Gold Sellers

[KEITH74]

it is getting hard to play the game when there are so many gil sellers spamming. there needs to be a way to block there Square Enix account so when they change there name there still blocked. and a better way to report them with screen shots. It has been a on going thing ever since FF11. been 30 days now playing and I have blocked 60 gil sellers. time to drop the ban hammer so the real players can play.

[QT_Melon]

Just a heads up, Gil sellers are now sending tells and harassing crafters to make gear for them. One good example are Yeti Staves for BLMS. Since the gil seller tells seem to be restricted to old zones, it would be nice if users can still be given the privacy filters I had suggested before which is to be invisible or friends only on player search. Completely eliminating player search makes it harder to invite users to Linkshells or parties (since not everyone is on your friends list). So eliminating player search is definitely not an ideal solution.

I believe this game gives out too much information to a player's whereabouts when sometimes a player may want to be left alone. If we were given those privacy flags as well, it would also greatly eliminate a bot's ability to use such a wide search to spam other users.

[Guffs]

Well, the spam party advertising caused me to quit the game today as I had to stop every few minutes to click no to the spam-invite, then yes to really not wanting it.

The 'special action team' the response suggested I 'Report' it to seems to consist of a janitor who deletes all the reports every Tuesday for the amount of effect there is.

Blacklist worked; now they have been inspired to invent a further annoyance to add to the inability to remove their posts from the comments any more.

Way to go guys, your new system made it astronomically worse,

[ArielLoha]

My idea to help mitigate some of the tell spam.

[OldSalty]

Here is the thing about Gil sellers.
Square Enix is a business. Like all businesses they are in it for the money, nothing more. They, like all other MMO RPG’s like to say how they disapprove of them yada yada yada. They will however to appease the masses ban the level one character and that account. But they do not ban the ones that are actually selling and farming for the sellers. This is because they posses many accounts that are being payed for and thus they are making money from said accounts. This allows them to basically burn the candle at both ends. They get to look like they take a hard line against RMT while at the same time making money from it.

If a company truly wanted to remove RMTs from their game they could. This is a few of the ways that they could;

1: When they kill the account of the level 1 character they could also ban all accounts connected to the IP address
2: All accounts attached to the MAC address
3: All accounts attached to the billing (address, credit card Ect.

Basically we will never be rid of them in games because both they and the company make money off of us.

[KisaiTenshi]

If a company truly wanted to remove RMTs from their game they could. This is a few of the ways that they could;

1: When they kill the account of the level 1 character they could also ban all accounts connected to the IP address
2: All accounts attached to the MAC address
3: All accounts attached to the billing (address, credit card Ect.

Basically we will never be rid of them in games because both they and the company make money off of us.

1. That doesn't work since one IP address may be subject to CGNAT (Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation) So you may actually ban an entire ISP, or an entire VPN
2. The MAC address of hardware is not immutable. Most home routers let you change them.
3. Also doesn't work since you can buy US/CA/EU prepaid credit/debit cards, even off eBay.

There is only one surefire way to get rid of RMT spam and that is to completely disable all communications without a paid account, and all paid accounts must have a unique physical keyfob account authenticator, not an Android app. No communications except party communications would be allowed. Unfortunately that makes it impossible for legitimate free trial players to do anything except the Duty Finder, assuming they figure out how to.

To kill the RMT itself requires SE to be more vigilant when a player is suspected of engaging in RMT/cheating/hacks. One way of pulling this off is to dump more entrophy into content so that bots can't simply teleport to mining nodes, fate spawn points, etc. If a mining node appears, it should appear in one of 100 locations at random and respawn only after players have left the area, not 3 same-spots like most do.

I suspect that SE does do more than we think they do, as many of the items that I trashed/converted in my retainers inventory going back to the beginning of the game have "Obtaining Signature" as the crafter name. So I suspect that the original characters have been deleted/transferred.

[Vindicta]

Well, the spam party advertising caused me to quit the game today as I had to stop every few minutes to click no to the spam-invite, then yes to really not wanting it.

I doubt this is the reason you quit the game - nobody who is enjoying a game would quit over something fairly trivial like this. Not saying this isn't incredibly annoying, but to drama-llama over it and say you quit is a bit of an overreaction. It's fairly trivial to ignore the gold sellers - you could for example form a party with someone else and wouldn't be able to be invited by the spammers. Should you have to? No. But there are temporary solutions available.

That said, some kind of options to limit party invites from complete strangers (a toggle) would be great.