Gold sellers - is there something going on about them?

Charwyn · April 2014

Gold spammers got to almost everyone. They are in chat (and it's much worse than in SWTOR or WOW), they spam via mail, they invite to guilds...
People are reporting them in huge packs (wasting lots of time, reporting 50 accounts per day).
My own mailbox is full of TESO confirmations of my tickets.

Would be nice to know:
Are there any measures taken by DEVs or support on this matter?

Maybe some employers should monitor the situation "in the field", because, you know, we just CAN'T report all of them!

We pay the subscription.
We wanna play the game, not just waste our time on clicking buttons - doing someone else's work.

zhevon · April 2014

The email spam has gotten clean up (well its been a couple of days ince I got one) - the guild invite spam is annoying and if reject they immediately send another one - sometimes from the same name. There should be a 15 minute cooldown for sending invites to the same person. I could ignore but these are essentially temps and I suspect something like will have broken-ass limitted space.

milaan_muc · April 2014

More annoying by far is that those gold sellers are placing their bots in public dungeons on the boss location. Makes it difficult to get a hit on a boss.

Aenima_pt · April 2014

Yes, they are getting banned as they are being reported as you can read in this post from the News and Patch Notes section.

Not only gold seller, but botters and cheaters too.

Loxy37 · April 2014

They did ban a load recently. Let's hope that once they actually have to stump up cash, next month, they will be a lot less. I know its making life hard. I've even had their group and guild invites while hidden behind a rock AFK.

loops73 · April 2014

Aenima_pt wrote: »

Yes, they are getting banned as they are being reported as you can read in this post from the News and Patch Notes section.

Not only gold seller, but botters and cheaters too.

well they are not keeping up with them.. today alone I added 25 spammers to my ignore list,every dungeon I go in there are 5 bots standing there and I get spammed every 5 minutes to join a gold farming guild.. this is the worst I have ever seen in an mmo..I will be moving to console when it releases,they wont be able to do it there.

Vortex500 · April 2014

I almost fell out of my chair today when I got a random invite to a gold seller guild. "iininifefeg" invites you to "Buy gold! 24/7".

Underthing · April 2014

I've got the SpamFilter addon running but it's not catching the game mail or guild invite ones. So I've been reporting those every chance I get. It would be nice to have a right-click menu choice and/or guild invite notification delete menu choice for "Gold Seller Spam" so us players don't have wait for and then fill out the reporting interface.

Also it would be a good idea to develop a 'trusted' list of players who report gold spammers. Each time a Zenimax rep determines a player has correctly reported a gold spammer, they give that player a +1 to their trust score. If a player mis-reports (e.g. they right-click the wrong name by accident), keep track of that too. A player becomes 'trusted' once they've reported over 100 gold spammers with 1% or less errors.

When you get say 50 of these 'trusted' players reporting a gold spammer, prevent that spammer from appearing in /zone, /yell, /whisper etc. and from sending game mail or guild invites to anyone else until a Zenimax rep can review the case. This way you can prevent the spammer from bothering too many people by switching phases, sending in-game mails or the new guild invite spam technique.
This would also cut down on the Zenimax time spent reviewing spammer reports. If the CS rep determines from the first report it is indeed a spammer, all other players who reported that particular spammer could automatically have their trust score adjusted and the CS rep can move on to a brand new incident.

Charwyn · April 2014

Aenima_pt wrote: »

Yes, they are getting banned as they are being reported as you can read in this post from the News and Patch Notes section.

Not only gold seller, but botters and cheaters too.

Nice to hear!
Didn't see that post, that's why created a topic.

YourNameHere · April 2014

loops73 wrote: »

Aenima_pt wrote: »

Yes, they are getting banned as they are being reported as you can read in this post from the News and Patch Notes section.

Not only gold seller, but botters and cheaters too.

well they are not keeping up with them.. today alone I added 25 spammers to my ignore list,every dungeon I go in there are 5 bots standing there and I get spammed every 5 minutes to join a gold farming guild.. this is the worst I have ever seen in an mmo..I will be moving to console when it releases,they wont be able to do it there.

No offense, but you are very naieve when it comes to these guys.

Gold sellers/spammers are like a hydra. You cut off a head and seven will grow in it's place.

If you think banning their account will stop them, they have stolen cc numbers and accounts of 10 more people to use. This is NOT something that is stopped overnight.

It is annoying. I only know of EverQuest who completely stopped them because they found ways players could get plat and in game time safely and through SoE themselves.

Keep reporting. That's all we can do. And home ZoS is on the ball.

Anoteros · April 2014

theyre also inviting to gold selling guilds now and you're unable to decline the invite if you ignore them prior.
I somehow ended up a member of one of these guilds without my knowledge.
There is jack all being done in game to stem this flood of gold spamming idiots.

How about changing the way public dungeons work to stop them botting 24/7 and farming bosses before normal players experiencing the dungeons for the first time can actually get a chance to get some loot no tanks to the broken loot system and the botters stuffing everything up.

Mishoniko · April 2014

A "Block Guild Invites" setting would nip the invite spam in the bud. Seems odd to have a modern MMO launch without it.

Gillysan · April 2014

Mishoniko wrote: »

A "Block Guild Invites" setting would nip the invite spam in the bud. Seems odd to have a modern MMO launch without it.

There are several things common to dealing gold sellers going back 10 years that I don't understand why ZOS never implemented them.

I had to turn zone chat off semi-permanently because my ignore list has already filled up.

Knightpanther · April 2014

Totally agree, a 'Block Guild Invites' option should be a priority.
Having been a loyal Everquest player for 14 years and having started EQ2 from its launch no game has ever given me thought to quit......but this one has, its amazing but this constant spam is giving me second thoughts.
All I ask is to get rid of these gold sellers, its not difficult and should be part of your customer service.
I would have no objection to a SOE style gold buying system if it puts these muppets out of business.

Be safe.

Valethar · April 2014

tobias.braunb16_ESO wrote: »

More annoying by far is that those gold sellers are placing their bots in public dungeons on the boss location. Makes it difficult to get a hit on a boss.

I think I ran into that yesterday. A level 5 with one of those nonsense names like "afdflksjdfs" along with a couple of higher level characters around 8-10 with similar names. Almost all of them were standing there without armor and just spamming staves and spells at the location where the boss spawns.

All I can recall is that it was some sort of mine I came across, but don't remember where or what the name was. It was sort of late last night. LOL

c1r3gamerb16_ESO · April 2014

I've noticed an increase past 2 days with gold sellers spamming at least 6 lines of "............... text ........" type messages. But haven't had any more in-game mails from them since ESO took the mail system down yesterday.

Also noticing they are now splitting up their URL's e.g. W-W-W..G.

It would be nice if instead of having to go through the reporting page (which seems to get slower each time I have to report a gold seller) there was an option on the drop down list when you right click a player just saying "Report gold seller" and the game auto saves the text box and submits report instantly.