Gold Spammers Everywhere

[Lylette]

Even though I'm a solo player like, 90% of the time, the whole gold spamming thing is just getting out of control, I normally don't look at chats etc, but it just constantly being flooded every 0.1 seconds is distracting me, this REALLY needs a fix soon before I just give up and quit.

[Naisho]

4 hours ago, xland44 said:

This is problematic because soon enough there will be "Ban bots" - if someone annoys a player he'll just use multiple bots to flag the person and get him banned. Also if you anger multiple people they can just decide to flag you as a bot to get you banned

Ah what I mean is that what flags the player won't be the players, but a feature they can easily add in. Like depending on the 'string' the bot types in chat the system will flag them as bot but will do nothing against them since they are not sure. But while they are flagged, X number of reports will auto ban them. In cases of bots, they will be flagged all the time by the system since they basically constantly spam WWW.GETYOURGOLDHERE.COM (which will cause said feature to flag them). So if a player was innocent, there is no reason for system to flag them so even if bad mannered player gets thousands of his friends to report him... at best they will send a GM to take a look since they will not get auto banned.

 

To reiterate: the players don't do the flagging; they do the voting. The system will flag prior if they are suspicious like typing certain words in chat, or trading large amounts of gold, etc (depending on the code they implement).

 

Edit again: Especially now it seems some innocent players are getting banned because the system flags them as suspicious. My suggestion would not ban them as such without the 'consent' of the player base.

[Mikhail]

3 minutes ago, Lylette said:

Even though I'm a solo player like, 90% of the time, the whole gold spamming thing is just getting out of control, I normally don't look at chats etc, but it just constantly being flooded every 0.1 seconds is distracting me, this REALLY needs a fix soon before I just give up and quit.

They need to do something. Simply saying "Remove all chats" is basically making this game a solo-game and you're forced to do the Duty Finder to

be in Parties. It's sad really. No one wants to stop and try block every single spammer more than they actually play the game.

Every Tom and Joe is telling you to 'block this chat' and then you won't have a 'MMO" anymore.

It's a solo game.

[Lylette]

1 minute ago, Mikhail said:

They need to do something. Simply saying "Remove all chats" is basically making this game a solo-game and you're forced to do the Duty Finder to

be in Parties. It's sad really. No one wants to stop and try block every single spammer more than they actually play the game.

 

Exactly, it's just horrible at the moment, I can tolerate them on some games where it's not as rapid or it's easier to block, but it's just not on tolerable on BnS. I was going to buy the starter kit or something, but I reconsidered it the second I saw just how bad the spamming is, if it stays like this, BnS wont last much longer.

[Dark Unwinding]

Hey guys,i took a 3 day break from this game has it improved yet with the bots or ques?

[Lylette]

1 minute ago, Dark Unwinding said:

Hey guys,i took a 3 day break from this game has it improved yet with the bots or ques?

Not that I'm aware of, it was pretty bad earlier today for me

[Dark Unwinding]

1 minute ago, Lylette said:

Not that I'm aware of, it was pretty bad earlier today for me

that is sad to hear.I'm not likely to come back till the game gets better intill then I can only hope it does

[Lylette]

1 minute ago, Dark Unwinding said:

that is sad to hear.I'm not likely to come back till the game gets better intill then I can only hope it does

Same here, it's not worth it at the moment.

[Mew]

On 1/26/2016 at 2:04 PM, voodooblade said:

No, dumb idea.

 

 

Wow this is so false I am dying of laughter. I assume you don't play MMO's after a few months of launch. ESO SWTOR, GW2 and Tera are mmos I can name right now, who got rid of bot spammers. Go ahead, log in and watch the chats. so this whole "Every MMO has bot spammers and it can't be stopped" is beyond false.  And 2 of those are "f2p" models. So either these games have sacrificed their souls to a demonic entity who devours gold spammers, or they found away. 

Also using the argument "They always get around" is beyond flawed. Minus the fact that getting rid of them IS possible. So because it can't be stopped no point in limiting it? In no other example in human life would you apply such a logic. Be it theives, Pedophiles, Murderers, Gangs, Illegal trafficking, Dictatorships, racial insensitivites, Political Corruption, EA/Ubisoft ect...

 

So download Tera, stare at the chat logs and send me a video or screen capture of a gold bot spamming post. Because in my two years there before BNS, I never saw it once.

 

EDIT: Oh and BTW they don't have a (At elast appearent) "security program"

I am dying of laughter ha....ha....ha....ha.....ha.....ha..... I didn't play eso or tera but I played and have recently played gw2 and there is still gold spamming. Not as much as there used to be of course, its been out a while. But its still there and I'm pretty sure if the developers can't find a way to stop it easily then a child from the internet can't either. Also, me saying they always find a work around isn't flawed at all. Even if they took extreme measures they would find a way. If they couldn't do it in region/faction chat they would spam your whispers. 

 

If the developers of those games did anything to stop them that completely got rid of them, then NCSOFT would be doing it as well. But I'm going to go ahead and assume that time solved the issue and the lack of people buying gold in those games after many years probably slowed/stopped the spamming. Blade and Soul is fresh market for them and they are probably making bank off gold selling right now. 

 

You can limit it, obviously. I'm pretty sure I never said something about them not being able to limit the spam. So before you write laughing about what someone says, make sure you know what your replying to lol. Your clearly a product of perfection and a god at the least, so how about you fix the gold spamming issue ^_^

[2501]

3 hours ago, Rukkirii said:

Greetings everyone, we wanted to provide a quick update. We recently deployed a hotfix to address the issue where some players were unable to be blocked. Please restart the client for these changes to take place.

 

I hope you have fast fingers, and can block 100 accounts every 15 minutes. That's the rate at which they were being created on Juwol.

[ActiumPraetor]

I'm seriously considering firing up my development tools and writing a proxy server for managing the chat issue - if I intercept all traffic used by the game I can pretty easily regexp anything that looks like a chat message and drop it at the proxy, neatly eliminating the RMT chat-spam problem in one fell swoop and simultaneously taking it out of NCsoft's hands. Basically this was what Guildwork did with FFXIV - shoehorn a proxy between the client and the Internet, and regexp-filter everything going through the proxy that is marked as a chat entry.

 

EDIT: A few moments with Wireshark and I can see the chat comes in from 64.25.37.254, at least on my client. If others with the technical capacity can gather IP addresses on what the game is using for what I might be able to get something going.

 

[BroCode]

Page 79.

i have become one with this topic.

the others have finally accepted me.

little do they know i am here to spam my gold selling website.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA

[GnatB]

8 minutes ago, ActiumPraetor said:

I'm seriously considering firing up my development tools and writing a proxy server for managing the chat issue - if I intercept all traffic used by the game I can pretty easily regexp anything that looks like a chat message and drop it at the proxy, neatly eliminating the RMT chat-spam problem in one fell swoop and simultaneously taking it out of NCsoft's hands. Basically this was what Guildwork did with FFXIV - shoehorn a proxy between the client and the Internet, and regexp-filter everything going through the proxy that is marked as a chat entry.

 

  

That's the thing, every single spammer I've seen so far would be filtered out by a basic regexp.  Now sure, there's some overhead processing every string each person posts.... so seriously, just process every (random) x string.  If somebody gets muted, they stay muted until/unless they complain to a GM.  (Not banned, muted... and not in a way that's apparent to them.  On their end it would seem normal)

 

Now sure, they'll figure out ways around a basic filter... but you can just keep adding filters.  Eventually they won't be able to do anything that looks like their URL's.

[ActiumPraetor]

8 minutes ago, GnatB said:

  

That's the thing, every single spammer I've seen so far would be filtered out by a basic regexp.  Now sure, there's some overhead processing every string each person posts.... so seriously, just process every (random) x string.  If somebody gets muted, they stay muted until/unless they complain to a GM.  (Not banned, muted... and not in a way that's apparent to them.  On their end it would seem normal)

 

Now sure, they'll figure out ways around a basic filter... but you can just keep adding filters.  Eventually they won't be able to do anything that looks like their URL's.

 

My Guildwork FFXIV settings include the following regexps:

 

(\$|USD).([gG]\s*[iI]\s*[lL])
([pP]\s*[rR]\s*[iI]\s*[cC]\s*[eE])
([dD]\s*[eE]\s*[lL]\s*[iI]\s*[vV]\s*[eE]\s*[rR])
([cC\(]\s*[oO0]\s*[mM])
(000\s*[kK])

 

It's exceedingly rare for a RMT spamvertisement to make it past those five regexp searches. Modifying to suit pretty much any other game (e.g., changing the "gil" detect to gold/zenni/rupees/whatever) should be trivial.

 

[Aile]

Has anyone ever tried simply making it so they don't get banned? Think about it just silently block them so they don't know they are being blocked. O_O

 

Or be super aggressive and say anyone promoting a gold spam website voluntarily gives the right to hack your system and find your mac address to ban you to your eula.

[LilRed]

23 minutes ago, ActiumPraetor said:

 

My Guildwork FFXIV settings include the following regexps:

 

(\$|USD).([gG]\s*[iI]\s*[lL])
([pP]\s*[rR]\s*[iI]\s*[cC]\s*[eE])
([dD]\s*[eE]\s*[lL]\s*[iI]\s*[vV]\s*[eE]\s*[rR])
([cC\(]\s*[oO0]\s*[mM])
(000\s*[kK])

 

It's exceedingly rare for a RMT spamvertisement to make it past those five regexp searches. Modifying to suit pretty much any other game (e.g., changing the "gil" detect to gold/zenni/rupees/whatever) should be trivial.

 

If this actually works why in the blazes hasn't this been done by the devs. basically if this works, you solved the issue that developers, being paid with  our money, should have been able to solve just as easily. And since they are not, shows a clear sign of corruption and laziness. I wish I was as technically savvy, so I have no idea of the authenticity of this....but the implications if it works....

 

I will attempt to put up with the bots as much as I can. But I can guarantee that I will just go back to Skyforge permanently, if this issue is not solved within a month of the date of open beta launch. 

[ActiumPraetor]

6 minutes ago, LilRed said:

If this actually works why in the blazes hasn't this been done by the devs. basically if this works, you solved the issue that developers, being paid with  our money, should have been able to solve just as easily. And since they are not, shows a clear sign of corruption and laziness. I wish I was as technically savvy, so I have no idea of the authenticity of this....but the implications if it works....

 

It works fine in FFXIV, thanks to Guildworks proxying game chat through itself and simply not passing filtered text to the client. Prior to this, RMTers in FFXIV would send their adverts directly to players via the game's person-to-person chat (/tell, in FFXIV's case). That said, Guildworks also allows for some cheating (such as automatically sharing boss spawn locations/times), but the chat filter was worth its weight in digital gold.

 

Most game developers don't want to deal with regular expressions because they have an element of "black magic" to them - regexp matching is a very powerful feature, but it's touchy, computationally expensive (read: slow), easy to mess up or get wrong, hard to debug, and if you screw something up you can really screw something up. In the case of a chat system for a game, a flaky regexp filter could easily break the chat's functionality and hunting down the bugs is a real hassle. (One errant character in an expression could make a chat filter drop 90+% of the chat traffic, for example.)

 

[Daemoroth]

11 minutes ago, ActiumPraetor said:

 

/snip

Most game developers don't want to deal with regular expressions because they have an element of "black magic" to them

/snip

 

 

True, but with the current avalanche of spam I think it's high time NCSoft create an interim solution that filters out ANY chat with a URL/words 'gold'/'usd'/'$' or a price (similar to 9.99) in the content.

 

Add a login announcement to all players that, as a temporary stop-gap measure, all chat containing such will be filtered until such time as a proper solution is implemented.

[Snowyamur]

Yeah, well, hopefully NCSoft will resolve this problem soon.

[Nephiral]

I dunno if we took the limit off of the blocklist that would be the best long term solution. Any tune ups on the prevention of using said unlimited blocklist would be cool but only 50 slots fills up fast when the gold spammers breed like rabbits and know you can't block all of them.

[LilRed]

8 minutes ago, Nephiral said:

I dunno if we took the limit off of the blocklist that would be the best long term solution. Any tune ups on the prevention of using said unlimited blocklist would be cool but only 50 slots fills up fast when the gold spammers breed like rabbits and know you can't block all of them.

Pretty much this. It has been said all throughout this entire thread and yet somehow, they chose "raise global chat restriction to lvl 10" out of all of the suggestions made. They basically chose the one that took the least amount of effort and highest probability of failing. And there is enough data from past games to know that statistically, such a "band-aid" would be severely insufficient. ...

 

So when they say "We're taking this issue very seriously" I have to call bullshit. 

[Dark Unwinding]

what i dont understand is why there isnt a system that restricts you from typing if you spam in chat.

[LilRed]

6 minutes ago, Dark Unwinding said:

what i dont understand is why there isnt a system that restricts you from typing if you spam in chat.

There is a system. I tested it, myself. I tried to spam something and after 6 messages of the same thing, I got "squelched" for just under 2 minutes. 

 

However, they're bypassing that system, just as they've bypassed the lvl 10 chat restriction. 

[Xiee]

They should have a captcha in place. Some other MMOs are already doing this. A captcha will randomly appear anytime and ask you to enter the code and you have a limit of 10 seconds or else you're logged out of the game. I remember seeing something like this on Aura Kingdom (Taiwan/Japan server, not the failure that is Aeria games.)

[Dark Unwinding]

1 minute ago, LilRed said:

There is a system. I tested it, myself. I tried to spam something and after 6 messages of the same thing, I got "squelched" for just under 2 minutes. 

 

well I'm glad they finally added a system like that in,but it could last more then 2 minutes,but better then nothing