Gold spammers - Why weren't we prepared for them?

casselna_ESO · April 2014

Ok, many of you have either ignored my posts, or are trolling yourselves.

I never said that we should have been *so* prepared for them that we'd catch them all and filter them out religiously. I didn't mean they should have all in place on catching them immediately and egregiously banning them and wiping them out. I truly expected there to be gold spammers, don't get me wrong. In fact, I EXPECTED THEM! I also expected ways of combating them that didn't involve my stopping all that I am doing for 10-30secs to report/ignore them.

All I asked was why they didn't have a *gold spammer* option that does the two options: reports/copies the line of text on which you clicked "Report gold spammer" (so that it shows their name and their handle) and automatically ignores them for you.

Also, with them making guilds, as someone else suggested, why don't we have a feature that simply ignores guild requests?? This would quickly curb them abusing guilds as a function of their gold spamming. As for in game mail, that is a harder one that might be able to be limited to making it so that only friends/guild mates can send you mail.

Dodece · April 2014

I think there was a lack of imagination on their part, but for good reason. Their game wasn't designed to be equitable to such an abuse. In other words there really shouldn't be a market for this kind of thing. Gold really shouldn't be all that valuable in the scale of things. So why would there be an army of people selling it, or a army of people buying it.

The game is fairly linear, and players level up prodigiously. So anything you buy becomes fairly useless after just a couple hours of play. In other words what we have is a system where you use something for an hour, and discard it once you are a few levels past it.

In a nutshell after someone plays for just a few hours. They should grasp just how truly pointless it would be to pay for gold, and I suspect that part of why the gold farmers have resorted to being so pernicious is, because they aren't getting the return on investment they hoped for.

Maybe a lot of people who would otherwise buy in a more grind centric game just aren't buying in this more linear progression fest. Meaning they have to go to ever more elaborate lengths to get anyone to shop at their stores. When you get right down to it. I am personally shocked that anyone thinks this would be a great game to make money at playing.

There have to be a lot of games out there where players would have a much more pressing need for the service. As it stands this is a game that compels the player to do the content in order to progress. You really can't bypass those limitations placed upon you by compensating with gold.

bwilson.homeb16_ESO · April 2014

The entire UI side of things seems an afterthought with very little time and money spent on it. Everything is perfectly voice acted, the water glistens, and there are thousands of books all with individual stories. A hell of a lot of time and effort went into that side, but I can't help feeling the game wouldn't provided a much better user experience if just a fraction of those resources went into improving the interface between the game and the player

zeuseason · April 2014

LOL @ one click reporting....like *thats* gonna solve the problem. Bots are like viruses tho, they are almost always 1 step ahead of developers. That's why they are so rampant right now and ZOS seems like they are actively implementing fixes for them, so all is good, long as they do it quick

robacooperb16_ESO · April 2014

I've been wondering this too - the influx of the Gold Sellers was swift and within hours of the Early Access beginning for the pre-orders. Now think about that, and think about how you have to enter a subscription plan to play... how did these many Gold Sellers get through via pre-order and now via regular subscription plans?

Khalvynnovb16_ESO · May 2014

With all these damm bots and gold spammers I spend more time reporting this aggravation than I do playing the game. Just make all bots and spammers killable then the players that hate them can get some satisfaction from it.

AlexDougherty · May 2014

Khalvynnovb16_ESO wrote: »

With all these damm bots and gold spammers I spend more time reporting this aggravation than I do playing the game. Just make all bots and spammers killable then the players that hate them can get some satisfaction from it.

If they could identify bots and spammers that easily, they could and would just ban them automatically.

Shimizu · May 2014

Increased number of staff/live moderators with Ban-hammers is one option, but on the scale ESO currently has this is by far the least efficient method of reducing the gold farming menace. Player reports, etc. will only scratch the surface.

Based on this, you'd think the most efficient way to solve the problem would be to design the game in a way that isn't so dependent on currency for everything (inv space, bank space, horse feeding, repair costs, shop-bought ingredients, and so on and so forth...). Many games have implemented systems where the currency is less important, which also removes the need for pointless gold sinks and limits goldfarmers ability to affect the game.

It is important to remember that if people weren't buying the stuff, there'd be no market for it and therefore, no sellers. Make delivery more difficult by:

Having a level (or quest) requirement to access mail
Having a level (or quest) requirement to access chat/player trade.

You don't really need any of these features before level 10 or so. Arguably longer.
If goldfarmers have to spend more time getting their lvl 1 trading mules through some content before they can sell their wares, this hurts them.

I've recently had a bit of spam mail where I'm being offered not only the ability to buy gold, but a list of rl cash prices for items like turpen, elegant lining, etc. This is not a good development! If we weren't forced into this cripple guild store system and there was actually a global market where people could buy what they need, nobody would have to resort to this. I expect most of this is coming from hireling abuse as well.

In all honesty though, if it weren't for inventory and bank size increases and a ridiculous break rate on gear you wouldn't need money in this game at all. Now that I've bought up those upgrades the only thing I have to do is feed my horse, another easily removable cash sink (there's also no reason for horses to cost what they do.)

The reason gold farmers have buyers is that if making money in the game is too time consuming or tedious people will resort to other methods. Fix that and the problem will solve itself.

KerinKor · May 2014

casselna_ESO wrote: »

And most importantly, Why don't they have a system in place to prevent gold spammers from making their guild a web site address??

I'm very critical of ZOS' total lack of any designed-in anti-bot and anti-spam tools, but even I will admit RMT were pretty creative here, I've not see than trick in other MMOs but maybe cause name length/character limitations means it's not practical to use a domain name as a guild name.

ZOS_HugoP · May 2014

Greetings folks,

We fully understand your concerns about such issues, and please be sure that we are working on various solutions for that.

Sabbatus · May 2014

Ridiculous thread is ridiculous.

This is like saying "Why can't anti-virus software manufacturers make software that catches 100% of virii all the time." It is ridiculous because it is impossible. The nature of hackers (both in game and out of it) is that they are constantly coming up with new ways to hack, so those methods have to be discovered and patched.

There is no QA team or beta test big enough to find 100% of the ways hackers will exploit your system.

Aurekai · May 2014

I'm now getting emails from gold spammers... the problem worsens...