Something has to be done about gold farmers

Never had to deal with IP blocking have you?

Here's some reading for you: Proxies, NAT, DHCP.

Short story: An IP is not unique to a person, so its very, very unwise to punish an IP because of the actions of a person. You should only apply IP restrictions when you can uniquely identify the owner of the IP or IP block.

In an attempt to be helpful:

The best solution I've come up with for credit spammers is to have actual humans in the game spot the spammers and then silence them such that their messages don't display, but that they don't realize that their messages aren't displaying. It would rob the sellers of their advertising method, as they couldn't tell whether their actions were actually doing anything.

Of course... there's still the problem of picking those people. If they're employees, you have to pay them. If they're players, then you have to find some way to pick them that will limit the likelihood that they'll abuse their power.

Anything short of humans enforcing the rules is bound to fail. Spammer behavior detection, chat term blocking, chat restrictions, etc just won't stop it. They'll adapt because they are controlled by humans, and humans are adaptable creatures who are excellent at finding solutions to restrictions.

Again, I'm pretty sure that the current way works fine. Yes, there are spammers visible on the fleet and the starting planets, but that is something you will never be able to fix. If you report and ignore them they will be dealt with.
Gold(yes, gold)sellers will always be a problem in MMOs, even moreso in f2p MMOs. It is something that you can't get rid off. They will always be there and you will always stumble over one or two.

The only thing I'd personally like to see is an accountwide ignore, like WoW does it. If you report someone for spamming there the whole account is placed on an ignore list for a certain amount of time (half an hour, maybe longer, I'm not sure). That ignore list is seperate from your normal ignore list, so that won't fill up too quickly. It would also condense the "report spam, click 'ok', ignore" steps into one step and therefore make it less of a hassle to deal with the spammers. Hell, the disappearance of the "ok" button you need to press alone would make things a hell of a lot quicker.

Buying credits in this game should be legal imo. What's the alternative? Spend $60 on a hypercrate and try to sell it while you watch the price drop to 4 mil on the gtn? Open it and end up with useless junk and the occational "decent" item? Spend your time buying cheap items and reselling them instead of playing? I've done all that and have made tens of millions of credits many times but it takes up too much time. As long as the credits weren't obtained illegally then players should be able to buy credits from other players. This will never happen of course cause the game's profits would tumble when ppl stop buying junk crates....then again it would force Bioware to start selling items actually worth $60.

Games like SWG and I think it was Aion had unique ways of dealing with gold farmers. SWG had members of the playing community take action while Aion unleashed a giant erm, bunny

Do Bioware actually employ GMs any more?

I agree - this game needs a spelling and grammar check built into chat that boots you from the game if you continually make mistakes.

That was awesome.

Redonk. Everytime you log in these days you're ignoring 5 new people. Is that really a solution? I recall in FFXI that they just had GM's sitting invised in highly populated areas and would just insta ban these guys after shouts.

Bioware needs to do this. Being their 1st MMO, I'll cut them slack for not having done it from the start...but 3 years later, they need to get their **** together.

Game has been out for less(!) than three years, not to mention that it went F2P more than six months after(!!!) its original release.