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How to dramatically reduce gold spammers
eldarth
Member Posts: 4,494 Arc User
There are two different ways gold spammers could be dramatically reduced:
As it stands, an account can be created programmatically and even without e-mail validation on PWE.
These accounts can then programmatically be logged into Neverwinter and spew their 3 lines of spam before getting "reported" for spamming and disabled.
This means absolutely nothing to the gold spammers because it is fully automated and costs them NOTHING.
Force a human being into either account creation or login and it would significantly slow the flood.
- Cryptic could implement a Turing test (ie CAPTCHA/"prove-you-are-human") during login.
- PWE could implement a Turing test during account creation.
As it stands, an account can be created programmatically and even without e-mail validation on PWE.
These accounts can then programmatically be logged into Neverwinter and spew their 3 lines of spam before getting "reported" for spamming and disabled.
This means absolutely nothing to the gold spammers because it is fully automated and costs them NOTHING.
Force a human being into either account creation or login and it would significantly slow the flood.
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"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
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In fact the sad truth is the results are so bad that is why they aren't used by most game companies. They only stop the most primitive bots in the world. It's more to stop amateur programmers than it is to stop the types of people who can automate things such as completing the tutorial.
personally I say give ever one who reports a gold spammer 15 rough AD per valid report.
no easy bot farming -> less companies that sell stuff.
- Dualspec
- Better rewarding foundry and foundry pvp maps
- Custom PvP leagues with leaderboards instead of the current 'matchmaking'.
- Armory
- make jumping cost stamina (to reduce hopping in pvp)
This is actually a good idea
It woudl help but not for long as there are bots that can fight fairly well. Still would be fun.
Captchas are really effective. Once I thought I was a human, but after they invented captchas, I can't solve them 90% of the times. Now I understand it's because I'm a robot.
And then a small minority of the people who actually do collect nodes will just stop collecting them. Especially in dungeons where the other players wouldn't wait for you and help you fight it off.
Same way as if people didn't exploit, there would be no exploits. Wait what??????
More sensibly, both of these possibilities: people didn't buy gold/diamonds/whatever, and people not exploiting, are equally as (un)likely.....
I think the priority is to kill the bots, without them the sellers won't have much to sell.
Well, i was referring to the open world instances and not dungeons.
I dont see how it will stop me collecting a node while doing some dailies or leveling up, on the opposite, this game need some randomnesses.
And the first method is easily detectable by human players (the different text, bag icon, collision)
Bots are doing the same thing for hours each day, everyday. Cant be that hard to recognize a pattern after a week or so.
* Add a few random things to the tutorial. Would make it harder to create new bots.
* Make it a bit harder to get to ALL the skillnodes in the game. Put adds there, make them climb etc.
* Add a turing test to "players" that act suspicious. Like getting X enchants in X hours. Or opened X skillnodes in X hours.
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
GMs in Game would also help, never seen one...
Bots replicate human behaviors but they can't think on their own. When the Soldier ask you to go pick up your gear, he should ask you a random math question, not just the why are you coming to Neverwinter one where the answer is meaning less, these questions and answers are randomly generated on the spot and not a table of questions and answer that can be learned. The answer must be typed in the chat window not just a multiple choice answer, wrong answer= booted from game, must log back in and answer another question to progress. Example of Questions: You have been at sea for 3 weeks! How many days is that?
Gold Spammers: Remove access to Zone, LFG, and Trade unless the account (not character) has more than 1 hour /played time.
Bots: There are two methods which should be used simultaneously:
1. Record all player activity. Look for repetition of activity.
2. Use heuristics to differentiate player interaction with the UI vs Bot interaction. Examples might include such things as:
- do they open inventory?
- do they check their character sheet?
- do they open their companion tab? (or even HAVE companions after level 16, and are those companions still rank 1?)
- do they upgrade their gear, ever?
- do they open the AH?
- do they accept any daily quests?
- do they type anything into any chat tab (guild, party, zone, say, lfm, trade)?
There are lots of things a real person will do as they play that no bot programmer will make a bot do. IF the characters activity does NOT include any of these "tells", then its a bot.
But connected cause killing the bots will cripple the gold sellers.
The best way to make a detection script for bots is to get one, test it and reverse engineer it, ofc this would be a continuous process.
Gold spamming bots can overcome anything through time and numbers - as they have those in infinite supply - but the moment they loose a dollar every time one of them gets banned - they simply can not afford to operate.
I know of one game that had a chronic gold spammer problem, that vanished instantly the moment they did this, so I know it works.
I agree, this is probably an easy way to rectify gold spamming overnight, but remember, it reclassifies the game as no longer Free To Play...kinda (just being the devils advocate here for the sake of the conversation). Did they also find a way around letting legit players eventually chat?
Implementing this will improve zone chat a lot. And I'm not only talking about the gold sellers
Out of sight, out of mind.
While this solution would kill gold spammers, it won't stop bots and gold sellers which are the heart of the problem, you just treat the symptom.
There are some drawbacks aswell, this game already looks money grabbing, further asking payment for use of chat may not be perceived very well.
I personally tried out an MMO where pretty much all communication channels beside /say were blocked. It was quite frustrating since i wasn't able to ask for information or even reply to whispers, so people thought i was ignoring them.
Great idea