Gold Spammers Everywhere

[Aiezen]

Jadestone Guard even knows whats up! Had to turn off Region last night, looks like Faction and LFG/Party Finder gotta go too.. Right now there really isn't even any point to having the chat window open, so sad :.(

 

[Elvenmad]

7 minutes ago, Azrael said:

Umm, while it would be good if currency exchange is activated i'm a bit worried about the initial Ncoin to Gold ratio. Since the game is just beginning, gold is worth a lot and it sorta devalues NCoin/dollar. I think it would be good to wait until gold value is a bit more stable so ratio is able to compete with gold sellers and is an acceptable one for people who buy NCoin to switch for gold. Although if there is no alternative to stop RMT then I would also support the currency exchange.

 

 yes It will take  time to 'settle' the initial exchange rate, that is to be expected as with any game which is why in my opinion it should have been active from launch, whenever is is enabled this is going to happen,  but it will settle and will work so the sooner it is enabled the better it will be in the end for everybody including NC

[kyuven]

2 hours ago, IntX said:

Two examples where this works flawlessly:
- Archeage

- Devilian

Here's the thing: Wildstar HAS this (the CRED system) and has had it since it was P2P. Wildstar is published by NCSoft.

The only reason i can think of why they haven't had the system in place for B&S is because of something involving the original developers.

Cuz that's the weird thing: Most NORTH AMERICAN and European MMOs, like SWTOR, Wildstar, Guild Wars, Daybreak's titles, Cryptic's titles, etc. barely have an issue with spam from what I've seen. Sure, it's THERE, but it's like 1-2 letters a week in your inbox or some bot next to a public area spamming /say.

But Japanese/Korean/Chinese titles, like this one and FFXIV, have spam issues like you wouldn't believe (OK actually since B&S has some of the worst I've EVER seen, you probably would believe me), or have some draconian or downright bizarre 

Which leads me to believe that it REALLY is something to do with culture and how they perceive the problem.

From what i understand from some community gab on FFXIV at least from the Japanese players, they blame US and wonder why the developers are wasting time on something that's OUR problem. Not all of them feel this way but there was a somewhat healthy consensus

[kyuven]

 

37 minutes ago, Aiezen said:

Jadestone Guard even knows whats up! Had to turn off Region last night, looks like Faction and LFG/Party Finder gotta go too.. Right now there really isn't even any point to having the chat window open, so sad :.(

 

This actually highlights a point i've been trying to make.

Someone suggested a nonsense quest to get an item to be able to talk in public channels.

Well. that's what the faction stuff IS. And they still bypassed it.

I actually have to wonder if they're actually trying to make money and not just destroy the MMO industry by making socializing impossible.

[Adylala]

Im so busy questing that I dont notice chat spam just keep your way lol chat is optional

[Elvenmad]

45 minutes ago, kyuven said:

Here's the thing: Wildstar HAS this (the CRED system) and has had it since it was P2P. Wildstar is published by NCSoft.

The only reason i can think of why they haven't had the system in place for B&S is because of something involving the original developers.

Cuz that's the weird thing: Most NORTH AMERICAN and European MMOs, like SWTOR, Wildstar, Guild Wars, Daybreak's titles, Cryptic's titles, etc. barely have an issue with spam from what I've seen. Sure, it's THERE, but it's like 1-2 letters a week in your inbox or some bot next to a public area spamming /say.

But Japanese/Korean/Chinese titles, like this one and FFXIV, have spam issues like you wouldn't believe (OK actually since B&S has some of the worst I've EVER seen, you probably would believe me), or have some draconian or downright bizarre 

Which leads me to believe that it REALLY is something to do with culture and how they perceive the problem.

From what i understand from some community gab on FFXIV at least from the Japanese players, they blame US and wonder why the developers are wasting time on something that's OUR problem. Not all of them feel this way but there was a somewhat healthy consensus

 

 I have played BnS, on CN, JP and RU servers for a number of years, none had any issues like we have here, and regarding other Korean developed and owned but western published games, I have played many over the past 15 years and any that have had any issues have very quickly acted on it and done some thing about it,  NCsoft are not new to this business, these issues are not new they should have known and expected it and should have been well prepared for well before launch.

 

 Which again makes me very surprised as I have said before, they have a currency exchange system already done but chose to not have it active for now, this to me from a business point of view is just crazy, they could have very easily doubled whatever profit they have made this week without any problems at all, it just does not make sense.

 

 As for chat spam, come on!  how the hell are lvl 1 characters able to spam in party dungeon finder ? ? first dungeon is level 20, LOL, They get to spam faction chat because you get to pick a faction at low level 5 or some thing like that, other versions its level 22, there is a reason for that to stop this low level gold spamming !!  

 

  You can get to lvl 5 in like 10 mins and have ALL chat available to you, LOL its like a accident waiting to happen and big gaming company like NC should have been well aware of what would happen and what makes it worse they still dont seem to have actually done anything about it,  in game peak times, faction, dungeon finder, general, zone chat are all USELESS, Everything that could have been implemented in this game for this problem has and is already in use in other versions, so there is no excuse.

 

 Last time i saw anything like the gold seller issues we have was with Neverwinter at launch, which was like 3/4 years ago, but they very quickly acted on it, by putting chat restrictions on every tab until a certain level, they had GM's in game at peak times actively watching were new players join the main world and insta account banning them, which is probably one of the best ways, it is not hard these days to IP and VPN ban accounts,  One thing I do say for Cryptic studios they acted fast and got the problem resolved fast.

 

 While here all chat is like 90% gold sellers they are all taking up a character slot on a server, legitimate players can not get in the game, even paying customers can not get in the game all because servers are full, LOL.......and NC's answer.......make more servers

[kyuven]

4 minutes ago, Adylala said:

Im so busy questing that I dont notice chat spam just keep your way lol chat is optional

It's an MMO. It's optional in the same way fingers are.

[kyuven]

3 minutes ago, Elvenmad said:

 

 I have played BnS, on CN, JP and RU servers for a number of years, none had any issues like we have here, and regarding other Korean developed and owned but western published games, I have played many over the past 15 years and any that have had any issues have very quickly acted on it and done some thing about it,  NCsoft are not new to this business, these issues are not new they should have known and expected it and should have been well prepared for well before launch.

 

 Which again makes me very surprised as I have said before, they have a currency exchange system already done but chose to not have it active for now, this to me from a business point of view is just crazy, they could have very easily doubled whatever profit they have made this week without any problems at all, it just does not make sense.

 

 As for chat spam, come on!  how the hell are lvl 1 characters able to spam in party dungeon finder ? ? first dungeon is level 20, LOL, They get to spam faction chat because you get to pick a faction at low level 5 or some thing like that, other versions its level 22, there is a reason for that to stop this low level gold spamming !!  

 

  You can get to lvl 5 in like 10 mins and have ALL chat available to you, LOL its like a accident waiting to happen and big gaming company like NC should have been well aware of what would happen and what makes it worse they still dont seem to have actually done anything about it,  in game peak times, faction, dungeon finder, general, zone chat are all USELESS, Everything that could have been implemented in this game for this problem has and is already in use in other versions, so there is no excuse.

Yeah see this isn't actually unique to B&S either. FFXI and XIV both have spam issues...on NA servers.

Something about american gaming culture is perplexingly attractive to gold sellers, which is by extension perplexing to the Asian developers since it's NOT a problem there, so they don't think about it when they develop the game's infrastructure.

Wildstar, ESO, and SWTOR, on the other hand, DID. Same with Star Trek Online and Neverwinter.

Granted they had OTHER problems...and spammers did exist for a little while, they just didn't last.

[Elvenmad]

 One thing I would like to know is were are all these gold sellers getting all this gold they claim to have from ? game as only been live a few days, one I noticed claimed to have 1000's of gold in stock and was selling it for 30 dollars for 10 gold !! REALLY 

 

Unless they have like 1000's of bots on each server, which could be why servers are full and constantly crashing, they can not be playing the auction house, there is a daily cap on sales, I hav'nt noticed any in chat selling items, they can not be spam crafting anything worth while as everything as a timescale on its production, most things worth while are up to 24 hours wait.

[Limeball]

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about coding or anything. However, is it possible for the chat to have a mute system, where if it detects the exact same message being sent (regardless of interval) it will mute you for an hour? If the character is continually muted, it would flag the character for investigation. It's not really a fix but would help alleviate the chat spam as well as continually having to increase block lists.

 

I know all they'd have to do is change one letter to get around it for each message, but the point would be to have a smart system that can detect the bot behaviour in chat. My bf who's got some programming background suggests another idea which is "Silent auditing of random characters. You log literally everything they do for perhaps as long as an hour. This includes when and how they move, what equipment they're wearing, what their character creation file is and what they say,l when they say and where they say it.

 

You take that and run it through a heuristic algorithm to see if they "look" like a bot or a player based on a known set of bot/ player characteristics. Of which this auditing system itself could be used to build. This is somewhat similar to how some virus scanners work at least on a basic level. I understand that this could be incredibly processor and storage intensive if not done correctly, which may push it down the list of viable options."

[Dark Unwinding]

when the game first came out i was so excited and played it 2 days none stop,I've been waiting for the game to come out for months now,but the fact that i have to wait nearly 1 hour just to log in and then when i do log in i have to put up with bots in nearly every mob spawn killing all the mobs and then i cant even talk in zone or faction chat cause there spamming.I feel a bit defeated and just cant put up with these things i found myself not even wanting to log in anymore i love the game but if ncsoft doesn't fix these things im gonna have to say goodbye to it. I would have rather pay a 1 time fee to buy the game then put up with all these problem cause its a free to play.

[Elvenmad]

33 minutes ago, Limeball said:

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about coding or anything. However, is it possible for the chat to have a mute system, where if it detects the exact same message being sent (regardless of interval) it will mute you for an hour? If the character is continually muted, it would flag the character for investigation. It's not really a fix but would help alleviate the chat spam as well as continually having to increase block lists.

 

I know all they'd have to do is change one letter to get around it for each message, but the point would be to have a smart system that can detect the bot behaviour in chat. My bf who's got some programming background suggests another idea which is "Silent auditing of random characters. You log literally everything they do for perhaps as long as an hour. This includes when and how they move, what equipment they're wearing, what their character creation file is and what they say,l when they say and where they say it.

 

You take that and run it through a heuristic algorithm to see if they "look" like a bot or a player based on a known set of bot/ player characteristics. Of which this auditing system itself could be used to build. This is somewhat similar to how some virus scanners work at least on a basic level. I understand that this could be incredibly processor and storage intensive if not done correctly, which may push it down the list of viable options."

 

 Yes it can be done, saw this in Neverwinter, first week of launch, and they are only a publisher not a developer, and also many other games, they made a system which detected anything that could read like a web address,  this is not a new idea, been around for at least 10 years that i know of, it picks up on chat and stops it being displayed, things like WWW, www, even  vv  vv  vv,   v v   v v  v v, .com, etc anything that could read as a web address, this is not new and i am sure NC would be well aware of it

 

 Most games have a 'profanity' filter how hard would it be to add these to it, you could even add the company names of the gold sellers, they all have to say who they are some were.  I am sure some one monitoring chat for an hour at peak times would soon come up with a huge list of names

[kyuven]

53 minutes ago, Elvenmad said:

 One thing I would like to know is were are all these gold sellers getting all this gold they claim to have from ? game as only been live a few days, one I noticed claimed to have 1000's of gold in stock and was selling it for 30 dollars for 10 gold !! REALLY 

 

Unless they have like 1000's of bots on each server, which could be why servers are full and constantly crashing, they can not be playing the auction house, there is a daily cap on sales, I hav'nt noticed any in chat selling items, they can not be spam crafting anything worth while as everything as a timescale on its production, most things worth while are up to 24 hours wait.

Here's the fun part: It doesn't matter.

The idea is they want you to visit their site and either buy from them, or get their keylogger on your machine.

If they have the keylogger, they just steal your account and strip it bare, then sell that gold to one of the former. Some of the sites don't even actually sell gold to players, they just bombard with malware that nabs your info and then turn around to sell it to the highest bidder.

This is also part of the problem with tracking these SOBs down: Oftentimes you'll have completely different entities doing the farming than are actually selling the filthy lucre. Hell, in this day and age the farmers aren't even really a problem other than being an eyesore.

 

This is also why we need more awareness. A lot of people get it into their head to go to the websites advertising and yell at them to stop...which gets the "company's" malware onto your machine and lets them loot n plunder to their heart's content.
Which, IMO, is part of why we get targeted over the asian servers: Their culture presents "ignore it and it'll go away" more than "complain until it goes away", Whereas in North America it's the opposite.

[enem]

1 hour ago, Limeball said:

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about coding or anything. However, is it possible for the chat to have a mute system, where if it detects the exact same message being sent (regardless of interval) it will mute you for an hour? If the character is continually muted, it would flag the character for investigation. It's not really a fix but would help alleviate the chat spam as well as continually having to increase block lists.

 

so if you look at gold selling spam in most games they add random characters to the start or middle or end of each post, to make it non-identical for this exact reason - to get around the detection of posting the same thing again and again.  if anything they need to leverage computer vision to find messages that look like spam, the same way a human would do. character matching ain't going to cut it unfortunately.

 

also one thing they need to do is increase the interval you can send messages (especially long ones) since at present you can spam again and again without any timeout. it's madness.

[enem]

1 hour ago, kyuven said:

Hell, in this day and age the farmers aren't even really a problem other than being an eyesore.

 

except they are blocking legitimate players from using the server slots.

 

[kyuven]

2 minutes ago, enem said:

 

except they are blocking legitimate players from using the server slots.

 

This is true...for now.

It's going to die off in a few weeks, though.

[Bezerko]

Also, even level 1's should be able to report the spammers.  Level 15 is a bit much.  I spend the first 14 levels completely unable to report all the spamming I see.  It's frustrating.

[Navhkrin]

9 hours ago, Rukkirii said:

We are also working on more counter-measures against RMT on top of looking into increasing the block list. These measures are coming soon and will require server downtime to be implemented. We want to make sure we can implement as many as we can before we take down the servers for these changes. 

 

In the meantime, you may also report these players to customer support as they have a team dedicated to their removal from the game.  You can report a player through a ticket here.

I suggest you guys to implement an intelligent string similarity-checking algoritm and mute people if they are spamming things with high-similarity over and over. 

[Cinge]

I agree. I need a much bigger block list. The RMT spammers are all in faction and /z chats. 50 is not even near close enough.

 

If only there was IP/VPN bans for anything outside NA/EU and maybe Aus/Oceanic.

 

It's getting extremely obnoxious fast. People selling gold in factions via paypal, you can tell who all the RMTers are as they spam WTB Soulstones and WTS moonwater stones.

 

You better be quick NCSOFT , people won't deal with this long.

[kyuven]

10 minutes ago, Bezerko said:

Also, even level 1's should be able to report the spammers.  Level 15 is a bit much.  I spend the first 14 levels completely unable to report all the spamming I see.  It's frustrating.

yeah this is a weird one...but I can see WHY they would do it.

One of the more unsavory tactics that some have engaged in is to overload the report system with dummy accounts so that the GMs are backed up sifting through it and their spambots last longer.

It doesn't really happen on P2P or B2P games, but on F2P games it can happen. And it's really stupid and self-destructive.

Plus the more obvious one of people creating dummy characters to spam reports of someone they don't like, which is more common

[Bezerko]

So I logged in on a level 4 alt about 40 minutes ago.  In that time, I filled an empty block list 3.5 times. That's about 5 new gold spammers every minute.  Or rather 5 spammers who rotate their randomized names every minute.

[Daxby]

 

8 hours ago, Protanos said:

So hundreds bots farm non-stop and real players wait in queue...  Same thing I see on TW server and one day they ban this bots and I have good week without login issues, but after good week this bots return again.... 

 

Well... it's sad but that happens on almost every F2P mmo...

[Deithrian]

Please buy our premium membership because we can't fix the bot problem and there are queues Q_Q ty <3

[Sahkee]

I must say, if something isn't done about this I will have no choice but to stop playing. This ruins the economy, the social aspects of the game as well as the honest gamer's ability to compete with people who buy the gear as fast as it's released.

[Aimscoes]

11 hours ago, Rukkirii said:

 

Community Managers do not have the tools to take actions on in-game accounts, which is why we direct players to the customer support team as they have employees dedicated to taking care of them as soon as they receive the reports.

Please... Get a temp team to go inside servers and instant ban Gold Sellers, how hard can it be. 

All it takes is 1 GM across all servers for a small amount of time and you will have beat'n their faces hard.