Gold Spam STILL Flooding Chat

[Helbane]

Here we are, January 30th and gold spammers are still flooding the chat with spam. What has NCSoft done about this? Raised the required level to chat, well guess what? It didn't work.

 

NCSoft Staff is extremely inept and has no idea what they are doing. They can't even stop chat spam how can you trust these people to run an entire game for years to come?

 

This chat spam happens in every single NCSoft game while other games ban / fix issues such as this, NCSoft lets it continue.

 

I'm *cricket*ing sick of the ignorance of the NCSoft staff. 

[Rathmiel]

The other day the spamming was so bad people stopped using the chat channels altogether. I have never seen a situation like that before. The past few days though, I am only seeing one or two spam messages every 30 minutes. That's about the average I have experienced in other MMOs. Maybe it depends on the server?

[Basture]

lol im only using the party chat right now cause the 50 limit in ignored is waay to low.

[Hime]

The spam is happening in waves as you can see. We get all of them and then they come back with new accounts. We've been banning the ones you see in game as well as getting them before they reach the game. As you can see, many still make it in. Spam is one of our top priorities right now and we're working with our devs to implement various tactics to combat it along with increasing the block list count.

[Pulgo]

Even if its still annoying to se these bots we cant deny that the patch helped a lot. They took care of the less skilled ones.

[Sylla]

My block list is full, how do i manage it????? i need to delete a few so i can add him...

[Pulgo]

It would be nice a function to delete all list.

[Dradiinmmo]

42 minutes ago, Hime said:

The spam is happening in waves as you can see. We get all of them and then they come back with new accounts. We've been banning the ones you see in game as well as getting them before they reach the game. As you can see, many still make it in. Spam is one of our top priorities right now and we're working with our devs to implement various tactics to combat it along with increasing the block list count.

Maybe enforcing region locks would actually you know...  force them to remain in there region ?

It is amazing how legitimate players in this game are constantly harangued by the developers but the exploiters/hackers/goldsellers seem to be getting a free ride.

Still no mention of why it is ok to change loot rules to master loot in the midst of a dungeon group.

[Liriel]

Can anyone explain to me why gold spammers feel the need to flood chat in this manner? Do they think it is good for business? It's the worst form of trolling i've ever seen in all my years of mmo gaming. 

[Liriel]

51 minutes ago, Hime said:

The spam is happening in waves as you can see. We get all of them and then they come back with new accounts. We've been banning the ones you see in game as well as getting them before they reach the game. As you can see, many still make it in. Spam is one of our top priorities right now and we're working with our devs to implement various tactics to combat it along with increasing the block list count.

 

Just increase the chat restriction to level 16. it seems to me that at level 11 they still only have a 5 min deletion timer for characters. Make that 7 day timer useful for something.

[Lilynetto]

 

10 hours ago, Liriel said:

Just increase the chat restriction to level 16. it seems to me that at level 11 they still only have a 5 min deletion timer for characters. Make that 7 day timer useful for something.

Well, that wont help. I'm seeing level 45 spammers around. They have to find another solution. Hime, is it possible to track gold buyers? Or as you know, buying things from these sellers? If so, what about coming up with a new policy which restricts buying anything from them with resulting a permanent ban. The fact is gold sellers will never stop because they dont care. You cannot change this fact. If you can manage to make the players "care" that buys these stuff, so that they will stop buying gold/items and eventually spammers will less spam and maybe they can stop.

[BaeofVengenace]

Do you think they would go hush-up a bit if every bit of chat's functionality / or major bit of it people like to use were quest activated? or perhaps a CAPCHA to use it maybe?

[Lilynetto]

34 minutes ago, BaeofVengenace said:

Do you think they would go hush-up a bit if every bit of chat's functionality / or major bit of it people like to use were quest activated? or perhaps a CAPCHA to use it maybe?

Not sure if that will work.

[Dradiinmmo]

37 minutes ago, BaeofVengenace said:

Do you think they would go hush-up a bit if every bit of chat's functionality / or major bit of it people like to use were quest activated? or perhaps a CAPCHA to use it maybe?

I made this suggestion to have a captcha for transitions and entering dungeons, something simple like the PIN we have to enter when we login. A mechanical solution that requires a player to be present to input a code.

 

With the level restriction to chat and this idea implemented it would seriously put a huge dampener on bots and gold sellers, and really give that level restricted chat some teeth.

[Panzercat]

I'm going to rant a little bit here.

 

NCSoft... You expect me to buy NC coins at least once TO SEND MAIL when you can't even control the nonstop wall-to-wall channel spam? I would also like to ignore them, but seeing as you've placed a 50 name hard limit on that feature, I'm SOL there too. Your game is pretty, but the abysmal social experience is killing it for me.

 

From this point forward, all my surveys will reflect your inability to control this spam.

[Nalroz]

LIFT THE BLOCK CAP!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ryiox]

I'm wondering why all foreign IPs other than NA or EU aren't banned? 

[Crush]

The new method is to spam friend invite :(

[Zeborah76]

NCsoft realy need to fucus on spammers and botters now and nothing els its realy getting out of hand 

am used to a few in most mmorpg but here omg never see so many 

 

[Hypatios]

12 minutes ago, Zeborah76 said:

NCsoft realy need to fucus on spammers and botters now and nothing els its realy getting out of hand 

am used to a few in most mmorpg but here omg never see so many 

 

It's ArcheAge all over again, that was wall to wall spam. They even hacked the chat server spamming messages so big it bypassed the maximum size of the chat box so you couldn't even scroll up to block the, you had to go to the starting area to hunt them down and block them by finding the actual character, then they started spawning and then hiding so you couldn't find them. They are malicious agents that do this to harm the game, nothing but a horde of angry locusts that just want to destroy. It was Trion's unwillingness to fix the bots and incompetence to fix the hacking spammers that killed the game 

[Zeborah76]

sadly those bots/spam companies had 4 a 5 years the time to make the perfeckt hacks and spamming chat system 

they no every weakness the anti hack system we have 

 

they just w8 till it comes to EU/US and boom they are ready to begin the invasion 

and it seems NCsoft was not ready for this or lets say they didt do anything to adept in those 4 a 5 years 

 

[Villerix]

What they did?

- They putted chat limit on lvl. Not bad.

 

What they can do?

- IF number_of_message_in_30_sec=>15, Chatban_for_1_hour=true

- IF same_message_posted_3_times_in_row, Chatban=true

- IF same_message_posted_3_times_in_60_sec. Chatban=true

- IF chatbanned_more_than_5_times_in_6_hours. IP BAN=true

- filter for "W W W" "www" "w." "w ." and "COM" "C O M" ".c" ". c" and for specific words they use in sequences "100% safe" "best prices"

- force admin to login sometimes - most of spam today was made by 2 bots who farmed first boss and got their lvl to pass first firewall

- admin can also handle farmbots - no gold = no spam - IP BANS or MAC BANS

- 1 copper per message

- also this protection program... it blocks some of my drivers and cant block bot program? oh CMON how many bot software for BNS was released?
 

 

[Guang]

14 hours ago, Dradiinmmo said:

Maybe enforcing region locks would actually you know...  force them to remain in there region ?

It is amazing how legitimate players in this game are constantly harangued by the developers but the exploiters/hackers/goldsellers seem to be getting a free ride.

Still no mention of why it is ok to change loot rules to master loot in the midst of a dungeon group.

I guess you've never heard of proxy/vpn

Pretty sure those botters are getting their ip bans, but they can easily come back with a new ip with a proxy/vpn

[Lusbox]

In the last few days I've seen a dramatic drop in goldsellers on faction chat, maybe 1 or 2 a day that are easily blocked and forgotten about. Chat is back to the way it should be, so whatever your doing NCSoft it's working.

 

The only place i see them now is in the starting zone, but as you'll only be there for maybe 30 mins it's not much of a problem.

[ElectricPotato]

32 minutes ago, Villerix said:

What they did?

- They putted chat limit on lvl. Not bad.

 

What they can do?

- IF number_of_message_in_30_sec=>15, Chatban_for_1_hour=true

- IF same_message_posted_3_times_in_row, Chatban=true

- IF same_message_posted_3_times_in_60_sec. Chatban=true

- IF chatbanned_more_than_5_times_in_6_hours. IP BAN=true

- filter for "W W W" "www" "w." "w ." and "COM" "C O M" ".c" ". c" and for specific words they use in sequences "100% safe" "best prices"

- force admin to login sometimes - most of spam today was made by 2 bots who farmed first boss and got their lvl to pass first firewall

- admin can also handle farmbots - no gold = no spam - IP BANS or MAC BANS

- 1 copper per message

- also this protection program... it blocks some of my drivers and cant block bot program? oh CMON how many bot software for BNS was released?
 

 

 

Some of these various things are implemented or already circumvented.  I noticed that some spammers have strings of letters/characters at the end of the message that keep changing to make the spam message unique each time.

 

Maybe something like 75 spam reports gets you a 15m chat ban ((From the channel you were using))? This could be problematic if the bots started reporting other people and flooding the system with temp bans on real players.

 

The party finder channel sometimes get spammed REALLY badly (backtoback messages from same playerbot). Also the cross server UI lobbies limit  your use of the report option (Greyed out for other servers or all servers), both the dungeon finder and arena lobbies, which seems to let a lot of spam in (or all the different servers contributing at once just makes it seem much worse).