rmt spamFollow

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I would add it as options, like the profanity filter. Give us the options :)

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.

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

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.

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'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.