Gold Sellers

[moudoka]

It would be a little hard to attack them in court if they are hosting servers in China or areas that do not recognize intellectual property laws ie have signed the Berne Treaty/Convention.

Well, it's a certainty most of these bots are from China. Just look at the syntax of their advertisements "Come on friend" and so on. I've had a great deal of experience playing with a variety of people from all sorts of demographic locations, from China to Egypt. Even if they don't adhere to the IP laws of the rest of the world, there are still actions that can be taken, and many people have offered some very good suggestions to alter the base coding of the game to allow for easier reporting. Prevent tells from characters under level 5/10, whatever. They're not openly shouting, simply mass-telling from the player search function. Setting yourself to busy prevents them from finding you. It shouldn't be that difficult, but apparently it is.

[QT_Melon]

Well, it's a certainty most of these bots are from China. Just look at the syntax of their advertisements "Come on friend" and so on. I've had a great deal of experience playing with a variety of people from all sorts of demographic locations, from China to Egypt. Even if they don't adhere to the IP laws of the rest of the world, there are still actions that can be taken, and many people have offered some very good suggestions to alter the base coding of the game to allow for easier reporting. Prevent tells from characters under level 5/10, whatever. They're not openly shouting, simply mass-telling from the player search function. Setting yourself to busy prevents them from finding you. It shouldn't be that difficult, but apparently it is.

Yes there should be actions taken against them, I'm just contesting people's rationale on "sue sue sue" when it's not that simple, breaking a ToS is not equivalent to breaking the law. The way SE could send a C&D letter to various websites is enforcing their IP if say the site is using names under trademark but as I said if they don't recognize Berne to begin with...

Setting yourself to /busy hampers gameplay. It means people can't invite you to parties, and those who actually send legitimate /tells cannot message you. It also messes up the Ready Check system since if you're still on /busy in a group doing a ready check it auto-declines saying you're not ready.

Players for various privacy reasons should have an option set if they can be found in search in my opinion. This prevents bots from just getting a large field list of people they can potentially spam. If a person wants to find me by name and has my correct name and not a fuzzy filter of names for example starting from "A" it would be a much better system than allowing anyone to get a wide berth of searches as spam fodder.

[KisaiTenshi]

They need to be attacked at the source. Sue them in open court, file injunctions, do whatever is required. You only need to log on for less than an hour to get all the major gil-selling websites to spam you. The list is growing too, as word is getting out SE does nothing to stop them. Probably gets kickbacks.

Gold selling sites, and gold spammers are one and the same. They are from chinese companies, sometimes they even have adsense/doubleclick accounts, which is why you sometimes see this junk show up on youtube videos for the same game.

SE just can't outstaff bots. For every 1 bot you see, there's likely another 32 doing the exact same thing on another server or another character:
This is 2:00AM Pacific on the 18th

Note the cyrillic letters.


This is 2:00AM Pacific on the 16th


There's always this uptick on spam around 2AM because that's when you can apparently create new characters on Excalibur, and then it's rather quiet for a while.

There's more practical solutions. The reason level limits aren't practical is that the bots would just clog up the server leveling... making it impossible for new players to actually get out of the starting area. The most practical requires "farming out" the reporting process and mentoring type of mechanics where someone should be able to right-click on a username and go "report", and then a different user (perhaps on a different server) can verify that the report is valid by being shown a screenshot. This has privacy implications. You also do -not- reward this. Players that are good mentors can then be given access to a little bit more privileged information to see how many times an account has been reported so GM's can prioritize dealing with RMT trash and gold spam.

In PvP games, usually the PvP mechanic is what keeps bots in check, but it doesn't work on spam bots because they just spawn in the safe area. The solutions in those games are very simple however, create a type of "Botbomb" type of item, use it on the suspected bot, it sends the bot to "bot jail" and then requires something more turing-test complete to get out. If you can't find the bot, you can also just enter the name. In much older games, they implement a type of captcha, but these no longer work because the bots just intercept the captcha generator.

But generally reporting this stuff to the forum, just barely will get the attention of the community manager.

When I worked for a certain site that has the same kind of fraud problem, there will be less than 4 people ever working on the entire system to eliminate fraud/bad people/accounts, those 4 people only get to pull the banhammer if something is reported through the tools or directly via email. The latter takes much much longer. I suspect the reporting form SE uses just creates emails that drop into their general purpose support queue.

[Blackdawn06]

Introduce a level cap on sending tells.

Must be level 10 to message people.

Problem solved. Most ridiculously simple fix yet hasnt been done. So yes, I would also like to lean towards the comment on SE getting kickbacks.

Edit - While it wouldnt COMPLETELY eradicate RMT spam, it would definitely reduce it.

[Maquinna]

be a good idea for SE to watch the market for low or regular quality items being sold for obscene prices. and find who's retainer it is, than start by banning said sellers that have successful sales. as these are good ways for RMT to hand off bought gill to players with a logged trade happening. i saw it on wow, coh, rift, etc. is it so hard for SE to implement anything like this to fight the RMTs? or are they in fact getting kickbacks? bring in some QOL changes for the right click block. it's only been asked for more times and in more posts than needed to be written.

[Fiona_Amaryllis]

Hello! I saw this post under the RMT tag and wanted to link to one I put under feedback. I think it would be a good idea to add a 'Report Gil Seller' button under 'Add to Blacklist' when you right click a name. I'm sure they'd have to add a system of some kind to handle that, but more people might report them if it was a little easier and didn't take 5 minutes per gil seller. I don't know if it's been suggested before and it's possible it might not make a difference, but I'd like to hope it might! Here's the post if anyone cares to comment, support, or disagree:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...10#post2852610

[Faelandaea]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...10#post2852610

Page not found

[moudoka]

The invisible thing actually sounds decent. However, the player search function is wholly flawed, as that is the primary source of the RMT bots spam. They flood tells at obscene levels, all via the player search. Disable that feature entirely, and they'll have to do something else. As irritating as it would be, they would then move on to area shouts, but prevent shouts until level 10. Many games do that. As for people buying gil, ban them. Ban their accounts, no refunds. They want to support the RMT bots, then they can beg the RMT bots for their money back and see how far that gets them. I do support that 100%. You buy off these sites, you deserve to go down in flames like the bots.

[QT_Melon]

The invisible thing actually sounds decent. However, the player search function is wholly flawed, as that is the primary source of the RMT bots spam. They flood tells at obscene levels, all via the player search. Disable that feature entirely, and they'll have to do something else. As irritating as it would be, they would then move on to area shouts, but prevent shouts until level 10. Many games do that. As for people buying gil, ban them. Ban their accounts, no refunds. They want to support the RMT bots, then they can beg the RMT bots for their money back and see how far that gets them. I do support that 100%. You buy off these sites, you deserve to go down in flames like the bots.

It's a bad idea to disable player search. It is needed to add people who are not on your friends list (which is capped at 200) to a Linkshell. I run a PS4 linkshell and not everyone is in the same zone where I can invite them to the Linkshell. I have to go by player name which is only available at search part of the time to add them. Player search needs to be refined, not disabled. Sometimes people think a feature is useless but haven't seen where it is needed.

/Tells are already restricted in this game, it just made RMT sellers increase the number of bots. Again, there are RMT farmbots at level 50, read back at least one page lol.

[YuuhiX]

Restricting PMs, Yells and Shouts for people under Lvl 10 is a start. I've seen this work in other games as well, at least to some degree. Blocking Player Search entirely is not going to help much, since spambot will then find other means of obtaining names. But we can still make Player Search something you only unlock after completing a certain part of the Main Story, let's say maybe at the point where you use the Airship for the first time or when you unlock Sastasha. Right now, the RMT bots have WAY too much freedom of obtaining player names and spamming the living moogle out of you. What's the only thing they have to do now to start commencing the scam routine (Yes, scam routine because most "RMT sellers" are just scamming you out of your account)?

- Step 1: Make a char (Takes around 30 seconds)
- Step 2: Go through the starting cutscenes (Takes about 3-4 minutes for them)
- Step 3: Use player search and start being the annoying git that you are

The total time they need to recover from a deleted char is merely 5 minutes at most. With the suggestions above, we can make that well over 60 mins, which will severely slow down their progress.