Gold Spammers Everywhere

[GnatB]

Maybe scare tactics?

 

Announce plan to ban gold buyers 2 weeks after they've hit level cap.

Then, in 2 weeks, announce you've banned 10,000 gold buyers.  (even if you've only banned 10)

 

Goal is to make buyers scared to buy, so you don't want an immediate ban, if they haven't (also) invested time in the character, they won't really care, they'll just try again on another.

 

But a hammer of doom hanging over the characters head that they don't really know about that'll wipe all their progress?  May make 'em think twice.

 

(edit:  And like most things, it's largely placebo, hence why you're saying you successfully caught and banned people even if you didn't.)

[BigPointyTeeth]

1 minute ago, 00039 said:

All they gotta do is look at the trade history and they'd be able to trace it right back to a farm bot

 

So are you proposing banning anyone who trades with an account that grinds like a crazy person silently for hours on end?  Not saying I disagree when it's clear-cut, but I worry about false positives there, especially if the late game is as grindy as I've read.  Investigating this sort of thing takes a lot of GM man-hours, too.

 

Also, even if that did solve the problem in the long term, it still leaves us in the short term with unusable chat systems and no in-game way to coordinate or meet people.  That's still a problem.

[BroCode]

ITs a *cricket*ing invasion damn. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST GIVE US MORE SPACE ON THE BLOCK LIST.

[Stiefl]

NCSoft surely cleaned [DE]Frostgipfel from bots/spammers, as you can see on my screenshots below:

 

Before:

 

After: 

[nekoshka]

34 minutes ago, GnatB said:

Goal is to make buyers scared to buy, so you don't want an immediate ban, if they haven't (also) invested time in the character, they won't really care, they'll just try again on another.

Delayed punishment is a great idea. It also works well on farm bots. It's hard to determine what your bot did that got itself banned if it did it 5 minutes ago.

 

8 minutes ago, Stiefl said:

NCSoft surely cleaned [DE]Frostgipfel from bots/spammers, as you can see on my screenshots below:

You'll notice in those pictures they use 3W instead of www. This is one thing a filter can do, make it harder for potential buyers to read the rather creative methods of avoiding the filter. If all buyers see is "3W.W5T6B7G8G.you know what" a lot of people aren't even going to recognize there's a web address there, or be able to figure out what that address is. Filtering isn't actually a strategy to stop bots so much as a strategy to stop buyers from discovering the website.

[Stiefl]

1 minute ago, nekoshka said:

Delayed punishment is a great idea. It also works well on farm bots. It's hard to determine what your bot did that got itself banned if it did it 5 minutes ago.

 

You'll notice in those pictures they use 3W instead of www. This is one thing a filter can do, make it harder for potential buyers to read the rather creative methods of avoiding the filter. If all buyers see is "3W.W5T6B7G8G.you know what" a lot of people aren't even going to recognize there's a web address there, or be able to figure out what that address is. Filtering isn't actually a strategy to stop bots so much as a strategy to stop buyers from discovering the website.

Dude, the first picture is "before", the second one is after NCSoft cleaned up and i'm currently playing and there is absolutely NO bot spamming besides the four that i blocked...

[Spearmint]

Ok for those of you who have not played NC games before let me tell you there are so many spammers and bots because the source code was "leaked" sold  to these companies  during development by  the developers at NCSOFT. this game has been live in korea for over 4 years. in development for atleast 3 years before that. However the problem is the source code was stolen! so all these people have a backdoor entrance to servers. Having said that those people who were found out to be selling the code all got fired several years back.....(they banded together and made tera) never played it not sure about bot issues.

  The other problem is gameguard... it simply does not do what it is supposed to do and should quiet simply be eliminated for other systems such as glyph or the one they use on some European lineage 2 servers. Gameguard is absolutely useless and ncsoft persist with them because they own them!.

 

Bottom line is when they discovered the code was"stolen" back in the day they should have started a new engine from scratch.

 

This is not just a rant I had played lineage2 for over 10 years and NCsoft was never capable of removing bots nor did they succeed in aion either (atleast I could kill the bots in aion and get points for it). Its a systemic problem with all NC games.... the number of cheats in wildstar and bots was kinda astounding at release.

 

The bottom line is keep this up  and just like those other games this will be dead within a few month and then you can do start  the server merges!. (There are just too many other games out that are just as good without the constant spam.

 

THIS LEVEL OF SERVICE IS SIMPLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

 

PS: in the time it took me to type this I received over 300 msg spams that cant be blocked because my blocker is full!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[KrazyX]

As of this moment.. my level 5's region chat is null and voided.  I filled my block list to its capacity within 30 mins.  I'm talking from zero to fifty in half hour.  Pointless to purge it now, as I'll only add the same gold spammer names + a surplus of many, many more.   Closing down region tab as of tonight on server Hajoon.  A new player needing to ask questions about the game, won't be able to, with the gold spam rapid scrolling the region chat.  Haven't chosen a faction yet for this lv 5 character, and I'm hoping faction chat isn't as bad.  High hopes I'm afraid.  Without a region chat, I am reminded of SWTOR before it went F2P.  You could play for two hours, without ever hearing a peep out of chat.

[Enamour]

http://imgur.com/tQHuvUX

 

Nice!

 

Edit: Screw it I cant get the picture in zz

[Glitch]

They are still there. My friend and I are sill seeing them. 

[Yahni]

Agree :( 

 

The limit is so laughable. I reached 50/50 on my 3rd day of playing. Faction chat is unreadable now. 

[Enamour]

Well at least it feels more like things are being done about them actively. Was kinda nice seeing the stream gone. Saw one pop up after I posted this but it poofed as well.

[MrNiN]

1 hour ago, nekoshka said:

Blame the criminals, not the police that sit by and do nothing? The problem is, there's always criminals, and that's why we have police. People are going to buy gold, and those people ruin it for the rest of us. You sound like those people that say "Let's teach men not to *cricket*", "Let's teach strangers not to danger", or "Let's teach mountain lions not to maul people". Yes, we blame the buyers. Yes, we demand buyers be banned. But not for one second do those buyers let NCSOFT off the hook.

Your comparing a game world to real world events. The difference is in the real world those are real consequences and no I am not suggesting we let everyone off the hook, I am suggesting we let ncsoft take care of the problem in their due time. Your demanding they do it now, now, NOW!!. They got bigger things to do right now. You quoted one line out of everything I said, and completely took it out of context, maybe you should read the rest. Your blaming ncsoft for not immediately squashing an issue that is much more difficult then you think, which is why I sited several other big name mmo's that still have boting and gold add problems. Its a fact of the game genre.

You cannot compare the police not taking action against criminals to gold farming. These are not criminals, nothing they do actually injures or hurts anyone. They also cannot be prosecuted as far as I know, for what they are doing. It would be like saying your going to send a kid to jail for selling gum on the street, its just a waste.  If you feel like your time being wasted is like being taken advantage of by criminals, why are you even playing a game? But whatever, you can try to apply your since of real world right and wrong, to a fantasy environment if you wish. Long and short of it is, the "problem" does not mean much and is not at the top of the things to do list. But, most people I encounter with your since of self importance rarely see the reason and logic behind patience, and not laying blame, so I cannot wait to see how you respond, or how you try and make out the ncsoft team to be wronging us with their lack of action.... really I'm just so excited, please enlighten us all with your profound since of justice and right from wrong.

[RMJI]

omg its horrible on the new servers. i have it under control on Poharan but on Gunma the gold spammers are just relogging and spamming with not a care in the world. Run out of 50 block spaces in 15 mins just looking at faction chat -_- I'm at the point where I'd buy money from them if it would shut them the hell up >_> Obviously that's never going to happen though.

[Vinter]

Real World Trading is never going to be stopped. But it can be seemless to the average player, and that's what they need to focus on. 

 

I myself made a post and had a talk with a NCSoft employee, who I hope forwarded my suggestion to stop this problem... one I used myself to stop this same problem in another NCSoft game.

This suggestion included source code of my method to solve the spam problem.. so I hope they actually listen to me, or this is not going to stop. Even worse, they might try to stop it by making the lifes of the players worse, like they did in that other NCSoft game.

 

Shit, I'd do the job myself signing a NDA agreement if they let me Lol.

[YamiNinjato]

It truly is horribly pathetic. I mean after blocking one instantly 3 - 6 more pop up.

 

[Mabutofu]

I don't think even Blizzard's multi-million dollar support team can completely get rid of bots, I don't think NCsoft would do much better.

[KrazyX]

The way things are, with this runaway gold spam, even having a limit is futile.  50, 100, 500 wouldn't matter.  The end of it will soon come along.  Its so sad that BnS doesn't have even a temporary solution in place.  Their successful launch, will be forgotten under the crushing hand of this senseless, heartless, volcano-like eruption of gold spam.  Its just plowing through villages, towns and cities, leveling everything in its path to ashes and ruin.

 

I have done a "20 year bin" (loose nuts and bolts collected over years) of mmos with gold spam, and this is the trump card of gold spam here in BnS.  I have never seen anything like it before.  They are literally killing the "community" air of Blade and Soul.  I am starting to enjoy just sitting here chatting in the forums, than ever trying to level up my characters.  Each day it just gets worse.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but has there yet been any official word from anyone at BnS or NCsoft on this?   I'm not talking a forum moderator or community person, but from its executive leadership, or someone with executive powers?

[Vinter]

6 minutes ago, Mabutofu said:

I don't think even Blizzard's multi-million dollar support team can completely get rid of bots, I don't think NCsoft would do much better.

 

support team is not the one responsible for that, dev team is.

[StrawberryMilk]

I said this on launch, the first minute of f2p my block list filled up to maximum.



Also, I need to say this a million times I'm sure.
We need a delete all on our blocklists. Or a select all option with checkboxes.
On Archeage I have over 1000 names at least on my block list, I can't even USE it anymore, I can't see when I have someone on it because their names are crowded amidst a million goldspammers, if I want to give people second chances or I forget why I had them blocked or no longer care, I can't without spending a stupid amount of time looking through for names that look vaguely familiar because I refuse to give myself carpal tunnel syndrome deleting all them, I got to the C's so far after a year of playing and occasionally knocking names off that list.

Please don't require us to have a limit and have to right click remove from blocklist over 250 names when we reach that cap... Like seriously, think about it for a moment.
 

[enem]

19 minutes ago, Vinter said:

This suggestion included source code of my method to solve the spam problem.. 

so what.. a clever regex?

 

 

[Vinter]

Just now, enem said:

so what.. a clever regex?

 

 

 

In a very simple way of putting things, yes. I hijacked the packet manipulation system of the client, parsed the chat message packet, and used a blacklisted array and regex to check for words, leet and a few more things like removing spaces of the string before checking it, to avoid T H E  S P A M  W I T H  S P A C E S .... COM.

[iNeverz]

Blizzard really didnt touch the farm bots, and honestly... you really didnt see many spammers in WoW. Not to this degree at least... and their game was free up to a certain point. 

[Zaiteki]

"I should go look for an expand block list petition on forums while i wait for our party."

and here i am 6 blocks left and i am getting really nervous. Of course other options on bot/spam handling would be nice but i am about to start begging, so i cant be much of a chooser.

[willo]

can we get a bigger block list at least?