Gold Sellers

[KisaiTenshi]

Here's how they could fix it:

Newly created account characters or accounts:
-Can't use shouts or yells until lv 10.
-Cool down on global chats.

Hacked Accounts:
-Report and ignore option added when you click/target on a name in chat.
-30 reports will mute them permanently and send a report to square enix to investigate.
(Judge debuff)

Strike their business:
-Put a gold transfer cap in mails and trades.

The can't use shouts or yells doesn't need to be set that way. Otherwise newbies won't be able to use it either. The cooldown, yes that will work, but so would a rate limiter (>90wpm) The shouts/yells ability needs to be triggered by something with more substance, a level cap is meaningless to a bot who will just grind past it anyway and it does nothing for hacked accounts.

The developers need to throw a language-strip regex into the input buffers. If the game client is in english, and set to english, strip all non-english characters except for the emoji used by Japanese users. Half the stuff I report either has greek or other accented characters that aren't used in French or German, and mostly consist of fullwidth (japanese) roman characters interspersed with halfwidth/normal sized ones. But this is just a monkey wrench where we need a bulldozer. Throw error 90000 at game clients that are exceeding 90wpm, and be done with it. Also use a buffer dupe check by checking for the string to be at least 60% different from the last 5 things said. This would be far more efficient (throttle+duplicate word test) than simply trying to block 90000 variations of O's

As for killing their business. Just prevent one-sided/uneven trades and limit Gil transfers to 10000gil/day per level acquired. It's not that hard to 95% percentile check the current market to see if someone is making uneven trades.

[Teizque]

As for killing their business. Just prevent one-sided/uneven trades and limit Gil transfers to 10000gil/day per level acquired. It's not that hard to 95% percentile check the current market to see if someone is making uneven trades.

^ I've seen this executed successfully in other MMO's. It wouldn't "kill" their business but would hamper it significantly.

[NovaUltimatum]

As for killing their business. Just prevent one-sided/uneven trades and limit Gil transfers to 10000gil/day per level acquired. It's not that hard to 95% percentile check the current market to see if someone is making uneven trades.

If you were to limit gil trades, you'd also need to limit the amount you can sell cheap items on the Market. It was done a lot in FFXI where you would see items worth a couple of gil being sold for millions as a transfer service for the RMTs. (the AH tax wasn't enough for them to care)

[KisaiTenshi]

If you were to limit gil trades, you'd also need to limit the amount you can sell cheap items on the Market. It was done a lot in FFXI where you would see items worth a couple of gil being sold for millions as a transfer service for the RMTs. (the AH tax wasn't enough for them to care)

SE can just 95% or 90% percentile the prices, makes it work like an actual (regulated) market. In a stock market there is a comission for listing and a comission for buying, and you can only sell at the best price and can only buy at the best price. You simply can't mis-price anything (and this is almost entirely regulated by price arbitration rather than computerized limits, but you can't arbitrate prices when the supply is unlimited while inventory is not) EG 100 sellers selling "Elm Log", the top 5cheapest and top 5 most expensive are dropped from the list and the average price is calculated. The game would then simply prohibit placing prices that are more than 10% below the calculated average or 10% higher than the calculated average. (Prohibiting dumping and illicit gil transfers) However this would only work correctly if you could buy individual quantities, not the entire stack. The entire stack is basically an "all or nothing" equivalent. Or more accurately described as "I don't want to get hit with multiple commissions."

I suppose one other way to solve this is just to deny the RMT and illict gold transfers by not allowing to be bought, or not listing anything more than 100% more than the average selling price if SE were to track the average selling price. Likewise denying one-way/uneven trades of that design as well.

[Squa11_Leonhart]

SE can just 95% or 90% percentile the prices, makes it work like an actual (regulated) market. In a stock market there is a comission for listing and a comission for buying, and you can only sell at the best price and can only buy at the best price. You simply can't mis-price anything (and this is almost entirely regulated by price arbitration rather than computerized limits, but you can't arbitrate prices when the supply is unlimited while inventory is not) EG 100 sellers selling "Elm Log", the top 5cheapest and top 5 most expensive are dropped from the list and the average price is calculated. The game would then simply prohibit placing prices that are more than 10% below the calculated average or 10% higher than the calculated average. (Prohibiting dumping and illicit gil transfers) However this would only work correctly if you could buy individual quantities, not the entire stack. The entire stack is basically an "all or nothing" equivalent. Or more accurately described as "I don't want to get hit with multiple commissions."

I suppose one other way to solve this is just to deny the RMT and illict gold transfers by not allowing to be bought, or not listing anything more than 100% more than the average selling price if SE were to track the average selling price. Likewise denying one-way/uneven trades of that design as well.

Commodity trading does not operate in any country under the same designs as the stock market.

[KisaiTenshi]

Commodity trading does not operate in any country under the same designs as the stock market.

Not having played the commodity market, I wasn't willing to describe how it works. That said, a video game doesn't have finite resources, only finite inventory space where the real world has finite resources but nearly unlimited inventory space, so a virtual commodity futures market would simply not work. The game's market system works more like stocks, not futures. You have X item and want to sell that item as a group for Y price. The brokerage charges a commission, and even if you try to under-price the market by more than 1/10th of a cent, the arbitrage algorithms will not let that trade hit the floor, someone will have bought the under-priced trade before it even leaves the brokerage and re-priced it at the best price. The game lacks the automatic arbitrage, or any best-price enforcement (frequently the default price is not the best price either) so it operates more like eBay's Buy-it-Now (which is more popular than the actual auction format.)

[Berani]

The can't use shouts or yells doesn't need to be set that way. Otherwise newbies won't be able to use it either. The cooldown, yes that will work, but so would a rate limiter (>90wpm) The shouts/yells ability needs to be triggered by something with more substance, a level cap is meaningless to a bot who will just grind past it anyway and it does nothing for hacked accounts.

The developers need to throw a language-strip regex into the input buffers. If the game client is in english, and set to english, strip all non-english characters except for the emoji used by Japanese users. Half the stuff I report either has greek or other accented characters that aren't used in French or German, and mostly consist of fullwidth (japanese) roman characters interspersed with halfwidth/normal sized ones. But this is just a monkey wrench where we need a bulldozer. Throw error 90000 at game clients that are exceeding 90wpm, and be done with it. Also use a buffer dupe check by checking for the string to be at least 60% different from the last 5 things said. This would be far more efficient (throttle+duplicate word test) than simply trying to block 90000 variations of O's

As for killing their business. Just prevent one-sided/uneven trades and limit Gil transfers to 10000gil/day per level acquired. It's not that hard to 95% percentile check the current market to see if someone is making uneven trades.

I agree that limiting shout is a problem due to low level players not being able to use the channel, thus depriving them of assistance.

I disagree with your remarks regarding languages. My close friend in Canada has an English-language client and a keyboard that has French-language specific characters and accents on it. Occasionally, he accidentally hits one of those characters while typing. Under your proposal, he'd have issues and potentially be auto-reported (because in my extensive gaming history, I have never seen a publisher err on the side of caution in implementing bans or other restrictions--and in FF:ARR, they most certainly have not erred on the side of caution, banning accounts of active players for as long as three calendar weeks when players have reported on their own to customer service that they have been compromised, putting the burden of proof on the player rather than taking the simple action of checking the logs for the IP discrepancies--what IP is the account normally logged into from, what IP was the ticket filed from, and what IP(s) has it been logged into from and can the customer provide the IPs they know they have logged in from--and restoring the account after receiving that simple flippin' information along with the license key from the customer). The dupe check could be abused because, due to the spammers, we often have to repeat tells to folks--frequently more than once.

Preventing one-sided trades is not really an option. If I want to give gear or gil to my friend just starting to play to help them out, that's my business. If I want to loan a guildmate 20k to 50k gil for a few days, that is also my business. It doesn't make me a gil seller or spammer and to insinuate it does is outrageous.

GMs do exist in game. I have actually spoken to one after filing a ticket. They are not a myth! (I know, I'm as shocked as everyone else!) The most obvious solution is to do what has already been suggested: rotate shifts of say, one hour (so they don't go crazy with boredom), stand around in the location of their choice--fishing, mining, logging...doesn't matter what they do or look like they're doing--the gil spammers and sellers will come to them. But I recommend chilling in Hammerlea. You'll see a whole lot of teleporters and bots using third party hacks and exploits there.

[VeersMorgan]

It would seem you could effectively crowd source the banning of bots. The idea is that some players aggressively blacklist only bots. If you can identify those blacklists, you could leverage them to ban bots from chat with a very low false positive rate. Basically look at player blacklists. Correlate those with known bots. Separate out the blacklists low false positive and high bot correlation, weight them accordingly then use the resultant number as a basis for an initial ban.

[KisaiTenshi]

I disagree with your remarks regarding languages. My close friend in Canada has an English-language client and a keyboard that has French-language specific characters and accents on it. Occasionally, he accidentally hits one of those characters while typing.

The intent behind that comment was to strip nonsense characters that players don't use to communicate in the language their game client is in, during the transmission phase. Like Cyrillic В is not B, У is not Y, but Japanese like to use Cyrilic Д (D) as mouth characters in a lot of emoji. So the game client might be sending onlУidiotsВuУgil.com but the stripping would remove the У and В before being processed for spam filtering. This would effectively nerf the ability to use accented look-a-like characters to send url's. If a string is mostly filtered out then it's probably spam anyway when combined with the transmission rate limiting.

As for one-sided trades, the game needs to escrow direct trades/mail with new players or high values. This could be either done as limiting gil (I never had to buy anything in the game except repairs until level 40's and started working on other classes) that can be traded if the player's highest class level is more than 5 levels apart. eg, someone level 1-5 could trade with another players up to 10,000g has been traded, and then be blocked from further transactions until leveled past that point.

This is all old-hat MMORPG fraud stuff, and no game is staffed enough to deal with it, much in the way no real city ever has enough police to handle all the jaywalking and rolling stops going on at once. You either throw in passive deterrents that make it more difficult to do bad things(speed bumps (friendlist trading requirements, filters)), or you just throw down heavy handed active deterrents that a directs both good and bad activity away (eg toll booths(monthly cost) and identity checkpoints(billing address requirements/region locks))

Personally I find the problem with dealing with RMT is that company doesn't take advantage of crowd-sourcing. Even at *ecommerce site* they make use of it because of the high level of Chinese counterfeits. The problem there is that the feedback sometimes has to cross a language barrier.

[VeersMorgan]

Watching the RMT tells is like watching a virus evolve. Like a virus there are apparently just a few critical coding area's to focus on. Making their website largely unreadable, making what they are selling largely unreadable, and making what they are selling it for largely unreadable.