Impossible to stop Flood of Gil Selling Abuse Chat

[CrisGer]

I started a new character last night and as soon as i got out of the opening movie in the city, i was hit by a tidal wave of orange shouting in the chat window that just kept running on and on there was no room for anything else. How is that possible? none of the names listed in the huge wave of text were found by the character seearch so they could not be blacklisted and the wave stopped. So I had to shut down shout completely . ONe of the names appeared later soliciting in open chat so i was able to finally blacklist them but i would not have known their ID if i had not taken an hour to painfully copy down the totaly weird and nonsensical names which are random letters.

First, there should be a way to stop a flood of shouting, like disable the macro that allows people to post a large body of text in the chat, they can type it live if they want or use the forum or voice chat.

Second, non realitic names should be banned, they are created obviously just for this purpose and to make it harder to stop them.

Third, they should post LIVE GMs IN the main game cities to patrol and recieve and act instantly on such abuse. Any GM IN the game would see this and be able to take care of it immedately Until the Abuse is stopped it will continue.

Fourth, shut down the websites that are openly advertised or make it impossible to post the www prefix in the chat. there is no valid reason for this, and would be another defense.

Fifth, make it possible to click on a name in chat and immediately report AND blacklist them or give us a way to silence them whether they are in the game or not. It appears they cannot be blacklisted if they are not present in the game world.

Sixth: Install a Spam Lock with a lock out for spamming that is time related, as suggested below thanks for that Impendus

Seven: Severe banning of anyone who buys from the sellers as well as the sellers themselves.


any addional ideas and may these pirates rot in hell for eternity.

Ref to some replied below due to my post count...

THEY ARE Spamming us when they aren't in the game, all four of the names i detected, recorded and reported IN the game were NOT on the character list at the time and were therefore NOT able to be blocked. That is WHY i made this report, and it is a serious flaw if they can bypass that.

And yes GMs can be live, one GM live can check a server main cities wthin two or three minutes and can compile and check main spawn areas for Spammers just as fast, and so it would take them maybe an hour or two ...to check ALL of the servers. It would be a instant help and a very great deterrent. I don't want to see us have to resort to vigilante tactics such as finding and spamming the spammers but i don't see much alternative if SE does not stop it soon.

I KNOW GMs can do such work fast because i have BEEN ONE>.....in other games.

we got a reply to my bug report on this so they ARE taking notice and working fast and I am hopeful most report will help as will your thoughts and comments: here is what they said just a few hours after I posted my report and reported all the names and data in game, which took an hour of fiddling with the speeding chat:

Square Eniz FFXIV Forum Moderator:

Hello there! We are aware that the spammers are out of control and are putting serious effort in to clearing out the chat logs. If you see a player spamming in the chat log like that, the best course of action is to submit an in-game GM call, making sure to include the player's name and use the subject "RMT Spam" with the report. This is the fastest way for us to collect their information and take action. An alternative to using the blacklist pane is to select the spammer's name in the chat log, select "Send Tell", then replace "tell" with "blist", that way their name is entered precisely as it appears. Thanks again for the report!

I placed my first report with all of the details and then an hour later saw one of the names that was listed in the spam active in the live chat so i reported them again. It is up to us to help Square Enix make reports every time we see mass spam, or shout spam or tell spam. Lets do what they can and I do hope and believe they will do what they can too. Together we can beat this mob of motherless bastards from the foaming dark pits of hell.

[Impendus]

Even something as simple as a spam lock. I know when I played Ragnarok Online for many many years, if you spammed too much to quick, etc, you were chat locked for so many minutes and the more you kept trying to spam if you weren't paying attn to the fact that you have been locked, it extends the lock timer. Something as simple as this would be a super quick temporary fix.

[Tandor]

Perma-ban those who buy from them.

[Kyronex]

1. Disabling the in-game macro is not the solution, there's nothing stopping them from creating macros with a Windows program that automates keystrokes. As somebody suggested, a lock like RO that detects spamming and locks them for longer if they continue to spam would be good.

2. I know some games prevent people from creating bogus names like "Fgjioj Lhhwpk" but it's just a name. Doesn't make it harder to "catch" them.

3. Hiring a GM for each main city across all servers 24/7 is not financially feasible, no company would do that.

4. RMTers are always circumventing chat filters by typing their URLs with filler characters like numbers, symbols, etc., they won't work.

5. If they're not in the game world, they're not spamming you. When they are then add them to the blist. Yes, a "click-on-name" ban/report would be great.

They're already banning RMT accounts. Everybody just needs to keep reporting them (http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...33498e43afd6f4)

[Cal]

Second, non realitic names should be banned, they are created obviously just for this purpose and to make it harder to stop them.

Some of the Sea Rogedyn(?) names look like facemash half the time so I don't know that SE has a way to stop that.

2. I know some games prevent people from creating bogus names like "Fgjioj Lhhwpk" but it's just a name. Doesn't make it harder to "catch" them.

I think you might have made a legit sounding Rogedyn name :P