Suggestion to Fight Spammer Friend Invites

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

Friend invites from spammers have gotten out of control. When they pop up in PE, it's annoying (especially if you are trying to quickly click through crafting or quickly invoke on multiple toons). When it happens during a battle, it can be a bit more annoying. Also, it is presumably profitable for the spammers and therefore removing profit from Cryptic, else they would not do it broadly.

Here is a simple feature to combat them.

You have to complete Blacklake District to send friend invites. If you have 5 friend invites declined in a 24 hour period, you cannot send additional friend invites for 7 days. You can still receive friend invites if you have not completed Blacklake, or if you are temporarily banned from inviting.

This won't stop the less-invasive /tell @gullible Hey buddy, please friend me so I can sell you AD

but it will quickly end the annoying popup invitations.

Unknown · September 2015

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artanisen · September 2015

Actually the only solution is to add the
following individual game settings.

1. reject friend invites
2. reject whispers
3. reject party invites

i do think the friend invite penalty could be a good idea.

zukn75 · September 2015

Unfortunately with the way bots turn over acounts it will hardly affect them. I agree it won't negatively affect normal players, but it also won't negatively affect bots suficiently, the only people it would hurt are true noobs.
As a correlaory, would limiting the number of friend requestsan account can send can send be a better alternative?

wylonus · September 2015

problem will solve if they (devs) use this idea, turn off friend invites in anywhere in adventure zones and dungeons, only available to be use is in PE zone.

Invites only works if groups you are with and knew each other if you are in dungeons and if you are in guilds.

Star Trek Online has same problem recently, it been going on, players getting "invites" while they are on missions or in "red alerts" encounters.

tripsofthrymr · September 2015

magenubbie said:
So at best, it'll delay them for 5 minutes until a new character washes up on the beach that will never complete the intro.

I added a requirement to have completed Blacklake District to prevent instant generation of new accounts. New players can still receive friend invites from their friends in the game (which is probably how an established player and his new RL friend will connect anyhow).

hmdq · September 2015

univ mode to exclude spammers/gold sellers: implement a real subscription on game via real money NO AD obviously. no more leechers no more spammers no more thieves. simple that.

Unknown · September 2015

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regenerde · September 2015

hquadros said:
univ mode to exclude spammers/gold sellers: implement a real subscription on game via real money NO AD obviously. no more leechers no more spammers no more thieves. simple that.

And you think those goldseller don't have access to CC numbers from stolen accounts, or from people that actually bought AD from them?

Or without any "F2P leecher", who's going to buy your items from the auction house, or who's running dungeons/skirmishes/PvP with you?
Do you really think, that NWO would survive the year with a subscription?

Reality check: http://steamcharts.com/app/109600
close to ~~-14%~~ -15% today, give it a few more days, and they will have lost all the players, that came back for the latest module.
Not to mention, with the Devs so slow with coming up with improvements for leadership, even more players are going to jump ship... paying players and "F2P leecher" alike.

Last but not least, GW 2 went F2P, SkyForge is F2P and even WildStar is going to be F2P in a few days... looks like F2P is the MMOs way to keep a game going.
But feel free to go back to WoW or any other subscription based game, and see for yourself, that even there you have botters/goldsellers running around.

On topic,
1. reject friend invites
2. reject whispers
3. reject party invites
option would do it.

dufisto · September 2015

just limit friend requests to 20 an hour. problem solved.

fogtripper · September 2015

dufisto said:
just limit friend requests to 20 an hour. problem solved.

Why that many? Hell, I would be fine with 1 per day.

dufisto · September 2015

fogtripper said:

dufisto said:
just limit friend requests to 20 an hour. problem solved.
Why that many? Hell, I would be fine with 1 per day.

1 per day is very restrictive. perhaps i want to friend a group i was running with. 20 per hour is more than i can see anyone legitimately needing. but enough to make botting friend requests go away.

jganth · September 2015

Or just police your game actively. Find the bots that are getting into the game and spamming like it was a free for all.

Stop cutting features and penalizing the human players while leaving the front door wide open. Right after the Leadership cuts and AD changes do these 'Friend' requests become apparent. I'm sure the irony is killing you.

xsi1e · September 2015

tripsofthrymr said:
Friend invites from spammers have gotten out of control. When they pop up in PE, it's annoying (especially if you are trying to quickly click through crafting or quickly invoke on multiple toons). When it happens during a battle, it can be a bit more annoying. Also, it is presumably profitable for the spammers and therefore removing profit from Cryptic, else they would not do it broadly.

Here is a simple feature to combat them.

You have to complete Blacklake District to send friend invites. If you have 5 friend invites declined in a 24 hour period, you cannot send additional friend invites for 7 days. You can still receive friend invites if you have not completed Blacklake, or if you are temporarily banned from inviting.

This won't stop the less-invasive /tell @gullible Hey buddy, please friend me so I can sell you AD

but it will quickly end the annoying popup invitations.

A simple solution that has been implemented in many mmo's to combat gold spammers from sending you tells and friends invites is to allow players to flag themselves as anonymous and friends only. This effectively hides you from whatever it is the spammers are using to locate you in the first place. This will not help with zone chat and such, but at least you will not have to deal with friend invites or tells from them while in the middle of dungeon boss battles. Was in Cragmire Crypt tonight on final boss and got gold spammer friend invites 3 times in a row. Extremely annoying since the invite pops up directly smack in the middle of the screen! Eventually the players that are going to stick around will end up using their own custom chat channels or some flavor of Voip. So taking that tell and friends invite avenue away from the spammers will drastically improve the players quality of gaming. As it stands now, NW is top of my list of being the most riddled with spammer parasites out of the multitude of other mmo's I personally play including 3 other pwe games and 2 other cryptic games.

Unknown · September 2015

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fogtripper · September 2015

dufisto said:

fogtripper said:

dufisto said:
just limit friend requests to 20 an hour. problem solved.
Why that many? Hell, I would be fine with 1 per day.
1 per day is very restrictive. perhaps i want to friend a group i was running with.

If that group wanted to be friends, they could befriend YOU. Each would be using one friend request.

Suggestion to Fight Spammer Friend Invites

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