Spammers/Gil Sellers

[FFVII_CID]

I'm sure that even the forums are better moderated than the actual GAME itself!!! I see no evidence of any sort of moderation in there.. any moderator would need to be completely BLIND to not see what's going on in there! 60 spamming gil selling bots on my BL still have not been banned.. some of them added last week.

I saw 2 of them just standing there at level 1, they are NOT playing the game they are just using bots to spam in public chat. They should be banned. Simple.

So why isn't it happening?

[SpitefulCrow]

I don't often post in forums because frankly I dislike them but I had to come here to say something about this problem. It's obnoxious and is ruining mine and my wife's first experience with the Final Fantasy series. I have had /shout turned off for a week. That wasn't enough. I get 2 to 3 private messages an hour. I have even had to turn off /yell. My blacklist is filling up fast. This problem is a huge issue and could be fixed so easily using any of the number of suggestions posted here by others so there is no need in me suggesting the obvious. Fix it.

TL;DR - /bumb

[TimeForge]

According to the internet:

Average cost of a 1 bedroom apartment away from a city center in China: $100 USD.
Cheapest rent I've seen in USA for a studio or 1 bedroom: $3-700.

Unless SE decides to restrict access to NA and EU servers for people with IP addresses originating in countries with incredibly cheaper costs of living like China, etc., gold farmers will "love u long time" as it were.

To them, investing $30 on a new account every time one gets banned is a great investment because a lot of these buyers are dropping enough in a single purchase to buy them a month's rent.

To SE, well heck, I put enough accounts on my blacklist in 1 day to account for about $275 (multiplied by 365 that's $100k USD per year) just on one server, in a small number of areas over the course of a few hours while I was in town to restock, etc. Multiplying that by the total number of servers, these gold spammers are giving them a lot of business; possibly millions per year or more.

[KisaiTenshi]

According to the internet:

Average cost of a 1 bedroom apartment away from a city center in China: $100 USD.

Stop you right there. Chinese gold farms are either:
a) Run out of Chinese prisons
b) Run out of Chinese gaming cafe's (or someone who owns several computers)
c) Run by "lazy people"

A & B can't be solved with IP bans, because they defeat them the same way anyone else does. IP bans do not work, you have to attack the core problem.
C) Lazy people could be anywhere in the world, but the tools are usually made by Russian or Chinese hackers, and then pirated and hacked themselves by English people, with the addition of rootkits, keyloggers and whatever else they can use to bait lazy people into using them, and then stealing their login credentials to empty their accounts.

I've seen this before, many many times, on freemium games. The game's economy tanks the minute gold sellers start up. I've seen people asking for things in the millions, when almost nothing in the game gives you gil.

So how do you solve the problem? Stop using Gil. You've already seen the Seals used in the grand companies, the gear you get from those is equal or better than anything you'll get as a reward in a dungeon, and crafted items are only good for turning into materia. So you may as well just rank all the crafting/gathering skills yourself and avoid dealing with the market. So far only items crafted at level 10 seem to make any money at all, and even then it's like 10's and 1's. But this may have more to do with the Legacy server I'm on and the conditions may be different on the new servers.

[Suikoden]

This needs to be acknowledged by SE already.

[Enthy]

Please do something about this! It's to the point where I've decided to just turn off shout in my chat log.. I would love if RMT would be auto banned after so many people report them.. what more proof do you need than say, 30 or 40 people reporting one person?

[Syamic]

And we can't have SE banning all those can we at a loss of millions a year

/sarcasm off

[TimeForge]

Imagine how many more millions SE would EARN per year if they were one of the first MMORPGs to stop Chinese gold farmers!

[Arriverderci]

We as players need GM's or someone else to battle the Sellers, not my job.

[TimeForge]

Yeah I've wondered many times why they don't just pay 3 people $20k USD per year to just round-robin log in and out of every server and teleport around to the major cities and ban the gold spammers. 3 people with GM teleport and ban privileges could do it if each had an 8 hour shift so the servers were covered 24/7.