Anything being done about out of control Gold Sellers?

aedra

Gold sellers are out of control, I feel like all the reporting I do does nothing. 5 more pop up the next day with their incessant spam. The worst part is that they multi-box and camp dungeon bosses, making it really tough to get any loot at all most of the time, I'm sure many people already know this. It is so obvious they are farmers with their random letter "names" or Chinese names. Are Zenimax going to do anything about it? It doesn't feel like they are to be honest and its getting increasingly frustrating.

Orizuru

There is a really good add on that blocks all of their spam 100%. It's even available through Curse Gaming and the Curse Client if you aren't comfortable installing mods yourself or have trouble trusting the source you download the mods from.

Curse Gaming is pretty good at verifying the add ons are safe to use before they add them to their library.

Aria

Once they ban the players that are buying along with the gold sellers ...hopefully the gold sellers will have no one left to sell to.

Elsonso

aedra wrote: »

Gold sellers are out of control, I feel like all the reporting I do does nothing. 5 more pop up the next day with their incessant spam. ... Are Zenimax going to do anything about it? It doesn't feel like they are to be honest and its getting increasingly frustrating.

While more gold spammers may pop up, the reason that new ones pop up is that the old ones are being banned.

Even if they are working on other solutions, and they say they are, they do have to bans the ones that get in while they work on those things.

They have said in the patch notes, in the things that they are working on, that they are working on these things. While we can debate the effectiveness of what they do, once they do it, it is an established fact that they are working on it.

I report 2-3 people per day, which is all of them. I never ignore them and I very rarely see them again. I deal exclusively with mail and guild invite spammers.

blueline

I've spent quite a few hours in game the last couple days and have noticed a dramatic decrease in gold seller spams, emails and boss campers.

Paks_ESO

I've noticed my GS spam reporting has gone down of late. I am not sure if that is due to my ignore list or their being banned, though.

I would love to see names on my ignore list gray out once the account is gone if for nothing else then just the satisfaction of knowing the *** will have lost time farming gold and advertising and will have to go through the process of making another account. Having the account name gray out would also let us free up room on our ignore list because we could remove the grayed out names.

fredarbonab14_ESO

If it was easy to get rid of these human trash, they would in a nano-second. As well as the BUYERS, that are THE reason why there are gold sellers in the first place. A pity a gaming company has to waste time of this human trash.

Moonchilde

There is also the option to block most of it, after you've done your daily quota of reporting. This is so far the best spam filter add-on for EOS that i've seen:
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info89-SpamFilter.html

Greydog

Curse is starting to put out the addons? ..sweet ...about time.

Seraseth

I use esoui.com, some great ones there.

Greydog

I've never gotten a bad addon from curse so I trust them ...never heard of esoui.com before eso

Laerian

Right click on character's name -> perm ban the account

How hard can be?

nerevarine1138

Laerian wrote: »

Right click on character's name -> perm ban the account

How hard can be?

Of course! It's so simple! That's why Blizzard has totally gotten rid of gold-seller spam in their game after 10 years of dealing with it.

Gold-sellers use stolen accounts. Banning them does nothing to deal with the overall problem. The best the developers can do is keep pushing out new chat filters and continue to swing the ban-hammer as often as possible. But as long as players continue to buy gold, the spam will go on.

soulclaw

There is a huge market for selling gold, otherwise we wouldn't see so many sellers. There is no magic bullet to cure this problem. Your choices are cry and get your panties in a twist or /ignore and FIDO.

It takes a second to put them on the ignore list and go back to playing the game.

ibrockbottomed77_ESO

I will say this, one of the reasons this is so pervasive is the total lack of real time observation by most gaming companies into this practice. I've said this in other games and I'll say it here. So far the only MMO that did banning this vermin right was EVE Online, which actively monitors chat and will ban your ass the instance you advertise. With the single shard system you wouldn't need an army of CSR's either, you'd need 1 person to monitor chat and insta ban anyone advertising. These scum bags will get the message really fast, just like they did in Eve. Passive monitoring of the problem and being reactive is fail.

OZGODUSA

What do you expect them to do about it? It's like Canute trying to stem the tide. It won't stop until players stop buying gold. And how can you ban players? If the financial transaction happens external to the game where is the proof? Will they then ban everyone who receives a gift of gold from a mate in the game?

This is a problem that is nearly impossible to solve. Because there will always be players who want to take the easy way out and use their wallet to make their gaming experience easier (and for them, better). Look at the Asian MMOs. Pay to win is a huge revenue maker for the publishers. Players pay thousands of dollars to gear themselves up by buying the gear.

GaBacon

whyyyyyy is my ignore list full!!! i mean if u cant get rid of these *** then make my ignore list infinite damn it

GaBacon

OZGODUSA wrote: »

What do you expect them to do about it? It's like Canute trying to stem the tide. It won't stop until players stop buying gold. And how can you ban players? If the financial transaction happens external to the game where is the proof? Will they then ban everyone who receives a gift of gold from a mate in the game?

This is a problem that is nearly impossible to solve. Because there will always be players who want to take the easy way out and use their wallet to make their gaming experience easier (and for them, better). Look at the Asian MMOs. Pay to win is a huge revenue maker for the publishers. Players pay thousands of dollars to gear themselves up by buying the gear.

are u serious? of course it is easy to manage. just have someone online that bans these people imediately and not have to wait 3 days until they see the report.

Tetujin

They should leave them in there, not ban them, just mute them so that they think they are spamming, and continue to collect the monthly subscription fee. Banning them just causes them to replicate and you have to do it all over again.

Lanatireb17_ESO

I wonder how hard it is just to have a mod or gm monitor zonechats and immediately banhammer everyone spamming that trash.

OZGODUSA

GaBacon wrote: »

OZGODUSA wrote: »

What do you expect them to do about it? It's like Canute trying to stem the tide. It won't stop until players stop buying gold. And how can you ban players? If the financial transaction happens external to the game where is the proof? Will they then ban everyone who receives a gift of gold from a mate in the game?

This is a problem that is nearly impossible to solve. Because there will always be players who want to take the easy way out and use their wallet to make their gaming experience easier (and for them, better). Look at the Asian MMOs. Pay to win is a huge revenue maker for the publishers. Players pay thousands of dollars to gear themselves up by buying the gear.

are u serious? of course it is easy to manage. just have someone online that bans these people imediately and not have to wait 3 days until they see the report.

If you think paying someone a full time salary to ban accounts that are automatically generated for gold spamming purposes is a good way to deploy resources then good luck to you. That's like the kid at the Dutch dikes putting his finger in holes in the dike as they appear.

Gold spammers create and delete new accounts every few minutes and it is automated, run via scripts. You will not solve the gold spamming problem until you remove what is driving them, which is demand for their services. Sure, game publishers will always try and do the right thing and implement measures to minimise their impact, but there hasn't been an MMO that hasn't had to deal with gold spammers. Except the dead ones that nobody wants to play.

qwertyburnsb16_ESO

It would help if they had online GM's in every zone. Not only helping players, but observing chat and witnessing any bots straight away. Games that do have online GM's do not have this issue to this extreme as response is instant with an immediate ban hammer.

Question for ZOS is how efficient is it really for someone to go through tons and tons of retrospective report tickets??? Really, I suggest having an GM toon would be so much better and a lot of player problems resolved in game. Also extremely good PR worth it's weight in gold which what you so desperately need now.

GaBacon

OZGODUSA wrote: »

GaBacon wrote: »

OZGODUSA wrote: »

What do you expect them to do about it? It's like Canute trying to stem the tide. It won't stop until players stop buying gold. And how can you ban players? If the financial transaction happens external to the game where is the proof? Will they then ban everyone who receives a gift of gold from a mate in the game?

This is a problem that is nearly impossible to solve. Because there will always be players who want to take the easy way out and use their wallet to make their gaming experience easier (and for them, better). Look at the Asian MMOs. Pay to win is a huge revenue maker for the publishers. Players pay thousands of dollars to gear themselves up by buying the gear.

are u serious? of course it is easy to manage. just have someone online that bans these people imediately and not have to wait 3 days until they see the report.

If you think paying someone a full time salary to ban accounts that are automatically generated for gold spamming purposes is a good way to deploy resources then good luck to you. That's like the kid at the Dutch dikes putting his finger in holes in the dike as they appear.

Gold spammers create and delete new accounts every few minutes and it is automated, run via scripts. You will not solve the gold spamming problem until you remove what is driving them, which is demand for their services. Sure, game publishers will always try and do the right thing and implement measures to minimise their impact, but there hasn't been an MMO that hasn't had to deal with gold spammers. Except the dead ones that nobody wants to play.

i say this because ive seen it done before and it was fine.

Fruity_Ninja

ibrockbottomed77_ESO wrote: »

Passive monitoring of the problem and being reactive is fail.

It's a very good point. In game moderation goes someway to helping things. Even if it is just to help tone down those who decide the zone chat is a place to make their filth public.

Nothing worse than running around questing, whilst having to witness a petty fight between two 13 y/o's who are arguing about which one will reach puberty first.

nidriks

It is seriously bad in Glenumbra today. There are a couple of names I keep seeing that I've already ignored. I'm wondering if they're finding ways to circumvent you ignoring them.

The name of the message poster is the same each time and I'm unable to ignore them after the first message I've ignored, so they must be the same person, right?

It's getting beyond a joke.

As for SpamFilter, well I installed that a week ago. I was frustrated to find I couldn't get it to filter out a certain spam message, no matter how I put it in to the filter. It also blocked my reply to whisper hotkey, so I removed it from my addons.

Ignoring each spammer has worked up until today.

I'd like Zeni to give us free reign to kill anyone who spams this crap...they post a spam message and they become instantly killable by anyone who's near them!

Tetujin

Check if you reached the ignore limit, it's like 90 people or something if I remember right.

nidriks

I noticed that one name was slightly different and managed to ignore him, so my ignore list ain't full. I still keep seeing the same names though. I know they're now using slight variations on each name, but I still should be able to ignore them if they're different...but I can't...so they must be the same name.

It's not a big deal once I move back out of Glenumbra, but I shouldn;t have to put up with spam like this in a mainstream subscription based MMO.

I've played many MMOs. I started with EQ back in 2003 and have played at least another 6 or 7 since then. I've never seen gold spam this bad! Not in any MMO I've played. I've seen gold spam in both channels and mail, yes, but in ESO it is something else.

Why does the game not filter this crap out?

C'mon Zeni, get with the bloody act.

OZGODUSA

GaBacon wrote: »

i say this because ive seen it done before and it was fine.

In all the MMOs I've played in the past 15 years starting from EQ I haven't seen this problem solved. It hasn't been fine except in dead games. You can apply bandaids which is really what your suggestion is (no offence), to have someone apply the ban hammer to accounts they see that are spamming, but for every account that is banned two more will be created within a minute. I appreciate your intent but the only way to really fix this problem is to cut off the intrinsic demand - the people who are using these services. Which is really beyond the scope of any of these game developers/publishers to fix. Unfortunately there are players out there that would prefer to pay real world money to gain an advantage in the game. They are the true cause of this.

Of course that doesn't absolve the publishers from their duty to do their part to keep these spammers from spoiling our gaming experience. They should do all the things they need to, spam filters, bannings, etc. So we don't have to see the spamming. But that's just pulling weeds out without fixing why they are growing in the first place. At this point Zenimax is probably deploying its resources to fixing bugs, preparing for the big content patch, and resolving stability issues rather than have a FT employee sitting there just clicking ban on accounts that will be recreated under another name and another IP address within a few seconds anyway.

EDIT: That said, things are usually particularly bad at launch of any MMO. People who do want to buy gold generally don't do so from companies spamming a game every 2 mins. They tend to do their research and purchase from reputable sellers who have built a name for themselves over time and don't have the need to spam gamers every 2 mins. Most of these spammers are fly-by-nighters who will go out of business soon.

Pretext

NaciremaDiputs wrote: »

There is a really good add on that blocks all of their spam 100%. It's even available through Curse Gaming and the Curse Client if you aren't comfortable installing mods yourself or have trouble trusting the source you download the mods from.

Curse Gaming is pretty good at verifying the add ons are safe to use before they add them to their library.

Sounds good, but why does not Zenimax have this sort of add-on in their game if its that simple?!

Razzak

Pretext wrote: »

NaciremaDiputs wrote: »

There is a really good add on that blocks all of their spam 100%. It's even available through Curse Gaming and the Curse Client if you aren't comfortable installing mods yourself or have trouble trusting the source you download the mods from.

Curse Gaming is pretty good at verifying the add ons are safe to use before they add them to their library.

Sounds good, but why does not Zenimax have this sort of add-on in their game if its that simple?!

Good question.

Orizuru

Pretext wrote: »

NaciremaDiputs wrote: »

There is a really good add on that blocks all of their spam 100%. It's even available through Curse Gaming and the Curse Client if you aren't comfortable installing mods yourself or have trouble trusting the source you download the mods from.

Curse Gaming is pretty good at verifying the add ons are safe to use before they add them to their library.

Sounds good, but why does not Zenimax have this sort of add-on in their game if its that simple?!

There are 2 primary reason I see to make the spam filter an add on.

1. No two players will agree 100% on what exactly is defined as spam. Some players will only think the gold sellers are spam, while others will think the players selling items are spam. Neither is wrong, even when they disagree because spam is a fairly ambiguous term that will have different meanings for different players. If ZOS implemented the spam filter in the back end of the game it would most likely need to be implemented in such a way that would allow players to define spam uniquely to avoid the messages in the chat that they believe are spam. While this wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement, this solution leads me to reason number two.
2. A spam filter that is an add on runs on the player's local client pc rather than on the game's server. Any implementation of a spam filter in the back end of the game client that could be done by ZOS would require an instance of the spam filter to be running on the server for every single player that is logged in. This would likely cause a huge impact on the performance of the servers and vastly increase the number of servers necessary in order to deliver a reliable and accessible product (the game) to players with as little lag as possible. By keep the spam filter as an add on though, this moves the spam filter off of their servers and onto our personal computers, where there are vastly more resources available to parse the chat window without causing game or server lag that would impact the gaming experiences of every single player that is logged into the game.

A spam filter add on basically allows ZOS to better serve their customers because it allows the player to customize their personal spam filter however they see fit, while also managing ZOS resources responsibly while leveraging the resources of the player's personal computer as much as possible.

Seems like a fairly sound business strategy to me.