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#1 May 08 2015 at 2:06 AM Rating: Excellent
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my blacklist is exhausted maxed out. all SE needs to do is simply...... log in with ordinary accounts to see who is violating terms of service by receiving the tells and friend requests and ban them. maybe warp to different zones. A one man per server ordeal. Maybe I'm ignorant or something......because this seems so easy
#2 May 08 2015 at 7:13 AM Rating: Excellent
You can clean out your own blacklist by hitting right click and selecting "Remove" on a name.

I start with any (deleted) names - which I agree SHOULD be removed by default - and then play a game where I delete the shortest names first, trying to see which RMT managed to make the most complicated awful variation of Wanttobuygil Isellgil.
#3 May 08 2015 at 7:24 AM Rating: Decent
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klooste8 wrote:
my blacklist is exhausted maxed out. all SE needs to do is simply...... log in with ordinary accounts to see who is violating terms of service by receiving the tells and friend requests and ban them. maybe warp to different zones. A one man per server ordeal. Maybe I'm ignorant or something......because this seems so easy


Thing is, the RMT spam is only a problem on NA server clusters, some more so than others. It's almost non-existent on Japanese data clusters (I've gotten maybe 3 in the course of 4 weeks.) The problem isn't 'logging in and catching them", the problem are the gil buyers. SE can sweep ban every single person that sends a spam tell and it does nothing when you have people who buy gil keeping them around. SE doesn't want to punish gil buyers so the more people on your server sell clears and a lot of crafted stuff for 300% markup, the more people will buy gil, the more prominent RMT will remain.

SE can add more filters but at this point the only solution is start dealing with buyers. Less market = less business = no need to keep advertising when you'll get no sales, as proven by the JP DC cluster and it's not: "Well they don't read english let alone broken english!" JP aren't that huge in buying MMO currency in comparison to NA/EU, which is why unless they allow western connections in their MMOs, especially F2P, you'll hardly see an RMT problem.

Edited, May 8th 2015 6:48am by Theonehio
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#4 May 08 2015 at 7:53 AM Rating: Good
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Honestly I stopped bothering to blacklist them. The fact of the matter is you almost never get a tell from the same one twice, so blacklisting one of them usually just does nothing.

Part of the problem IS that people buy gil, though I feel it's myopic to blame that on players selling things. The other part of the problem is that there's no simple way to report the spammers. WoW has a lovely feature that just lets you right-click a name and say "Report spam." This sends a spam report to the system that can then note all the pertinent details of the target and at the same time puts that spammer on a temporary ignore list so you don't have to hear them anymore (without taking up room on your real ignore list).

Frankly just about every MMO I've ever played has dealt with this better than FFXIV has.

Edited, May 8th 2015 8:54am by Callinon
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#5 May 08 2015 at 8:10 AM Rating: Good
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I installed third party software to deal with the RMT spam. After I installed the software I've had very few RMT tells and when I get those tells I just update the filter. Without the filter I couldn't have a conversation with someone without getting bombarded with RMT tells.
#6 May 08 2015 at 8:54 AM Rating: Decent
Archmage Callinon wrote:
Honestly I stopped bothering to blacklist them. The fact of the matter is you almost never get a tell from the same one twice, so blacklisting one of them usually just does nothing.

Part of the problem IS that people buy gil, though I feel it's myopic to blame that on players selling things. The other part of the problem is that there's no simple way to report the spammers. WoW has a lovely feature that just lets you right-click a name and say "Report spam." This sends a spam report to the system that can then note all the pertinent details of the target and at the same time puts that spammer on a temporary ignore list so you don't have to hear them anymore (without taking up room on your real ignore list).

Frankly just about every MMO I've ever played has dealt with this better than FFXIV has.

Edited, May 8th 2015 8:54am by Callinon


Likewise.

There are filters though that SE could add in, but the problem is 1: Can they be bothered, 2: Would the programing allow it.

SE could add:
Limit to Friendlist only /tells.
Limit to 5 non Friendlist contacts a week or go extreme 1 non Flist a week.
They could go extreme on trial/new accounts.

In all honesty I rarely use /tell for anyone but my Friendlist. Also adding the option that they have to be added both ends before /tells can be used, I noticed RMTs like to add you as a friend....

The work around is probably PF, allow /tells to be received if you are apart of a PF and responds only from PF leader.

Does SE want to spend time doing the above? I don't know. The good thing is /tells cant be received when inside an instance.

Problem SE has they don't seem to sit there thinking about blocking the work arounds to systems, I have to do that in my job far too much. I work with Students and Staff, so I am very used to it!
#7 May 08 2015 at 9:10 AM Rating: Good
Trial accounts cannot send tells at all, only respond to them. That's why desperate RMT trial accounts resorted to /say, /shout, and /yell in most areas.
#8 May 08 2015 at 9:14 AM Rating: Excellent
It's true the overall problem is the demand for buying gil. Without the demand, there would be no need for supply.

However...

It's not realistic to solve the problem by going after buyers. The demand will still be there. You'll just have an endless cycle of banning buyers with no relief for the RMT spam that's bothering legit players. And ultimately, it's not the buyers who are directly bothering us... it's the RMT spammers.

Likewise, you can't ban all the RMT accounts and end spam forever. Spam will keep happening... but SE can certainly make life harder on the RMT by empowering the playerbase to flag spam accounts.

If there were an easy, logical way to put the hammer on buyers, I'd advocate for that too. As it stands, though, SE can cover way more ground by letting players gang up on spammers.

We need:
- Right-click RMT spam flag (and the "RMT flag" option would only appear if you received a tell from someone... this way, players can't abuse this feature)
- Back-end logic that automatically bans accounts with obvious RMT trends, such as an account being flagged as RMT spam by more than 15 people in a single day (for players to abuse this, the "abused" player would first need to send out /tells to 15 different people, and then ALL of those people would need to report him as spam)
- Instant bans for players found to be in blatant abuse of this feature (i.e. explicit chat log evidence)

Also, we need an in-game tell filter. I'd set mine to reject any tells with any punctuation marks beyond periods, commas, quotes, question marks, apostrophes and exclamation marks. That, alone, would solve most of the problem.
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#9 May 08 2015 at 9:28 AM Rating: Excellent
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Catwho wrote:
You can clean out your own blacklist by hitting right click and selecting "Remove" on a name.

It's too bad there isn't a way to completely empty out the blacklist with a single action. I clear out my blist completely from time to time, and it's tedious to do that in XIV.

Archmage Callinon wrote:
Honestly I stopped bothering to blacklist them. The fact of the matter is you almost never get a tell from the same one twice, so blacklisting one of them usually just does nothing.

Yeah, I've changed to doing the same. I only blist the ones that I see repeated messages from.
#10 May 08 2015 at 9:43 AM Rating: Excellent
In my case, there are some legitimate bad apples on the server I have blacklisted, and I want to keep it that way, so doing a mass cleanout of my blacklist isn't an option for me. But yeah, I think a "remove all names from this list" button would make life easier for a lot of people.
#11 May 08 2015 at 10:18 AM Rating: Good
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Quote:
SE could add:
Limit to Friendlist only /tells.
Limit to 5 non Friendlist contacts a week or go extreme 1 non Flist a week.
They could go extreme on trial/new accounts.


They could but you want to be careful about limiting the ways legitimate players can communicate with each other. Forcing me to friend list everyone I need to have a conversation with feels pretty restrictive. Actually it feels a lot like Nintendo friend codes, which are a running gag for a reason.

Putting everyone into this oppressive bubble world where they can only talk to one another after performing a secret handshake would not improve the situation.

Quote:
In my case, there are some legitimate bad apples on the server I have blacklisted, and I want to keep it that way, so doing a mass cleanout of my blacklist isn't an option for me.


Agreed. Since I stopped blist'ing RMT spammers, I can now use my blist for ignoring real players I want nothing to do with. Which is what it's for.
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#12 May 09 2015 at 8:34 AM Rating: Good
Blocking accounts rather then names would be best. That way if the GS logs out and creates a new character to spam, it won't have as much as an effect because you blocked the account rather then the original mumbo-jumbo name.
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#13 May 11 2015 at 12:16 AM Rating: Decent
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I'd just like an optional option to block all tells except for those from people on my friendlist. Just a little button in the settings to click on. That will solve everything for me.

Now it's either i get nothing and can't communicate ( /busy ) or i get everything and can't communicate thanks to the spam ( /online )
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#14 May 11 2015 at 5:20 AM Rating: Default
Archmage Callinon wrote:
Quote:
SE could add:
Limit to Friendlist only /tells.
Limit to 5 non Friendlist contacts a week or go extreme 1 non Flist a week.
They could go extreme on trial/new accounts.


They could but you want to be careful about limiting the ways legitimate players can communicate with each other. Forcing me to friend list everyone I need to have a conversation with feels pretty restrictive. Actually it feels a lot like Nintendo friend codes, which are a running gag for a reason.

Putting everyone into this oppressive bubble world where they can only talk to one another after performing a secret handshake would not improve the situation.

Quote:
In my case, there are some legitimate bad apples on the server I have blacklisted, and I want to keep it that way, so doing a mass cleanout of my blacklist isn't an option for me.


Agreed. Since I stopped blist'ing RMT spammers, I can now use my blist for ignoring real players I want nothing to do with. Which is what it's for.


I would add it as options, like the profanity filter. Give us the options :)
#15 May 11 2015 at 11:43 AM Rating: Excellent
Quote:
I would add it as options, like the profanity filter. Give us the options :)


This is why I'd simply like a /tell filter. Just give me the option to block any /tell with special characters, extra spaces, ".com" or weird characters.

I seriously don't get why this isn't a reality by now. SE doesn't even need to do a ton of work! Just empower us to do the work.
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#16 May 11 2015 at 12:20 PM Rating: Good
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Thayos wrote:
Quote:
I would add it as options, like the profanity filter. Give us the options :)


This is why I'd simply like a /tell filter. Just give me the option to block any /tell with special characters, extra spaces, ".com" or weird characters.

I seriously don't get why this isn't a reality by now. SE doesn't even need to do a ton of work! Just empower us to do the work.


The problem with giving the players the option here is that you are essentially advertising to the RMTs what those countermeasures are as well--and as has been capably demonstrated already--they'll find a way around it.

To use one example; your ".com" filter could be circumvented by changing the period to a comma or by changing the "o" to a zero. And unless the RMTs assume you're so stupid that you'll type in the zero or comma laden URL verbatim; they know you'll get the "gist".

SE's attitude--at least as it seems to me--is that it's better to lets hundreds of spam tells through than to block even one legitimate tell because of aggressive filtering, i.e. there's simply no way to block every RMT tell without claiming innocent casualties in the process.
#17 May 11 2015 at 6:40 PM Rating: Decent
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QSlick wrote:
Thayos wrote:
Quote:
I would add it as options, like the profanity filter. Give us the options :)


This is why I'd simply like a /tell filter. Just give me the option to block any /tell with special characters, extra spaces, ".com" or weird characters.

I seriously don't get why this isn't a reality by now. SE doesn't even need to do a ton of work! Just empower us to do the work.


The problem with giving the players the option here is that you are essentially advertising to the RMTs what those countermeasures are as well--and as has been capably demonstrated already--they'll find a way around it.

To use one example; your ".com" filter could be circumvented by changing the period to a comma or by changing the "o" to a zero. And unless the RMTs assume you're so stupid that you'll type in the zero or comma laden URL verbatim; they know you'll get the "gist".

SE's attitude--at least as it seems to me--is that it's better to lets hundreds of spam tells through than to block even one legitimate tell because of aggressive filtering, i.e. there's simply no way to block every RMT tell without claiming innocent casualties in the process.


"Hey, if you want to keep in touch out of game or sign up for our Free Company (despite popular belief people do still do this) go to www.freecompanynamehere.com or www.FCNAMEHERE.guildwork.com...wait I can't send you the url to our Free Company's website."

This leads to needlessly inviting people to a linkshell when you can't always drop what you're doing and invite them to a party to chat. People cry that SE hinders "legit players" in the fight against RMT and pretty much any other option will continue to do so. In XI I can mail myself whatever the hell I want unless it's on the "no send list"...in XIV? I can't. Every other MMO I can.

I still say if it's obvious that buying gil will be bad for you, there will be far less RMT spamming you because they won't get any business. They can bypass filters.
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#18 May 11 2015 at 8:11 PM Rating: Excellent
Chat filter would totally be helpful. You just have to be smart about it. For example, filter out:
".com"
" . "
".c"
" ."

Do the same with commas. Then, filter out all other special charatcters. That would solve like 99 percent of the problem right there, and I could easily tweak my approach if needed.

I would even filter out any letter that has no business standing on its own. Send me a tell with a floating g or l? Or anything with a lowercase standalone i? Block that crap!

Give the the option, SE.

Edited, May 11th 2015 7:16pm by Thayos
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#19 May 20 2015 at 8:37 AM Rating: Decent
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Thayos wrote:
It's true the overall problem is the demand for buying gil. Without the demand, there would be no need for supply.

However...

It's not realistic to solve the problem by going after buyers. The demand will still be there. You'll just have an endless cycle of banning buyers with no relief for the RMT spam that's bothering legit players. And ultimately, it's not the buyers who are directly bothering us... it's the RMT spammers.

Likewise, you can't ban all the RMT accounts and end spam forever. Spam will keep happening... but SE can certainly make life harder on the RMT by empowering the playerbase to flag spam accounts.

If there were an easy, logical way to put the hammer on buyers, I'd advocate for that too. As it stands, though, SE can cover way more ground by letting players gang up on spammers.

We need:
- Right-click RMT spam flag (and the "RMT flag" option would only appear if you received a tell from someone... this way, players can't abuse this feature)
- Back-end logic that automatically bans accounts with obvious RMT trends, such as an account being flagged as RMT spam by more than 15 people in a single day (for players to abuse this, the "abused" player would first need to send out /tells to 15 different people, and then ALL of those people would need to report him as spam)
- Instant bans for players found to be in blatant abuse of this feature (i.e. explicit chat log evidence)

Also, we need an in-game tell filter. I'd set mine to reject any tells with any punctuation marks beyond periods, commas, quotes, question marks, apostrophes and exclamation marks. That, alone, would solve most of the problem.



I disagree. It may not affect some but some it will.. If there is no fear of being banned why not buy gill. If people fear being banned allot will stop. The lack of any in game moderation is the reason there are so many butt wipes in this game. With adult supervision children will be children.

They cant even stop bots how will they ever catch anyone.

My server is so bad with rmt spam it actually has us thinking of changing servers.. Oh wait SE makes more money if we do that.
I watched the same bots for over a month que up for dungeons and I bet they are still there. IF I can see the bots why cant SE.. Stop the rmt income and they have nothing to sell....

We been playing on busy which stinks but now they are doing as many yells or shouts. This another thing that is starting to make us debate if we want to play.

SE is doing nothing and all I hear is look what they can do with the cash shop and how much they can make the game better. Well friggen spend some money stopping this rmt crap. Hire some more GM's, I have never even seen one in this game...

I know those on servers that dont have as much rmt action as some servers dont understand it. But on Ultros it is several tells/shouts/invites a minute, It is beyond bad. Our server is dying and has mostly newbies on it now. It is so bad it is wrecking the game for people on Ultros.

Black list dont do anything. Most are new accounts every 5 minutes. Plus my blacklist would fill up in less than day.

I realize they can not stop it all, I played FFXI for a very long time and this is 1000 times worse, It is like they dont try at all to stop them.

Edited, May 20th 2015 11:36am by Nashred
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#20 May 20 2015 at 10:45 AM Rating: Excellent
Quote:
I disagree. It may not affect some but some it will.. If there is no fear of being banned why not buy gill. If people fear being banned allot will stop. The lack of any in game moderation is the reason there are so many **** wipes in this game. With adult supervision children will be children.


I'm actually kind of agreeing with you. I agree that gil buyers are the driving force of the RMT problems. Think of it this way... I wouldn't open a doughnut shop in a neighborhood where there was no demand for doughnuts (although I can't imagine where such a place might exist).

That said, there's absolutely no reason why SE can't give players the tools to filter out RMT spam. It would be easy, and once we have the tools, we could take it upon ourselves to evolve our filters along with spam tactics.

If Bob in my FC is buying gil, then there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. If he happens to admit it in chat, then I can report him and send that screenshot to SE... but that's it. Meanwhile, Bob is perpetuating a problem that results in RMT spam through shouts, tells and friend requests that I have no way to block. And as I continue playing, it's not the fact that Bob buys gil that constantly bothers me... it's the fact I'm being bombarded with spam that I can't filter out.

SE should give us the tools to filter out that spam -- leave it up to players to see what we want to see. Meanwhile, on the back end, SE should continue going after buyers.

It's a two-part solution, and there's no need to choose one or the other.
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#21 May 29 2015 at 10:54 PM Rating: Good
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I'd like it if we could disable receiving whispers and friend requests from account below veteran status 2. That would severaly undercut a gillseller's ability to spam players. The accounts they play on are short lived.

What do you guys think of this possible solution?
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#22 May 29 2015 at 11:47 PM Rating: Excellent
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garethrogue wrote:
I'd like it if we could disable receiving whispers and friend requests from account below veteran status 2. That would severaly undercut a gillseller's ability to spam players. The accounts they play on are short lived.

What do you guys think of this possible solution?

Problem with that is that it hurts actual new players which is a very bad thing.

I think SE should be looking at the number of tells sent. Anyone who sends more than X number of tells to Y number of people in Z amount of time gets automatically muted and flagged as a potential spammer. Make the numbers high enough that it wouldn't affect normal people having normal conversations, just the spam bots.

Also, let us blacklist people with pending friend invites and auto-decline the invite when you do.

Also, make the blacklist bigger and/or let us delete names in bulk. It's a pain having to clear out older entries individually just to make more space every week.
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#23 Jun 10 2015 at 2:06 PM Rating: Decent
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Karlina wrote:
garethrogue wrote:
I'd like it if we could disable receiving whispers and friend requests from account below veteran status 2. That would severaly undercut a gillseller's ability to spam players. The accounts they play on are short lived.

What do you guys think of this possible solution?

Problem with that is that it hurts actual new players which is a very bad thing.

I think SE should be looking at the number of tells sent. Anyone who sends more than X number of tells to Y number of people in Z amount of time gets automatically muted and flagged as a potential spammer. Make the numbers high enough that it wouldn't affect normal people having normal conversations, just the spam bots.

Also, let us blacklist people with pending friend invites and auto-decline the invite when you do.

Also, make the blacklist bigger and/or let us delete names in bulk. It's a pain having to clear out older entries individually just to make more space every week.


Karlina wrote:
garethrogue wrote:
I'd like it if we could disable receiving whispers and friend requests from account below veteran status 2. That would severaly undercut a gillseller's ability to spam players. The accounts they play on are short lived.

What do you guys think of this possible solution?

Problem with that is that it hurts actual new players which is a very bad thing.

I think SE should be looking at the number of tells sent. Anyone who sends more than X number of tells to Y number of people in Z amount of time gets automatically muted and flagged as a potential spammer. Make the numbers high enough that it wouldn't affect normal people having normal conversations, just the spam bots.

Also, let us blacklist people with pending friend invites and auto-decline the invite when you do.

Also, make the blacklist bigger and/or let us delete names in bulk. It's a pain having to clear out older entries individually just to make more space every week.


I was thinking more along the lines of an option to disable and reenable whenever.In my own experience, I rarely ever have any interaction with new players, and I don't think I've ever gotten a tell, so I'd have no issue shutting off tells from vet status 1. Most of your first 30 days is doing story and dungeons anyways. I think it could work, or should at least be tested.
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#24 Jun 10 2015 at 3:49 PM Rating: Excellent
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I'm with Karlina. While I understand wanting to squish the problem, hurting legit players in the process is not the way to go about it. And just because you might not've received a tell from a curious newbie does not mean others haven't.

That said, message frequency is the safest indicator of shutting something down. You're still going to get some messages that slip through the cracks, yes, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say legit players aren't sending 15+ tells a minute. If you are, you're either a very, very, very fast typer or sending things of significantly little substance. In any event, breaching this should prompt the player with a warning and initiate a cooldown period. You can still send tells as normal, but if you surpass that limit again before the cooldown expires, your whole account gets muted and not just that individual character. In the case of players having their accounts stolen and hit with this status, there needs to be something to make the player aware they've been locked and to easily contact a GM. They can then do their thing from there to lift the restriction, notate the account, etc..Of course, if the RMT tries this and sees the account holder is based in some US state, but the current connection is from China, well... I'd err against removing the lock even if the person did seem to speak passable English. Or defer the process to web-based/email support to confirm identity like with a driver's license scan.

Otherwise, I'm okay with something that'd block friend requests outright or impose a level restriction of the player's choosing. Being friends isn't a requirement to communicate. It might also be a good idea to revisit what XI did and make it impossible to search a zone or a player within it if you haven't been to it yet yourself. This should ideally help to cut down on the lists the bots can generate to contact. From there, it's just a matter of implementing and updating filters. They're never going to go away and I don't agree with the concept of punishing the buyer doing any good. As with most temptations to cheat, you'd have better luck in addressing why people consider RMT to begin with. And that's a direct result of accessibility to resources. Not fun and too grindy? You bet people will cut corners.
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#25 Jun 10 2015 at 8:02 PM Rating: Excellent
Seriha wrote:
Otherwise, I'm okay with something that'd block friend requests outright or impose a level restriction of the player's choosing. Being friends isn't a requirement to communicate. It might also be a good idea to revisit what XI did and make it impossible to search a zone or a player within it if you haven't been to it yet yourself. This should ideally help to cut down on the lists the bots can generate to contact. From there, it's just a matter of implementing and updating filters. They're never going to go away and I don't agree with the concept of punishing the buyer doing any good. As with most temptations to cheat, you'd have better luck in addressing why people consider RMT to begin with. And that's a direct result of accessibility to resources. Not fun and too grindy? You bet people will cut corners.


Not sure what it's like on other servers, but for Balmung all my RMT tells come from Limsa, Ul'Dah and Grid. Sometimes they might come from starter zones, but that's it. I've never had them in higher level areas. The way XIV is setup right now, you could easily trek to any zone on foot in not much time. Not sure what they need to do to stop RMT, but there seems to be every little they can do other then take reports and ban accordingly.
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#26 Jun 10 2015 at 8:33 PM Rating: Good
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Seriha wrote:
I'm with Karlina. While I understand wanting to squish the problem, hurting legit players in the process is not the way to go about it. And just because you might not've received a tell from a curious newbie does not mean others haven't.

That said, message frequency is the safest indicator of shutting something down. You're still going to get some messages that slip through the cracks, yes, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say legit players aren't sending 15+ tells a minute. If you are, you're either a very, very, very fast typer or sending things of significantly little substance. In any event, breaching this should prompt the player with a warning and initiate a cooldown period. You can still send tells as normal, but if you surpass that limit again before the cooldown expires, your whole account gets muted and not just that individual character. In the case of players having their accounts stolen and hit with this status, there needs to be something to make the player aware they've been locked and to easily contact a GM. They can then do their thing from there to lift the restriction, notate the account, etc..Of course, if the RMT tries this and sees the account holder is based in some US state, but the current connection is from China, well... I'd err against removing the lock even if the person did seem to speak passable English. Or defer the process to web-based/email support to confirm identity like with a driver's license scan.

Otherwise, I'm okay with something that'd block friend requests outright or impose a level restriction of the player's choosing. Being friends isn't a requirement to communicate. It might also be a good idea to revisit what XI did and make it impossible to search a zone or a player within it if you haven't been to it yet yourself. This should ideally help to cut down on the lists the bots can generate to contact. From there, it's just a matter of implementing and updating filters. They're never going to go away and I don't agree with the concept of punishing the buyer doing any good. As with most temptations to cheat, you'd have better luck in addressing why people consider RMT to begin with. And that's a direct result of accessibility to resources. Not fun and too grindy? You bet people will cut corners.


Blocking someone based on their level has the exact same effect as my idea, only it can affect actual players who aren't as hardcore as you or I. At least if you could restrict chat to vet status 1, you'd get 100% of RMT, and new players would quickly graduate from that status.
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Star Swirl on Behemoth AKA Best-hemoth AKA The Cool Kid's Table----60AST, 60WHM, 60SCH/SMN, 60BLM, 60MNK, 38 PLD, 34DRG, 31NIN, 27MRD
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