new way to combat bots / spammers

demonmonger · October 2016

Are you tired of seeing gold spammed in pe?

Are you fed up with bots running around in game?

Well I am!

Here is my suggestion to slow their roll.

1) upon saying the same phrase 3 times, without moving your character between comments.

Your character will get a pop up box and be muted until the box up box puzzle is complete.

Failure to complete the puzzle will give the player an instant disconnection from server blocking the computer from connecting for 30 minutes on first offense.

Second offense will be disconnection plus 72 hour pc ban from game.

Third offense will be 999 day ban from pc connecting to the game plus account deletion.

(To be continued)

sockmunkey · October 2016

So then they will just spam once or twice and rotate to another one of their thousands of accounts. This will solve nothing.

oldbaldyone · October 2016

The only way to beat spammers really is to dedicate humans to it. Get some volunteers that can be trusted to be able to mute accounts in game. Mutes last 24 hours for the first time, longer for the next times. Obviously some review process would be required - maybe customer support could do that if they file a ticket and they can see in the logs what was said the previous 30 mins they were in game before mute/ban.

You combine that, with the current in game preventions in place (need to complete quests, etc), and eventually you'll make progress. Yes, they can create accounts pretty fast, but some dedicated people should be able to create them faster.

I don't think you'd have a hard time finding volunteers.

ironzerg79 · October 2016

oldbaldyone said:
The only way to beat spammers really is to dedicate humans to it. Get some volunteers that can be trusted to be able to mute accounts in game.

This won't do anything, either. They'll just log on to another account and keep spamming away.

And why waste the time? So what if it makes /zone unusable in PE? Is it really that big of a deal that we want Cryptic (who's obviously already strapped for manpower) to spend more money to hire or monitor a system of people that just sits there and mutes gold-spammers?

They have enough on their plates already. This is just a waste of time.

ecrana · October 2016

ironzerg79 said:
This is just a waste of time.

Agreed. They need to focus on fixing this game. I still don't see why the spam annoys people so much. Ignore it. Turn off zone chat in PE. Honestly, how much time are some of you spending in PE anyway? The way people complain it seems as if you are sitting around PE for hours being bombarded by spam.

Yes, the spam is annoying. But in the grand of scheme of things it's such a minor issue when compared to everything else that's actually broken in game.

reg1981 · October 2016

ironzerg79 said:

oldbaldyone said:
The only way to beat spammers really is to dedicate humans to it. Get some volunteers that can be trusted to be able to mute accounts in game.
This won't do anything, either. They'll just log on to another account and keep spamming away.

And why waste the time? So what if it makes /zone unusable in PE? Is it really that big of a deal that we want Cryptic (who's obviously already strapped for manpower) to spend more money to hire or monitor a system of people that just sits there and mutes gold-spammers?

They have enough on their plates already. This is just a waste of time.

+1

I've just adapted to tune them out. Sure it sucks that zone chat is unusable but come on, most are just trolling in there anyways. The in game mails are now like many other things, on auto pilot to report spam -> ok.

I see them in game all the time, report some can't be bothered on others. But they do not bother me in game either while they run around.

It's kinda like the question "Can we co-exist with this alien life form"? Beginning to seem like we must and I can deal with that. Main thing is don't buy 3rd party. Made that mistake in the past, have the ban record to prove it and learned my lesson.

You want to progress quicker for cheap? Get a mount that has wanderers fortune, use dragon hoards and other utility enchants that help you progress. You'd be surprised how quick you can pile up some RP with the right stones in there!

What is needed to ebb this flow is a deterant to keep people from buying. First offense, slap on the wrist 3 days. Second offense, bye bye. And make it very clear at first offense that next time it's account deletion. Or make it bye bye on first offense and make that very clear to all players IN GAME not on the forums. Make sure there is no way that someone doesn't know they are toast if caught.

demonmonger · October 2016

We can monitor bots for them.

Cms can cycle through game and ban bots...

silverkelt · October 2016

I dont understand, why anyone even cares, gold sellers moving into mmos like 15 years ago.. I just ignore them.

I ignore when I get mail, when they send me messages, when I see them spam.

None of it matters to me one wit.. who cares. Ignore it, they will be in every mmo you will play.

oldbaldyone · October 2016

I just avoid PE and that seems to fix the issue for me. I was just stating a possible route

They definitely have bigger issues.

plasticbat · October 2016

Whatever measure you want to spend time/effort to filter/ban/mess up chat spam, they can defeat them with a few minutes of coding.

Posting the same message triggers something? Just post 3 slightly different posts.
Posting without moving character triggers something? Just move the character once a while.

Unknown · October 2016

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aradyn · October 2016

Sadly it just comes down to the right coding. I have been on games before that combated the issue by blocking multiple items IP Addresses, MAC address, and banning the account after someone was truly caught. This meant spammers & bots had to have floating IPs, be able to change their MAC address, and create a new account after they got caught spamming...too costly to bot at that point. Here it seems they just take the lazy approach of banning the account.

plasticbat · October 2016

aradyn#0871 said:
Sadly it just comes down to the right coding. I have been on games before that combated the issue by blocking multiple items IP Addresses, MAC address, and banning the account after someone was truly caught. This meant spammers & bots had to have floating IPs, be able to change their MAC address, and create a new account after they got caught spamming...too costly to bot at that point. Here it seems they just take the lazy approach of banning the account.

Unless you are talking about banning the whole ISP subnet (say comcast), you cannot just ban IP these days. In yesteryear, may be. Today, you can't. One can easily change mac address and get a new dynamic IP address. It is not hard at all. I could do that 10 years ago casually. Certainly, people can do it today. It is not costly at all. Changing MAC address, IP, creating new account is part of the programming (they don't need to write new code) and is being used now against any game provider. That is why nobody is talking about banning IP anymore. Nobody is using a dedicated static IP to do any of this.

e.g. let say I am using an ISP (say comcast), I use IP address 10.10.10.10. I change to 10.10.10.11. NW banned 10.10.10.10. Joe user also uses my ISP and he picks up 10.10.10.10. He would be banned. For one person, may be, oh well. But, I keep on changing IP. Eventually, 10.10.10.* will be all banned. That does not make sense these days. I was using 10.10.10.* as a simple example. These days, you can get a dynamic IP from different subnet of the same ISP. That is I can get 10.10.10.10 today and get 10.11.11.11 in the next round.

plasticbat · October 2016

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sockmunkey · October 2016

aradyn#0871 said:
Sadly it just comes down to the right coding. I have been on games before that combated the issue by blocking multiple items IP Addresses, MAC address, and banning the account after someone was truly caught. This meant spammers & bots had to have floating IPs, be able to change their MAC address, and create a new account after they got caught spamming...too costly to bot at that point. Here it seems they just take the lazy approach of banning the account.

It costs them nothing to make an account, all they need is an email. So banning is completely worthless. There might of been a way to slow them down at account creation. But at this point its far too late, they have thousands of accounts. As it is, their shout bots are completely disposable. They only shout once, maybe twice, and are gone forever. We don't need to ban them, they ban themselves, while bringing up the next bot.

It's why even ignoring them is useless, the ones you ignored yesterday, wont be the ones you ignore today. And this is even with the new restrictions in place that prevent use of zone until you complete certain content. Think about it, they can get characters to level 15, and past all the various gateways. So fast, and so effectively, that they still have no issue with completely, one and done, disposable shout bots. They laugh at the idea of banning, it's built into their entire business model.

There are only two ways to stop them. Make creating accounts far to expensive to make a profit. Something not likely to happen in a F2P game. Or you cut them off from their buyers. Either by making it so risky and dangerous to purchase from them. Or offer a legit, competitive, alternative. So that players wont even feel the need, or want, to even entertain the idea of buying from them. And with the direction the game is gone, that is less likely then ever.

kreatyve · October 2016

Maybe have your guilds do a "Spam reporting" event. Gather your guildies up, take an hour or even half an hour, stand in PE and report as many spammers as you can. A whole bunch of reports on the same accounts will get CS on it quicker, I think.

hawkeyel · October 2016

I think they have come up with the best plan yet to get the bots out of this game. You kill the game you kill the bots . Problem solved.

demonmonger · October 2016

Sounds good... time to test it out

jarecord03 · October 2016

The identifying difference in bots is there speed. if they are so efficient at getting to lvl 15 etc. target this and halt they're exp for 24 hrs for 'suspected botting'. False positives should be low if they are so good. what do you think?

plasticbat · October 2016

First, they need to define what is 'fast'. An hour? 2 hours? 30 minutes?
Normal experience player can bring up an alt fast too.
Bot does not feel anything for waiting. So, waiting for 24 hours will not bother them. They can wait for a day or even a week.
It only bothers normal player.

demonmonger · October 2016

We have to find ways to take our game back without hindering normal players.

muramune99 · October 2016

If Cryptic is smart, they would just make a system in-game that allows RMT, but then would take a cut of the profits. With this, they can reduce the price of items in the ZEN store to benefit players. That or allow players to directly sell items directly for AD or ZEN (it doesn't even have to be very much).

I say this because players will always find ways for bots to outmaneuver changes and reports. Plus, it will clear up the chats.

plasticbat · October 2016

muramune99#1335 said:
If Cryptic is smart, they would just make a system in-game that allows RMT, but then would take a cut of the profits. With this, they can reduce the price of items in the ZEN store to benefit players. That or allow players to directly sell items directly for AD or ZEN (it doesn't even have to be very much).

I say this because players will always find ways for bots to outmaneuver changes and reports. Plus, it will clear up the chats.

The bot does not want AD or Zen. They want $. Player can sell stuff in AH to get AD.

Unknown · October 2016

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sandukutupu · November 2016

I feel as if I am shouting into the wind ... a lot. My solution and others are not for developers but for the players. I posted them many times and people continue to ignore the subject.

My Solution - When I am in PE I hide the chat box using one keystroke. Oddly STO and CO (prior Cryptic games allowed this) and used a minimize button.

Dr. Tomoko's Solution - He created Rezone chat, although he left the game, all you need to do is kill your Zone chat, Join Rezone channel and save. Zone ends up being left to the spammy bots and their pointless ads.

Also if you are bothered by spam mail and PM's -- >> My Solution << --

I don't know, I think I hear a massive echo. Am I being heard? Is this thing on?

macaran5123 · November 2016

Only thing I want is to be able to automatically ignore any message the fits a user-generated regular expression. Seems most of the gold spam uses lots of non-alphabetic characters to get past server-side filters. Just let me ignore ( .*((\\.*|/.*)*){2,100}.* | .*([a-Z]*[1-9]+[a-Z]+){2,100}.* ) and I'd be happy. Sure I might catch a few "legitimate" messages with that, but honestly if you want to talk in leet speak I probably don't want to see your message anyway. O.o

beckylunatic · November 2016

ecrana#2080 said:
I still don't see why the spam annoys people so much. Ignore it.

Anyone who is so much bothered by goldseller spam that it upsets them and ruins everything, I'd really like to know how you manage to tolerate living in the world with all the advertising. Existing must be terribly painful.

nameexpired · November 2016

macaran5123 said:
Only thing I want is to be able to automatically ignore any message the fits a user-generated regular expression. Seems most of the gold spam uses lots of non-alphabetic characters to get past server-side filters. Just let me ignore ( .*((\\.*|/.*)*){2,100}.* | .*([a-Z]*[1-9]+[a-Z]+){2,100}.* ) and I'd be happy. Sure I might catch a few "legitimate" messages with that, but honestly if you want to talk in leet speak I probably don't want to see your message anyway. O.o

Yes, one of the many problems in this area is the general filter.
If we could make our own simple filters (or preferably regex) the spammers would not know what is blocked. In the way the system currently works Cryptic provides the gold sellers with a nice testing environment.

Unknown · November 2016

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beckylunatic · November 2016

magenubbie said:

beckylunatic said:

ecrana#2080 said:
I still don't see why the spam annoys people so much. Ignore it.
Anyone who is so much bothered by goldseller spam that it upsets them and ruins everything, I'd really like to know how you manage to tolerate living in the world with all the advertising. Existing must be terribly painful.
Easy. Proper ad-blockers, no TV and watching what you'd usually watch on TV using.. downloads. If there's one thing I find annoying and something that should be illegal it's advertising in it's current form on this planet. I don't like being lied to. The closest thing to an ad I've been in years have been larger price prints in the stores. Or perhaps the video suggestions on youtube with no browsing history for them to read.

That said, I just don't use /zone chat in PE. Problem solved.

Your own media management can only go so far, unless you literally never go out in public. There are billboards, ads on all public transit properties (buses, benches, shelters, stations), store signage. Ads everywhere.

Don't get me wrong, I think the modern advertising environment is outrageous and invasive and I do wish it wasn't like the way it is, but... I dunno, brains just learn to filter a lot of it out. And I find the game experience about the same. Broadcast spam in zone chat is just background chatter to tune out.

aradyn · November 2016

It's not even the gold seller bots that bother me. It's the public queue bots that take over dungeons and skirmishes and hold them hostage that drive me insane. Sure I can always go private queue, but that shouldn't be forced. If you can kill off bot power to harvest, then you can do much more damage to them.

new way to combat bots / spammers

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