Gold spammers - Would be sort of easy to tackle

Lucifah

Hi, I'm hoping that any officials read this (and maybe even respond to it).

The gold spammers are a real pain in the backside, only a week and a half after going live with ESO.

Some suggestions that could mitigate it with little effort:

1. Forbid any trade between players where in-game gold is paid, if players are below a certain level (5 maybe)? You could still allow trading items without payment. Though not many people will need to trade anything at those levels.

You often see people with names like "sohdfojdshgfjdk" lurking around the banks, level 2-4 usually. So essentially all they have done is create a character, skip tutorial, and walk straight to the bank to then trade and annoy everybody.

2. Make it way easier to report them.

We've got a popup with ignore and report options. Make it a one-click action without filling forms and the like. A menu item like "report & ignore spammer" would do. I'm sure many people don't report because their ignore lists are getting crowded, or because they can't be bothered any more. Making it easier will help.

3. Use regular expressions to detect URLs and anything indicating gold offers. It's no rocket science to detect patterns like G_O_L_D. Thiis doesn't need to lead to an automatic block/ignore/ban, but it should create a ticket automatically for further investigation.

4. Force a temp ban of a few minutes, if anybody says the exact same thing in public chat twice in short succession.


Gold spam is really bad already, in these early days. It'll get much worse if you don't act on it ASAP. Otherwise this going to become worse than games like WoW and will render zone chat useless.

Other than that, fantastic job! Love the game, despite the inevitable bumps on the road, which are normal when MMOs go live.

Nermy

Gold spamming is annoying me and most of my guild. Quite a few of us take the time to report them but a simpler way of reporting would be extremely useful. Just like your "report & ignore spammer" pop-up idea.

I wonder do the GMs browse these forums? Do any regularly post?

Daverios

You have to realize these gold farmers have more resources and manpower than Zenimax right? Pretty easy when you only have to pay 10 cents amd hour and make 20 cents to be profitable.

I say the game just should not be available in these depressed economies because it only encourages theft, money laundering, CC fraud and creates a drain on ours. You do know that every single gold farmer account is bought witn stolen CC info right and it is common for them to operate 12-100 accounts per 'farmer' right?

broran

point 4 doesn't work, gw2 has a system where you can't repeat yourself in chat and gold spammers get around it easily by going "(web address) a" "(web address) b" and so on.

oskiwee

Do they all realize also that there is guild invites being sent out when u just get in game to join their guild to sell gold? Yes there is a gold selling guild right now in the game please get rid of this ***.

karstenb16_ESO7

The whole gold selling system works only because work labor is cheap in China compared to US and western Europe. Try a whois search on the domains they are advertising. They're all registered in China.

So why not beat them with their own weapons. Hire 20 workers in China. They'll probably cost the same as one american or european employee. Have 10 of them sit in chat and wait for gold seller spam. Have the other 10 check the game world for bots.

Have them take a screenshot and click a button to suspend an offending player's account.
Have one person at ZO HQ look at the screenshots once or twice a day to confirm that no innocent person got suspended incorrectly. Then terminate those accounts permanently.

Problem solved.

Lucifah

Daverios wrote: »

You have to realize these gold farmers have more resources and manpower than Zenimax right? Pretty easy when you only have to pay 10 cents amd hour and make 20 cents to be profitable.

I say the game just should not be available in these depressed economies because it only encourages theft, money laundering, CC fraud and creates a drain on ours. You do know that every single gold farmer account is bought witn stolen CC info right and it is common for them to operate 12-100 accounts per 'farmer' right?

Yes I'm aware that those farmers have better resources. Blocking whole countries is not an option. They'll just use a hijacked proxy in Europe/NA and carry on.

It's probably not possible to get rid of all of them, but if you can reduce the number and make reporting/blocking easier, it's worth it IMHO

robert

Just insta-ban the buyers and the sellers will eventually go away.

Nermy

Just read this. Seems they are listening and taking action... I wonder if we will notice any change.

Ignore me... forgot the date!