

One can hope Hawklaser. One can hope.

Obviously the reason why they dont use external evidence is because it can be doctored. but one can only hope they are.

I can commend the Dev team by treating everyone the same, but they really do need to lift some of the restraints from the GM teams.

[CarnivalNights]

Yes, they need to have a reasonable chat log monitor put in place. They could have it automatic on a separate server that queues these messages. They could use machine learning and anything that seems suspicious can be brought to a GM's attention automatically and they could spot ban them. They don't even need to design the system themselves, they could just buy existing software that yes, exist today to do this.

They would just need to have a lot of logs say, 10000 spam entries and 10000 non-spam entries and they could train the A.I. on that. There would be a % of failure but it learns through failure and success and because a GM would review the potential spammy message, no "good" accounts will be banned by accident. It's really not hard to implement. If done from scratch it would take maybe 2 weeks to do by a single developer.

This idea scares me because my wife and I trade large amounts of gil between each other since we share all our gil and I don't want either of us getting flagged because of a mess up on their end and it'll end up taking us weeks and maybe months to even resolve.

[Sythen]

Thats understandable, but, You're not a bot, you have jobs and some crafting leveled, you have playtime, a name that is readable and not just a random headbutt of a keyboard.

Im not trying to promote that the GM's and the STF go HAM and start dolling out bans like the amount of spires i pulled when leveling AST in 4.X, they will still need to do investigations as and when.