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Gold Spammers Everywhere


Glyndwr

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On 1/21/2016 at 11:58 AM, JennBren said:

 

Thank you for responding directly here in the forums. Speaking on behalf of veterans of countless other MMOs, we've all had experiences with the problems common to public launching of a new game.

 

I for one need help following your suggestions. Going to the web site to create a "ticket" is less than ideal as the level of effort on generating a new ticket is considerably more than the gold farmer needs to expend to send the spam in the first place. The ticket on the web site, once you navigate to the correct form, your form requires fields for Issue, Subject, Description, Reason for reporting, Time of Incident, Character Name (not at all easy considering the random characters used to create a typical gold farmers name), which character your reporting, realm name, and possibly attachments. This effort required on the part of a willing player with good intention is asking a bit too much in the consideration of their time and as a result, you are not likely to have too many people willing to go to the effort with so little assurance that anything is even being done with their report.

 

The "In Game Report Feature" I have yet to be able to locate in the game interface. If you could post instructions as to a quick efficient way that was easy to access for players in game, I would be delighted to help. As an example, World of Warcraft allows you to simply right click the name of a spammer in the chat dialog and choose the option, "Report for spam". I think there is a quick conformation and then you're done. A tool in Blade and Soul like this would be VERY appreciated by the community. If there is such a tool already in place, and anyone knows where to find it, I would be very grateful for that information. Thanks in advance to all who took  the time to read my reply. Have a great one! ^_^

 

Hey JennBren!

Not sure if anyone answered your question on how to get this guys reported.

 

Using WoW as an example, you are also able to do this here with BnS. Except that you need to get out of the Starting area to be able to actually Report and Block them. (If you are in the starting area still you can only block). Just hold Alt key and then right click on the characters name in the chat (if there is to much spam you might have trouble till you report a few of them to slow the chat down)

 

After that, they get reported and added to your block list which helps your chat look a lot neater! And saves having to remember the names of those annoying spammers and opening up tickets.

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18 hours ago, Hanadeus said:

simple solution for y all, make new tab and stop Remove Region Chat then have spam Free Chat Tab

But all this accomplishes is removing all global chats, defeating the purpose of having in game chat in the first place. But I already do this. I just have my chat permanently in party only chat. But we shouldn't have to do that. We should be able to discuss the game, or anything else, with people other than those we have in our parties, friend lists, and clans. 

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A free to play game is definitely very hard to maintain on gold spamming and i am well aware of the sheer impossibility to ever hope to block all of them.
 
There is however a very effective solution that i have seen a couple of free titles as well as paid titles take that helps quite a lot, Now bare with me this proposal might make a few people mad but i assure you it works quite well the majority of the time. I think to use anything beyond whispers or local chatting, NC-Soft should add a starter pack inside the cash shop or possibly even the ability to purchase it on the site for a few bucks maybe like 5$ or less. What this should do is Require you to make a purchase, as well as have payment info on file at some point in order to speak in chat channels.
 
Now before everyone explodes at this idea, You could also give incentive to lessen the blow, I.E use something like that current 5$ pack where you get a cosmetic item, a week of premium, maybe perhaps a few bag upgrades? But you make this only purchasable once per account. This would make the pack a great deal almost irresistible to buy for a new player, as well as helping cut back drastically on gold spammers.
 
Most gold spammers are not willing to invest money or put payment info on the game, It also cuts back on automatically generated accounts. It's definitely a risk and has some potential to upset people who are not willing to pay for things in the game, But i think its a very effective solution to slow down the rate of spam or possibly even remove the majority of it.

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On 1/18/2016 at 11:30 PM, Hire De Lune said:

How about we discourage other players from being scammed by these bots.. the most effective method is to look down on such behaviour.

IT's literally common sense to not buy something from a website like that. if someone does that, then they deserve to be scammed. 

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3 hours ago, Zeaig said:


There is however a very effective solution that i have seen a couple of free titles as well as paid titles take that helps quite a lot, Now bare with me this proposal might make a few people mad but i assure you it works quite well the majority of the time. I think to use anything beyond whispers or local chatting, NC-Soft should add a starter pack inside the cash shop or possibly even the ability to purchase it on the site for a few bucks maybe like 5$ or less. What this should do is Require you to make a purchase, as well as have payment info on file at some point in order to speak in chat channels.
 

 

This is one of the worst ideas I have ever seen. Pay to chat? NO!

 

You want an effective solution? There are two:

1) Get rid of the incentive to buy gold. Korean grinders need to stop nickle and diming their players. Stop charging to port, stop charging to upgrade weapons, stop charging to so much as blow our noses. Without an incentive there will no longer be demand.

 

2) Chat ban people who have repeated used the same or substantially similar message within X amount of minutes after Y amount of times. In order to catch multiple accounts this might need to ban people who repeat a message that has already been posted however this would require a bit of tinkering to get right.

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Part of the problem right now is that since the game is new and people have not accumulated a large amount of money, the goldsellers are able to get a large return for low effort. As the game gets older and the sellers have to sell more gold to get the same amount of cash, then the ferocity of chat spam should die down a bit.

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11 hours ago, INemesisl said:

Yeah I know, this is really annoying. I suggest right clicking them, click report and block all of them. 

You can't though, you fill that up fast and if you unblock them to block another you just trade spam of one for another. 50 blocks maximum.

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Immediately after yesterdays second attempt to stop the gold spamming:

"It's quiet Jim, too quiet"

"I know they're out there somewhere".

 

Logged on today:

"They came at us in their hundreds, we where overwhelmed in minutes"

"God help us all"

 

Time for another 5+ hr maintenance sequel: 'Spam Wars: Revenge of the Sellers' and may the farce be with you.

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I think expanding the blocklist by several hundred would be great until ncsoft can do something more permanent about the spamming, because sorting the blocklist out every day is a chore by itself. Also, better blocklist management would be great (for example you could select multiple blocklisted players and report them with 1 click instead of going through them one-by-one). 

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The new spammers are all level 11+

 

In other mmo's like Rappelz: they place anti-bot mobs in the low level area's.

 

Example trick:

 

If you hit the mob, you will kicked off the server and a message is sent to Support.

They will check why the player hit the anti-bot mob and if the account seems illegal, it will banned.

 

Bots must level up to 10, so they will auto-grind on some mobs in low level zones.

If we can place some mobs in the places, the mob will yell for example "don't hit me, i hate bots" and if you keep hitting mob and mob died, server will disconnect you immediately.

 

We need trick the bots while leveling up. Some mmos does it.

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You know i read earlier in this thread or maybe it was in another one about gold spammers about how a Dev was all "hey guys we just put in the level restriction to fight against gold spammers but we have other things we are working on".  I think its nice that the devs are on the forums to talk to us directly and to tell us that they are doing something.  But they need to do it fast--fast--SUPER FAST!  Dont make the mistake that Wildstar did with waiting until its too late to take action.  Though it might have just seemed like they are simply "waiting until its too late" because they dont communicate as much as they should.  I mean...yah take your time to test out what you plan to implement to make sure it doesnt break your game.  But dont spend too much time gathering data, collating metrics, investigating bot behavior/methods, looking at weather patterns, or playing with your Ouija board.  If you guys are worried that one of your fixes might adversely affect legit players QOL then screw it just ask us if we think it will mess up our QOL instead of trying to do the predictions yourself.

 

I'm actually very excited to be playing this game but i'm scared to log in to play because i dont want this game to end up in the same crappy (imo) state as games like WS, TSW or SWTOR.  Crappy as in it sucks to play the game not crappy as in they arent making enough money.

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9 minutes ago, Xenosaga said:

 

That is bit annoying step, every chat text with captcha?

No one MMO uses it.

 

Yeah i agree  its boring. But i for one would prefer to put a captcha every 20 or 30 minutes than having the chat like it is now.

 

Of course i hope they can find a better solution.

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On 1/30/2016 at 1:01 AM, Zeaig said:

A free to play game is definitely very hard to maintain on gold spamming and i am well aware of the sheer impossibility to ever hope to block all of them.
 
There is however a very effective solution that i have seen a couple of free titles as well as paid titles take that helps quite a lot, Now bare with me this proposal might make a few people mad but i assure you it works quite well the majority of the time. I think to use anything beyond whispers or local chatting, NC-Soft should add a starter pack inside the cash shop or possibly even the ability to purchase it on the site for a few bucks maybe like 5$ or less. What this should do is Require you to make a purchase, as well as have payment info on file at some point in order to speak in chat channels.
 
Now before everyone explodes at this idea, You could also give incentive to lessen the blow, I.E use something like that current 5$ pack where you get a cosmetic item, a week of premium, maybe perhaps a few bag upgrades? But you make this only purchasable once per account. This would make the pack a great deal almost irresistible to buy for a new player, as well as helping cut back drastically on gold spammers.
 
Most gold spammers are not willing to invest money or put payment info on the game, It also cuts back on automatically generated accounts. It's definitely a risk and has some potential to upset people who are not willing to pay for things in the game, But i think its a very effective solution to slow down the rate of spam or possibly even remove the majority of it.

 doesnt work when a lot of the gold spammers are premium users. so that means these sites have no problems creating throw away premium accounts....probably using the credit cards of the idiots that buy from them.

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I'm enjoying the game and ignoring the chat entirely. Found myself a clan, set my chat options to only see Whispers, Party, and Clan chat and that's that. Largely, this is a problematic issue which is why, as much as people hate it, I'm looking forward to the fact that Black Desert will have an IP Block. Don't get me wrong, I understand why many hate it and I sympathize but the more people you let swim, the more people there are pissing in the pool. 

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On that note, I still think the solution is quite simple: create admin level accounts that can log in and play the game that have all the special powers necessary to grab evidence to and instantly ban accounts. Assign these accounts to full-time in-house employees. You only need three per-server to fill a 24hr period in shifts. Banning these accounts is all they do!

 

Financially, I think it makes sense also. Whatever you have to pay these people over time is likely less than the amount of money you'll lose as more and more people leave the game out of the sheer annoyance of these spammers. In the mean time, you can still work on creating back-end solutions and eliminate these positions once a proper automated solution is created.

 

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All right, I think I've got something going here...

 

I have a small utility put together that acts as a packet-inspection firewall specifically for game chat. It monitors incoming chat messages, performs some deobfuscation on each message to strip out common methods RMT spambots use to dodge detection, and then regex-filters them. If the message doesn't trip a spam filter, it's handed off to the game client. If it does, it's dropped and the client never receives it. Upstream data from the client is not paid any attention and travels unobstructed. The actual program is tiny (70KB, thus far) but uses a mess of DLLs for Unicode handling/regex and a kernel driver to hook into Windows' networking. Best of all, since it's technically a network tool and not a game hook, it's perfectly within the EULA/TOS to use. (Game Guard doesn't even know it's there, which is hardly surprising given how terrible Game Guard is in practical application at its stated purpose.)

 

I coded it to be encoding-flavor-/language-/message-content-agnostic (or insofar as this is possible, anyway) so it should be able to handle more than just BnS - it should in theory work with any game chat in any language that sends non-encrypted text in ANSI/ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16LE, or UTF-16BE. So basically it's a network-level, non-game-specific RMT spam eliminator. When I fire up the app in debug mode the RMT spam on my copy of BnS instantly stops (in both faction and party-finder - I haven't checked lobby yet), but normal messages come through fine, and this with only four regex checks. The only adverse thing I've noticed is that I get a lot more of the "joined channel" messages than I normally do - I'll have to check into that further.

 

Also, if I did this correctly, I might be able to add a massive-capacity (read: thousands of entries) blocklist. I'll have to experiment with this to see what can and can't be done in that arena before proclaiming any victories there.

 

It's not even remotely ready for public use yet - it's just a proof-of-concept console app with no user interface - but I am cautiously optimistic.

 

 

Oh, while I'm thinking about it... Some folks will say filtering out RMT spam at the network level isn't a sound approach because it eliminates the ability to report spammers since the client never even sees the spam. My counterargument is that game companies, especially in the F2P space, often don't care about RMT unless it's so bad that it pisses people off and they start to leave the game as a result. Also, and this is also especially true in F2P gaming, RMTs can create new accounts at least as fast as game staff can ban them, so the overall efficacy of banning spambots is questionable.

 

Stay tuned for more as I develop it...

 

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