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Gold Sellers


LeMage

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The starter planets have gotten even more crazy. Dear Friend... less than 30 seconds apart.

Sure I can ignore Yuatgdfterfshl but right after there is Ghtmknxbhcgdy. Since chat can mark 'obscene' words with f*** before showing, can't it filter okaygold "dear friend" or w/e and send right to not shown? Or instead of ignoring by sender, doesn't work well in these guy's cases, can Bioware make it "If message content contains X & Y or Z don't show message.

 

At least make them and their bots visible on map and targetable. Make killing them a conquest item and I'm happy.

Edited by LeMage
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The starter planets have gotten even more crazy. Dear Friend... less than 30 seconds apart.

Sure I can ignore Yuatgdfterfshl but right after there is Ghtmknxbhcgdy. Since chat can mark 'obscene' words with f*** before showing, can't it filter okaygold "dear friend" or w/e and send right to not shown? Or instead of ignoring by sender, doesn't work well in these guy's cases, can Bioware make it "If message content contains X & Y or Z don't show message.

They can, but the spammers will just use \/\/ instead of W, or C0/\/\ instead of com, or "My friend" or "Hail, friends!" instead of "Dear friend", and so on. It's a never-ending battle similar to the one in armoured warfare between armour and weapons. It *isn't* worth the effort because in the end, the weapons win.(1)

At least make them and their bots visible on map and targetable. Make killing them a conquest item and I'm happy.

OK, but since they are the same faction as the players, that would summon memories of purpling up in ArcheAge so I could attack my own faction. No, because how do you stop it being used to grief actual new newbies?

 

(1) That's why modern warships don't have meaningful amounts of armour. A WWII battleship whose main armour belt wasn't well over a foot thick was essentially unprotected, but with the rise of various sorts of surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles, most notoriously Silkworm and Exocet, there's no point any more.

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They should restrict general chat to level 10+ or something like that.

 

I doubt this would matter much, unless they restricted it to level 71+. I'm not actually saying that would be a good idea however, since that would affect every character that hasn't reached that level. Just that it would mean those accounts would be forced to not only level the characters, but be Subscribed for at least one month.

 

I could be wrong, however from what I'd guess most of the gold sellers on the starter worlds are on F2P accounts for spamming purposes, so are easily created, and abandoned if they got banned.

 

Unfortunately I truly don't have any good idea's on how to deal with them, except to turn off the General Chat if your going to a starter world.

Edited by Toraak
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Sorry folks but Bioware will never do anything about it. The game is how old now, and to this day, the spammers are still given free reign.

 

All you can do is put them on /ignore. Report Spam does nothing so don't even waste your time. You'll just get aggravated.

 

Over the many years, we all have given suggestions on how to deal with them and Bioware just ignores us. So, there is nothing you can really do about it other than the ignore thing. :(

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T1) That's why modern warships don't have meaningful amounts of armour. A WWII battleship whose main armour belt wasn't well over a foot thick was essentially unprotected, but with the rise of various sorts of surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles, most notoriously Silkworm and Exocet, there's no point any more.

 

Minor nitpick. Destroyers "back then" had very little armour too. There are no real equivalents of battleships today, they are obsolete. Modern Aircraft carriers are more heavily armoured than back then.

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I could be wrong, however from what I'd guess most of the gold sellers on the starter worlds are on F2P accounts for spamming purposes, so are easily created, and abandoned if they got banned.

 

You are wrong. F2P accounts can not use general chat at level 1, and when they can use general chat they have a one min cool down between messages. So the credit spammers absolutely can not be F2P accounts as, first, they wouldn't be able to use chat, and, second, they post far too frequently.

Edited by ceryxp
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You are wrong. F2P accounts can not use general chat at level 1, and when they can use general chat they have a one min cool down between messages. So the credit spammers absolutely can not be F2P accounts as, first, they wouldn't be able to use chat, and, second, they post far too frequently.

 

You forget what we usually see are two gold spammers spamming in pairs, so for two FTP accounts to alternate their messages between the timer, that's completely doable.

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They could easily silence them and get rid of them but are putting no efforts at all.

 

Sorry folks but Bioware will never do anything about it. The game is how old now, and to this day, the spammers are still given free reign.

 

Over the many years, we all have given suggestions on how to deal with them and Bioware just ignores us.

 

I'm curious, what are your suggestions on how to deal with them that will not impede on the experience of playing the game for everyone else? I'm asking because the only solutions I could come up with (harsh level/chat restrictions, prohibiting F2Pers from chatting at all, additional layer of forced identification) would constitute a high risk of turning away a certain portion of the player base that will find it to be too much of a hassle for them to continue playing. We already have F2Pers who complain about the moderate chat restrictions that are in place right now.

Edited by Phazonfreak
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You forget what we usually see are two gold spammers spamming in pairs, so for two FTP accounts to alternate their messages between the timer, that's completely doable.

 

Edit: I stand corrected. I was going to log into a F2P account and show you the message that level 1 characters get if they try to use chat, but apparently the chat restrictions have changed since the last time I did that (a year, 18 month or so ago). F2P accounts can use chat at level 1. Perhaps this changed with 6.0 when they changed a number of the restrictions on F2P and preferred accounts. Frankly, I think it's a good thing that the chat restrictions were lifted. It unduly penalized F2P players, making it nearly impossible to group or learn about the game in the early levels, and disincentivized people who were here to try the game from paying to play. It was a ridiculous restriction.

 

That said, that doesn't mean that BW can't do something more than what they are doing to address the spammers. Sit down interns at terminals and let them nuke the spammers from orbit. But penalizing players who are not breaking the rules so you can target some bad actors is not the answer.

Edited by ceryxp
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If nothing has been done yet, it's probably never going to change. Something to consider, and I'm not in to conspiracy theories, but unless someone can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of those currency sellers could very well be EAWare themselves. They've been selling credits indirectly through their Cartel Market for years. I doubt one of those sellers are them, but also don't put it past them, this is a business and it's about making money. Either way you look at it though, they're obviously not going to do anything about it.
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Another fix, EA can pay me $15/hour part time working remotely to go through spam reports, looking at the spam text to see if it's really gold seller spam, and banning reported accounts. Heck. I'll do it for $12/hour.

 

Can I rob this idea and under cut you by 1 cent ;) 11.99/hour :D:D:D

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If more people would bother to use the "report spam" function via right-click on the seller's name in the chat window, it would be a lot better. But as I experienced lately, people rather rant in chat or try to insult the spammers for a very long time than report them, so even after half an hour there aren't enough reports to get those seller accounts squelched (which means getting an account wide chat ban for 24 hours)

Sure they could just go and make a new one, but if those would get squelched by the players within minutes every time, at some point it's no longer worth the effort to create a new account. Though then probably the ingame mail spam would increase again.

 

And last but not least, as long there are players who buy those credits, there will be sellers selling them and spamming advertisements too.

It's not really rocket science to earn enough credits to comfortably play the game by just playing the game, or if people really want to use their real money instead of their time, the cartel market stuff can be sold for credits too. No need to involve those shady sellers at all, yet obviously players still go to them.

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Remove the ability for non-subscribers to use general chat and mail for characters until they reach Lvl 25?

 

Until recently, I'm not certain when it changed, F2P accounts were barred from using chat until level 25. They could not use gen chat, but they also could not use guild chat, they could, IIRC, receive but not send /tell messages. Did those restrictions stop the spammers? I started playing in 2012, when the restrictions on F2P accounts were the most onerous, and credit sellers have been a problem since then. Penalizing people who are not breaking the rules isn't going to stop the spammers. As noted above, more people need to report the spammers. I admit that I don't, but I generally have gen chat turned off, not because of the spammers, but because there are so many toxic people in this community it's not worth having open. Feeling that it's necessary to have gen chat turned off rather than deal with the toxic players is another issue entirely, but it certainly doesn't help to deal with the spammers. Yeah, players could do more by reporting the spammers en masse, and BW could do more by devoting some resources to the problem, but penalizing people who just want to play the game for something they didn't do, don't do, and have no control over isn't the answer.

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Perhaps if BW decided to try selling its own currency in some reasonable way, similar to how Blizzard is doing it in WoW, they could simply put the credit spammers out of business.

 

Ever since Blizzard Tokens became a thing in WoW, I have rarely if ever seen any gold spam anymore.

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