RMT means "real money trading" and refers to the practice of selling in-game items for real money. There's a wide range of opinions on that practice, but a lot of people (myself included) view RMT sellers as disruptive forces in game and RMT buyers as cheaters.
To Zikh's idea, I'm not sure that'd work. Frying in game mails by keyword match seems likely to cause issues, especially if a player wondering why his mails keep getting deleted gets banned (and you can't tell someone that their mail was deleted as spam, as then the RMT groups -- which have lots of accounts -- will probe the system to figure out how to get around it). One approach that seemed to help in EQ2 was marking suspected RMT spam mail and chat messages and forcing users to click through to see them. CoH and WoW made it easy to report spammers, though that didn't seem to help too much.
The only largely effective approach I've seen is to ban entire countries from the game or banish them to region-locked servers. That's a really ugly solution to the problem, but it does seem to reduce it substantially. Another less effective but still workable approach, at least according to SOE, is to run the market yourself as the game developer, which should shut the other outfits out entirely. Of course, you risk being called supporting cheating and pay to win, so there's no real way to succeed there.
To Zikh's idea, I'm not sure that'd work. Frying in game mails by keyword match seems likely to cause issues, especially if a player wondering why his mails keep getting deleted gets banned (and you can't tell someone that their mail was deleted as spam, as then the RMT groups -- which have lots of accounts -- will probe the system to figure out how to get around it). One approach that seemed to help in EQ2 was marking suspected RMT spam mail and chat messages and forcing users to click through to see them. CoH and WoW made it easy to report spammers, though that didn't seem to help too much.
The only largely effective approach I've seen is to ban entire countries from the game or banish them to region-locked servers. That's a really ugly solution to the problem, but it does seem to reduce it substantially. Another less effective but still workable approach, at least according to SOE, is to run the market yourself as the game developer, which should shut the other outfits out entirely. Of course, you risk being called supporting cheating and pay to win, so there's no real way to succeed there.
The Freelance Wizard
Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
