Gold Spammers Everywhere

[EvaRench]

3 or 4 came every one minute in faction chat ... we getting attacked by bots ... wonder if ip ban would help ?

[Vinter]

Just now, EvaRench said:

3 or 4 came every one minute in faction chat ... we getting attacked by bots ... wonder if ip ban would help ?

Nope. 

 

Dynamic IP / Proxies. Not even banning china would.

[KrazyX]

7 minutes ago, Zaiteki said:

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

 

I wouldn't bother.  At the rate the spammers are flooding in new names, it'll only fill up the same...just take a few minutes longer.  Gotta figure, even if the devs are banning them.. at what rate... six per half hour time?  This is nothing to the gold spammers.  They've already abandon those names and moved on to twenty more.  Its the "hydra effect.  Frankly I'm starting to think they're not flooding the ads to sell spam, but this seems more to be a DNS-like attack on our chats, on a much higher level.  They are rendering any defenses or barriers useless at stopping them or allowing this mmo to function at any pace.  I'd bet my NCcoins that its one or two entities behind the spam.

[Uldihaa]

They need to increase Block list size, restrict chat access for newly created characters for a time limit (and increased that limit for every character that is deleted on that account in a 24 hour period),  and employ GMs with banhammers.

 

For future actions, they can create a special 'Mute' function for use by GMs. When used, it filters any goldseller's chat out for everyone else, but to the seller, the spam is still there. This would hopefully avoid what I suspect is going on right now. I think many of these sellers are logging in, spamming, logging out, then deleting the character. The spam seems to come in waves of 3 to 5 minutes right now, and there is a time limit of 5 minutes until a recently deleted character's slot is open.

[Machder]

Okay, seriously NCSoft, how bloody hard is it to implement a script using a combination of repetition detection and regular expressions to stop these gold sellers from spamming us to oblivion?  I am seriously sick of having to block these idiots every 5 minutes.  It really is not difficult to resolve.  In fact, here is a list of three things I would like to see.

 

1) Get rid of bots in ARENA MATCH CHAT! We can't block them, we can't report them... They are there, right now, really, yes REALLY really, yes even now. Oh my !@#$ god, even right now, and guess what? They'll be there in 15 minutes too.

 

2) Develop a script that checks for percentage of repeated text.  If the text is mostly repeated, short of a few numbers as suffix, it's a bot, or idiot wanting to get banned.  Further add a frequency checker.  If you spam more than 3 times in 20 seconds and the text is similar, blocked for a minute!  Further, get some regular expressions thing going for filtering out websites.  It's not that hard.  I've been playing MMO's for over 15 years and I can easily find a powerful enough regular expression that would filter out most of them.  I am sure a reputable company like NCSoft has at least one logic programmer with more than an amoeba in their heads to figure this one out.

 

3) Give players the power to silence people.  Don't worry and stop thinking with tunnel vision...  This will not get abused.  Say 100 people are needed to block a spammer.  On a server, that's easy!! Heck Mushin has like what, 5k logged in right now? 10k since there is a que? 100 is EEEEASY to find.  You could also have a soft reset, so if someone doesn't get reported for like 1 minute, counter resets.  Also you can implement a percentage of all online people that are required to vote-kick someone, so not just large servers can do it.

 

Pardon my brusque tone but this seriously is just deplorable.  Please pass this on to the dev team or Give-A-!@#$ department, but get it to someone! I don't care if you give me another violation point for my boorishness; at least I know SOMEONE actually read it. 

 

Look folks, I like this game, I really do, but don't make me be the first wallet warrior to flounce at this B.S. (no that's not Blade & Soul acronym...)  and close my wallet until I feel like this problem is resolved.  It's out of hand and easily resolvable, so why build a player base that wants to support this game but is too blinded by their disdain over such nuances?  It's an easy problem to resolve with many avenues to do just that, and being a programmer myself, this isn't just a conjecture as to what may work; I've seen this used successfully in a few games in the past.

 

Cheers!

[enem]

13 minutes ago, Vinter said:

 

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.

 

so basically what you're saying is GameGuard is patently useless :D
 

preventing spam from getting to the chat windows of other players is a definite priority I should think. the issue with detecting it on message send is that spammers find ways to workaround the filters in place, hence using 3W instead of WWW and using C()M in place of COM etc. basically anything that is blocked directly gives them hints how to change their approach. i assume each unsuccessful attempt can add up and auto flag an account, but they just create a new char and try again.

 

what's odd is beyond any filtering like this there is simply no chat timeout functionality. at all! in other threads and replies i had mentioned Black Desert's chat solution which was an energy resource system. everytime you sent a chat it would cost energy and this only slowly recovered. it has issues and can be offset with easily made free accounts in the context of BnS - but in it's environment I think it's a fairly decent idea. of course it penalises anyone that it wanting to actually be helpful in chat :/

 

my preference would be to make a live dynamic list of heavily reported players, and we as players can opt in to having those players blocked for us. this way the community can pounce on a spammer and we all get the instant benefit rather than wait for CS or GM's to validate or process reports and actually take action.  what's the downside? it might prevent us from seeing a legitimate chat message now and then, but if the player is encouraging a high number of reports then maybe that's not so bad.  the followup on the reports can happen later but we as players get the immediate benefit of our and our peers reporting effort.  

[Bushtuckrman]

Yeah I am trying to level but the gold spam really takes the social aspect out of mmo's.  Never seen it so bad before.  I suggest adopting Tera's model its what the community wants and it fixes the issue by a more than acceptable amount.

[enem]

another thought. once a spammer is caught and banned they simply create a new account and continue as before. being banned is the obvious indicator they have been discovered.

 

what if instead of banning them they get their account on login routed to a 'special' server that only contains other spammers and botters. they will happily continue spamming chats thinking they have customers when in fact they don't. comes a time and NCSoft can just nuke all of them in one go.

 

(of course they probably have a control account legitimately logged into the servers to verify their messages are coming through.)

[dagwood]

The chat is literally un-usable. Even if you block all of the spambots your list will fill up quickly, WTF guys? Give us an unlimited block list already, or at least way higher than 50.

[Yaviey]

Just now, dagwood said:

The chat is literally un-usable. Even if you block all of the spambots your list will fill up quickly, WTF guys? Give us an unlimited block list already, or at least way higher than 50.

 

Hi dagwood, we're looking into some options for the block list and trying to work on some solutions for the spammers. We will get this fixed. In the meantime, we appreciate your patience.

[Rhearn]

Yeah, TERA required you to be L10 or something first?

 

I just turn off all chat now, except whispers and general/say. 90% of what was said in faction chat (which was the last to be completely overrun by spammers) was just "mental vomit" anyway. Lol. Occasionally you get people asking questions but they rarely receive answers because people are too busy being vulgar or stupid. But if people really need help they can always come to the forums. And the lack of public chat has zero impact on social gameplay. I can still hit F7 for example and do cross server dungeons and get a party very quickly. :)

 

Spammers are like a pathogen, you have to starve it. As long as people are not using their services, then it's only a matter of time before their efforts diminish and they calm the f### down lol. Because right now they're trying to cash in on the initial popularity of the game.

[ShadowRose]

I blocked 47 bots in my faction chat in juwol in the last 30 minutes and theres already 15 more scrolling it nonstop and im out of blocks!

 

Fix this devs *crickets*

 

Its so bad i dont even want to play bns with this and that saying something since i played 10 - 15+ hrs a day since it came out.

[bug]

Looks like they're going from server to server or something. We had this happen on Mushin twice today, they stopped for some time then resumed, then stopped again a few hours ago.

 

 

They appear faster than you can report and block them.

[Xanth]

You'd think these game company's would hire full time admins to sit in the chat's for the first week or so of launch to stop these spammers.  But, they really don't care, they can't care, otherwise they'd have done something by now.  I wasted $20 on this game, leaving not just because of the spammers, but because it's boring as hell.

[bug]

1 minute ago, Xanth said:

You'd think these game company's would hire full time admins to sit in the chat's for the first week or so of launch to stop these spammers.  But, they really don't care, they can't care, otherwise they'd have done something by now.  I wasted $20 on this game, leaving not just because of the spammers, but because it's boring as hell.

Well damn man it's not the end of the world, I'm sure they're working on it.

 

I'm still having a blast with the game and hope to be doing so for a long while.

[enem]

3 minutes ago, Rhearn said:

Occasionally you get people asking questions but they rarely receive answers because people are too busy being vulgar or stupid. But if people really need help they can always come to the forums.

 

game should have a mentor system.

 

players can apply to opt in to being helpers (and they get vetted and checked up on to ensure they are abiding by the games standards) and they get a channel and admin rights over it. new players can then post questions and have someone answer them away from all the bullshit and spam that clogs up region and faction chat today.  what's different is the questions people ask are not auto relayed to the chat. they appear once the mentor has provided an answer - meaning there is no public place a spammer can leverage to get their website and prices advertised.

 

i would happily give up a couple of hours on a server now and then trying to help out new players (if I thought I knew how this game worked :/)

[Sheytan]

Perhaps a cool-down on chat if you message more than "x" times in "x" seconds? It would greatly reduce the spam for the time being until NCSOFT gradually reduces the amount of bots/spammers. Just now on Juwol the server had/has a huge spam of bots. Chat is unusable, and it does fairly get irritating if you want to have a conversation in your faction chat, or just communicate. https://gyazo.com/5a030d945b7b2e0a2f10fcd3ae812cc1  

[Yaviey]

7 minutes ago, ShadowRose said:

I blocked 47 bots in my faction chat in juwol in the last 30 minutes and theres already 15 more scrolling it nonstop and im out of blocks!

 

Fix this devs *cricket*

 

Its so bad i dont even want to play bns with this and that saying something since i played 10 - 15+ hrs a day since it came out.

 

Hey ShadowRose,

 

We are aware of the issue and are making strides to resolve it. Please be patient with us while we do so. In the meantime it may be useful for you to temporarily disable certain channels where they're at so that it's not as bothersome while you play.

[djicode2]

Just configure the chat channel and remove region chat and party request chat. It's the main 2 channels they spam on. I don't ever see them and don't have to bother with blocking.

[Ardnaxela]

There's no spam in Jiwan. Hasn't been for hours now.

[djicode2]

Yeah, it's bad. Just remove Region and Party Request from your chat channel config for now. Gets rid of 99% of spam and can still see local, party, system etc etc.

[Vinter]

38 minutes ago, enem said:

 

so basically what you're saying is GameGuard is patently useless :D
 

preventing spam from getting to the chat windows of other players is a definite priority I should think. the issue with detecting it on message send is that spammers find ways to workaround the filters in place, hence using 3W instead of WWW and using C()M in place of COM etc. basically anything that is blocked directly gives them hints how to change their approach. i assume each unsuccessful attempt can add up and auto flag an account, but they just create a new char and try again.

 

what's odd is beyond any filtering like this there is simply no chat timeout functionality. at all! in other threads and replies i had mentioned Black Desert's chat solution which was an energy resource system. everytime you sent a chat it would cost energy and this only slowly recovered. it has issues and can be offset with easily made free accounts in the context of BnS - but in it's environment I think it's a fairly decent idea. of course it penalises anyone that it wanting to actually be helpful in chat :/

 

my preference would be to make a live dynamic list of heavily reported players, and we as players can opt in to having those players blocked for us. this way the community can pounce on a spammer and we all get the instant benefit rather than wait for CS or GM's to validate or process reports and actually take action.  what's the downside? it might prevent us from seeing a legitimate chat message now and then, but if the player is encouraging a high number of reports then maybe that's not so bad.  the followup on the reports can happen later but we as players get the immediate benefit of our and our peers reporting effort.  

 

The thing is, they don't know you've caught them. What I used is packet blocking client side, so in their screen, the message was shown, but not in the user's screen. The best way of defeating spammers, is not letting them know they're caught.

Spammer client -> server -> filter -> if ok, send packet to chat system with an "all" parameter/argument, sending the response to everyone in range.

                                                          -> if flagged as spam, send pack with a "sender" parameter/argument, sending the response only to our spam-flagged client.

 

 

 

There are systems to parse everything to english character words, so that isn't a problem tbh.. it's a little tedious to do, but it can be easily done. You don't need to get the whole chat string to get a spammer, a little bit of the whole string is enough, and that's the beauty of the system :P

[RoninSword]

Gold Farmers are in almost any mmo out there, very hard to stop unless they take drastic measures

[eunusunt]

10 minutes ago, Yaviey said:

 

Hey ShadowRose,

 

We are aware of the issue and are making strides to resolve it. Please be patient with us while we do so. In the meantime it may be useful for you to temporarily disable certain channels where they're at so that it's not as bothersome while you play.

Maybe making the "block spam" option in the settings actually do something would be a start.

[Yaviey]

2 minutes ago, eunusunt said:

Maybe making the "block spam" option in the settings actually do something would be a start.

 

We're working on some options.