Gold Sellers

[OlyverW]

as an experiment I left my game logged on when I went to sleep last night and after a little over 6.5 hours I had almost 30 tells

[moudoka]

Only thirty tells Olyver? I get 30 in a few hours of gametime. It's constant bombardment from the same 3 or so sites selling everything they can. They bot their wares all over, gathering shards to sell by the thousands. It's pretty easy to tell the bot merchants on the marketboards, when the same vendor has 10k+ crystals/shards for 3 or 4 different types up. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. I still think they need in-game GMs who respond to botting reports. I've YET to see a single one even bother to acknowledge the problem exists, or see one period. Still can't figure out why they have such terrible systems in place to report them.

[OlyverW]

Only thirty tells Olyver?

Yep and after 19 hours ( left it logged on when I went to work ) it was 114 tells and 5 friend requests from the same malicious bot (they would rescind and rerequest).

And ya I have seen bots doing quests in Buscarron Druthers, Twin Adder, and I saw a bunch standing outside Gridania too ( was a small group of garden gnomes... at least thats the gear they chose for them)

A better way to report these bots/gilsellers would be a big improvement

[Zedd702]

I'm gonna keep saying this as it is a simple short term solution...

The MAIN thing I would LOVE to see is the option to BLACKLIST the ACCOUNT, not just the name of said hjkahsk or adfsfsfsf... If you could block the account rather than a small fraction or temporary character 1-1000, that will force them to be a lot more creative like having to create a whole new account to spam from because not only have you blocked the first character, you blocked future messages that can be potentially made from the same account in the next 2-3 minutes.

[Zedd702]

To be honest... I don't believe an "Auto report" system would help at all. Just look at the life of these threads on this issue alone and see that they have not really addressed or done anything about the situation that would even remotely be helpful...

Auto report would be useless. I would rather have an option to where I myself can silence the incoming tells like BLACKLISTING THE ACCOUNT OF THE SPAMMER to where I wont have to deal with the next tell from the second, third, fourth, fifth or one hundredth character they created from the same account after I black listed the others mere seconds prior to the next tell.

This is the ONLY thing that really upsets me in this game to a point where I am almost willing to bet that SE has a hand in or is getting more revenue in secret from the in game RMT sites/distributors... I'm sorry, this is a really easy implementation and a quick solution so that players are not inconvenienced by the same account over and over and over again.

[KisaiTenshi]

There's been a huge uptick in spam over the last 3 days for whatever reason. They are deleting the characters they are spamming with after as little as 5 minutes. Blacklist is ineffective when they do that.

In another game (free-to-play) they actually put cooldowns on the accounts and on the servers, because the RMT was filling up all the free character spaces on the server. (It got to a point where there was more RMT bots than there were players, resulting in long queues.) This can be partially mitigated by having 24 hour cooldowns on character deletion, and trial accounts only allowed to have one character.

And if SE wants to crank things up a notch, require a unique one-time-password generator to be used when multiple connections come from the same ip.

[Sender_Kayl]

This is hugely depressing. There are so many good ideas here and on other threads and /reddit: {Easy to implement} minimum level 10 to use shouts and whispers. blacklist cap removed or radically increased. blacklist account option. Reports made as convenient as blacklisting. Cooldown for character creation. Limit shouts and tells to one per second (prevents mass spamming without limiting how a real person would use it). {Medium difficulty implementation} implement more adaptive algorithms for identifying mass spam and random "twertew retwtrt" type names. Have a new starting character complete an instanced quest where they have to identify a random object like an apple or a hammer from a list of twenty within two tries or get locked out for an hour before they can even join the world. And finally, have ACTIVE PLAYER ADMINISTRATORS! This last point is the most hatefully obvious and viciously stupid. I've never seen a subscription mmo that doesn't have player admins. And ultimately, all of these points have been covered over and over, and players have sent suggestions using the in game menu (these suggestions are probably never read,) made suggestions using these boards (you can tell me these suggestions aren't contemptuously ignored, but it's been OVER A YEAR of these threads suggesting easy, sensible fixes) and finally just curled up in a corner, whimpering and suggesting ways to deal with it ourselves, like disabling the /tell feature entirely. I've cancelled my sub and will probably go back to Blizzard. Their customer service department are aces, their dev team extremely effective at dealing with gold sellers, and I have more play hours invested there anyway.

[Zedd702]

Yeh... This really fucking ridiculous! Last night was the PRIME FUCKING example of why I am asking for an option to BLACKLIST THE ACCOUNT CONNECTED TO THE CHARACTER....

I was in Ul'dah, chatting with friends that were online... The same three Black Mages I've seen in the past surrounding the aetheryte crystal that has not moved since I began playing this game, my thoughts are the accounts of the gil farmers...

Anyway, I was at the entrance of Ul'dah, where you first start out when you pick your class (THM/GLA/PUG). First tell from the lvl 1 GLA came after standing next to him for three minutes. I quickly looked at account ID, as his name was pretty catchy (something similar to your cat walking across your keyboard), got a tell from him, I instantly blacklisted him, he was offline in about 5 minutes, maybe a tid bit more. I remained in the same spot, a PUG with the same account info came into Ul'dah with a similar name. The moment his character was visible for me in Ul'dah that was when I received the tell...

The above pissed me off big time! I sat there and thought "Yeh I could report this guy, but nothing will happen," "I could blacklist this guy again, but he will come back as another toon that is free to terrorize me with a new character," "What the HELL is taking SE so long to fix such a simple solution so that players can give themselves peace of mind from fucking RMT bots?!"

I got pissed logged out without even saying good night and went to xbox...

[moudoka]

I think it's safe to say they will not implement ANY of these ideas. They make too much sense. The archaic way you have to clear your black lists, the extremely long and tedious report menu that does NOTHING to ensure anyone reads your messages...yeah. The game itself is great (except for RNG, that can burn in hell), and I've many friends who play. But these bots, the constant, unending spam is getting far too excessive. I've seen the messages "we banned x amount of accounts for RMT" but they don't even scratch the surface. Once again, just look at the market boards to see where the gil sellers are making their gil. CRYSTALS, SHARDS. When you see the same freaking retainer selling 10k wind shards, 10k lightning shards, 10k fire crystals...you tell me that's a human getting those. JUST ONE freaking administrator can log onto the server, and just look at the damn market board. It's EXTREMELY obvious who's botting, find the account those retainers are tied to, ban it. This spam NEEDS to come to an end, or at least slowed to the point where it's not endless harassment with zero chance of relief. I'm tired of having to disable features in a game I PAY FOR, because the developers refuse to implement ways of stopping the spam. In the time I've taken to type this up, I've gotten 7 tells, all from the SAME DAMN WEBSITE bots.

[IsaacDamodred]

I took my complaints to the extreme and was temp-banned for kicking up too much crap about RMT policy neglect. They aren't going to do anything about RMT until it seriously begins affecting their business, which you think it would have already done.