Gold Spammers Everywhere

[Enubis]

As I mentioned, all the goldfarmers need to do is pay one or two people to monitor the bots assuming they aren't already doing so to keep them online. A response check does nothing. In the perfect world, a game company would focus on consumer first, but in reality, we look at the gaming industry there are plenty of games created just for a quick buck and dropped like a sack. Indeed MMO communities are growing more and more unforgiving but the crux is the problem isn't because the consumers are *cricket*ed up. No, the general populace might just be jaded. Wildstar for example, A TON of said issues were already raised during beta and the company did squat about it only when they started bleeding population did they start to do any change and by then it's too late, people moved on. It's a cycle really with so many mmos. Join one, get disappointed, move on to the next. It is SO easy to drop an F2P game compared to a P2P one too. It's an endless cycle and until a company decides to actively engage with the community over real issues like botting and start figuring things out together can we see some changes. I've seen a few people offering ideas, hell offering themselves to help ban bots. May not be the best ideas, may not be the best person for the job but it is obvious we all want this to work out.

 

So this last bit is for NCsoft should you even look at this post in the forum. Fix the damned botting issue please before it destroys the game.

[Kappamaro]

simple equa

 

bots + full servers =hight queu  (make ppl buy premium)

 

i just got 15 min and suddnely *bam* 407min to log in

[AnthraxThv]

Ask to Lineage 2 players!!! the weird thing is anothers MMO doesnt have this problem... not in the same lvl

[MrNiN]

The blink eye? I'm not real familiar with that one. You saying that players voicing being upset over the bots is going to kill the game? If so, I can only assume you think so because it will spread around and potential players will here of the boting and then go elsewhere.  Or are you saying that getting rid of the bots will mean gold farmers exiting and canceling subs , and so NCsoft will loose to much from them leaving? Oooooor are YOU a pro-bot player!?! AkA the enemy of all fun. lol I just kidding.

[Danganronpa]

The bots are really bad, and it seems like botting and gold sellers in general is an issue with NCsoft games because I've played other F2P games and subscription games and it's nowhere near as bad (FFXIV was pretty bad before the expansion but they managed to pretty much solve the issue somehow). I'm also pretty sure NCsoft has zero plans to solve the gold seller and botting issue because they have taken the same "do-nothing" stance in other regions as well.

[Enubis]

2 minutes ago, Danganronpa said:

The bots are really bad, and it seems like botting and gold sellers in general is an issue with NCsoft games because I've played other F2P games and subscription games and it's nowhere near as bad (FFXIV was pretty bad before the expansion but they managed to pretty much solve the issue somehow). I'm also pretty sure NCsoft has zero plans to solve the gold seller and botting issue because they have taken the same "do-nothing" stance in other regions as well.

 

Exactly the greatest concern and the worst of it all that they do nothing, since they have done nothing. This being a localized version of an already made game could simply be a quick cash in on the international market. I sure as hell hope not.

[MrNiN]

Yeah, your probably right, I actually stayed away from all NCsoft games after my experience with bots in Aion. God that one burned me up. I loved that game at launch,  but at a steady pace it just took a blade to my soul :-) Wildstar was the only game that NCsoft had anything to do with sense Aion that I played. Now of course there is BnS. Here is why I was hoping BnS would be different with bots then Aion was. BnS was a pretty big success in the region it was first released, Korean area I think. Anyway when asked by serveral gaming publications if they would be bringing it to a western release they said they were undecided. The main reason explained for that was they were still, I don't know if Jaded is the right word, perhaps disappointed, over the fact that they had put so much into Aion for its western release, had a ton of subs, and then everyone just mass exited the game, it seemed like they found it kind of insulting, and were not sure if they wanted to risk another title on a western release. That's what the article was saying that I read at the time. Which was back in 2012 or 2013 I think.

So I had high hopes when I heard they would release in the west that they would do what is necessary to keep BnS from being another Aion bust. I don't know how boting and gold farming is viewed by the public in eastern regions, but Western region players hate them with the," fury of a thousand suns". Hey a new BnS kung fu master skill name for the future update..Counter attack with Fury of a thousand suns!!!! Sorry had a lot of coffee and I am going to pass out soon because I'm on my way down from that high now.  If that makes since.

[Froggyman]

43 minutes ago, Enubis said:

 

Exactly the greatest concern and the worst of it all that they do nothing, since they have done nothing. This being a localized version of an already made game could simply be a quick cash in on the international market. I sure as hell hope not.

Considering I have been aware of their plans to localize the game...four YEARS ago, i would say a lot of time and effort actually went into this release. I understand people are mad about the bots, and I also understand that NCSoft doesn't have the best record in that regard, but just hear me out a second.

 

Let's say they did what you said and hired a few people per server to manually get rid of some of the bots. Keep in mind that bot spamming, and bots farming are two different issues we are talking about here, and are achieved very different ways. As far as I can tell, the game only has an issue with bot SPAMMING, meaning a script meant to advertise. Bot SPAMMING is harder to control because it is so much easier for the offender to do, than it is for the defender to fix.

 

Example. All those toons you've seen in the videos and gifs showing bots with stupid or keyboard smash names popping in and then immediately spamming, None of it is done mechanically. And I mean none of it. From account creation to loading a toon in, picking a class, and even guiding it through the tutorials and to the starter town, ALL of it is put on a script that a computer will run over and over again. Banned? New email, account, login, char, tut, bam, back in town, spamming away.  Now imagine that said computer can do that more than once, and can even tell when it needs to make another account WITHOUT any help from a human.

 

Now explain to me how a couple of poor souls are supposed to combat that? Should I ask ol' Henry to take on the machine again, wot? (yeah like, two people are gonna get that) Point is, that isn't going to help.

 

They COULD do several things about it though, and they should, and I believe they will. For starters, they could add a simple spam check so that they could only send so many messages in a certain amount of time. To make it a real problem solver and not just a quick fix, they could add an auto-kick function as well, meaning if you tried to post more than twice after having already been told to wait a few seconds, it kicks you. There does not exist a bot that wouldn't currently be removed by such a feature, yet it would only kick bots (and really spammy people 

 

who

talk like

this

for whatever

reason.

 

That's like five dings, for one, and yeah, multiple sentences are better. But I digress, there definitely needs to be a dynamic system in play, but you're only help is something automated, no human could stop the influx of bots, and we shouldn't try to. There are far better methods.

[Mazaka]

agree with froggyman

 

there's a need to use the understanding of botting system to prevent it.

 

some ideas can be taken from other current authentication tools; in-game random visual generated code to type confirm / logging in with verification code send to handphones instead of email (owning multiple emails is easy, hand phones, not so) / some kind of public nomination to kick the spammer out of server (more than 20 player accepting to kick).

 

im not so concern about bot farm, but bot spammers. they ruin the social system in the game. and what makes an mmo is the company you have and that requires communication. a clean chat system would do wonders to a game.

[SolidusBlitz]

There were bots October 1, 2003, the day Lineage 2 came out. So either they don't give af or they're not trying hard enough to get rid of them. Personally I think someone, somewhere in the NCsoft hierarchy is making a profit

[Arathos]

Yes it's not a secret or shame it's business. aside from all the ignorant and dumb answers, online game developers tend to give slight exploit to gold companies to make profit in short term. Some do actually have contracts with them in the long run. if you're asking why even, obviously because of the profit that bots can make which is massive compared to real players lemme briefly explain how while I'm waiting in queue:

 

Let's say you have two full servers of 10k users one has real players while other is full of bots. the bot company would pay exact amount of money on all ip ports for certain period of time while on the other hand farm gold and other stuff, however only developers will profit from this stage unless they allow constant items transfer to other servers.

the server packed with real players will most likely profit developers way less because you have uncontrollable amount of free/potential players and few cash players. it depends on game mechanics and economy system that either let player farm and grind which equals successful work for a bot, or has restrictions to refrain trading and grinding which kill the majority of bot companies work.

It's pretty obvious developers never take an action against bots even if they mention otherwise and pretend that it's under control. you can simply for a start to block all chinese ip and ports and track down other regions and put them on blacklist. even release more restrictions on currency and AH.

there's just lots of way to get rid of bots and make a healthy game it's even easier than you think and costs like nothing but again if I was developer I'd care the least about my community and the game and put money on top of everything because MMOs cost a lot to make and keep alive for long run.

[SolidusBlitz]

Someone at NCsoft made the assessment that they make more money with the farmers active. But imho, behind the face value, they lose legit players because of it. Unfortunately, the loss of players specifically because of bots and gold farmers is not a tangible figure so all they care about is the $$$$ from the way things currently are.

[Eldemarco]

Even the new servers are filled with bots and gold spammers. The only logical course of action is that if enough players ban a certain player name, the entire account gets an IP ban, or a lock. Or, require periodic captcha codes or secondary password entries in order to speak in chat. This will kill the bot's ability to post at the very least.

[nekoshka]

I don't see what's so hard about programming the chat servers in such a way as to filter out these websites. It's the same website getting spammed all the time, with different random characters thrown in. Just ban the website letters if they ever appear in order without a certain number of normal characters. So g'o'og'l'e'.'c'o'm should be pretty easy to filter out. I could write a program that filters out text like that in 5 minutes.

 

Also, making a minimum chat level of level 3 means they need to at least spend some time in-game, which adds to the cost of their business model; time is money. The overall goal is not to stop spamming, but to make it unprofitable. If you keep adding layers and layers making spamming more difficult, eventually they will stop because their cashflow will get too small, or at the very least, the spamming will be reduced significantly as fewer people can pay their increased costs.

 

And this can all be player-driven. Give players a modest amount of experience or supplies (the same amount they'd get for killing a few enemies their level) for reporting a confirmed gold spammer and you'll have dozens of people reporting a new spammer within seconds.

 

How such simple solutions are not a part of every game at launch I do not know.

[Eshman]

The ultimate solution for this problem isn't blocking the bots--it's taking down the gold selling websites entirely. Unfortunately, that's something only NCSoft is going to have to do. It's not as simple as creating a simple text filter either--the bots are taking up spots on the server creating lag and congestion for legitimate players. A simple search ran on any engine (Google, DuckDuckGo, etc.) reveals all the websites [and clones] out there atm that are taking advantage of the problem. It's quite sickening and frustrating but they're one of, if not the main, reason the servers keep going down--if you ask me anyway. Give NCSoft time and patience as I'm sure they're doing everything they can think of. I can't imagine it would be quite like this though...

[Dreamer0526]

23 minutes ago, nekoshka said:

I don't see what's so hard about programming the chat servers in such a way as to filter out these websites. It's the same website getting spammed all the time, with different random characters thrown in. Just ban the website letters if they ever appear in order without a certain number of normal characters. So g'o'og'l'e'.'c'o'm should be pretty easy to filter out. I could write a program that filters out text like that in 5 minutes.

 

Also, making a minimum chat level of level 3 means they need to at least spend some time in-game, which adds to the cost of their business model; time is money. The overall goal is not to stop spamming, but to make it unprofitable. If you keep adding layers and layers making spamming more difficult, eventually they will stop because their cashflow will get too small, or at the very least, the spamming will be reduced significantly as fewer people can pay their increased costs.

 

And this can all be player-driven. Give players a modest amount of experience or supplies (the same amount they'd get for killing a few enemies their level) for reporting a confirmed gold spammer and you'll have dozens of people reporting a new spammer within seconds.

 

How such simple solutions are not a part of every game at launch I do not know.

Thats not the point, the gold spammers take character slots on the server = More queue for normal players.

[Kounat]

Block the faction chat ones, otherwise chances are you wont be in the same region too long to enjoy the abuse - it's not worth the block-space

[nekoshka]

2 minutes ago, Dreamer0526 said:

Thats not the point, the gold spammers take character slots on the server = More queue for normal players.

Without a way to profit off the game, they will leave, freeing up slots. I doubt the dozen or few slots occupied by them make much of a difference anyways.

 

11 minutes ago, Eshman said:

The ultimate solution for this problem isn't blocking the bots--it's taking down the gold selling websites entirely.

Impossible. These websites probably operate out of China/Russia. To take them down would require the cooperation of foreign governments that have shown no such wish to do so in the past. They'd have better luck attacking the websites directly.

[KrazyX]

On ‎1‎/‎18‎/‎2016 at 11:27 PM, Youmukon said:

Hello!

 

Just to let everyone know, our team is fully aware about the RMT/Goldsellers spam going on and we are currently working on countermeasures to reduce the inconvenience it causes to players.

 

In the meantime please keep reporting bots by either using the in-game report feature or by submitting a ticket (Report Player > "They were trying to sell gold by spamming chat".), these reports greatly help our team to identify and removes bots from the game.

 

Thanks again!

I thank you all for taking note of this, and putting time and efforts towards some sort of solution.   May I ask, have you sat down, and truly given thought to the harm this is causing to players, and perhaps even to your profit potential?  I would strongly suggest, that you all add this among your in game surveys, and ask your player base how they feel about this overwhelming bombardment of gold seller spam in region and faction chat.  Ask them individually, one-on-one, privately, how does this affect their gaming sessions??  I think, what you see here in the forums, is only the tip of the iceberg.

 

I abruptly quit playing last night, simply because I was mentally exhausted of seeing and dealing with this gold spam.  Imagine frantically trying to kill a erupting ant infestation in your home, with only a pencil tip eraser at your disposal?

 

I reached the 50 name capacity of my block list.  The flood gates had broken loose, and I could stop it no longer.  So I purged my list, in hopes that perhaps many had been removed or banned from the game already.  To my disbelief, within 15 minutes I had already reached 30 blocked gold spammers and they were continually flooding in.   I can't ignore gold spam or telemarketers.  Both enrage me to know end.  Like the ants in my home...I have to eradicate them.  I am the Carl Spackler (played by Bill Murray) in the movie Caddyshack.   What am I to do, when you're giving me only a pencil tip eraser to deal with this infestation??? 

 

Within 30 minutes of my abruptly departing BnS because of the unstoppable gold spam, I would have spent $30 dollars in another mmo (postponed because of a simple image glitch on their purchasing page).  Money to spend on any mmo, and I was driven away from BnS into the hands of another...because of gold spam.

 

PS:  I am a Master's Pack recipient with all seven character slots in active use.  None of them, are at a level where they can access the "report spam" option of the block feature, that I keep hearing about.  All my efforts are futile.  Players like myself, are getting pummeled by this gold spam, having  just the 50 list cap, and only the block option at our disposal.  The situation is desperate here, for us low levels and newbs!!  Please send backup!!!

[Tarselis]

Why should they do something about it? You have to charge ncoins to use mail. A nice opportunity to earn some extra $$$ from the goldsellers who will see this as an investestment for their business model.

[Kyrrua]

Can we create a feature that will only allow level 10 character to see the chat but not posting until then ?

You clearly don't need help to understand the game or ask question in chat in low level, just follow the line and the yellow point... The game is smarter enough to show you what do to until level 15+.

 

Would be a good way to gain time against those gold sellers, the time they reach lvl 10 our mods would already have banned some others.

Making waste 1 or 2 hours to gain 1 or 2 hours.

 

Something like :

Chat level minimum required = 10

Whisper level minimum required= 10

Can post only 1 message per minute on /s until level 10 (to avoid low level camping zone like bamboo by sellers)

After that I assume that if the bans by ncsoft mods are fast it will be a good change.

I wonder if we can also put a feature like twich does that will not allow u to post the same message twice.

[Offended]

 

On 1/23/2016 at 7:26 PM, Revillot said:

 

I think I may have found a part of how they are "beating the system". IF there is a limit in chat posts, they are entering into a loading zones, then backing back out for a short period to continue. I have seen dozens of people doing this in piles outside a loading zone. I'm currently in Everdusk, West of "Scouting Party" at the "Bandit Hideout." I am watching about a dozen different names pop in and out with gibberish names like "djhfhjeca." If there is a chat per minute limit, this might be how they are resetting it.

Those ones are checking every channel for the 2 viridian resource spawns that are just outside of the loading zone. So if your wondering why it takes 8 hours to find a viridian resource spawn its because 20% of every server is the protected RMT class and nothing will be done about them. Which Is why I only play NCSoft games for first month.

[Veckans]

You fill the blocklist for bots in just days, and now they are free to spam again without any restrictions. Does NCSoft support goldselling and botting or is the limit just a bug?

[Dradiinmmo]

Nearsighted devs.

 

It is like they had no foresight for this release at all.

Servers... garbage (only 6 in reserve for NA ???)

Reporting from the start... Nope not till 15.

Some attempt to prevent bots... Nope

Proper forums with proper sub forums (no class forums ?)... Nope

In game CS/GMs ?... Nope

Temp overflow servers ?... Nope

Block list ?... sure a palsy 50 blocks....  i bet there are more then 50 bots made in an hour.

 

This game has been out for YEARS in other regions, how does it get released with so much.... lacking ?

[Raspberry]

Hello!

This is getting out of control.
Today I blocked 26 gold spammers. You need to do something about it, we can't log in every day, unblock bots and reblock as needed. That's WAY too much hassle.

These are today's blocked spammers.