thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
edited January 2016
The easiest way to solve this is for friend invites to not pop up in the middle of your screen while playing, instead for them to automatically go onto a "pending list". Then, when you log in the next time, if people have sent you a friend invite, they pop up on your screen one at a timeand you can respond to them then. In general, when someone you actually want on your friends list sends you a friend invite, you know their @handle already and will be able to accept either the moment you log on, or by simply going onto your friends list and accepting from there immediately. Furthermore, the only reason bots send you that invite is to then whisper you afterwards. If it automatically puts them on pending without popping on your screen, they then generally remove you a moment after whispering and so you wouldn't even have all those bots on your friends list set to "pending" that you then have to manually remove.
This solves the issue, without getting all complicated.
This is definitely a problem that has, seemingly, gotten worse. I am constantly bombarded by friend requests every few minutes with dialog boxes popping up in my face while I'm in the middle of instances. Sometimes these requests aren't even proceeded by a message, which makes me wonder if these players aren't already on my ignore list, yet still allowed to send me friend requests.
A non-intrusive solution for this would be for friend requests to appear as an icon along the radius of the mini-map. Not only that, but there needs to be restrictions on how many players someone can invite within X amount of time. I'm sure the average user does not invite more than a few users every hour. Of course, there could be exceptions, so an algorithm should be used to determine what the intent of an individual player is. A low level player trying to friend 100 level 70 players within 1 minute should never be allowed. Someone who has held an account for 2 months who wants to friend 10 people at once should be acceptable.
bioshrikeMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,729Arc User
/hide yourself. IIRC, there's also a command to block friend invites as well, (check the NW Wiki).
<::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::)xxxxxxxx(:::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> "Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
It doesn't matter how a game is designed. Sure more tedious games get botted more but that is only half of the equation.
There are always going to be players who do not want to invest time and effort to achieve the same results regardless of the game. Even in games which have no grinding mechanics you will find bots who sell currency. Sorry but there is quite seriously no bottom line to laziness in the I want it Now Generation. Some people are simply not happy unless they become the top tier player in a time period of time not befitting of the time investment.
There will always be people who are willing to pay to CHEAT their way passed others who invested their time and effort. There's no avoiding it with gameplay mechanics. Lessening but never avoiding it.
Beyond that let me point out the most obvious logical fallacy: Neverwinter offers their own equal services in the Zen Exchange. If people wanted to pay to avoid the grind the option is there without paying for bots (and their spam). The problem is that bots do not value time like people do so they will always undercut the price legitimate players place on their time and effort. There is no defense in NW to justify people paying bots instead of players.
The blame remains, as always, on the players who buy from third party vendors at the expense of the experience of legitimate playerbases. This game is nothing compared to other games as far as a grind, albeit I agree the grinds they incorporated lack decent options to navigate the grind such as farming methods or reliable sources of income. No matter the game there will always be people willing to whine they don't want to invest the time to climb the ladder...and without a time investment to climb the ladder there is no achievements or progression, ergo there is no incentive to play.
Woah, slow down there, grandpa. You might break a hip!
Blaming your player base, and indeed the entirety of all humanity? Are you serious?!
A lot of us make fun of this company and everyone associated with it, be they moderator or developer or whatever, talking about how out of touch they are and how much they must view their customers and players with contempt....But HOLY HELLS, man! You're not supposed to just come right out and scream it at us!
Reality is what it is. You can either continue your pathetic and ineffectual complaints about it, refusing to grasp the insanity of your personal ideal, or you can deal with it. The game can either be designed with the knowledge that this behavior will always exist, and the company can take ownership of what they do, or it can be a crotchety grandpa yelling at the kids to stay off its lawn.
The whole economy needs reworked to not allow the trading in things that are high value AND rare. Not sure how it can be done though.
Dear gods, no! The worst part of the game is that there's nothing to trade, nothing to actually work for beyond stacks of refinement stones, no epic rewards for all the so-called epic content. This is especially problematic when dungeons and skirmishes of wildly different difficulties and time requirements offer effectively identical rewards--no one's going to run anything but the most efficient version other than to boost their ego, which just makes everything that much more boring (people complain about only three epic dungeons, when really there's only one; two tops). There's no sense of reward, or of payback for effort, just a long, long, long, grind.
see what Zib posted, yes, it is odd that everytime when fighting boss, it like we were been "watching"... bam, spam with invites and tells from sellers in middle of fights.
to me, it is indeed a 3rd party program, that anyone can watch who in the fight. as anyone recall that program from "Guild Wars" that we can watch other guilds vs guilds, it can be similar tool they use to watch us.
i do know cryptic are aware of existing programs, i mean there is several types created by hackers. what i am really complain about, it getting hounded and endless harassing, and that is voliation of CoC and EULA agreement that other "sellers" code use players shouldnt bother anyone, and they are the ones who has broken agreements with Cryptic and they should know the policy and they are not being enforced, smoke them out and tell 3rd party users that they mean business or the company will be facing with congress as they did with Sony/SOE, and Hasbro may have to withdraw lisense rights since they cant keep clients protected. it is bad for business. cut out 3rd party and take some losses, but may will recover once they are gone, and then players will begin to reinvest with cryptic with no other selling competitors. maybe they should know why sellers are selling so cheap, thier zen market are little too high, so they use bots as source of income and they dont need anything but want cash, but they werent suppose to sell anything for cash, since it is not thier property, it belong to Cryptic Studio.
Ambiminister said "blame on players", doesnt he mean "all of us" or just specific ones? if he said all of us, then that is rude, many of us avoid them, and being spammed alot, so they hope that any players who get frustrated and decide short-cut deal with 3rd party sellers. then there is flaw with prices set by zen market or rarity of getting coalescense wards or specific marks they need to upgrade, they get fed up waiting to be lucky to have those pull from the boxes for months, trying.
then whose fault was it, Ambi? they feel shafted by nasty "RNG" over and over that made by devs. it was suppose to be a game. either they had no choice but to cheat and they dont like it.
others, those dont care for games, just money or make new hack programs because they are bored to become "rock stars".
Well, i'm not interested into this whole "blame game", i'm more interested into what the Devs are going to do to solve this issue? How about a new Dev blog/stream about the goldseller problem?
+ Whatever was done to the chat in December last year did nothing against the goldseller spam.
+ Report spam does nothing against goldseller spam, and a growing ignore list does slow down the game client a lot. Just test it out for yourself, log into your account and see how long it takes to load the client, then log into a new account... And btw. i tried to clear my ignore list a while ago, and the game nearly froze the moment i opened the ignore list!
Anyway, the Devs could at least try to get the green light from above for giving us a working spam filter. A chat filter shouldn't take up too much time and resources, and it would be at least a start...
The idea to make the friend request less obvious by making it appear as a notification somewhere at the edge of the screen is decent, since we don't need to be screamed at that we've got new friend requests. Add to this micky1p00's suggestion of not allowing private tells unless the friend request has been accepted, and that's a lot of progress already.
Chat spam:
"Report Spam" or "Ignore" aren't viable options. Either they (bots) make different accounts, or only you (the reporter) get to not see them (bots) while the majority player base you're trying to reach (buyers/sellers/traders) will not have even noticed your entry.
+1 sobac +1 regenerde
It's just a bloody chat filter... detect "www" or "three w" or the likes and suppress the message containing it... apply this only to public chat zones. Have private chat zones hidden so that bots won't have a list of them to turn to after public areas have been taken care of.
All of the above shouldn't take a month to have ready... imagine the number of happy people you get not being yelled at about friend requests, or able to finally use Trade Chat for the purpose it was meant for...
I wanted to give neverwinter a try again, but this tells me it's not worth giving it a go, which really is too bad, I like the classes and most of the setting.
Ever thought, someone in Cryptic Studios or one of the parent company has a vested interest in these gold sellers. Cryptic Studios parent company is Chinese Own Company. All the Gold Sellers originate from China.
So, someone collecting salary from Cryptic or PWE plus geting cut from the Gold Sellers with influence in decision making at Cryptic.
So even if Ambi spoke the entire truth -which I don't believe- his views will get us absolutely nowhere because the issues he describes cannot be solved. What can be solved is the reason for the spam: the attempt to sell goods. With nothing to sell, there's no reason to spam. And if they can't find active players, spamming becomes a lot less interesting as well.
The current situation, with only a few handfuls of non-zen items being worth any meaningful amount in trade value, and most of those being indirectly zen items (lots of wards needed) and requiring significant grinding (refining), is one of the most decried aspects of the game. The massive amount of bound items makes it painful to create and gear new characters (or guildmates/friends)--which when compounded with how character slots are zen purchases makes it difficult to enjoy what should be a variety of build options--and very difficult to make any sort of AD off the market, instead forcing you into the HIDEOUS GRIND that is even more decried than the dearth of tradeables!
Would getting rid of all trading "fix" the problem? Yeah, pretty much. But that fixes it in much the same way that cutting off my head would fix this runny nose of mine.
Well, i'm not interested into this whole "blame game"
Under normal circumstances I'd agree with you. IF there's a human error somewhere, I could care less who made it, as long as it gets fixed.
However, in this case the "blame game" has to be played. Not in order to fire someone, but to identify the core of the problem and to come up with ways to get it fixed.
So even if Ambi spoke the entire truth -which I don't believe- his views will get us absolutely nowhere because the issues he describes cannot be solved. What can be solved is the reason for the spam: the attempt to sell goods. With nothing to sell, there's no reason to spam. And if they can't find active players, spamming becomes a lot less interesting as well.
While i do understand this, i would prefer to see something like... Dev: Ok, we have this problem. Dev: And that is what we can do about it. and maybe a Mod could make this happen?
And then there is the option to not just temp. bann AD buyers, but to remove the bought AD as well. The GMs could even go so far to remove any item they bought with that AD too.
Brand new player here. It freaked me right out logging in and getting blasted with spam when I was not even what, level 3 or whatever it is when you get to Protector's Enclave? I could barely say any actual chat in the window, even when I turned off a bunch of channels. I only got one friend request from a spammer, but plenty of whispers and just plain in chat spam. If most other games can bust this down to a bare minimum I can't see why this one is failing to do so.
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bioshrikeMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,729Arc User
Brand new player here. It freaked me right out logging in and getting blasted with spam when I was not even what, level 3 or whatever it is when you get to Protector's Enclave? I could barely say any actual chat in the window, even when I turned off a bunch of channels. I only got one friend request from a spammer, but plenty of whispers and just plain in chat spam. If most other games can bust this down to a bare minimum I can't see why this one is failing to do so.
There is a command, IIRC it's /whois or something similar, which lists all players in a particular zone or instance. My bet is that these RMT spammers use this to get players' handles and send the messages that way. Perhaps a good first step would be to disable such a command...
<::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::::)xxxo <::::::::::::)xxxxxxxx(:::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> oxxx(::::::::::::::> "Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
it is strange and sound like pretty mean, they ban players who buys, but not the sellers. so, what are they? the baits?
the AD sellers get banned probably too at some point, but they also probably only use those accounts for either a limited time or sales. in other words, it doesn't matter to the AD sellers, unless they hit one of the accounts with a lot of AD to sell on it.
but i'm pretty sure, that those AD sellers are smart enough to either spread their AD over several accounts, or maybe even store any items, that can be sold easy over the AH, in guild banks.
and since there is only little "feedback" on this matter, i don't think that they are even considering removing the bought AD. it took them long enough to come around with an official word on actually banning AD buyers at least temp.
Comments
This solves the issue, without getting all complicated.
A non-intrusive solution for this would be for friend requests to appear as an icon along the radius of the mini-map. Not only that, but there needs to be restrictions on how many players someone can invite within X amount of time. I'm sure the average user does not invite more than a few users every hour. Of course, there could be exceptions, so an algorithm should be used to determine what the intent of an individual player is. A low level player trying to friend 100 level 70 players within 1 minute should never be allowed. Someone who has held an account for 2 months who wants to friend 10 people at once should be acceptable.
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
Blaming your player base, and indeed the entirety of all humanity? Are you serious?!
A lot of us make fun of this company and everyone associated with it, be they moderator or developer or whatever, talking about how out of touch they are and how much they must view their customers and players with contempt....But HOLY HELLS, man! You're not supposed to just come right out and scream it at us!
Reality is what it is. You can either continue your pathetic and ineffectual complaints about it, refusing to grasp the insanity of your personal ideal, or you can deal with it. The game can either be designed with the knowledge that this behavior will always exist, and the company can take ownership of what they do, or it can be a crotchety grandpa yelling at the kids to stay off its lawn. Dear gods, no! The worst part of the game is that there's nothing to trade, nothing to actually work for beyond stacks of refinement stones, no epic rewards for all the so-called epic content. This is especially problematic when dungeons and skirmishes of wildly different difficulties and time requirements offer effectively identical rewards--no one's going to run anything but the most efficient version other than to boost their ego, which just makes everything that much more boring (people complain about only three epic dungeons, when really there's only one; two tops). There's no sense of reward, or of payback for effort, just a long, long, long, grind.
bam, spam with invites and tells from sellers in middle of fights.
to me, it is indeed a 3rd party program, that anyone can watch who in the fight. as anyone recall that program from "Guild Wars" that we can watch other guilds vs guilds, it can be similar tool they use to watch us.
i do know cryptic are aware of existing programs, i mean there is several types created by hackers.
what i am really complain about, it getting hounded and endless harassing, and that is voliation of CoC and EULA agreement that other "sellers" code use players shouldnt bother anyone, and they are the ones who has broken agreements with Cryptic and they should know the policy and they are not being enforced, smoke them out and tell 3rd party users that they mean business or the company will be facing with congress as they did with Sony/SOE, and Hasbro may have to withdraw lisense rights since they cant keep clients protected. it is bad for business.
cut out 3rd party and take some losses, but may will recover once they are gone, and then players will begin to reinvest with cryptic with no other selling competitors.
maybe they should know why sellers are selling so cheap, thier zen market are little too high, so they use bots as source of income and they dont need anything but want cash, but they werent suppose to sell anything for cash, since it is not thier property, it belong to Cryptic Studio.
Ambiminister said "blame on players", doesnt he mean "all of us" or just specific ones? if he said all of us, then that is rude, many of us avoid them, and being spammed alot, so they hope that any players who get frustrated and decide short-cut deal with 3rd party sellers. then there is flaw with prices set by zen market or rarity of getting coalescense wards or specific marks they need to upgrade, they get fed up waiting to be lucky to have those pull from the boxes for months, trying.
then whose fault was it, Ambi? they feel shafted by nasty "RNG" over and over that made by devs. it was suppose to be a game. either they had no choice but to cheat and they dont like it.
others, those dont care for games, just money or make new hack programs because they are bored to become "rock stars".
How about a new Dev blog/stream about the goldseller problem?
+ Whatever was done to the chat in December last year did nothing against the goldseller spam.
+ Report spam does nothing against goldseller spam, and a growing ignore list does slow down the game client a lot.
Just test it out for yourself, log into your account and see how long it takes to load the client, then log into a new account...
And btw. i tried to clear my ignore list a while ago, and the game nearly froze the moment i opened the ignore list!
Anyway, the Devs could at least try to get the green light from above for giving us a working spam filter. A chat filter shouldn't take up too much time and resources, and it would be at least a start...
Friend requests:
+1 thefacricant
+1 micky1p00
The idea to make the friend request less obvious by making it appear as a notification somewhere at the edge of the screen is decent, since we don't need to be screamed at that we've got new friend requests. Add to this micky1p00's suggestion of not allowing private tells unless the friend request has been accepted, and that's a lot of progress already.
Chat spam:
"Report Spam" or "Ignore" aren't viable options. Either they (bots) make different accounts, or only you (the reporter) get to not see them (bots) while the majority player base you're trying to reach (buyers/sellers/traders) will not have even noticed your entry.
+1 sobac
+1 regenerde
It's just a bloody chat filter... detect "www" or "three w" or the likes and suppress the message containing it... apply this only to public chat zones. Have private chat zones hidden so that bots won't have a list of them to turn to after public areas have been taken care of.
All of the above shouldn't take a month to have ready... imagine the number of happy people you get not being yelled at about friend requests, or able to finally use Trade Chat for the purpose it was meant for...
So, someone collecting salary from Cryptic or PWE plus geting cut from the Gold Sellers with influence in decision making at Cryptic.
Would getting rid of all trading "fix" the problem? Yeah, pretty much. But that fixes it in much the same way that cutting off my head would fix this runny nose of mine.
Dev: Ok, we have this problem.
Dev: And that is what we can do about it.
and maybe a Mod could make this happen?
And then there is the option to not just temp. bann AD buyers, but to remove the bought AD as well. The GMs could even go so far to remove any item they bought with that AD too.
so, what are they? the baits?
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
but i'm pretty sure, that those AD sellers are smart enough to either spread their AD over several accounts, or maybe even store any items, that can be sold easy over the AH, in guild banks.
and since there is only little "feedback" on this matter, i don't think that they are even considering removing the bought AD. it took them long enough to come around with an official word on actually banning AD buyers at least temp.