Gold sellers

centur1an · October 2013

Hey

Love the game and cant wait to try the new ranger however

Logging on and having to ban over 129 ids per day because of spamming is getting boring

i've submitted tickets, asked questions but never do I get a response from Cryptic,

Can the Moderators please or perhaps the Customer service team perhaps do something major about the gold sellers,

Seems there is only 2 main ones spamming

******* and PVP Bank

cant we get these sites banned or (if I had my way DDOS)

* EDIT seems I cant post the websites here so took away the second part

arontimes · October 2013

The best way to fight them is to simply not buy from them. When nobody buys from gold sellers (or any other store that sells illicit goods, virtual or physical), they won't have a reason to exist. The fact that they exist means that there are people who patronize their services.

On Cryptic's side, they can ban those who buy from gold sellers as well as the gold sellers themselves. However, this is an F2P game where it costs nothing to create a new account, so it's an endless cat and mouse game.

krisst0f · October 2013

They SURELY act against Cryptic ToS tho....

bluedarky · October 2013

krisst0f wrote: »

They SURELY act against Cryptic ToS tho....

As Arontimes said, it's a constant cat and mouse game because as fast as they ban the accounts another is made to replace it, Cryptic needs to find a balance between making it unprofitable for Gold Sellers without making it unfun for regular players.

It's difficult to balance this without resorting to measures like IP bans and the like, which are completely useless anyway.

fondlez · October 2013

They should have used the new Module to shake up the new player system to be more like Tera, so that new players are not dumped into the middle of town/cities the second they finish the initial tutorial. Instead, they would need to complete something like Blacklake District before being able to get to town.

That would be unlilkely to eliminate gold spam entirely (*), but it would make the effect of gold spammer bans be greatly more inconvenient.

(*) In truth, I have NO idea how the heck Tera manages it so well given they don't even get gold spam in their starter zone! It cannot be due to their 25GB download because they used to have even more spam than Neverwinter during their beta...

eldarth · October 2013

It's okay though -- that one that does the major amount of entries in the chatroom - has an anti-spam policy right on their FAQ/about the company. So, those all must be non-spam chats you are seeing.
[/sarcasm]

I think Cryptic/PWE could place a HUGE dent/detriment in the speed at which "new" accounts are created by implementing a Turing-Test/Captcha mechanism to ensure that ALL registrations are done by humans and not script bots. If it takes them 5 minutes to manually create an account it would rapidly become unworthy of the effort when they get 33-lines of spam in before they are banned.

dndmasterdark · October 2013

DDOSing people is completely illegal in most places as far as I know.
Not a good way to combat "criminals" is to become one yourself.

khimera906 · October 2013

Having a limit of 10 characters (just an example) per message before you reach level 20 (also an example) might help. I know other games that have similar restrictions and it seems that it works there.

dndmasterdark · October 2013

IMO the best way to solve this problem would be to hire 1 staff agent to run instance to instance insta-banning the spammers on the spot, also could insta ban pvp bots if he has extra time. There is no possible way they could keep up to even 1 person insta banning people like this for gold spam and pvp botting. Pay him $10.00 an hour or more to sit in a chair clicking "ban this guy for spamming gold selling" all day for 8 hour shifts. Easy work and to fund his pay sell a companion called "The Bot Hammer" a purple companion that slams his hammer down and crushes anything in his path. I bet ya alot of these companions would sell...tons...

Fixed.
BTW I am looking for an extra job.

P.S. To further slow the sellers down, just ip ban them or modem ban them. Modem banning is way more effective than IP bans.

Why they do not do this...boggles me. Except maybe one reason.

jintortle · October 2013

Also If you do not need general chat - make a Custom Chat channel - Join a Talkative Guild and spend your time their. Although some Zones are fun and not really much spam outside of PE!

chaelk · October 2013

fondlez wrote: »

They should have used the new Module to shake up the new player system to be more like Tera, so that new players are not dumped into the middle of town/cities the second they finish the initial tutorial. Instead, they would need to complete something like Blacklake District before being able to get to town.

That would be unlilkely to eliminate gold spam entirely (*), but it would make the effect of gold spammer bans be greatly more inconvenient.

(*) In truth, I have NO idea how the heck Tera manages it so well given they don't even get player spam in their starter zone! It cannot be due to their 25GB download because they used to have even more spam than Neverwinter during their beta...

I beleive you can't actually chat on tera for a certain time after you start. I created a character and went to answer someones question and found that I wasn't able to use chat becasue I was new.

On champions, for silver accts(F2P) its 20 hrs of gameplay before you can use chat. NO PM,s no zone, no mail, no friend requests.

ausdoerrt · October 2013

Well, the number of gold spammers speaks to the popularity of the game ^__^

Though perhaps it's a good time to start talking about introducing level-based chat restrictions. Like having to run a certain quest or reach a certain level before granting players the ability to post in zone chat in PE.

marricus · October 2013

chaelk wrote: »

I beleive you can't actually chat on tera for a certain time after you start. I created a character and went to answer someones question and found that I wasn't able to use chat becasue I was new.

On champions, for silver accts(F2P) its 20 hrs of gameplay before you can use chat. NO PM,s no zone, no mail, no friend requests.

Like that idea. Although it might be frustrating for new players trying to figure things out. People are inherently lazy and do not do much research before entering F2P games.

As for banning etc. Insta account band people as soon as they see 50 people reporting would be a solution. Although I can see that getting abused

Banning people found to have received items/gold/AD from these companies might not be palatable to Cryptic. It is probably the very same people that also buy Zen and items from the official store/site. People actually willing to spend money on the game. The ones effectively paying their salaries etc.

yokihiro · October 2013

Those spam in PE's zone chat has gotten completely out of control. At least every minute a new account spams. I click all the time on report, next one just posts the same message with a different account. I doubt that anyone really buys from them, their texts have become so cryptic (with all the \\//\\// and (..()..//\\//\\) that only die-hard players that know this spam-site from other MMO spams already will understand what they want to tell you anyway. I think they just spam to spam now. Obviously the scripts they have written are running so easily through the registration process that it hardly costs them a lot of time to let the spam running all day and night.

The only solutions would be captachs and restrictions. Better captchas during registration process with shifting input fields and different names for the input fields every time, captchas in game to start a chat (valid for the next 5 hours) and chats channels separated by level. Like chat channel 1-10, 11-20 and so forth so that lvl 60s can mute all channels but the lvl 51-60).

thraexis · October 2013

Here is another idea, i will post it here instead of making a new post.

---
turn moonstone island into a noobie island
limit chat range to the moonstone island
dont allow players to leave the noobie island
until they finish all quest leading up to level 15

Limit text length to 35 or 40 spaces
level requirement to use trade and lfg channel
at level 16.

eldarth · October 2013

dndmasterdark wrote: »

IMO the best way to solve this problem would be to hire 1 staff agent to run instance to instance insta-banning the spammers on the spot, also could insta ban pvp bots if he has extra time. There is no possible way they could keep up to even 1 person insta banning people like this for gold spam and pvp botting. Pay him $10.00 an hour or more to sit in a chair clicking "ban this guy for spamming gold selling" all day for 8 hour shifts. Easy work and to fund his pay sell a companion called "The Bot Hammer" a purple companion that slams his hammer down and crushes anything in his path. I bet ya alot of these companions would sell...tons...

Fixed.
BTW I am looking for an extra job.

P.S. To further slow the sellers down, just ip ban them or modem ban them. Modem banning is way more effective than IP bans.

Why they do not do this...boggles me. Except maybe one reason.

1. It only takes 5 people to report-spam on a gold spammer -- do you really think 1 person hired to watch multiple instances would be faster than that? Not likely. Even if they paid 1 person for each instance -- that's what a dozen in PE, another half dozen in each zone, so perhaps an extra hundred people to sit and watch each instance when there are already hundreds of players right-clicking and reporting spammers in each instance already.
2. There is no "Modem banning" -- TCP/IP protocol does not have any modem identification involved so this is impossible.

yokihiro · October 2013

eldarth wrote: »

1. It only takes 5 people to report-spam on a gold spammer -- do you really think 1 person hired to watch multiple instances would be faster than that? Not likely. Even if they paid 1 person for each instance -- that's what a dozen in PE, another half dozen in each zone, so perhaps an extra hundred people to sit and watch each instance when there are already hundreds of players right-clicking and reporting spammers in each instance already.

You only ban accounts by reporting. A GM that can check the chat channel could easily copy the whole textline and block it. Then they would need to change it every 1 minute for the next post. But with scripts they would do that of course as well, but then they could no spam their "come on baby" 1000 times a day in the exact same way.

stormdrag0n · October 2013

I just wish they would set filters in place that auto banned word combos Also "Lets get moving" must have some other significance in Chinese than it has in english as it makes no sense in the context they use it.

stercogburn · November 2013

This issue is now starting to drive me mental when I'm in PE. Its getting really difficult to see actual chatter in the zone because its flying off the screen so fast. It also makes trying to use zone chat quite redundant at times.

Needs addressed. Fast.

melodywhr · November 2013

hmm... you can have your opinions about the simplicity or the difficulty in battling gold spam in zone chat. but unless you're actually part of the group that is responsible for it within this company, all you have is conjecture.

gold spammers have been a problem for mmos for forever. now you can believe that or choose to ignore that fact, but it is a fact. try doing a google search for 'gold spammers' and see what you get.

then you can apply that to what you know about how gold spammers in neverwinter have had to change their tactics over time. everything from being limited to three lines of spam to having to use special characters to try to spell out their URLs...

gold spammers will always be around trying to drum up business as long as there are people willing to buy from them. sad but true.

jartril · November 2013

I looked for a proper place to post this but found none so here goes.

To the Devs:
Is there a way to block excessive use of non-letter characters that the Gold Spammers use to flood the chatlogs with?

Sure we can just report them for spam and put on ignore but for every one you do, three new spammers pop up. They really make it hard to follow conversations in the game.

The use of \/\/ for W's and <> for O's should be a target, also using ' excessively are give a ways for spammers.

I know you do your best to keep them out (at least I hope so) but getting six to twelve Gold spammers in a manner of minutes HAS to be dealt with.

Thank you

ulkaur · November 2013

As i said before, include the level of the player in the chat box, and allow players to choose in their chat options panel to disallow specific levels of chat.

This is not the tiered chat system, similar to that of EQ2.

What I am talking about is I could have levels 23-50 enabled, someone else might have 17-50 enabled and someone else might have 1-50 enabled. i just want someone to have to work harder to annoy me. They get to do it for free currently, with seemingly no effort.

Scripts will allow someone to quickly create an account but a script will not level a bot to 23 to get past my filter easily. And guess what? If I can't read their chat, they don't exist to me.

ordensmarschall · November 2013

That Gold Spammers are part of the MMO scene is true, and it is difficult to combat them, but it can be done. The amount of spam they create in the zone chat is ridiculous. I have never seen that amount in any MMO I have played. I have actually seen their messages overlap each other. Cryptic really needs to do something about it. Prior to the merge they were a nuisance, now they are a problem. Unfortunately people must be purchasing from them or else they would not bombard the chat system the way they do. I find it hard to believe that anyone would be stupid enough to purchase from them. Until players become smart enough to stay from them, which I am afraid will never happen, Cryptic will have to step in. Reporting them as spam is seemingly ineffective as they post with the same speed all the time.

dndmasterdark · November 2013

The first thing this makes people think when they see it, is that Cryptic either is in on this or just lets it happen not caring. I am not saying this is the case at all. Just saying you need to fix this as it drives people away from your game, probably losing alot of money on this one Cryptic. If you keep ignoring it, you let them ruin your game. Your choice.

This is probably why I we all see level 10-15 players join Guilds NEVER to see them again. :rolleyes:

On a side note I am sure if you buy 1 million gold your account is flagged and banned possibly? Definately should be but still I guess the spam is the issue here. Anyone willing to admit they have received 1 million gold and still have it ingame?

augustus888 · November 2013

Cryptic just need to make it harder to automate the Account Creation process. Reduce the spammers access to fresh accounts and Ignores will be more effective.

dndmasterdark · November 2013

augustus888 wrote: »

Cryptic just need to make it harder to automate the Account Creation process. Reduce the spammers access to fresh accounts and Ignores will be more effective.

I wonder what happens when the handles that are ignored get removed / banned. Does not look like the ignore is removed from your list, So I suppose when someone else makes the new handle that a gold spammer has used you automatically have them ignored?

augustus888 · November 2013

dndmasterdark wrote: »

I wonder what happens when the handles that are ignored get removed / banned. Does not look like the ignore is removed from your list, So I suppose when someone else makes the new handle that a gold spammer has used you automatically have them ignored?

Sounds like something else they need to fix.

heavymet4l · November 2013

You guys all look in wrong direction, real solution should stop methods that goldsellers are using to deliver gold.
Atm they all ask "customer" to place some item like potion for sale on AH with buyout of million.. You can even look in AH who is buying gold from them.
Change that all items should have maximum and min price, ie simple potion max 10k, some trash gear 50k... they will lose ability to deliver AD.

drbaals · November 2013

heavymet4l wrote: »

You guys all look in wrong direction, real solution should stop methods that goldsellers are using to deliver gold.
Atm they all ask "customer" to place some item like potion for sale on AH with buyout of million.. You can even look in AH who is buying gold from them.
Change that all items should have maximum and min price, ie simple potion max 10k, some trash gear 50k... they will lose ability to deliver AD.

Oh really thats your great idea how to combat gold sellers. All it takes then is 20 pieces of trash gear to get a million. What are you going to do then reduce that max to lower level. Pretty soon its not technically a AH that the players set the prices its all done by the devs. Which changes it from an AH to a player vender store. Which would make more people quit the game faster then they already are.

I still cant figure out why the devs are not combating this more then they do now. It really effects thier money income when a gold seller beats them down like this.

I play swtoor and i dont see the gold spammers in that game? Its f2p also so making accounts isnt different then this game.

heavymet4l · November 2013

drbaals wrote: »

Oh really thats your great idea how to combat gold sellers. All it takes then is 20 pieces of trash gear to get a million. What are you going to do then reduce that max to lower level. Pretty soon its not technically a AH that the players set the prices its all done by the devs. Which changes it from an AH to a player vender store. Which would make more people quit the game faster then they already are.

I still cant figure out why the devs are not combating this more then they do now. It really effects thier money income when a gold seller beats them down like this.

I play swtoor and i dont see the gold spammers in that game? Its f2p also so making accounts isnt different then this game.

Now imagine, if their "customer" want to buy 10mil AD, he will have to grind 200 pieces of trash gear, write all trash gear names to goldseller and gold sellers must find them all in AH and buy? haha..

melodywhr · November 2013

drbaals wrote: »

...snip...

actually that other game you mentioned has currency spammers in it. all you gotta do is a google search.

every mmo has these issues. unless you are involved in the processes of battling against it, all you have is conjecture.

Gold sellers

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