Cheapest Credits!

The people "spamming" are throw away toons completely unconnected to the toons they do business on. You'd gain nothing by following them.

/Agree.

While on the surface... players (being generally impulsive, emotional, and possessive about "their" MMO) want Bioware to auto detect and prevent... this is a band-aid at best and does nothing to deal with the core issues.

What many people seem to not understand is that the modern MMO currency businesses are largely middleman-broker businesses these days. By this I mean that they obtain most of their game currency from other players in game who are wealthy and looking to trade in game wealth for RL money. They sell to a broker, and the broker then sells to buyers.

ALSO.. if you do a little bit of digging, you will find that many of these alleged Asian currency companies are actually Canadian based companies. They are probably being operated by some enterprising Asian (likely a Hong Kong immigrant given the ease with which you can immigrate within the Commonwealth of nations), and hence the reason for poor English skills).

SO.... yeah.. Bioware actually would want to audit and follow the movement of credits from character to character to find the sources and take action on them. Which does not mean that they cannot squelch the spammers.... but the reality is... like in many investigative actions in business and government.... there can be advantages to root cause analysis and action in letting them spam away for a while.

It's actually pretty simple, but it requires knowledge of code they're not going to share. You need access to their chat system code and to add a field into the account-level data model.

Be sure to tell them it's 1 MIL, not 1000K.

I played that game too, but now they are so lazy the last batch have been sitting next to the mailbox at the gtn on whatever sides fleet they are smamming

A mil is 1/1000 inch

Yup and every time they figure out a way to mute it, the bot program gets changed. Its not a simple fix. You figure out to ban people that say certain websites, they change how they type the websites. Instead of hackmyaccount.com it turns into hackmyaccount,com or one of many, many, many different ways of putting it. Mute those that repeat the same message over and over could cause issues with people trying to buy or sell stuff or recruit for Ops if your settings are not quite right and then spammers change their bot program to alternate their message.

Yeah.. /agree.

It cannot be squelched completely.. not even WoW has succeeded in that regard. The clever spammer will always find a way... like laying out dead corpses on the ground to spell out a web site.... that was hilarious when that happened in WoW.

Standard reply to this.

If they want to stop gold spammers and make bans for various offenses *more workable* they (IMHO) need to do like they do for The Secret World, pay for the account (I think I paid like $5 during a digital download special on amazon) then its free to play.

This means at the very least a ban (for gold spamming or whatever) has a penalty greater than the need to go get a new throwaway emailbox and register again, banning the credit card used to buy the account would add a layer of difficulty to re-registering.

If they wanted they could give back most or all of it as CC, worthless to spammers but a nice starting bank for a f2p to buy unlocks.

A little diligence by the ingame Mods for the first month would make ingame gold spamming unprofitable and give the concept of account bans for other abuses a few teeth ... IMHO

That is proof that it can be squelched from chat. The spammers had to figure out how to lay out bodies to get their point across because it was impossible to do in chat.

I say if we can get to that point in this game, we should consider that a win.

But we're not even close. BioWare hasn't done anything at all to solve the problem. It's almost as if they don't care. Well, except for the "almost".