Spam - And no, not the good kind...

markfalcone

I know spam is a problem with all of the MMO's and I know there are many ideas on how to keep it down if not conquer it, but it occurred to me that I'm not entirely sure what you guys are doing to cut down on spam and it appears to be getting worse rather than better. Here's my view of the situation:

We appear to be reporting spammers (those selling astral diamonds and such for cash, though I suppose others may be reporting annoying characters who post over and over and over again to attempt to gain attention as well since I do) and this puts them on a hopefully unlimited Ignore list. On WoW this list was limited and then was grown out further when it was found it was not enough.

One way you have also implemented to hold back the tide is forcing players to play through the tutorial before being allowed access to Zone, which strangely enough does not appear to be working.

From what I remember about WoW, one method they eventually resorted to was blocking the specific IP addresses. This appears not to yet be enforced here and I highly recommend it. No, it did not stop the spam entirely, but it did slow it down considerably. And yes, there were eventually complaints by players, but it turned out that those players were purchasing services, which was against the EULA anyway so they really didn't have a leg to stand on with their complaints.

While I'll continue reporting spammers, I just find it highly annoying that I'm ending up reporting one easily every 2 to 3 minutes in Protector's Enclave's Zone chat. That is far too much spam. I like my spam fried and served on my ramen or chopped up into my scrambled eggs, not in my gaming.

Mahalo.

slambit

got fed up with gold spam every minute, i turned off zone chat now i just enable it if i need a group in an adventure zone

drartwhodent

Would it really be that hard for the programmers to fight the spam?
As it is now, they really do not seem to care much.
News Flash! We players care a great deal about this!
If x number of accounts have been reported by us, all with the exact same text message, why oh why do you not automatically block future messages from ANY accounts that are exactly the same text??!!??
Seriously.
In order to 'fake them out' a bit, you could even do it 'silently' - don't tell them they are being / have been blocked, let them think their hieroglyphics are still going out into zone chat.
Please!
We beg of you!

sominator

Hey team,

We're aware of the spam issue, and Customer Support are doing their very best to combat spam as it arises. Ideally, we'd like to have an even better (and more preemptive) anti-spam system that what's already in place, but that will take some time to develop.

Thanks for your concern and suggestions, though, and especially for your patience with this! We're doing our best to keep the game spam-free!

bioshrike

Blocking IPs is a bad idea - especially if you consider that most ISPs hand out dynamic IPs - meaning that what was a spammer's IP one week could become yours eventually.

I'm not sure of your wording, but all players *do* have to complete the tutorial to enter PE and use zone.

The only improvement I could think of would be to up the minimum level one can use before chatting into zone - maybe something like level 10, where you have to at least complete Blacklake and start the Tower District.

beckylunatic

That would suck for trying to get people to run the Blacklake skirmish... which a lot of new players wouldn't even know about since they're... new.

markfalcone

Hmmm, but Bio may be on to something, Becky. What about some kind of other method to team up for Skirmish that didn't involve a chat line? Not saying I have that answer.

bioshrike

markfalcone wrote: »

Hmmm, but Bio may be on to something, Becky. What about some kind of other method to team up for Skirmish that didn't involve a chat line? Not saying I have that answer.

There's now an official LFG chat channel, so people should use that to look for a team, (or NW_Legit_Community if you don't cheat/exploit *shameless plug*). The restriction I described would be on using zone.

There are other steps that could be taken - enact a type rate limiter to how quickly one can post into zone chat. Heck, maybe they can even disable the ability to paste text into *just* zone chat, so that spammers couldn't just paste in their advertisements.

Lastly, just park a live GM in PE and have them handle mutes/bans in real time.

melodywhr

bioshrike wrote: »

Blocking IPs is a bad idea - especially if you consider that most ISPs hand out dynamic IPs - meaning that what was a spammer's IP one week could become yours eventually.

I'm not sure of your wording, but all players *do* have to complete the tutorial to enter PE and use zone.

The only improvement I could think of would be to up the minimum level one can use before chatting into zone - maybe something like level 10, where you have to at least complete Blacklake and start the Tower District.

i started to think about this and thought... what if you could temporarily ban an IP for 15-20 minutes or longer? long enough to irritate someone trying to spam. most ISPs do use dynamic hosting, however you're usually stuck with an IP address for a certain period of time. the only problem with this idea or the idea of blocking mac addresses is if the spammers are masking IPs and/or mac addresses. and we get back into the whole reason why blocking spammers is such a revolving door kind of situation.

bioshrike

melodywhr wrote: »

i started to think about this and thought... what if you could temporarily ban an IP for 15-20 minutes or longer? long enough to irritate someone trying to spam. most ISPs do use dynamic hosting, however you're usually stuck with an IP address for a certain period of time. the only problem with this idea or the idea of blocking mac addresses is if the spammers are masking IPs and/or mac addresses. and we get back into the whole reason why blocking spammers is such a revolving door kind of situation.

That could work, though I'm assuming we're talking about only a chat ban here. It would prevent switching accounts to be usable as a work around, but the spammers may just start cloning MACs to generate new IPs for themselves...

markfalcone

Of course I have to wonder just how many computers are running these spams. You block one, another one comes up within a minute. That means someone or something has to be running though the tutorial over and over and over again while the others are spamming, right? Or am I missing something.

As for the IP's and MAC's, Bio is right about just switching IP addresses and cloning MAC's. Copy cat hackers can do those simple tricks. On the other hand, I seem to recall from my old IT days that it was possible to complain directly to the provider along with time and IP stamps. Providers don't typically want that kind of reputation and will usually shut down such operations. Not all of them and certainly not a majority in the world, but most in the United States would.

sockmunkey

markfalcone wrote: »

Of course I have to wonder just how many computers are running these spams. You block one, another one comes up within a minute. That means someone or something has to be running though the tutorial over and over and over again while the others are spamming, right? Or am I missing something.

This exactly. This is why ignoring, reporting, banning, or even direct moderating chat is so ineffective. The spammers know they will get muted/banned the moment they spam. The accounts are disposible. They spam, log out, and move to the next account. By the time you have either ignored, muted, or ejected someone. They have already logged and moved on to the next one. making it pointless. The best you can do is prevent the same one from coming back again. But they typically never do anyhow.

We are fighting a factory. Producing spam bots in an unlimited assembly line fashion. It costs them nothing to do so and they can do it faster then they can be moderated.

zebular

. . . . . In my opinion, and as stated by another, the best solution is to start reporting them for abuse to their ISP Companies, which would have to be done by PWE. Abusive customers is generally something ISP's take quite seriously. My sister used to be a Network Administrator for one such ISP Company and they were quite heavy handed when it came to users doing bad things on their Network. Even Comcast has some policies for abusive use of their Networks. Banning IP addresses themselves though is a slippery slope.

tinukeda

zebular wrote: »

. . . . . In my opinion, and as stated by another, the best solution is to start reporting them for abuse to their ISP Companies, which would have to be done by PWE. Abusive customers is generally something ISP's take quite seriously. My sister used to be a Network Administrator for one such ISP Company and they were quite heavy handed when it came to users doing bad things on their Network. Even Comcast has some policies for abusive use of their Networks. Banning IP addresses themselves though is a slippery slope.

While I don't disagree with this, there is a slight problem: any hacker/spammer worth their beans isn't using their own home service/gear. They would probably be using a hosted (or compromised) service, theoretically one that doesn't enforce such service rules, and they would be using it as anonymously as possible. And depending on how hackable the API is, they might not even be using an install of the game. I highly doubt that this is the work of a bunch of script kiddies running stuff on their l33t home pc.

zebular

tinukeda wrote: »

While I don't disagree with this, there is a slight problem: any hacker/spammer worth their beans isn't using their own home service/gear. They would probably be using a hosted (or compromised) service, theoretically one that doesn't enforce such service rules, and they would be using it as anonymously as possible. And depending on how hackable the API is, they might not even be using an install of the game. I highly doubt that this is the work of a bunch of script kiddies running stuff on their l33t home pc.

. . . . . You cannot chat in Zone or Say through the third party access to the chat servers, you can only do so in custom channels. These players are physically in-game spamming Say and Zone as well as sending mail (possibly via Gateway also). Besides, I doubt true hackers would be wasting their time spamming a game and it's those true hackers who would be hard to track, not these individuals and/or groups of spam bots. Regardless, you have to start somewhere so start with the ISP and go from there.

. . . . . Just some food for thought: it's become more prevalent that the majority of Gold sellers come from North America now-a-days, and not another Country as the old stereotype leads many to assume.

mctankypants

IP banning would be difficult. A prime example of that is Myanmar(Burma). The entire country is locked down heavily by their government and most internet cafes and users all run proxies to get around the lockdowns.

tinukeda

zebular wrote: »

. . . . . You cannot chat in Zone or Say through the third party access to the chat servers, you can only do so in custom channels. These players are physically in-game spamming Say and Zone as well as sending mail (possibly via Gateway also). Besides, I doubt true hackers would be wasting their time spamming a game and it's those true hackers who would be hard to track, not these individuals and/or groups of spam bots. Regardless, you have to start somewhere so start with the ISP and go from there.

I just can't buy, given the factory assembly line speed of them popping up, that the spammers are actual people actually playing/typing this stuff. You would need a sizable workforce to achieve something like that.

So you can't zone/chat via 3rd party apps? I'm sure someone with enough hacking experience would beg to differ! All it takes is 1-2 hackers on the payroll of a gold seller 'company'. They write the bots and pass them out (or run them on their own army of compromised pcs; heck, people rent armies of 1000's of those at on an hourly/daily rate sometimes).

xelliz

tinukeda wrote: »

So you can't zone/chat via 3rd party apps? I'm sure someone with enough hacking experience would beg to differ! All it takes is 1-2 hackers on the payroll of a gold seller 'company'. They write the bots and pass them out (or run them on their own army of compromised pcs; heck, people rent armies of 1000's of those at on an hourly/daily rate sometimes).

Also, once a program gets out in the wild, others will start doing this if they can make money. This happened in another MMO I played for a while. At least a couple of legitimate players I knew from in game started botting full 9 man parties and selling currency. Obviously they made good money doing this since they were paying for a minimum of 10 accounts per month.

aiaus

The spam has gotten so bad that it ends up in my mail box AND ive even been sent a tell....Seriously need to fix this soon.

cdnbison

From what I have seen (and you have, too), the spammers tend to use a *lot* of special characters in their messages. WAY more than would be used in a normal message. If there were a way to filter messages / auto-block based on the number of special characters used, that would probably work pretty well. 99.99% of the playerbase will never use that many special characters ($ / - * etc etc) and if you set it to auto-ban on say, the 2nd or 3rd occurrence before silencing them, it would probably cut things down quite a bit.

arontimes

I say crack down on those players who buy gold and powerleveling and botting services, as these are bannable offenses. I remember one MMORPG that didn't take such matters seriously; the Philippine version of Ragnarok Online was infested by bots due to the powers that be not willing to ban such offenders, instead giving them temporary suspensions. I knew this because I had several friends who ran bots, and all they received were a slap to the wrist for their role in compromising the game's integrity.

saini50990

hey guys first banning ip will not work cause of dynamic ip u can get new ip by just disabling ur net or if ur usingvpn reconnecting so they r not fruitful. i like the idea of removing the option to copy paste in zone chat but that is way to annoying for other user too cause when u r typing in trade channel u dont want to give link of ur object everytime do u.
and dev u guys have just made sure that typing the whole url site is banned or some similaar way but the spammers are being creative and u have to step up.and if what sominator is said is true that u r currently working on it and it will take time so in the mean time make 1 gm always online in pe so that he can mute or ban the gold spammers and if u dont have personnel start making mature players gm so that they can handle what u cant for now. these gold spammers and pressing a whole lot of my and other players nerve u cant chat in game cause they always posting 3 links after every 30 sec and which is way too many . most of the time my zone chat is closed , i m only playing through lfg and trade channel but for how long , we keep on reporting them in 1 day even while doing dungeon i reported more than 30 players but they seem to have created so many accounts so i think an in game gm shld be always present to monitor them , u dont need to say hi to players just stay quite if u wanna and banning them .
whenever a gm comes online that spamming seem to stop so the ultimate solution is u guys only u for now .
PEACE OUT :cool:
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13.4K GWF destroyer (WEED)

ocampusmaximus

I've noticed two interesting facts:

- The spamming parasites are making "offers" and lowered their prices. Means they're desperate. Business hasn't probably been good for them lately.

- There are people behind the spamming. I once had the pleasure of sending nice, warm, insulting, tells to one of them and a minute later the character sent me a friend request.

overddrive

Responding without reading the entire thread:

Spammers mass produce spam. That means they have large numbers of accounts, large numbers of bots, and a large number of pre-made text. If nwo wants to get rid of spam, they need to start there, getting rid of mass-accounts, getting rid of mass bots, getting rid of mass-texts.

See, exploits, glitches, spam, all of it, they each multiply the others. So an easily exploited game is an easily spammed game. Nwo simply needs to get its ship squared away period. It IS really really nice and convenient to no have to constantly get a one-time password from my email to use the launcher, it is nice to not always have to mess with security questions and all of that, but the ease of getting through that first door is without value when it means the gaming experience to follow is essentially ruined.

You guys need to fix the glitches, the exploits, the bots and the spam before you even really have a game experience worth developing new content for.

overddrive

saini50990 wrote: »

hey guys first banning ip will not work cause of dynamic ip u can get new ip by just disabling ur net or if ur usingvpn reconnecting so they r not fruitful. i like the idea of removing the option to copy paste in zone chat but that is way to annoying for other user too cause when u r typing in trade channel u dont want to give link of ur object everytime do u.
and dev u guys have just made sure that typing the whole url site is banned or some similaar way but the spammers are being creative and u have to step up.and if what sominator is said is true that u r currently working on it and it will take time so in the mean time make 1 gm always online in pe so that he can mute or ban the gold spammers and if u dont have personnel start making mature players gm so that they can handle what u cant for now. these gold spammers and pressing a whole lot of my and other players nerve u cant chat in game cause they always posting 3 links after every 30 sec and which is way too many . most of the time my zone chat is closed , i m only playing through lfg and trade channel but for how long , we keep on reporting them in 1 day even while doing dungeon i reported more than 30 players but they seem to have created so many accounts so i think an in game gm shld be always present to monitor them , u dont need to say hi to players just stay quite if u wanna and banning them .
whenever a gm comes online that spamming seem to stop so the ultimate solution is u guys only u for now .
PEACE OUT :cool:
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13.4K GWF destroyer (WEED)

Well, in order to convey their message, spammers HAVE to use specific words in a limited variety of combinations. Develop a simple algorithm to filter that narrow pattern of text OUT. It is simple math. And yes, if you are trying to make a legit trade you will need to avoid those combinations. Sounds complicated but really how hard can it be to filter out "Buy AD NOW, 1.5 mil for 15.99", or any of its limited variations?

bioshrike

overddrive wrote: »

Well, in order to convey their message, spammers HAVE to use specific words in a limited variety of combinations. Develop a simple algorithm to filter that narrow pattern of text OUT. It is simple math. And yes, if you are trying to make a legit trade you will need to avoid those combinations. Sounds complicated but really how hard can it be to filter out "Buy AD NOW, 1.5 mil for 15.99", or any of its limited variations?

The fact that no email spam filter is 100% effective is evidence that it isn't that simple. There are some really good ones, no doubt, but it isn't as simple as people make it out to be. I will say that since the spammers have resorted to using all sorts of characters in their messages is proof that the devs' efforts are at least party effective...

thatasianbradah

markfalcone wrote: »

Mahalo.

It's nice to see a fellow local Hawaiian playing this game as well. I agree. The spam issue through gold/diamond bots needs to be tended with as it impedes a lot of vital messages. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

jacksoon

You can try auto ban all the people that use number in the zone chat ( ex 13,11,10,1,3 etc) in this way, they will prob spam to the trade channel but at last people will be able to close that chat and still speak whit the whole comunity. Or we can simply close all the zone chat and create a new zone channel to use, whit the use of a psw gived by the creator

aiaus

send them a mail or trackem down and have them shutdown

omgnicktaken

The sad truth is that we as players are responsible for it. If no one ever used their "services" then they would shut down pretty fast. People who go to those sites and buy their goods are feeding them. I would never use these "third party" services just for that reason - they may be cheaper then the official store, but i would rather support the devs then these botters+spammers who are annoying and also destructive to games economy.

For a fix, i would vote the following: have different zone channlels for sub 30, 30-59, 60. I would think the bots would still need a good amount of time to level up, so this should at least cut the amount down for higher levels while not completely shutting down low level chat.

calorien

I think Cryptic needs to have a talk with PWE about gold seller management. For all PWE's faults, there are very few gold sellers on PWI (to the extent that, when one does try to set up shop, it's a big deal on the forum and is shut down within a day) and while I haven't play their other games as much, I don't remember having ever seen a gold seller on Jade Dynasty, Forsaken World or their other titles.