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  1. #1
    That SpellCast Guy
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    How would YOU detect RMT players?

    This topic stems out of this related thread, where we're currently having a semi-heated discussion about the quality of SE's RMT-detection algorithm. I think it's an interesting topic, so I want to split off and draw in some more opinions about it. I'll post some of my own ideas, but I'd really like to see what others can come up with as well. Hopefully some good ideas will come up in here, and there's always some small chance that someone at SE will read over this information and improve their detection methods as a result.

    Imagine that you have access to a database with all character data, all POL accounts linked to them (including credit card info), and logs of all actions ever taken in game. With the ability to look absolutely anything up, what do you look for to find accounts that are involved in either buying or selling gil? Don't worry about trying to find some way to hit everyone in one sweep, if you think you have a good method to catch one particular type (fish-botters, for example), that's a good thing.

    What specific criteria would you search for? Does your criteria guarantee that players matching it buy or sell gil, or does it just make them suspicious? Can you combine multiple criteria to be totally sure, or at least make it very likely? Once you've found a suspicious-but-ambiguous character, how could you look deeper into that specific character to come up with a final decision?

    On the opposite side of detecting RMT, it's also very useful to consider criteria for detecting legitimate players. With this sort of criteria you can exclude people, and shrink the set of "potential RMTs" to use your other criteria on.

    As discussed in the original thread, "false positives" (incorrectly labeling legitimate players as RMTs) should be minimized as much as possible. Incorrectly banning a real player is a major mistake, much more major than failing to ban an RMTer. Make sure to consider special cases like linkshell bank characters that have a high gil-throughput, but are legitimate.

    Thanks, looking forward to seeing what people can come up with.

  2. #2
    BG's most likeable Québécois
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    my top 2 personally

    Giant train of people on /follow especially if all nude taru

    and of course someone who never answer tells and moves, (considering he's not /away and blisted you)

  3. #3
    Bagel
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ratatapa View Post
    my top 2 personally

    Giant train of people on /follow especially if all nude taru
    I saw a legitimate player do this for Mog Bonanza. The mules had terrible names like Qqqsixtwo, Qqqsixthree, Qqqssixfour, etc. I thought they were RMT but like a pathetic idiot I followed them through Port Bastok until I saw they were going to the Bonanza Moogle.

    and of course someone who never answer tells and moves, (considering he's not /away and blisted you)
    I know tons of people who afk without putting up /away. I have (accidentally) been guilty of this crime. Please don't ban me.

  4. #4
    BG's most likeable Québécois
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    read again i said dont answer tells and moves

    aka not afk

  5. #5
    Absolute Messenger of Promathia
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    Well i don't know about tracking, but seeing 10~ Nakid level 1 Mules go in and out of Their Friends Moghouse via the NPC for 24 hours a Day seems like it might just be an RMT

  6. #6
    BG's most likeable Québécois
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    Quote Originally Posted by Karbuncle View Post
    Well i don't know about tracking, but seeing 10~ Nakid level 1 Mules go in and out of Their Friends Moghouse via the NPC for 24 hours a Day seems like it might just be an RMT
    False!

    they got 10min afk per day to get their bowl of rice!

  7. #7
    That SpellCast Guy
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    A couple of mine:

    Look for players that send out or trade gil regularly in exact multiples of 1,000,000. I don't think that you can buy random amounts of gil, just exact multiples. From my (admittedly limited) experience with linkshell bank payouts, they're usually not exact amounts either, usually something "we have 10M extra this month and 42 members, so you each get 238k". Some linkshells may pay out in exact million increments though, so this isn't a 100% indicator.

    Combined with the above, if you have a character that sends out large amounts of gil to many different players, can you find a common link between all or most of those players? Do they all possess the same linkshell, even if it's not currently equipped? Have most of or all of those players been in an alliance together in recent history? If so, it's likely a bank mule. If there's no apparent link between the players, the chance of RMT bank is much higher.

  8. #8

    Waterboarding.

  9. #9
    Absolute Messenger of Promathia
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deimos View Post
    A couple of mine:

    Look for players that send out or trade gil regularly in exact multiples of 1,000,000. I don't think that you can buy random amounts of gil, just exact multiples. From my (admittedly limited) experience with linkshell bank payouts, they're usually not exact amounts either, usually something "we have 10M extra this month and 42 members, so you each get 238k". Some linkshells may pay out in exact million increments though, so this isn't a 100% indicator.

    Combined with the above, if you have a character that sends out large amounts of gil to many different players, can you find a common link between all or most of those players? Do they all possess the same linkshell, even if it's not currently equipped? Have most of or all of those players been in an alliance together in recent history? If so, it's likely a bank mule. If there's no apparent link between the players, the chance of RMT bank is much higher.
    But, Bro games has 5% EXTRA so 1,050,00!

    Seems like a good Method however o .o i always send my mule Gil + Change (Meaning 500,000 gil but with the extra 1,945 Odd amount of gil i have)

  10. #10

    rmt don't get big jackpots selling bhaidate or osodes (when they were worth a lot, ofc) anymore, but rather operate by volume on low reward targets. by limiting the gil making activities like gardening that a player can do on trial accounts (eg, 1 or 2 pots instead of 10) the money reaped from said activities is cut dramatically. no profit, no rmt. no rmt, no need to detect them. it's better to disincentiveize the activity than punish it, as the more of the competition you kill off, the more those who evade detection grow. whomever has a system that dodges the filters will expand while the others will eventually copy that technique. it's evolution in action.

  11. #11
    Cerberus
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    getting a /t "cao ni ma" after having them pull a free train on Kor. tunnels for your smn burn?

  12. #12
    Bagel
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    Considering what SE has done, I think the real topic is how can SE avoid false positives?

    The most obvious answer: If you think an account that is more than 4 years old is selling gil, you should probably have a human look into it. Any account older than 4 years should NEVER be auto-banned. In fact, I think even 1 or 2 years would be appropriate.

    Under 2 weeks old? Go ahead and auto-ban.

  13. #13
    Relic Weapons
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    I suspect that the key to being an effective RMT is that nobody is going to notice you acting like an RMT. It's like being a successful spy or happily married.

    The good ones will progress at a reasonable pace, have level appropriate equipment and rank and don't draw attention to themselves, even when camping something like Charybdis.

    My best bet is following the money. Money goes in to one character from a bunch of others. Money does not go out from that character through AH or bazaar, except for ridiculous purchases, like buying 12 treant bulbs for 1 million gil.

    There's actually a pretty decent textbook on forensic accounting that you can get from the Government Printing Office (pretty cheap too.) A quick scan of that should give you some ideas. (I was doing research on shell companies and weapons smuggling at one point.)

    I think using names is a troublesome one. Some people may not really think that the name is important and choose a random string just to keep the software happy. Using your initials can get you things like RFGJK or HMSL (real life examples.) There are linguistic potholes too. Strings that look nonsensical in English, might be valid in another language. Dabdab and darata, for example, are both Arabic words.

  14. #14
    Relic Weapons
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    Quote Originally Posted by Spekkio View Post
    rmt don't get big jackpots selling bhaidate or osodes (when they were worth a lot, ofc) anymore, but rather operate by volume on low reward targets. by limiting the gil making activities like gardening that a player can do on trial accounts (eg, 1 or 2 pots instead of 10) the money reaped from said activities is cut dramatically. no profit, no rmt. no rmt, no need to detect them. it's better to disincentiveize the activity than punish it...
    Good point. They already do this for fishing with the fishing limit of 10 catches a day until lvl 20 (no to mention the Bounty Hunters.)

  15. #15
    An exploitable mess of a card game
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    I believe players handing out advice to SE on who is RMT is why there are so many problems. I remember years ago when people were saying they should IP ban all Non-NA/EU/JP areas. People think they know it all and can devise a method of banning people, but in reality, it's their arrogance that leads to ideas such as the gardening bans. People think all RMT are a like and that simply isn't the case. There are NA as well as Chinese gil sellers. At one point, a LS on Diabolos called Papajohns (Heavy HNMLS) had a few members selling gil. After the shell broke, one member admitted to selling 50mil (He even had a warning from SE). It's very difficult to tell the difference between a gil seller and a regular player.

  16. #16
    The Mizzle Fizzle of Nikkei's Haremizzle

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    Quote Originally Posted by Neosutra View Post
    Waterboarding.
    Various forms of advanced interrogation techniques? I feel you.

  17. #17
    Sea Torques
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    Bismarck

    Quote Originally Posted by Deimos View Post
    This topic stems out of this related thread, where we're currently having a semi-heated discussion about the quality of SE's RMT-detection algorithm. I think it's an interesting topic, so I want to split off and draw in some more opinions about it. I'll post some of my own ideas, but I'd really like to see what others can come up with as well. Hopefully some good ideas will come up in here, and there's always some small chance that someone at SE will read over this information and improve their detection methods as a result.


    As discussed in the original thread, "false positives" (incorrectly labeling legitimate players as RMTs) should be minimized as much as possible. Incorrectly banning a real player is a major mistake, much more major than failing to ban an RMTer. Make sure to consider special cases like linkshell bank characters that have a high gil-throughput, but are legitimate.

    Thanks, looking forward to seeing what people can come up with.

    I had not read the other thread until you posted this and had a link to it.

    You seem to be making the same basic assertions without facts to support them to then describe SE's inability to handle the issue properly.

    Assertion 1:

    SE has an algorithm that is used to detect RMT

    Assertion 2:

    SE bans players based upon the results from assertion 1

    Assertion 3:

    People being banned are not guilty of RMT but are being banned for RMT


    Did I miss where SE said they had an auto detect / auto ban function in the game to remove RMT?

    I do know that they said they had a detection system to locate and autoban people who did certain things (POS hack, speed hack, etc.)

    IMO you are wrong, but please post the facts to support the 3 assertions. (I think something like this would suffice:

    A GM or SE saying "I (we) banned you for growing ice crystals and selling them to an NPC" or "I(we) banned you for sending a million gil to each of your mules" or "I(we) banned you because you have 22 mules growing ores" or even something simpler like "You have too much gil so banztick for you"


    At best...they might have a system to identify players for review....that is, players who have a lot of gil, send a lot of gil, have a lot of level 1 mules, that NPC items from gardening, that NPC items from crafting, that have similar names, that have nonsensical names, etc.

    But, I'm doubtful that any of the players who were banned were banned for any of these factors simply because hundreds of players do the same things all the time.

    IMO, no facts to back me up, if they have a list, they review it manually with a person to track where the gil goes or comes from.

    IMO the thing I would look for is a person buying or selling gil. Anything short of that is just plain guessing.

  18. #18
    That SpellCast Guy
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    SE has directly told us that they have tool(s) to ban RMT: RMT-PWNER V1.337.

    If you read the Allakhazam threads that were linked in the other one (this one is good), people were specifically told by GMs and customer service reps that they were banned for RMT activity. The common link between all of them is that they had a lot of gardening mules and used the same or similar methods as the RMTs have been lately (wildgrass seeds, etc). This implies that some sort of automated system caught them all.

    Multiple players who were told that have now been reinstated, because they were banned incorrectly. If they were reviewed by a human in the first place, what changed?

  19. #19
    CoP Dynamis
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    Simple. GMs have gotten lazy and let a machine decide who is bad and who is good

  20. #20
    Yoshi P
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    It's amazing that there aren't checks in place to differentiate between accounts with nothing but gardening mules, and accounts with characters with actual progress + gardening mules.

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