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[PS4] Changes to Combat Gold Spammers
strumslinger
Member, NW_CrypticDev, Cryptic Developer Posts: 1,724Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Well met, adventurers,
We’re aware of the frustration that spammers in Protector’s Enclave are causing, which is highly intrusive during gameplay. Due to this, we implemented some changes to Neverwinter on PlayStation®4 that will make it more difficult for spammers to function and harass legitimate players. While we can’t share the specifics of these changes, all characters will be subject to the following restrictions until you have progressed a certain amount in the main quests:
- No ability to use the AD Exchange
- No ability to perform in-person trades
- No ability to mail items or receive items from other players via mail
- No ability to use zone chat
- No ability to use “Say” in static zones
- Limited use of the auction house to values between 1 and 1000 AD.
We’d like to note that these barriers of entry are quite low, meaning you’ll only need to play for a few hours before being able to perform the functions stated above. This is to ensure legitimate players are affected as little as possible with these changes.
We’re also currently in the process of evaluating the rules we set - whether by tweaking, adding, or removing - in order to provide a smoother experience for new players while blocking gold spammers. We’ll monitor the results of these new changes in the coming days to judge whether they need adjusting.
Characters that were created before 8/25 at 8AM PT will not be affected by these rules in order to avoid any confusion.
Lastly, if you see these spammers in-game at any time, do NOT contact or purchase from them. Doing so puts your account security at risk in addition to other players. Astral Diamonds sold by these sites are often acquired by compromising another player’s account, or even yours! These sites are not condoned by any member of the Cryptic Studios and Perfect World Entertainment team.
We thank you for continuing to support Neverwinter and wish for your future adventures to stray clear from any evil magic.
- The Neverwinter team
Moderator Update:
To unlock trading, auction house, and other social functions, one must have completed any five of the following quest chains on any one character on the account. Once unlocked on any one character, all characters will be unrestricted.
Chain: Return of the Crown
Quests to complete:
The Trail of the Crown
Cornering Karzov
Chain: The Tower District
Quests to complete:
Returning the Pain
Fists of the Warband
Into the Cloak Tower
Chain: The Plague Tower
Quests to complete:
Troubled Times
The Plague Tower
Chain: Blackdagger Ruins
Quests to complete:
The Sea Caves
Bloodying the Bandits
Grimstorm Keep
Chain: Neverdeath
Quests to complete:
Dragon Attack
Opening the Way
The Clockwork Tomb
Chain: Helm's Hold
Quests to complete:
The Underscar
The Being from Beyond
The Sanatorium
As soon as Module 10 hits the PS4 in October, one will be able to see much more easier in game these required quests as they will all be displayed in the new Campaign Layout screens and menus.
We’re aware of the frustration that spammers in Protector’s Enclave are causing, which is highly intrusive during gameplay. Due to this, we implemented some changes to Neverwinter on PlayStation®4 that will make it more difficult for spammers to function and harass legitimate players. While we can’t share the specifics of these changes, all characters will be subject to the following restrictions until you have progressed a certain amount in the main quests:
- No ability to use the AD Exchange
- No ability to perform in-person trades
- No ability to mail items or receive items from other players via mail
- No ability to use zone chat
- No ability to use “Say” in static zones
- Limited use of the auction house to values between 1 and 1000 AD.
We’d like to note that these barriers of entry are quite low, meaning you’ll only need to play for a few hours before being able to perform the functions stated above. This is to ensure legitimate players are affected as little as possible with these changes.
We’re also currently in the process of evaluating the rules we set - whether by tweaking, adding, or removing - in order to provide a smoother experience for new players while blocking gold spammers. We’ll monitor the results of these new changes in the coming days to judge whether they need adjusting.
Characters that were created before 8/25 at 8AM PT will not be affected by these rules in order to avoid any confusion.
Lastly, if you see these spammers in-game at any time, do NOT contact or purchase from them. Doing so puts your account security at risk in addition to other players. Astral Diamonds sold by these sites are often acquired by compromising another player’s account, or even yours! These sites are not condoned by any member of the Cryptic Studios and Perfect World Entertainment team.
We thank you for continuing to support Neverwinter and wish for your future adventures to stray clear from any evil magic.
- The Neverwinter team
Moderator Update:
To unlock trading, auction house, and other social functions, one must have completed any five of the following quest chains on any one character on the account. Once unlocked on any one character, all characters will be unrestricted.
Chain: Return of the Crown
Quests to complete:
The Trail of the Crown
Cornering Karzov
Chain: The Tower District
Quests to complete:
Returning the Pain
Fists of the Warband
Into the Cloak Tower
Chain: The Plague Tower
Quests to complete:
Troubled Times
The Plague Tower
Chain: Blackdagger Ruins
Quests to complete:
The Sea Caves
Bloodying the Bandits
Grimstorm Keep
Chain: Neverdeath
Quests to complete:
Dragon Attack
Opening the Way
The Clockwork Tomb
Chain: Helm's Hold
Quests to complete:
The Underscar
The Being from Beyond
The Sanatorium
As soon as Module 10 hits the PS4 in October, one will be able to see much more easier in game these required quests as they will all be displayed in the new Campaign Layout screens and menus.
Call me Andy (or Strum, or Spider-Man)!
Follow Neverwinter on Twitter: NeverwinterGame
Like Neverwinter on Facebook: Neverwinter
Follow me on Twitter: StrumSlinger
Post edited by zebular on
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Comments
a better fix is an easier report/block function.
FWIW, there's no such thing as a 100% effective measure. These are deterrents, nothing more. You aren't going to completely wipe them out but you can make it difficult on them to flourish.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
On topic I am glad you guys are working on this I report at least 2 a day when I play but I doupt this will stop them as very few people go to the forums and last time I checked the report from chat log function was not mentioned or in the instruction manual.
@strumslinger
It is not very hard to identify accounts sending spam messages or mails with machine learning algorithms. That's no longer "scary PhD stuff". It's easy for an average programmer to implement in a short amount of time. Google's open source TensorFlow is a perfect tool.
You can run messages through a machine learning filter far faster than even the best bot farm can make them and get a toon to PE. Given the nature of messages commonly seen, your accuracy would easily exceed 99% for a given message. Require say 5 spam messages to trigger an auto account ban, and the chance of a false positive is 0.001%. Combined with other indicators of a real player, the actual false positive rate can be far lower.
A similar machine learning algorithm can spot large, fishy transactions on the AH and flag them for manual review (not a good idea to auto-ban based on that in a first iteration).
PM me if you want to have a serious discussion. I use machine learning classifiers regularly in my job.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Edit: I Also have to say, it is one of the reason i started play in console these games, to avoid this kind of thing (Spam, Hack, RTM, etc.).
Knox's Irregulars
Your new system is simply terrible in thought and implementation. I googled everything I could think of and found nothing. I checked forums and Reddits, I have experienced friends who have been on since the PS4 conversion, none had a clue wtf was going on. I filed two tickets, only one got an answer and it came two days later. What really makes me salty is I bought in right off the bat. I saw that event that is running and thought it was the most genuinely fun event I'd ever seen in an mmo. If someone has paid in they SHOULD NOT BE SUBJECTED TO THESE LIMITS. I feel like these limitations have nothing to do with the gold farmer problem and everything to do with pressuring new players to buy in and purchase bag space because that is EXACTLY what is happening. You got your player base established, now you're squeezing the people they are bringing in. You're forcing the brand new players to sell everything for silver for the first several hours (possibly days) of game play. So that sweet piece of low level gear can't earn you even a tiny amount of AD when someone goes to deck out their new Alt. Likewise it's going to slowly eliminate that entire level pool of gear existing in the AH. If you want to stop farmers, track transactions and snuff them out, don't drop in a thinly veiled money grab and try to sell it to the people who are already paying you.
To unlock trading, auction house, and other social functions, one must have completed any five of the following quest chains on any one character on the account. Once unlocked on any one character, all characters will be unrestricted.
Chain: Return of the Crown
Quests to complete:
The Trail of the Crown
Cornering Karzov
Chain: The Tower District
Quests to complete:
Returning the Pain
Fists of the Warband
Into the Cloak Tower
Chain: The Plague Tower
Quests to complete:
Troubled Times
The Plague Tower
Chain: Blackdagger Ruins
Quests to complete:
The Sea Caves
Bloodying the Bandits
Grimstorm Keep
Chain: Neverdeath
Quests to complete:
Dragon Attack
Opening the Way
The Clockwork Tomb
Chain: Helm's Hold
Quests to complete:
The Underscar
The Being from Beyond
The Sanatorium
As soon as Module 10 hits the PS4 in October, one will be able to see much more easier in game these required quests as they will all be displayed in the new Campaign Layout screens and menus.
[ Support Center • Rules & Policies and Guidelines • ARC ToS • Guild Recruitment Guidelines | FR DM Since 1993 ]
I choose to believe that I'm helping the cause XD
I have completed three of the requested chain quests and claimed the rewards from campaign page. Reached lvl 20. But still I am locked out!
I am seeing indications that chat does not actually unlock without doing Blackdagger. I don't know if this is bugged, or intended that doing the earliest three is insufficient.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Your exactly right, as soon as I complated the Black Dagger Ruins everything unlocked for me
How about we do some math? If there are 100 paying players putting 10 dollars a month in are complaining about a problem, It should take 1 person less than 1 week to solve the problem equalling in 1000 dollars in payment for jobs done. Now take 3 weeks off work to let the cash build back to 1000 then send someone in to address the problem. Now multiply it up by about 100 or 1000 and there should be a lot of time left over to fix any given problem.
Instead of setting restrictions on all players through a set it and forget it type of setup how about someone get off their lazy asses and come into the game once a week and MONITOR the chat box and delete and ban accounts as needed. Yes I have heard all of the excuses about what it takes to sign in and read the chat box, guess what I do it every day and it doesn't seem that hard? Now the implications of whats stated would suggest we want GM's to come play with us, NO just sit hidden in the enclave and READ the chat box, its not that hard to figure out who's spamming and who is not. This also can't be a job with a set day of the week for monitirong.
Another way is to take the crime stoppers method, pay people to participate in removing spammers instead of just blocking the player. I find the report player ability in neverwinter to be annoying and slow, you also can't report a group of people as there is a time limit between reporting.
I still think the cheapest and best option is to have a REAL person REALLY do something about spammers by sitting there and removing them as they come up. Take the guess work out of reviewing reports about spammers and having to investigate them, JUST SIT IN AND REMOVE THEM YOUYR SELF.
Tell me I am wrong here, You expect me to pay to play everyday, where is the hurt in expecting someone to fix/take care of problems every day? I pay a sub, there are rules about spamming, why am I seeing or needing to participate in a part of something that should be taken care of by the main followers/setters of the rules.
Normal players and new players suffer
Knox doesn't have quests; he's just sending me on crafting missions.
So, I try to submit a ticket, but the help function sends me on a wild goose chase (try it out for yourselves, no matter which button you press, it'll lead you back to square 1).
So, I tried to submit a bug report, and went thru another wild goose chase; can't even report a bug.
So, I tried submitting a ticket to the GM. I write in my subject, fill out the body, and can't even hit the "Submit" button.
TBH this last bit of deception is it for me. I don't think unlocking chat can make this game enjoyable anymore, especially now that I know what kind of bull HAMSTER the social aspects and Help function this game has to offer.
[ Support Center • Rules & Policies and Guidelines • ARC ToS • Guild Recruitment Guidelines | FR DM Since 1993 ]