I recall the first time I experienced a large number of Chinese gold farmers. It was during Lineage II Open beta.
I was fortunate enough to be in the closed beta and during that time it was great. Small groups, tight knit user base. Then open beta came, and with it quite literally hundreds of players with a "CN" at the end of their name. They camped just about every spawn site and pvp'd in large packs and used a lot of tricks to dupe players into either going "red" (Back then you dropped all your gear if you killed someone not fighting back).
Then they started becoming pervasive in WoW. I do not recall seeing them in AO however. I guess the money is too easy to come by in that game, who knows.
Anyway, one of the things L2 decided to do was pretty much cut out the entire subnet of China from their game and open the game in China with its own set of servers, pretty much internal.
I've been thinking about what we could about these farmers and it's a tough nut to crack. First comes to mind, don't use their services, give them money, or go to their sites.
No doubt some may be spoofing through US ISPs but maybe notifying those ISPs of the traffic?
The only logical solution would be to nuke China. That would both take care of America's debt, and take out all of the Chinese Farmers that are so prevalent in American MMOs.
How about a shared blacklist, e.g. fleets could create a black list that all their members can add spammers to. This would reduce the spam. STO already has the 24 hr shutup feature if a person gets 10 complains against them -- i think this a good idea too, we just have to keep them on "shutup"
Every couple of days someone thinks they're a genius and comes up with the great idea of banning all of China as a fix for getting rid of gold spammers.
First off, if you look at a game like Aion where they actually DID block foreign IPs (not so much for gold farming as rather to keep profits spread out over all the localized regions) they still manage to spam and sell currency. This means up to two things: The Chinese spammers are getting through anyway or, the spammers aren't all Chinese IPs.
I play MMOs from China. I had to stop playing Aion because NCSoft decided that foreign IPs can't access the game anymore. It didn't matter that I'm Canadian, with a Canadian credit card - I was playing from China and therefore they wanted me on the Chinese server or they didn't want me at all. I could have connected via proxy or tunneling service, but I chose not to because it's an added hassle that other games (Champions and STO included) don't do to you.
I am part of a very small minority of English people who play from China (and other countries like Russia who often suffers regional bans) but the easiest way to guarantee I never play your company's game is if you block my region. If you log into Aion right now you STILL see currency farmers setup all over the place and you get tells every day. Banning Chinese IPs doesn't work and only succeeds in chasing away legitimate customers. You MIGHT get rid of some of the low-end farming companies who don't know how to use a proxy - but the majority of them do.
The other problem is that a lot of these spamming companies aren't even located in China. Once upon a time these companies had to employ people to farm the gold for them - but now every website has a page set up where you can sell your currency. People who race to max level and then spam repeatable missions for massive amounts of credits then have the option of selling currency directly to these websites. That website might be located in the US, in China, in the UK, or in any other country - and banning China isn't going to stop them either.
There are still farmers in China, there are at least two people running WoW farming operations in the small town I live in. But both of those guys have contacts in the US who offer them tunnels free of charge, they will never be IP banned.
Every couple of days someone thinks they're a genius and comes up with the great idea of banning all of China as a fix for getting rid of gold spammers.
First off, if you look at a game like Aion where they actually DID block foreign IPs (not so much for gold farming as rather to keep profits spread out over all the localized regions) they still manage to spam and sell currency. This means up to two things: The Chinese spammers are getting through anyway or, the spammers aren't all Chinese IPs.
I play MMOs from China. I had to stop playing Aion because NCSoft decided that foreign IPs can't access the game anymore. It didn't matter that I'm Canadian, with a Canadian credit card - I was playing from China and therefore they wanted me on the Chinese server or they didn't want me at all. I could have connected via proxy or tunneling service, but I chose not to because it's an added hassle that other games (Champions and STO included) don't do to you.
I am part of a very small minority of English people who play from China (and other countries like Russia who often suffers regional bans) but the easiest way to guarantee I never play your company's game is if you block my region. If you log into Aion right now you STILL see currency farmers setup all over the place and you get tells every day. Banning Chinese IPs doesn't work and only succeeds in chasing away legitimate customers. You MIGHT get rid of some of the low-end farming companies who don't know how to use a proxy - but the majority of them do.
The other problem is that a lot of these spamming companies aren't even located in China. Once upon a time these companies had to employ people to farm the gold for them - but now every website has a page set up where you can sell your currency. People who race to max level and then spam repeatable missions for massive amounts of credits then have the option of selling currency directly to these websites. That website might be located in the US, in China, in the UK, or in any other country - and banning China isn't going to stop them either.
There are still farmers in China, there are at least two people running WoW farming operations in the small town I live in. But both of those guys have contacts in the US who offer them tunnels free of charge, they will never be IP banned.
Proxies are easy to overcome if they run a client. The client could report the IP subnet, or better yet, ident the machine by polling drive ID or some other hardware ID. Ban on that.
NC Soft is notorious for banning foreign IP's. I understand that you would want to play form China but really isn't your response somewhat self serving?
I think that something needs to be done, that is for sure. I would say that you would have to study the legitimate traffic coming from there and the spam traffic and then make a business decision. Spammers can and do ruin these games.
I wonder if it's feasible to keep a recent message buffer for each chatter on the system, and compare their comments to previous comments made within the last 5-10 minutes.
Seems to me that the spamers all use the same message, over and over again. Should be pretty easy to target people saying the same thing over and over again repeatedly, and after they've said it 2 or 3 times, auto-silence them for a certain amount of time.
Then you save a copy of what they said for future reference because it's obviously been looped.
When the auto-silence ends, then their new comments are checked against the previously recorded statement, and if it's the same thing again, they get silenced for even longer.
Repeat this once or twice and it silences them for 24 hours.
Proxies are easy to overcome if they run a client. The client could report the IP subnet, or better yet, ident the machine by polling drive ID or some other hardware ID. Ban on that.
NC Soft is notorious for banning foreign IP's. I understand that you would want to play form China but really isn't your response somewhat self serving?
I think that something needs to be done, that is for sure. I would say that you would have to study the legitimate traffic coming from there and the spam traffic and then make a business decision. Spammers can and do ruin these games.
No more self serving than the people who call for bans on entire regions because of the actions of a handful of people. I say handful because the number of farmers/sellers compared to the number of subscribers is considerbly less.
I'm not saying there is no problem. Currency selling is a problem that few, if any games, have been able to solve. The easiest solutions from a player's perspective are banning a region (which is ineffective and costs the company profit), banning the buyers of currency (which costs the company profit again), and offering a first party option to buy currency (but unless their prices are lower, also somewhat ineffective). NCSoft bans regions and still has the problem. CCP (EvE Online) destroys the items bought with RMT money and sets buyers' wallets to negative. CCP also offers a first party option but the rate of exchange is considerably worse than what you'd get from a third party seller.
The problem is there is no easy solution. RMTers are crafty and will find a way to bypass any bans put in place. Any long-term WoW players can probably remember this firsthand. First they blocked tells, then they sent mails. Then they blocked mails, so they sent random party invites. They blocked party invites so they invited to guilds and stood in Orgrimmar spamming on /say and /shout. You can't make a game that has no economy or you drive away people who love to trade.
I think the reason why this problem still exists is that there is no clearcut solution to it. Every option has downsides and different companies want/don't want certain actions. On the CO forums a Cryptic rep said they won't do regional bans because they want to allow players from all regions to play - as they don't have specific localized versions.
I wouldn't call my stance on this self serving, I wasn't in favor of regional bans when I was living in Canada either. Giving more power to the players helps, such as the report option in STO - if enough players report a spammer they get silenced for 24 hours. That's not the only solution, obviously, but it's a step in the right direction.
Comments
The majority of MMO's played worldwide are in America. China owns America. It will market to its people all it likes.
First off, if you look at a game like Aion where they actually DID block foreign IPs (not so much for gold farming as rather to keep profits spread out over all the localized regions) they still manage to spam and sell currency. This means up to two things: The Chinese spammers are getting through anyway or, the spammers aren't all Chinese IPs.
I play MMOs from China. I had to stop playing Aion because NCSoft decided that foreign IPs can't access the game anymore. It didn't matter that I'm Canadian, with a Canadian credit card - I was playing from China and therefore they wanted me on the Chinese server or they didn't want me at all. I could have connected via proxy or tunneling service, but I chose not to because it's an added hassle that other games (Champions and STO included) don't do to you.
I am part of a very small minority of English people who play from China (and other countries like Russia who often suffers regional bans) but the easiest way to guarantee I never play your company's game is if you block my region. If you log into Aion right now you STILL see currency farmers setup all over the place and you get tells every day. Banning Chinese IPs doesn't work and only succeeds in chasing away legitimate customers. You MIGHT get rid of some of the low-end farming companies who don't know how to use a proxy - but the majority of them do.
The other problem is that a lot of these spamming companies aren't even located in China. Once upon a time these companies had to employ people to farm the gold for them - but now every website has a page set up where you can sell your currency. People who race to max level and then spam repeatable missions for massive amounts of credits then have the option of selling currency directly to these websites. That website might be located in the US, in China, in the UK, or in any other country - and banning China isn't going to stop them either.
There are still farmers in China, there are at least two people running WoW farming operations in the small town I live in. But both of those guys have contacts in the US who offer them tunnels free of charge, they will never be IP banned.
Proxies are easy to overcome if they run a client. The client could report the IP subnet, or better yet, ident the machine by polling drive ID or some other hardware ID. Ban on that.
NC Soft is notorious for banning foreign IP's. I understand that you would want to play form China but really isn't your response somewhat self serving?
I think that something needs to be done, that is for sure. I would say that you would have to study the legitimate traffic coming from there and the spam traffic and then make a business decision. Spammers can and do ruin these games.
Seems to me that the spamers all use the same message, over and over again. Should be pretty easy to target people saying the same thing over and over again repeatedly, and after they've said it 2 or 3 times, auto-silence them for a certain amount of time.
Then you save a copy of what they said for future reference because it's obviously been looped.
When the auto-silence ends, then their new comments are checked against the previously recorded statement, and if it's the same thing again, they get silenced for even longer.
Repeat this once or twice and it silences them for 24 hours.
No more self serving than the people who call for bans on entire regions because of the actions of a handful of people. I say handful because the number of farmers/sellers compared to the number of subscribers is considerbly less.
I'm not saying there is no problem. Currency selling is a problem that few, if any games, have been able to solve. The easiest solutions from a player's perspective are banning a region (which is ineffective and costs the company profit), banning the buyers of currency (which costs the company profit again), and offering a first party option to buy currency (but unless their prices are lower, also somewhat ineffective). NCSoft bans regions and still has the problem. CCP (EvE Online) destroys the items bought with RMT money and sets buyers' wallets to negative. CCP also offers a first party option but the rate of exchange is considerably worse than what you'd get from a third party seller.
The problem is there is no easy solution. RMTers are crafty and will find a way to bypass any bans put in place. Any long-term WoW players can probably remember this firsthand. First they blocked tells, then they sent mails. Then they blocked mails, so they sent random party invites. They blocked party invites so they invited to guilds and stood in Orgrimmar spamming on /say and /shout. You can't make a game that has no economy or you drive away people who love to trade.
I think the reason why this problem still exists is that there is no clearcut solution to it. Every option has downsides and different companies want/don't want certain actions. On the CO forums a Cryptic rep said they won't do regional bans because they want to allow players from all regions to play - as they don't have specific localized versions.
I wouldn't call my stance on this self serving, I wasn't in favor of regional bans when I was living in Canada either. Giving more power to the players helps, such as the report option in STO - if enough players report a spammer they get silenced for 24 hours. That's not the only solution, obviously, but it's a step in the right direction.