I mean seriously, they started during beta (near the end) and now my Email box is flooded with advertisements for energy credits. They flood the channels, send direct tells (have to report/ignore constantly), and now the email box is getting flooded with it. I logged on today with 12 new messages from them. :mad:
Cryptic, put a stop to this ... not only are they destorying the economy (actually the people buying the credits are.. but.. whatever), but it's completely annoying as hell..
Someone have a decent way to stop gold spammers? Remember you have to be able to correctly identify accounts that are TRUE gold sellers and then lock those accounts down.
The problem is there is no 100% accurate way of doing this; you are either going to lock some accounts that are not supposed ot be locked or you are going to let some accounts that should be locked to remain unlocked.
The problem should start to go away now that the "Grace Period" is ending. Those gold farmers will have to start forking out a monthly subscription to continue spamming us with mail too.
I just hope that Cryptic does not allow them to chat/mail if a "Free Trial" ever comes out for the game. And I still want the ability in-game to lock down my mailbox to accept mail only from people who are on my Friends List.
EDIT: And to keep this PC; its not just Chinese that are Gold Farmers. :P
I mean seriously, they started during beta (near the end) and now my Email box is flooded with advertisements for energy credits. They flood the channels, send direct tells (have to report/ignore constantly), and now the email box is getting flooded with it. I logged on today with 12 new messages from them. :mad:
Cryptic, put a stop to this ... not only are they destorying the economy (actually the people buying the credits are.. but.. whatever), but it's completely annoying as hell..
Do you really think Cryptic care?
They have heaps of more important stuff to get out.. LIKE MINI SKIRTS and meeting there pro-order commitments. (Like the really care about that either) (I purposely used bad grammer and speeling)
If a single account has 5 tells/emails flagged as spam in a day, poof.
If they want to argue they can submit a ticket. It would take them 5 seconds to review the ticket and confirm if it was a false positive since the message associated with the spam flag is right there.
The common argument I have heard is the gold sellers are actually good for the company because they buy the game. BS, if that was the case then banning them would be even better since they would either have to purchase a new copy of the game or go the Frell away.
How do you guys know they are from China? Any evidence?
It's a steriotype from older mmorpg's. "Chinese Gold Farmers" has become a term used for any gold farmers. Much like "noob" has been hijacked from new player to effectively mean numpty.
Many of the gold sellers were actually from Korea and a lot are Eastern Europeans.
The email gold spammer don't even need to own STO all they have to do is make a bullchit account on these forum then PM thier spam. As all PM's here go to the STO Mail Box in game. And if in game a video capture of chat will give them all the account names they need.
We aren't localized for China, so you can't play in Chinese. Even still, we don't want to discriminate against people by region. As long as you're understanding of the fact that the game may not be localized to your language, we want you to be able to play. Just because it's not supported in Chinese, and stereotypically the "gold farmers" are in China, we don't want to penalize everyone in the region from playing if they want to just because of a few bad eggs. That's just not fair.
We're working hard on the gold-spammers, and solutions to them, and we're making good progress. If you guys would like to help though, here's my recommendation:
Whenever you see gold-spam chat, please report it! We've made this especially easy, all you have to do is right-click on their name in chat, and hit "report spam." To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming. If you want to be doubly sure action will be taken sooner rather than later, after hitting "report spam" copy their @handle, and send it to us through the GM Ticketing system. This way a real person will evaluate the case rather than a computer, so we don't need for a lot of reports to pile up before they get spam-banned.
Finally, another step you can take to help us, as obvious as it may be, is do not play into this. Don't buy their gold. If you give them business, they will come.
We aren't localized for China, so you can't play in Chinese. Even still, we don't want to discriminate against people by region. As long as you're understanding of the fact that the game may not be localized to your language, we want you to be able to play. Just because it's not supported in Chinese, and stereotypically the "gold farmers" are in China, we don't want to penalize everyone in the region from playing if they want to just because of a few bad eggs. That's just not fair.
We're working hard on the gold-spammers, and solutions to them, and we're making good progress. If you guys would like to help though, here's my recommendation:
Whenever you see gold-spam chat, please report it! We've made this especially easy, all you have to do is right-click on their name in chat, and hit "report spam." To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming. If you want to be doubly sure action will be taken sooner rather than later, after hitting "report spam" copy their @handle, and send it to us through the GM Ticketing system. This way a real person will evaluate the case rather than a computer, so we don't need for a lot of reports to pile up before they get spam-banned.
Finally, another step you can take to help us, as obvious as it may be, is do not play into this. Don't buy their gold. If you give them business, they will come.
What would even be the point of buying credits, the currency is damn near devalued, there is almost nothing of value to buy other than ships and those are a luxury not a necessity as you are given a free ship at every new rank.
I have almost a million credits and so far the only things I've bought that werent from exp badges are a runabout and a star cruiser simply out of boredom. Maybe input a system to buy exploration badges for energy credits?
If Cryptic would provide halfway decent rewards for doing stuff, people would have no need to buy from them..
As long as Cryptic is going to give out 100EC (Energy Credit) batteries for killing stuff 3 levels above you this will continue
I have more credits than i can possibly spend at the moment, i fact i haven't found the need to spend a single credit yet, i get everything i need from missions and loot.
We aren't localized for China, so you can't play in Chinese. Even still, we don't want to discriminate against people by region. As long as you're understanding of the fact that the game may not be localized to your language, we want you to be able to play. Just because it's not supported in Chinese, and stereotypically the "gold farmers" are in China, we don't want to penalize everyone in the region from playing if they want to just because of a few bad eggs. That's just not fair.
We're working hard on the gold-spammers, and solutions to them, and we're making good progress. If you guys would like to help though, here's my recommendation:
Whenever you see gold-spam chat, please report it! We've made this especially easy, all you have to do is right-click on their name in chat, and hit "report spam." To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming. If you want to be doubly sure action will be taken sooner rather than later, after hitting "report spam" copy their @handle, and send it to us through the GM Ticketing system. This way a real person will evaluate the case rather than a computer, so we don't need for a lot of reports to pile up before they get spam-banned.
Finally, another step you can take to help us, as obvious as it may be, is do not play into this. Don't buy their gold. If you give them business, they will come.
What about my inbox on this site, I'm up to 19 emails of gold spammers. Put a report function in there as well
Whenever you see gold-spam chat, please report it! We've made this especially easy, all you have to do is right-click on their name in chat, and hit "report spam." To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming. If you want to be doubly sure action will be taken sooner rather than later, after hitting "report spam" copy their @handle, and send it to us through the GM Ticketing system. This way a real person will evaluate the case rather than a computer, so we don't need for a lot of reports to pile up before they get spam-banned.
Finally, another step you can take to help us, as obvious as it may be, is do not play into this. Don't buy their gold. If you give them business, they will come.
I have been right-click reporting every one of them that I see, but sometimes I have to do it 3 or 4 times before it will work. Lag maybe? I dunno.
I will certainly start reporting their handle to a GM now that you've suggested it, but I don't think they're going to be prepared for the onslaught of messages.. because there are A TON of these spammers. They seem to reproduce like tribbles.
To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming.
Suggestion: you could add an automated step that looks for keywords in reported spam. Like ".com", "buy", "credits" etc. Let GMs edit this list freely as spammers change tactics. Reported spam that hits a keyword is flagged for GM attention without multiple reports. Or even preemptively barred from zone chat and stranger tells until reviewed.
In a very, very, very old MUD I played, shouts drained stamina. New accounts had very limited stamina. Maybe zone chat needs some kind of similar throttle.
We aren't localized for China, so you can't play in Chinese. Even still, we don't want to discriminate against people by region. As long as you're understanding of the fact that the game may not be localized to your language, we want you to be able to play. Just because it's not supported in Chinese, and stereotypically the "gold farmers" are in China, we don't want to penalize everyone in the region from playing if they want to just because of a few bad eggs. That's just not fair.
We're working hard on the gold-spammers, and solutions to them, and we're making good progress. If you guys would like to help though, here's my recommendation:
Whenever you see gold-spam chat, please report it! We've made this especially easy, all you have to do is right-click on their name in chat, and hit "report spam." To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming. If you want to be doubly sure action will be taken sooner rather than later, after hitting "report spam" copy their @handle, and send it to us through the GM Ticketing system. This way a real person will evaluate the case rather than a computer, so we don't need for a lot of reports to pile up before they get spam-banned.
Finally, another step you can take to help us, as obvious as it may be, is do not play into this. Don't buy their gold. If you give them business, they will come.
You know whats not fair not being able to read anything in chat because a these chinese gold farmers (checked source codes on websites) are spamming the TRIBBLE out of most areas.
Also not fair new players or people asking for help can't ask or be answered because the spam is so fast an furious.
Also not fair a few bad apples in a region ruining the game for the REST OF THE WORLD thats not fair.
Region ban them an get rid of china it will solve 95% of the woes with gold sellars in this game, you need to take a seious look at your customer base cryptic an decide what you need more a few ppl in china or ****ing away/off the rest of your customer base (ie the world)
We aren't localized for China, so you can't play in Chinese. Even still, we don't want to discriminate against people by region. As long as you're understanding of the fact that the game may not be localized to your language, we want you to be able to play. Just because it's not supported in Chinese, and stereotypically the "gold farmers" are in China, we don't want to penalize everyone in the region from playing if they want to just because of a few bad eggs. That's just not fair.
We're working hard on the gold-spammers, and solutions to them, and we're making good progress. If you guys would like to help though, here's my recommendation:
Whenever you see gold-spam chat, please report it! We've made this especially easy, all you have to do is right-click on their name in chat, and hit "report spam." To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming. If you want to be doubly sure action will be taken sooner rather than later, after hitting "report spam" copy their @handle, and send it to us through the GM Ticketing system. This way a real person will evaluate the case rather than a computer, so we don't need for a lot of reports to pile up before they get spam-banned.
Finally, another step you can take to help us, as obvious as it may be, is do not play into this. Don't buy their gold. If you give them business, they will come.
I can live with you guys not shutting down regions...i completely agree that you shouldn't. But when I log in and have to delete several emails from spammers, that irritates me. The fact that the in-game and out of game PM/Email system is the same also contributes to the ease of these guys spamming players. Because of this companies such as these can increase the amount of spam they can produce. 1 person plays the game gathering energy, takes a few screenies from time to time and another perosn can spend all day on the forums pushing spam out to us.
While the idea of these two systems being tied together is nice...its not needed...seperate them. Second, another company gives out 3 day ban for people who spam the chat channels for than x number of times in x amount of minutes. I have friend this happened to...he spammed his profession 10 times in under 5 minutes and was banned for 3 days. Trial accounts shouldn't be able to send PMs/Emails or tells unless the people they are sending them too are on the friends list. A system needs to be put into place that looks for keywords/phrases in chat, this way if we report someone, the chat is sent with it (or the chat server log looks for that users chat logs) and tries to identify key words or phrases. If those phrases are found, then they get banned....a good way to use this system would be to make the phrases the web addresses they spam. Most importantly, don't tell us players exactly what you did to stop spam. Seriously, if we know, they know, and they can try and find workarounds. All we need to know is...nothing at all. Put it in a patch and let it ride. We'll notice, trust me.
We aren't localized for China, so you can't play in Chinese. Even still, we don't want to discriminate against people by region.
Yes, WE do. We exist in reality, where its Chinese gold sellers that dominate the market. If you started a U.S.-only server, it would be full the next day.
Just because it's not supported in Chinese, and stereotypically the "gold farmers" are in China...
No, not 'stereotypically'; that connotes untruth. No one has a problem admitting that the majority of worldwide email spam and viruses originates from the good ol U.S.ofA., so why are we scared to admit that most gold selling is from China?
Picard would be appalled at the suggestion of banning China from the Federation.
Only in public but you know when he got off the bridge an is deleting his gold spam mail off the fed mail network he is cussing an praying for the ban stick to land
How do you guys know they are from China? Any evidence?
Do a whois on ANY of the Gold sites from just about any MMO you can think of. Take a wild guess where are located...? You guessed it! Mainland China. Of the 10 that I looked up with a simple Google "STO Gold" search, 8 of them were located in China and the rest where registered with Chinese names and fictitious addresses.
Heres another one.. find the only country in the world that has any government policy / restriction regarding the sales and trading of "Virtual currency". Yup, that would be China as well.
It is not ethnocentric, nor racist, nor derogatory to include "China" before the word Goldselling. It is just a plain fact. It is not meant to insult or to be derogatory, I think it is meant more to emphasize just how ridiculous it is that legitimate gamers are now once again forced to wade through the private messages, the spam, the emails and no doubt in the future the process of recovering their TRIBBLE accounts because someone in a far distant land wants to make $3 and hour in the latest MMO of choice.
Frankly, as STO does not have any "time limit" mechanism built into the game (A legal requirement now in China), it is illegal according to Chinese law for the STO to even be played there. So, my vote is for a Countrywide IP ban, as someone else mentioned there seems to be no current plans for STO to be released there so why allow people that are not even allowed to play this game, access it for the means to disrupt others?
they are profiting from other ppl's laziness so at the end of the day they are the ones that are laughing. if they weren't making any money they wouldn't be wasting their time spamming you
Comments
Someone have a decent way to stop gold spammers? Remember you have to be able to correctly identify accounts that are TRUE gold sellers and then lock those accounts down.
The problem is there is no 100% accurate way of doing this; you are either going to lock some accounts that are not supposed ot be locked or you are going to let some accounts that should be locked to remain unlocked.
The problem should start to go away now that the "Grace Period" is ending. Those gold farmers will have to start forking out a monthly subscription to continue spamming us with mail too.
I just hope that Cryptic does not allow them to chat/mail if a "Free Trial" ever comes out for the game. And I still want the ability in-game to lock down my mailbox to accept mail only from people who are on my Friends List.
EDIT: And to keep this PC; its not just Chinese that are Gold Farmers. :P
Because all of them are from China... :rolleyes:
Captain Pure Heart to the rescue. :rolleyes:
Over they're. Get it rite your gramer is difinately bad . GOSH
Do you really think Cryptic care?
They have heaps of more important stuff to get out.. LIKE MINI SKIRTS and meeting there pro-order commitments. (Like the really care about that either) (I purposely used bad grammer and speeling)
If a single account has 5 tells/emails flagged as spam in a day, poof.
If they want to argue they can submit a ticket. It would take them 5 seconds to review the ticket and confirm if it was a false positive since the message associated with the spam flag is right there.
The common argument I have heard is the gold sellers are actually good for the company because they buy the game. BS, if that was the case then banning them would be even better since they would either have to purchase a new copy of the game or go the Frell away.
It's a steriotype from older mmorpg's. "Chinese Gold Farmers" has become a term used for any gold farmers. Much like "noob" has been hijacked from new player to effectively mean numpty.
Many of the gold sellers were actually from Korea and a lot are Eastern Europeans.
If Cryptic would provide halfway decent rewards for doing stuff, people would have no need to buy from them..
As long as Cryptic is going to give out 100EC (Energy Credit) batteries for killing stuff 3 levels above you this will continue
We're working hard on the gold-spammers, and solutions to them, and we're making good progress. If you guys would like to help though, here's my recommendation:
Whenever you see gold-spam chat, please report it! We've made this especially easy, all you have to do is right-click on their name in chat, and hit "report spam." To avoid griefing through this system though, it takes many many reports of this type before an account gets banned for gold farming. If you want to be doubly sure action will be taken sooner rather than later, after hitting "report spam" copy their @handle, and send it to us through the GM Ticketing system. This way a real person will evaluate the case rather than a computer, so we don't need for a lot of reports to pile up before they get spam-banned.
Finally, another step you can take to help us, as obvious as it may be, is do not play into this. Don't buy their gold. If you give them business, they will come.
No they wouldn't.
What would even be the point of buying credits, the currency is damn near devalued, there is almost nothing of value to buy other than ships and those are a luxury not a necessity as you are given a free ship at every new rank.
I have almost a million credits and so far the only things I've bought that werent from exp badges are a runabout and a star cruiser simply out of boredom. Maybe input a system to buy exploration badges for energy credits?
I have more credits than i can possibly spend at the moment, i fact i haven't found the need to spend a single credit yet, i get everything i need from missions and loot.
What about my inbox on this site, I'm up to 19 emails of gold spammers. Put a report function in there as well
If nobody buys from them ever, they would stop, that's for sure.
They would not exist if it wouldn't be a lucrative buisness (at least for them)
I have been right-click reporting every one of them that I see, but sometimes I have to do it 3 or 4 times before it will work. Lag maybe? I dunno.
I will certainly start reporting their handle to a GM now that you've suggested it, but I don't think they're going to be prepared for the onslaught of messages.. because there are A TON of these spammers. They seem to reproduce like tribbles.
In a very, very, very old MUD I played, shouts drained stamina. New accounts had very limited stamina. Maybe zone chat needs some kind of similar throttle.
You know whats not fair not being able to read anything in chat because a these chinese gold farmers (checked source codes on websites) are spamming the TRIBBLE out of most areas.
Also not fair new players or people asking for help can't ask or be answered because the spam is so fast an furious.
Also not fair a few bad apples in a region ruining the game for the REST OF THE WORLD thats not fair.
Region ban them an get rid of china it will solve 95% of the woes with gold sellars in this game, you need to take a seious look at your customer base cryptic an decide what you need more a few ppl in china or ****ing away/off the rest of your customer base (ie the world)
Fact is there always seem to be people who will buy from them, sad but true.
I can live with you guys not shutting down regions...i completely agree that you shouldn't. But when I log in and have to delete several emails from spammers, that irritates me. The fact that the in-game and out of game PM/Email system is the same also contributes to the ease of these guys spamming players. Because of this companies such as these can increase the amount of spam they can produce. 1 person plays the game gathering energy, takes a few screenies from time to time and another perosn can spend all day on the forums pushing spam out to us.
While the idea of these two systems being tied together is nice...its not needed...seperate them. Second, another company gives out 3 day ban for people who spam the chat channels for than x number of times in x amount of minutes. I have friend this happened to...he spammed his profession 10 times in under 5 minutes and was banned for 3 days. Trial accounts shouldn't be able to send PMs/Emails or tells unless the people they are sending them too are on the friends list. A system needs to be put into place that looks for keywords/phrases in chat, this way if we report someone, the chat is sent with it (or the chat server log looks for that users chat logs) and tries to identify key words or phrases. If those phrases are found, then they get banned....a good way to use this system would be to make the phrases the web addresses they spam. Most importantly, don't tell us players exactly what you did to stop spam. Seriously, if we know, they know, and they can try and find workarounds. All we need to know is...nothing at all. Put it in a patch and let it ride. We'll notice, trust me.
Yes, WE do. We exist in reality, where its Chinese gold sellers that dominate the market. If you started a U.S.-only server, it would be full the next day.
No, not 'stereotypically'; that connotes untruth. No one has a problem admitting that the majority of worldwide email spam and viruses originates from the good ol U.S.ofA., so why are we scared to admit that most gold selling is from China?
No you aren't. Not according to my infallible anecdotal evidence. On launch day, I had no spam. Now I get more and more each time I log on.
Only in public but you know when he got off the bridge an is deleting his gold spam mail off the fed mail network he is cussing an praying for the ban stick to land
Do a whois on ANY of the Gold sites from just about any MMO you can think of. Take a wild guess where are located...? You guessed it! Mainland China. Of the 10 that I looked up with a simple Google "STO Gold" search, 8 of them were located in China and the rest where registered with Chinese names and fictitious addresses.
Heres another one.. find the only country in the world that has any government policy / restriction regarding the sales and trading of "Virtual currency". Yup, that would be China as well.
It is not ethnocentric, nor racist, nor derogatory to include "China" before the word Goldselling. It is just a plain fact. It is not meant to insult or to be derogatory, I think it is meant more to emphasize just how ridiculous it is that legitimate gamers are now once again forced to wade through the private messages, the spam, the emails and no doubt in the future the process of recovering their TRIBBLE accounts because someone in a far distant land wants to make $3 and hour in the latest MMO of choice.
Frankly, as STO does not have any "time limit" mechanism built into the game (A legal requirement now in China), it is illegal according to Chinese law for the STO to even be played there. So, my vote is for a Countrywide IP ban, as someone else mentioned there seems to be no current plans for STO to be released there so why allow people that are not even allowed to play this game, access it for the means to disrupt others?