Gold Sellers

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

It actually doesn't work in any game it's been implemented in. Instead of having 5 bots standing around, you end up with 300 bots cluttering up the newbie areas to get over the level restriction, thus making it difficult for players to actually progress.

Let me find an example...



Archeage only lets you report, at most 20 times... and until the GM's process the report (could be up to 3 days), the bots have had enough time to level past the point where they were blocked from spamming/goldfarming. So a lot of bots were reaching level 50 long before they got booted.

Other games (like Mabinogi, and Wizardy Online) that I played any significant amount of time on, the problem is compounded by the number of servers/channels that exist. Mabinogi, has no yell/shout mechanic (it's a cash shop item), so the bots just constantly spam the "say" system, and the bots all campout around Uldah (the only spawn point for that continent, regardless of storyline progression.)

Freemium games however basically are screwed over by the fact that they are free to play. So there is no throttling by subscription.

Games with free trials have the same problem. http://support.na.square-enix.com/fa...245&id=20&la=1 (FFXI) http://support.na.square-enix.com/fa...5382&kid=70929 (FFXIV), https://us.battle.net/support/en/art...tarter-edition (WoW)

And they just disable everything but "say" and "party" chat without a subscription.

Which means that the accounts doing the spamming, are paying/stolen accounts.

Like the best "reasonable" compromise is to unlock /tell /yell and /shout into an instanced tutorial, which acts as a type of game-generated captcha about politeness and roleplaying. Make a dozen NPC characters appear, and have the tutorial do something like:
- emote (?) at a (specific) female NPC
- /tell the (specific, without mentioning the name) shopkeeper something nice
- /shout the aggressive monster name and location
- /yell something ...
V1.0 actually had something like this for the emotes, there's no reason it couldn't be brought back and tacked on to the emote storyline bit like before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZgcq-FMpfw&t=91

At best it would just make bots get stuck in an instance and unable to spam until they complete it, at worst, it delays the delete cycle.

Where the delete cycle needs to be fixed is preventing new characters from being created on ANY server if a character has been queued for deletion less than a day ago. With the delay being relative to the level obtained. eg a level 50 character wouldn't be deleted for 24-48 hours, while any character deleted within 24 hours of creation would put a 24 hour cooldown on creating any new character on any server if they have used /tell /shout or /yell . Another possibility is just permanantly closing character creation on the busy servers and make new character creation by invite-only (eg "Invite a friend to FFXIV! Just email this referral code, this will invite them to create their free trial character on the same server you play on!")

There's no perfect system, and there never will be short of China cracking down on RMT within their own country first.

[YuuhiX]

If we can be given the option to auto-block whispers from ppl under lvl 10, it's a start. I've only gotten 2 minutes off the Busy status and already I get about 8 different bots whispering me. It's just driving me mad

[Malgor]

One solution that worked well on a game I played long ago (can't recall atm) the solution to spamming was, in addition to a timer (no more than 1 /tell /msg every 3-5 seconds), and the blacklisting was community driven.

so if a character was blacklisted by players for sending unwanted tells, once that player reached a threshold set against the server population ratio, that player was automatically muted from /tells /shouts /msgs for a period of 8, 12 or 24 hours (depending on the number of blacklist/spam reports)

And it was tied to the account holder, if they used another alt for the same purpose, if the alt performed the same actions and received another blacklist mute, then all the characters tied to that account were muted for that cumulative period of time.

This seemed to have an eventual effect where the gold sellers were quickly running out of alts to spam with and forcing them to wait to advertise, or purchase another copy of the game, which soon made it UNPROFITABLE, and they eventually faded away.

[Amnesia]

How about just prevent people from sending more than, say, 10K in gil to someone who has been on their friends list for less than 1 month.

Seems like that would solve the problem---if RMT can't deliver the gold, then people can't buy it and then they'll stop with the tells..

[QT_Melon]

How about just prevent people from sending more than, say, 10K in gil to someone who has been on their friends list for less than 1 month.

Seems like that would solve the problem---if RMT can't deliver the gold, then people can't buy it and then they'll stop with the tells..

RMT is a bit more clever than that actually.

What they do is tell you to sell an item. Let's say a Peiste Skin Map.

They tell you to put it up at a certain price
RMT guy buys the map at 20 million gill "5% city tax fee" so you get the exact amount.

We started noticing that kind of activity on our server, where maps and other in game goods were bought at highly unusual prices.

[KisaiTenshi]

RMT is a bit more clever than that actually.

What they do is tell you to sell an item. Let's say a Peiste Skin Map.

They tell you to put it up at a certain price
RMT guy buys the map at 20 million gill "5% city tax fee" so you get the exact amount.

We started noticing that kind of activity on our server, where maps and other in game goods were bought at highly unusual prices.

There's a solution to that too, albeit more complicated.

The game could run a bell-curve for price distribution, not allowing an item to be priced 20% below the current best price and a floor of the NPC price, nor priced 20% above the average selling price. Anything more than 20% over the current best price is flagged as potential RMT. Any items that are not crafted by the player would be denied from listing at anything more than 20% over the average selling price unless there are less than 10 of the items on the market.

[QT_Melon]

There's a solution to that too, albeit more complicated.

The game could run a bell-curve for price distribution, not allowing an item to be priced 20% below the current best price and a floor of the NPC price, nor priced 20% above the average selling price. Anything more than 20% over the current best price is flagged as potential RMT. Any items that are not crafted by the player would be denied from listing at anything more than 20% over the average selling price unless there are less than 10 of the items on the market.

The problem with that is due to the limited inventory space players do actually put up items they intend to keep but at an inflated cost. That's why you see those listings for 999999999 gil I wouldn't want them banned for RMT.

[KisaiTenshi]

The problem with that is due to the limited inventory space players do actually put up items they intend to keep but at an inflated cost. That's why you see those listings for 999999999 gil I wouldn't want them banned for RMT.

That's a different scenario. By putting stuff at "nobody-would-buy" prices, you're actually trying to use the market as a bank. It shouldn't be encouraged, so SE should probably increase inventory space, or charge a non-refundable listing fee.

Let me tell you though....
In Mabinogi... I put stuff everywhere, the mailbox, the house's shop, I maxed out the number of spare characters and setup a second account just so I could mail stuff to it. But all this stuff had fees based on the NPC sell price. I basically quit the game because the tiny inventory was ticking me off in ways I can't describe and I wasn't paying for the cash shop just to rent a tiny amount of extra space. When I switched to Wizardry Online, I pulled the exact same thing and setup a second account and mailed stuff back and forth to circumvent inventory limits. Unfortunately this is very reflective of how I organize stuff in reality, and even how I organize stuff on my hard drive. When people started recycling in the 80's... a lot of stuff got kept because the impression given is that throwing away anything reusable/recyclable made you a bad person.

I've so far survived this game by ramping up the crafting skills and then selling/npc'ing any gear I can just make again. MMORPG's trigger peoples hoarding tendencies for some gawdawful reason. Since dyes are easily accessible, there's no reason to keep rare colors of anything.

Anyway, you'd just have such items that remain on the market without a purchase after a week delisted and returned to the Retainer's Inventory. If the Retainer's inventory is full the player would be prompted to make space in the retainer's inventory before selling any more items. Simple enough.

[MrKyo]

There is something that guildwars does with their friendslist is that when you block or add someone, you add their entire account.

This one immediately fix the problem, but after a while i doubt that gold sellers will have as many accounts to switch once they are blocked by everyone on a specific server. Even if they do, it might be a once or twice a day thing to block a spammer.

Also implement something on the block list to right click and "Report as RMT / Spamming" to send that directly to SE, once SE sees enough people realm-wide have blocked that account, they may not even need to monitor the activity to hand out a ban depending on the magnitude. This will prevent the need to remove goldspammers after your list gets full as they will just be terminated as if it never existed. Rendering very old goldspam accounts useless to relog into after they have been unblocked via old age removal.

[moudoka]

I'm getting spammed 20-30 times in SHOUT in Limsa. Way to fail SE, way to fail.

And the bot is STILL spamming. ten minutes later, it's still going.