Zenimax - This Is How To Stop Gold Seller Spam

Gromulus

Make an evolving list of URLs related to gold selling services and if anyone mentions one of those URLs in any form of chat, filter out the chat message server side so it doesn't appear in game. No gold seller will register new URLs at the same rate they make new characters or open up new accounts.

Make some intelligent variants of known URLs in case they get more clever in circumventing the filter.

Publius_Scipio

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/63110/in-game-chat-already-becoming-infested-and-annoying#latest

Gromulus

@Publius_Scipio‌

That thread just points out there is a problem. It doesn't suggest a solution.

Publius_Scipio

my point is to link it all together.

pounamu

Yeah those gold sellers are a real pain and the idea of an auto filter of URLS is a great way to beat these bone heads out of the game we love.

Publius_Scipio

Is ESO vulnerable to bots or is it an actual person spamming the chat?

Gromulus

It can be a bot even, just a program that feeds keystrokes in. I could even record keystrokes in my Logitech keyboard and have it come across as spam in game, but there are more sophisticated methods.

I don't think Zenimax can kill the input, they need to curb the output.

EQBallzz

It's a novel idea but spammers know to use unusual combinations of characters to display the same info without the exact url to bypass this type of filter. Using slashes instead of "w" for instance or breaking up the url with special characters. There is a near unlimited number of variations to do this so it won't work I don't think.

The better plan is to have dedicated ppl banning these spammers immediately. If they can't get their message out enough per purchase of each game copy it won't be cost effective. They also need to give better tools to us to quickly and efficiently report/ignore them with a single right click option in one easy step.

Limiting chat lines per X amount of time for the first 10-15 levels is drastic but also could help cut down on the huge spam effect at least.

Publius_Scipio

@Gromulus‌ now the actual people behind the bots/keystroke programing, are they actual gamers that purchase the game unleash bots and walk away from the computer? I'm trying to understand who they are and their purpose in a game in general.

AGx07

the reason why that wont work is because spammers like to use links spelled out like this: ww w. go ldsp ammer . co * m and assume people willing to go there will figure out to take the spaces and stuff out.

What they really need are live admins that are playing the game with 1-click ban abilities. Soon as they see one of those shouts, banned.

Gromulus

Publius_Scipio wrote: »

@Gromulus‌ now the actual people behind the bots/keystroke programing, are they actual gamers that purchase the game unleash bots and walk away from the computer? I'm trying to understand who they are and their purpose in a game in general.

No, these are BS companies, typically in much less well off countries. Their primary intention isn't to sell gold, it's to gain your credit card information and commit credit card fraud.

Publius_Scipio

Gromulus wrote: »

Publius_Scipio wrote: »

@Gromulus‌ now the actual people behind the bots/keystroke programing, are they actual gamers that purchase the game unleash bots and walk away from the computer? I'm trying to understand who they are and their purpose in a game in general.

No, these are BS companies, typically in much less well off countries. Their primary intention isn't to sell gold, it's to gain your credit card information and commit credit card fraud.

Then Zenimax must act and without hesitation, in order to protect its customers' game experience and stop fraud committed through their product.

Gromulus

AGx07 wrote: »

the reason why that wont work is because spammers like to use links spelled out like this: ww w. go ldsp ammer . co * m and assume people willing to go there will figure out to take the spaces and stuff out.

What they really need are live admins that are playing the game with 1-click ban abilities. Soon as they see one of those shouts, banned.

Yeah, that would help too. Ban the account so they can't create more characters. Because they violated the Terms of Service by spamming as such, they deserve nothing better.

But still, intelligent parsing of chat input would work to a fair degree. Maybe not enough for them to be forced to spam "you can buy gold, Google it" to get past the filter, but better than the current situation.

Blackhorne

AGx07 wrote: »

the reason why that wont work is because spammers like to use links spelled out like this: ww w. go ldsp ammer . co * m and assume people willing to go there will figure out to take the spaces and stuff out.

Have you not used regular expressions? For example:

/\bw[\W|_]*w[\W|_]*w[\W|_]*.[\W|_]*g[\W|_]*o[\W|_]*l[\W|_]*d[\W|_]*s[\W|_]*p[\W|_]*a[\W|_]*m[\W|_]*m[\W|_]*e[\W|_]*r[\W|_]*.c[\W|_]*o[\W|_]*m\b/

(as a Javascript regular expression) would match what you wrote plus any other version using the characters "www.goldspammer.com" whatever spaces, tabs, or other non-word characters were inserted between them. It wouldn't match anything else unless it had those specific characters in that specific order with nothing between them but non-word characters (and underscores).

Now, what I just wrote wouldn't match unicode characters or the slashes trick mentioned by @EQBallz, but it's not hard to come up with a list of character equivalents and an algorithm to generate a regular expression which will match all known equivalents for a given string. Combine that with a culture that rewards spam reporting (to help find unknown character equivalents), and it's not be that difficult conceptually to get ahead of the gold spammers.

The only question in my mind is how much load this would put on the server.

Etchesketch

Maybe to save somebody's sanity... just forget them and move on. Gold sellers have never been stopped anywhere, any game. They just find ways around it and any time wasted by devs on them is just that, wasted time that could have been used fixing the game.

Not saying I like it, but I learned along time ago that complaining about it only raises your BP as you realize nothing will be done really.

Publius_Scipio

Etchesketch wrote: »

Maybe to save somebody's sanity... just forget them and move on. Gold sellers have never been stopped anywhere, any game. They just find ways around it and any time wasted by devs on them is just that, wasted time that could have been used fixing the game.

Not saying I like it, but I learned along time ago that complaining about it only raises your BP as you realize nothing will be done really.

So every modern MMO is simply infected by these people and bots and the chatting experience is lost and we just move on?

Etchesketch

Publius_Scipio wrote: »

Etchesketch wrote: »

Maybe to save somebody's sanity... just forget them and move on. Gold sellers have never been stopped anywhere, any game. They just find ways around it and any time wasted by devs on them is just that, wasted time that could have been used fixing the game.

Not saying I like it, but I learned along time ago that complaining about it only raises your BP as you realize nothing will be done really.

So every modern MMO is simply infected by these people and bots and the chatting experience is lost and we just move on?

yeah pretty much sadly. We can complain, I won't try to stop anyone from fighting the good fight but nothing will come of it. It never has in the past 15-20 years of online gaming. So many fairly easy to do solutions and they have never really even tried.

Saerydoth

Publius_Scipio wrote: »

@Gromulus‌ now the actual people behind the bots/keystroke programing, are they actual gamers that purchase the game unleash bots and walk away from the computer? I'm trying to understand who they are and their purpose in a game in general.

No, these people use compromised/stolen accounts. Gold and things "sold" illicitly for real money are not farmed by people who by the game. They are stolen from compromised accounts.

Melian

Etchesketch wrote: »

Maybe to save somebody's sanity... just forget them and move on. Gold sellers have never been stopped anywhere, any game. They just find ways around it and any time wasted by devs on them is just that, wasted time that could have been used fixing the game.

Not saying I like it, but I learned along time ago that complaining about it only raises your BP as you realize nothing will be done really.

There may be no game entirely free of it, but some games have far more than others. Keeping these vermin in check is not a waste of developer time because, although you may be an exception, people don't necessarily want to pay a monthly subscription to be bombarded with gold sellers' spam.

Sakiri

What I want to know is how EQ2 managed to not have gold spammers post 2006.

No other game has a spam filter quite as epic as theirs. I don't get mail, I don't get tells. And I know they exist because I see the bots in game all the time.

Whatever they did to their chat to keep people from getting spam, they need to do here.

Poxs

EQ2 uses active monitoring to stop gold farming. They have servers that monitor login access and if a server is from say china and it is accessing a US server then the account is monitored for their first 20 levels. Any spamming at all causes the account to be flagged and one of their admins looks at the chat history and bans the account if the EULA was violated.
It's called ACTIVE monitoring. They monitor on keywords as well (like "Gold") to flag the chat automatically so one of their operators can see if something should be done.
They do not have the TONS of toons playing like WoW has and so the level of effort on their part is not as bad.
The point is that Sony is taking an ACTIVE position to stop spamming rather than a REACTIVE position (reaction to complaints).

He11cat

Etchesketch wrote: »

Maybe to save somebody's sanity... just forget them and move on. Gold sellers have never been stopped anywhere, any game. They just find ways around it and any time wasted by devs on them is just that, wasted time that could have been used fixing the game.

Not saying I like it, but I learned along time ago that complaining about it only raises your BP as you realize nothing will be done really.

actually, that is incorrect. there is an MMO called Fallen Earth that has been out for 4 years and has not had a single gold spammer, mainly because the currency used in-game is NOT gold, but poker chips.

powned

So what if anything is Zenimax/Bethesda doing?

Sakiri

Poxs wrote: »

EQ2 uses active monitoring to stop gold farming. They have servers that monitor login access and if a server is from say china and it is accessing a US server then the account is monitored for their first 20 levels. Any spamming at all causes the account to be flagged and one of their admins looks at the chat history and bans the account if the EULA was violated.
It's called ACTIVE monitoring. They monitor on keywords as well (like "Gold") to flag the chat automatically so one of their operators can see if something should be done.
They do not have the TONS of toons playing like WoW has and so the level of effort on their part is not as bad.
The point is that Sony is taking an ACTIVE position to stop spamming rather than a REACTIVE position (reaction to complaints).

I could see how it wouldn't work in WoW simply due to the speed at which chat moves on some servers.

Here, there's one server(per region) and I can't see how it'd be hard to take a look at it now and again.

What amazes me is that there were gold sellers preordering for this. lol

Laerian

Publius_Scipio wrote: »

@Gromulus‌ now the actual people behind the bots/keystroke programing, are they actual gamers that purchase the game unleash bots and walk away from the computer? I'm trying to understand who they are and their purpose in a game in general.

They get the gold from:
- stolen accounts
- bot farmers
- gamers who sell their gold to these sites

This is a P2P game so those goldspammers in chat are probably stolen accounts.

Saerydoth

powned wrote: »

So what if anything is Zenimax/Bethesda doing?

Honestly, it depends on 1) how bad it gets, and 2) how big the game gets. The problem Blizzard ran into, with hundreds of servers and 12 million players, was that it was logistically impossible to monitor chat, as it would've required at the minimum quadrupling their already huge GM staff.

Accounts are going to get compromised. A large percentage of players don't keep their computers and login credentials secure, and there are bad guys out there to exploit this. Phishing emails will get sent and responded to to get people's account details. Fake websites will be created.

This is one reason that I don't want to see this game explode in population like WOW did at the very beginning. I would like to see a healthy stable population, rather than ballooning up to 12 million and then losing half of it. Most of WOW's issues were created by just being TOO BIG.

For EQ2 it is far easier to monitor chat, because there are FAR fewer servers and FAR fewer players than, say, WOW. Depending on how fast ESO grows and how big it gets, it may or may not be possible to monitor it. We will have to wait and see.

jedensuscg

The Badboy addon in WoW curbed almost all chat spam, gold spam, etc, for me back when I played WoW. It did this with limited access to the api, by a single person working part time on it.

To think the developers with full access to their own code and engine can't do it, shows that it's not impossible, but frankly, they just don't give a *** enough to do it. plain and simple.

THEY DON'T CARE! regardless of the bull crap they feed us.

gdawg311b14_ESO

eq2imora_ESO wrote: »

What amazes me is that there were gold sellers preordering for this. lol

This is not what is happening, and i doubt the gold sellers are even really selling gold this early in the game (nothing to buy really).

they are using stolen accounts, and what they do is they get you to go to their website that you think is a gold selling website but its really a phishing website, and then they steal your account too... this way they dont care if they get banned, they havent spent a penny, and they will take everything on your account and stockpile it, it adds up after 10 thousand accounts and 3-6 months... and that is when gold actually becomes an important part of the game.... THEN they have the means to actually really sell it.

And if your account gets stolen you cant report it, what are you going to tell the GM's? u went to a gold buying site and got ur acct stolen?

Blackhorne

jedensuscg wrote: »

The Badboy addon in WoW curbed almost all chat spam, gold spam, etc, for me back when I played WoW. It did this with limited access to the api, by a single person working part time on it.

The Badboy didn't stop any spam from being sent. It stopped you from seeing the spam. More on this after your conclusion.

To think the developers with full access to their own code and engine can't do it, shows that it's not impossible, but frankly, they just don't give a *** enough to do it. plain and simple.

THEY DON'T CARE! regardless of the bull crap they feed us.

Badboy had one stream of text to monitor: the text Blizzard was sending to your chat window. It had a relatively powerful computer which probably wasn't being taxed by WoW that much (WoW is really quite light on hardware built after around 2005.)

For ZOS to do this, they would have to monitor every output stream from every active player. Furthermore, the system which would be doing this is already being taxed by running the game logic for everyone.

So you're right in that it's not impossible (see my post above for one example mechanism) but it may not be economically or technically feasible to do it well in a centralized manner.

Because we generally don't tax our systems as much, there's actually a pretty good chance that a Badboy-style addon on every player's computer would have less of a noticeable performance impact than running the same code, even optimized and compiled, on the megaserver.

Wow

A filtering system wont work, they will just put space on their URL, replace some character with alphabet, or whatever. They are smart.

The best way to combat those gold sellers is to place game master to monitor the /zone chat, but that wont be the most effective way.

Should've let the users flag someone on the chat, if someone have 10 flag or something, they will be banned from /zone for some period of time.

ZOS_TristanK

Thank you for reporting this issue, folks. Gold selling is a violation of our Terms of Service, and we hope that you rest assured that we are investigating each incident of gold selling that is reported to us. Our team is tackling these reports as they come in, so please continue to report these cases to our Support Team in-game by using the /help command. We understand that this can be frustrating, and appreciate your patience.