Gold Spammers are really out of control!

willborn0001

I know this thread will be considered as a spam, but someone need to say. You get really mad when you stay at PE trying to make/find groups, and need to block 50 spams/minute.

Please Devs, do something about these gold spammers. They become really out of control!

valwryn

It is not just Neverwinter. In other games, spammers are finding ways around devs attempts to block them. Not much they can do.

Just do what Merlin told the crowd, "Ignore and turn your back to Morgana and she'll cease to exist!"

myowmyow

Report, report, report . . .

smulch

The only way to kill the gold spammer is to kill off their business.

In other words, they would need to buy from their website to find out the hoard accounts and ban them over and over. Eventually, the spammers would just leave NWO or stop advertising (because it does more harm than good).

Anything else can easily be bypassed. Filters, they use special characters. Min level, they use a bot to level it. IP ban, they make another account and a program that change the IP. Region ban, there's programs that make servers believe you are from another region. Account ban, the spam is made by a program that make new accounts constantly to spam.

ayroux

Or...

How about making more things BoA such as any zen item.

Or they could also STOP with the out of control RP/arti-equip prices. Then people would stop buying from them and start buying direct.

Actually that would only happen if they adjusted their prices, we all know they are out of wack!

lewstelamon01

Going to say the same thing that gets said in every other thread like this:

Believe what you like, but Cryptic is doing all they can to curb this issue. However, this is a cat and mouse between businesses, not between people living in basements. Spammers are not just a bunch of misfit kids being annoyances, these are full-on, fully staffed business enterprises. Imagine, if you will, the call center for AT&T or any other major company. Now, imagine all those cubicles filled with a computer, running a scripting program spamming PE 24/7/365. If you can get the scale of that, you'll have an idea of what Cryptic is up against.

Account bans? This is free to play, another account takes the work of a randomly generated email and something like 60 seconds to create.

Filters? We've seen the result of that. Spammers will butcher their URLs any way they can to get them through.

IP bans? Ineffective. They can be spoofed and many ISPs no longer use static IP addresses in any case.

Region bans? There are ways around those.

Level minimums? One of the oldest measures to prevent spam. These guys see these a mile away and will keep a slew of accounts on hand properly leveled to circumvent this.

Bottom line is that for every measure Cryptic implements, these spammer businesses will devise a counter measure, because this is their profit center. Advertising has as much a vital place in their business as it does in any other legitimate business venture. It has to be cut off at the source: Dry up their demand and they will--as any other business will do--leave and go where the money is.

hustin1

I think if players were able to create their own text filters (with a reasonably powerful filter language), we could figure out how to block the spammers most of the time. It would still be a cat-and-mouse game, but there are vastly more players than spammers, and if enough of it gets blocked for enough time the spammers won't really have much to gain from Neverwinter -- not enough to justify the effort, I think.

pirwzy

Text filters can be updated. People made mods for WoW that could block spam with just about 100% accuracy for years on end. I doubt the spammers in this game have any more options for obfuscation than the sellers of WoW gold. You can only obfuscate a URL so much before it becomes unintelligible and the spam stops directing people to your website because it cannot be read.

smulch

pirwzy wrote: »

Text filters can be updated. People made mods for WoW that could block spam with just about 100% accuracy for years on end. I doubt the spammers in this game have any more options for obfuscation than the sellers of WoW gold. You can only obfuscate a URL so much before it becomes unintelligible and the spam stops directing people to your website because it cannot be read.

When it happens, do you know what those companies do?

They open up a new website, often which will redirect to the main one. There's no end to it.

eldarth

lewstelamon01 wrote: »

It has to be cut off at the source: Dry up their demand and they will--as any other business will do--leave and go where the money is.

Fight back - google SpamReflector. Bombard their customer service e-mail accounts with you and thousands of your MMO friends.

zebular

Closing as it was left open by mistake. Please report bad behavior the proper way, which is through Support, whether in game Help > Request GM Help > Player Behavior (or for spammers, right click name > report spam), on the Support site, or by email at customerservice@perfectworld.com - Discussions of bad player behavior is not allowed per the Rules.

Safe travels,
Archmage Zebular of Mystryl
PWE Community Moderator