This gold spam actualy makes me a bad person - every time someone says "hello friend" and "good luck" my first reaction now is to hit them with a stick...

They need to have a real live person GM on at all times whose entire job is to just listen to zone chat in the 3 starter zones (where you zone in after leaving prison).

When they see a gold farmer say something in chat, they insta-ban the account. Period.

That's the ONLY solution at this point. And the fact that they haven't done so...is just sad.

destructor646646b14_ESO wrote: »

They need to have a real live person GM on at all times whose entire job is to just listen to zone chat in the 3 starter zones (where you zone in after leaving prison).

When they see a gold farmer say something in chat, they insta-ban the account. Period.

That's the ONLY solution at this point. And the fact that they haven't done so...is just sad.

This a million times over!

Coupled with random GM "raids" to public dungeons to ban the farmers that are being used to make the gold in the fist place. As it stands its far too easy for them to set up several farming accounts coupled with some spamming seller accounts.

Its actually ruining the game, I encountered this while playing AION after three weeks I was so sick of it I left never to re-sub again. Please don't let this happen to ESO :'(

They should take a page from the other major MMOs and implement some filtering. Banning accounts we report is all well and good, but it's a useless gesture without some proactive tools in the bag to prevent it in the first place.

I have 3 alts in different alliances and Stonefalls is the worst for it by far. I downloaded the spamfilter addon as a result but that doesn't seem to work so well.

Then I went into a dungeon where 5 bots were stacked up hitting the boss with their heavy attacks and killing it in 1-2 secs. I couldn't get a heavy attack in in order to get some loot. Of course these guys ruining dungeon instances are also the ones spamming chat/mail/guild invites to sell gold. This is just so bad now, it is ruining a lot of gameplay.

If you don't have GMs in a game like this, you are so far below the base minimum level of customer service that it's not even visible to you.

Part of the gold farmer problem is that, when you /ignore the spammer, it only applies to the particular character YOU are playing on. You can ignore their whole account, but you have to ignore on each of your characters. You can continue getting their spam mail to your account even then. I have just started reporting them as harrassment or cheaters. 25 in my email today alone.

As long as ZoS continues to hold hands with ZAM you will have the gold spam, nothing will be done

AlliN wrote: »

And the best part - there are only 2 megaservers, so, once it's done, it's done - it's not like this live gm would need to check 30 realms like in WoW.

Problem is though, gold sellers make new accounts with stolen credit card details, so there will be new ones always.

Well that isn't exactly how a megaserver works. Everyone is still on separate servers, so you are still only seeing a small portion of the players and the chat that is actually going on. A 'megaserver' simply means that you can seamlessly jump between servers without your knowledge in order to group with friends and guildmates. They didn't just combine everyone on to one, massive supercomputer; that would be a chat/population nightmare.

And - as unfortunate as it is - truth be told, gold farmers get their money from people actually buying their gold. I'm sure there are some sites just out looking to steal credit card numbers, but the lasting gold selling sites have an actual business going (albeit illegal), and if they were truly just stealing card numbers and not providing the gold, they would have destroyed themselves by now.

I have taken to just reporting them (the ones that spam long messages every <10sec over and over), then ignoring them.

BTW: IP bans are pointless unless they are known to be on a static IP, most in the world are on dynamic IP, but even then proxy/vpn will get around it.

AlliN wrote: »

And the best part - there are only 2 megaservers, so, once it's done, it's done - it's not like this live gm would need to check 30 realms like in WoW.

- This is a HUGE point, it takes away the alibi every other MMO uses, which is the alleged large number of staff needed to monitor every zone on every server.

Fact is, it should only take one person per server, looking at the chat logs with a rudimentary filtering system, who could ban-on-sight the perfectly obvious spam.

But no, ZOS seem intent to let this happen.

Swampster wrote: »

Savinder wrote: »

ZOS seems to be pretty quick to ban gold-spammers in chat and the ones that send guild invites or mail only seem to send them once, so it's safe to simply report them without ignoring them too, and to clear your Ignore list every day.

Sadly that's not my experience.. I've reported spammers, and they've (the same account) still been at it hours later. Not ignoring just leaves the windows open to their incessant spam indefinately.

It'll all be a moot point soon enough as everyone's ignore lists will be full to the brim!

Sorry, for "quick" I meant "within 24 hours".
I do ignore spammers in /zone chat, but I haven't seen one that I ignored and removed from the list the day after spam the chat again.

On the other hand there's plenty of new spammers every day that I have to ignore and report whenever I log in.

Valethar wrote: »

They should take a page from the other major MMOs and implement some filtering. Banning accounts we report is all well and good, but it's a useless gesture without some proactive tools in the bag to prevent it in the first place.

They might be doing this; when I saw the first gold seller, they were posting a normal www address. Then they started w w w and w_w_w and variations thereof. I think there were autocensors kicking in. Of course the sellers will find ways around it, but at least they have to take a few seconds longer. The live person still sounds like the best option at this point.

Macdui wrote: »

How big the ignore list? I feel I must be getting close. You can right click a name in chat, select ignore, then report the account name displayed in chat. Can we have the same options to right click the name of an in-game mail sender. Atm you have to write down the name, add it to ignore list then do the same to manually report them. Getting so many now I've given up reporting and ignoring the gold mail spam because it's so slow a process. Just finish with one before the next mail arrives.

But really how did ZOS not see all this coming and design from the ground up with it in mind?

All you have to do to report mail spam is press F1, whilst the offending mail is chosen, which takes you to the report section.

The spam is getting out of hand. We need a right click option "report spammer" or "report gold seller" which auto ignores and sends chat log, ID and everything needed to GMs who's work is just to handle and ban spammers and botters.

Also if an ID gets more than some number of reports within short time then he should be muted from all chat and marked for investigation.

It can't be THAT hard?