RMT Messages

Friend invites can be sent in three ways:
Handle name ID (HN-ID) it's the number that shows on your PlayOnline screen close to the "avatar" picture.
Ex: 00-0566348 (hypothetic HN-ID)

Handle name:
Above the HN-ID you have your Handle name:
Viper (hypothetic Handle Name)

In these two ways you would get a message like this:
"Hey Viper .... hugecheap...."

In-game search:
When you add people through the game, the name that is put on your friend list is the character name for the player at the moment you add and no custom message can be input (as far I know) so you would receive something like this:
"Hey Mariane ... hugecheap ..."

I've received spam in both english and japanese so far. (My acct is japanese)

I have got about 5 of these messages one of which had numbers in the name. These are coming from hacked ficticous accounts or through the email with fake names. Hope SE fixes this soon its really annoying.

Thats interesting Marianne, the last message i recieved said "Hey brobson.."
Since my name is clearly not brobson, nor do i have any mules with that name, what do you make of that?

I get pol messages from them. they are using the free trial to do this.. on top of that the server leak.. had to occur around this time :(

I'm sure many of us use add-ons like ad-block-plus and hence do not see these ads.

/word

Which cuts significantly into our site revenue, but we certainly can't stop you. =p

I make it a point to look at every ad here and see if there's something I'd like more information on... most of the time it's nothing of interest to me, but I do click from time to time when something catches my eye, knowing full well I'm helping the admins here stay motivated to continue maintenance and development of the site. :)

I have 2 chars on my account, one of them is set to invisible, so that char is not searchable through POL friend search and I have never gotten any messages adressed to that char. However, my other char is not invisible on the POL friend search and getting lots of messages all the time. Thing is, I have forgot how to make yourself invisible to friend search, anyone know how? Gonna make both chars invisible, I believe that will stop the messages.

I just started to get them now with a char Ive had for 4 years and its really irritating thinking I have a friend who actually took time to POL message me then its just a friggen RMT tryin to advertise ><
I think RMT are gay and I think that if your exploiting a videogame to make money maybe you shouldnt be playing the video game and you should get a job . hmm??
I hate spam I hate the fact that because of RMT's I lose out on a better gaming experience do to loss of camp or inflated prices.. 3 yrs ago on hades when they activated new servers to allow for the increase of players from Europe it was great a new market.. 2 years ago. BAM crap I cant afford and cant camp cause of RMT's.. Now Im pretty happy about the prices.. Ive never been rich and I probably never will be but I shouldnt have to fork out RL money for for fake currency to purchase and item I cant camp spend time camping for cause I have a RL that doesnt allow me to sit on FFXI 24 / 7 (which I would love to do) or pay more then my 19.99 (or whatever it is) monthly charges to to get gil because some duechbag decided to inflate the price cause hes botting a spawn point.. and maybe im just crying but this is how I feel.. RMT's have caused this game to go to hell in aspects of inflation and being stingy people in real life.. I think SE should do more lottery marbles and just boost up the gil in the game or take the billions they confiscate from each server and split it between every char on that server and call it confiscated currency reinburstment or something... just my opinion..

Now this is one helluva good idea. As quoted from Robocop..." I LIKE IT!!!!"

How do you think the RMT would react to this, or SE itself?

Things that make you go hmmmmm?

I've been getting a lot of these messages on Gilgamesh,so have a couple of my friends.We just delete them every time.
I would love to see the confiscated gil being shared between the members on each server!!!

The messages are annoying yes... but it takes what 1 minute to read and erase it? No matter how much we complain about it, it is not going to go away. If SE felt that it was a problem, they would have an update to fix it, maybe perhaps something will be there to resolve the issue in December's update. Until then, is it really worth all this arguing about something that we can not control?

Wont that make it hard for friends and parties to find you?

/invisible is PoL only not search.

errr not in-game search.

I have yet to get a single RMT message. I'm not invisible on POL or anything, so I'm not sure why I haven't gotten a message yet, not gonna complain about it tho :D

Almost if not all of these messages are being sent from free trial accounts and since they announced the 14 day free trial thing in october on their website it obviously got worse than what it used to be.

As for SE, they have several options to stop this such as: remove trial accounts to limiting what they can do, but every option aside from "do nothing" costs time and money, which is why they're taking no action aganist this. And as for banning them, whats the purpose of banning an account that's going to expire in 2 weeks anyway?

I have yet to receive a single one of these messages. And to whomever suggested the reimbursement of confiscated gil, I support that 100percent. The economy is out of whack hard right now because of all the gil they flushed out. Its rather bemusing to me how I can NPC stuff for cash better then I can sell it.

I believe I posted below Cainen's Thread, and I had Quoted from it..

so there ya have it..Cainen's Idea!!

I support this decision also. 100%. Like I said,couldn't see why it wouldn't work?

You can set you character as "invisible" on POL as well. It has a search function where you can search for any character on any server, and it gives you the option to send a "friend request" to anyone, but unlike the ingame friend request you can edit the message so it doesnt say anything about beeing friends, and you can write whatever you want in the message.

yeah i know complaining about this isnt gonna fix anything I just wanted to vent about the topic since someone opened it for discussion .. ha fools.. jk
but yeah who knows the SE gods might have a plot to eliminate more RMT's thats why they arent concerned about it or then again like another person said Its just not a major concern yet. Besides SE is using the free account trials to lure people so they are making money off it so why would they complain?
Thank you for those that agree with my opinion your the first ones that ever did that.. cheers to the supporters lol..

Firgured something out, they were sending the messages to a handle I no longer had....which was the first on I had when I started FFXI but deteled it. All messages I have gotten go though thoough that handle...so I'm thinking they hacked Pol handle list.

I was in a party in Caedarva Mire once and everyone in the area got a /tell msg promoting a website you could buy gil from, strangely everyone said they got it at the same time O.o weird, but was kinda funny seeing as it was in english and most ppl in the area were japanese at the time XD lol must show how desperate RMT is getting with SE doing a good job with them.

I was keyhacked by using windower last Summer.. I came back and ever since I've gotten these POL messages

my brother who plays on pc gets these messages. not so much the tells but messages. I play on 360 atm and have yet to see one of these messages. So heres my thought sites like this wiki alla all have rmt adds on there sites. so one day you decide to check out one of the ad's just to see what rmt charge for gil and what not. most sites leave cookies on your pc so maybe they getting our info that way, anyone think of that???

I have never checked one of those sites so they can't have gotten my info that way. Also my fiance plays on a 360 and he has had the messages through his account on that.

Everyones going to get there share of these messages, and if you don't, then you have one dayum helluva horseshoe up yer @$$!

I believe that we had a mini mini update that took like 60 sec. that cleared this up, but don't quote me. Ask Jarrek, or what his name is, I forget. That might have cleared of this issue!

From what I've understood, this was due to RMT companies finally discovering that the PlayOnline webservice responsible for relaying POL messages was open to the world, and had almost no security on it. It was relatively trivial to send POL messages to anyone you wanted through the insecure interface, without having to log in and go through the POL or FF in-game front end at all.

Couple that with a hack/leak of all POL address info awhile back, (or just scraping the player info from the zone /who list), plus freebie trial accounts that you can send out 5000 messages at once from and not care if they get immediately auto-banned for spamming... and there you have it.

I never got one...I feel left out Q_Q lol.