Goldspammers.

fledmagician · March 2016

I don't know what to suggest, but more needs to be done to ban gold-spammers, the zone-chat is constantly full of them. To the point where it's basically unusable for anything else. Combined with goldspammers messages being horrible jumbles of nonsense characters (presumably to dodge the filter?) it makes the chat almost unreadable.

It's not just /zone either, it's in every chat window.

Given how big of a deal communication is in an MMO, something has to be done.

mamalion1234 · March 2016

i just dont give attention to it. THE best you can do.

looomis · March 2016

Dont use the channels where they occur.
I look at gold spammers from a different angle: When there are some, the game is alive. There was a time when the zone chat was empty.

rayrdan · March 2016

In the end every f2p game has spam of this kind...my brain kinda developed its own filter

fullmetalaricx · March 2016

just put a setting where we can put how many characters per chat we can see and on what channel
ex. if i put in max 40chars, any chat above 40 characters will be ignored on that channel

looomis · March 2016

fullmetalaricx said:
just put a setting where we can put how many characters per chat we can see and on what channel
ex. if i put in max 40chars, any chat above 40 characters will be ignored on that channel

If it could be solved this easily, it wouldn't be a problem. The only solution is already mentioned in this thread: don't use public channels.

minotaur2857 · March 2016

looomis said:

fullmetalaricx said:
just put a setting where we can put how many characters per chat we can see and on what channel
ex. if i put in max 40chars, any chat above 40 characters will be ignored on that channel
If it could be solved this easily, it wouldn't be a problem. The only solution is already mentioned in this thread: don't use public channels.

It could have been solved relatively easily, but would involve more detailed logging than they actually do to track the movement of stuff.

zebular · March 2016

Many folks think that solving goldspammer issues is an easy task, yet every MMO in existence has them. If it was as easy as many would like to believe or convey, then the problem would have been solved and spread through MMOs over the past twenty years of their existence. Sadly, just as MMOs find a way to combat them, the Goldspammers find new ways to get around any obstacles.

The best solutions that players can do are are:

1) Right-Click "Report Spam" on these folks in chat. This will not only place their @ handle in your ignore list, it will also create a ticket for the Game Masters as well as if enough folks report them this way, the system will silence them for 24+ hours.

2) Place Zone, LFG, and Trade in their own tab(s) apart from your Guild, Group, and Custom Channels and only tab to Zone, LFG, and Trade when you need to. Personally, I don't even have LFG or Trade on any tabs and Zone has it's own tab apart from any others.

Using both methods above, I rarely see spam unless I sit in Protector's Enclave with my Zone tab active and even then, 30 seconds of reporting them causes it to become an infrequent occurrence.

l0th4ri0 · March 2016

Goldspammers are easy to beat. All you need is a clientside filter for chat. If I could block any message in my client that had a dollar sign in it, all spam would vanish for me.

We had a thread about this a while ago.

regenerde · March 2016

As allready mentioned over and over again for years now...
+ a editable spam filter would be an easy solution
+ the profanity filter, that is allready in place, could be used as base
+ players could add keywords on their own to that new spam filter, if anything triggers the filter, it goes into a new chat channel/window

Instead of ingoring account after account, we would only have to edit the rules of the spam filter maybe once per day, and that would be it. And this was working as mod. from another player in WARHAMMER Online several years ago.
So, why can't that be done here too from the Devs?
With the Maze in game in a day, there should be some Dev time for this change.

And report spam does not help a bit.
+ AD seller create new accounts every minute, and they use a spam account mostly for 1 round
+ the more accounts you put on your ignore list, the slower your game gets. i have thousands of AD seller accounts on my ignore list, and i can't even empty it anymore. when i try, it nearly freezes the game down. don't believe me? go ahead and try it out for yourself...

Besides, even if you avoid the zone/say chat in PE, you might still see their advertisement in for example Neverdeath Graveyard from time to time.

joyousdeciever · March 2016

i agree not using zone lfg and trade channels when you do not need to is the best way to avoid spammers

arabatur · March 2016

I only have Guild and bespoke channels active, anything else is just an annoyance.

minotaur2857 · March 2016

Other games I've played have had far less of a problem, but you couldn't just create another meaningless free account in them.

What needs doing is to track the suspicious movement of ADs between accounts, and this needs a human or intelligent computer system. Something worthless on the AH for a million+ ADs. Check the buyer's account and see where the ADs came into it from, track them back to the source. Once you find the same one several times, ban the accounts with the enormous amounts of ADs in them.

To do this you need all the transactions to be logged.

wildfirede · March 2016

suggestion: limit so that only accounts who have purchased from the ZEN store or are max level can use public channels, i would suggest a limit to the number of things a account can post in the AH too.

regenerde · March 2016

They're allready doing that, but...
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1207160/updates-on-bans-suspensions-december-22-2015
looks like AD buyers only get a 3 days temp. ban.

Any level limitation won't work in the long run, they can level those characters to any level needed for their spamming...
And a limit to auctions won't hurt the AD sellers either, they just make more accounts.

wildfirede · March 2016

regenerde said:
They're allready doing that, but...
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1207160/updates-on-bans-suspensions-december-22-2015
looks like AD buyers only get a 3 days temp. ban.

Any level limitation won't work in the long run, they can level those characters to any level needed for their spamming...
And a limit to auctions won't hurt the AD sellers either, they just make more accounts.

Agree on that sadly, there are things that can and can't be managed and it pleases me that the ashm. lair was fixed for example in this patch (cheers to whoever fixed that).
Yes they will level a char but i naively think that banning a level 70 account hurts them more than banning a level 15.

On a side note - i would ban people buying from those sites for 30+ Days, not 3.
it's like -"Ok i need AD for next week - buy from some bot side on Friday - get a 3 day ban - have cheap AD on Monday and be ready to play"

hroya · March 2016

No market, no sales. None dynamic design caters suppliers.

fledmagician · March 2016

looomis said:
Dont use the channels where they occur.
I look at gold spammers from a different angle: When there are some, the game is alive. There was a time when the zone chat was empty.

So, any of them?

I've seen them in zone, LFG and /trade. Hell, I even got whispers from them today.

I wouldn't even mind so much if the messages were comprehensible, but the jumble they force into their sales pitch to get it past the filter makes each message take up twice as much room as it needs to.

regenerde · March 2016

Any server sided spam filter is just too slow, by the time they eventually update it, the AD sellers are allready spamming another message to get past it.

The only spam filter, that would actually work in this situation, would be one we could adjust on our own. As mentioned before, that would force the AD seller to rewrite every single spam message.
They might not run out of new accounts to spam, but they will run out of read-/understandable advertisement pretty quick...

l0th4ri0 · March 2016

regenerde said:

They might not run out of new accounts to spam, but they will run out of read-/understandable advertisement pretty quick...

It wouldn't even be THAT hard to get rid of them. They won't know what we are blocking, all the spam filters would be slightly different from each other as they would all be custom. The spammers wouldn't even bother trying to get past them all.

As I said before, just blocking the dollar sign would remove the spam.

rollingonit · March 2016

l0th4ri0 said:

It wouldn't even be THAT hard to get rid of them. They won't know what we are blocking, all the spam filters would be slightly different from each other as they would all be custom. The spammers wouldn't even bother trying to get past them all.

As I said before, just blocking the dollar sign would remove the spam.

It wouldnt take them long, to just change it to 10 USD/EUROS/YEN for etc etc etc. Then they could block USD, then the spammers say 10 MONIES for etc. And we go in a circle like this, like they already do, with botters/RMTS/spammers.

l0th4ri0 · March 2016

rollingonit said:

l0th4ri0 said:

It wouldn't even be THAT hard to get rid of them. They won't know what we are blocking, all the spam filters would be slightly different from each other as they would all be custom. The spammers wouldn't even bother trying to get past them all.

As I said before, just blocking the dollar sign would remove the spam.
It wouldnt take them long, to just change it to 10 USD/EUROS/YEN for etc etc etc. Then they could block USD, then the spammers say 10 MONIES for etc. And we go in a circle like this, like they already do, with botters/RMTS/spammers.

Again, think this through. They won't know what is getting blocked. They won't know what to change. The spammers will be completely in the dark, not knowing if any of their spam is getting through. Stop assuming that spam is inevitable and think about it for a second.

rollingonit · March 2016

l0th4ri0 said:

Again, think this through. They won't know what is getting blocked. They won't know what to change. The spammers will be completely in the dark, not knowing if any of their spam is getting through. Stop assuming that spam is inevitable and think about it for a second.

Sorry loth, missed the clientside word.

regenerde · March 2016

That would be the point, they can still handle the profanity filter on the server side, but give us control over a spam filter on the client side. Add to that an ignore list, that we could empty with a single click once in a while, or an ignore list that we could separate into tabs like
AD seller - regular spammer - [censored] spammer
which would also help us a bit... and all this needs, would be some Dev time to get it done.

rowdydwarf · March 2016

Cryptic should pay people to set in Protector's Enclave for 15 minutes to a 1/2 hour at a time and just ban all the spammers that come up.

regenerde · March 2016

If they want to hurt the AD sellers, then they should start banning their mindless worker drones in the instances first...
If something like that would happen every day, and they would actually ban more then just a few of those bots, then that would be a good start.
That might even take some stress from the server in return...

But to keep the chat clean, we really need a client side spam filter, we can adjust on our own.

eldeskal · March 2016

A few responses to the suggestions above:
* Banning the spammers can't work. The problem is that, just as they have automated parts of the game, they can automate account creation. There is very likely no human player sitting behind those messages.
* Requiring a particular level to use public channels doesn't work, as simply invoking will level a character up to 70 in a short while without ever playing the game. You could perhaps require some endlessly grindy hard-to-automate series of tasks (vigilence tasks?) but then noobs can't get help when they need it.
* @l0th4ri0 has the only feasible solution for the spam itself: distributed, organic, client-side filtering. It offers everything you want from a security solution: no feedback to the bad actor, no ability to predict (or learn) what will get through, organically adaptive in an asynchronous manner.
* Just filtering the spam messages doesn't solve the whole problem, though. There are people using these services, so they continue to impact the economy, which inevitably leads the Cryptic team to make gameplay miserable while trying to counteract it. l0th4ri0's filter concept only works for people who don't want to take advantage of the goldsellers; Cryptic's aim is to also prevent those that want to buy from goldsellers, hence we will not see client-side filtering.

l0th4ri0 · March 2016

I'm pretty sure we won't see clientside filtering either. My reason to believe this has nothing to do with the feasiblity of the filter idea, however. It would work. But not gonna happen.

Just remember this, guys. The next time someone says that spam is inevitable and you should just live with it. Turn off all the chat channels, or whatever... there really IS a solution, and it is easy as hell. Try not to get frustrated the next time you are in PE and the chat window is 90% spam. Remember that you really didn't need to see any of it.

This could have been different.

regenerde · March 2016

eldeskal said:

...
* Just filtering the spam messages doesn't solve the whole problem, though. There are people using these services, so they continue to impact the economy, which inevitably leads the Cryptic team to make gameplay miserable while trying to counteract it. l0th4ri0's filter concept only works for people who don't want to take advantage of the goldsellers; Cryptic's aim is to also prevent those that want to buy from goldsellers, hence we will not see client-side filtering.

And there's a solution for that problem too, the AD from the third party web page purchase will be deleted, and the item that was sold will be restored to the player in return.

Not to mention, a client sided spam filter doesn't has to mean the end of any server sided spam filter. Cryptic can still continue to filter on their end, and we could at last keep our chat really clean.

rollingonit · March 2016

Just gonna leave this here.

Patch notes for another game just recently released.
Chat Filtering has been added.
Players will be able to access the new personal chat filter via the ESC menu. This menu will allow you to register words you want filtered from chat.
Filtered words can be up to 50 character long.
The chat filter is literal, not case sensitive and does not support wildcards.
Any chat entry containing the filtered word will not be displayed in your chat window.

Been 3 years, your competitor implements in less than 3 months.... Sigh... It's not like the clientside filter wasn't suggested years ago either....

scathias · March 2016

there have been entire discussions on these forums about why this idea is stupid for NW. Please go read them and educate yourself.

Goldspammers.

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