Gold sellers messing with a chat loophole, hard to find the name to be ignored now

Bansheedragon · April 2014

deef85b16_ESO wrote: »

My god some people do seem to like that the game is in their eyes going down by the minute and scream F2P in every post involving issues, I'm not because I really enjoy playing this game, and I really hope they act hard and quickly soon. I agree that they need to be more pro-active and some issues should not be allowed to go live, nevertheless don't compare them to big mammoth studio's like Blizzard etc. They are young/new in the field and need to learn from their mistakes and IMO it would be sad to see this game going F2P / P2W. Yelling these terms at every issue doesn't accomplishes anything, it only drives people away which would give them a fair chance otherwise.

Yes they will make mistakes and they will need to make mistakes to learn from them, that is unavoidable.
But would it not be great if they could actually learn from others mistakes as well?

There are countless MMOs out there, and Zenimax seems to be making the exact same mistakes that many of them have already made.
So why do they need to make the same mistakes, why can they not learn from the mistakes of others?

They could have avoided to much of this if they had just taken the time to think ahead and look at what others have done and then learned from their mistakes.

Etchesketch · April 2014

So it's obvious they have no real time spam filtering going on.

There is no reason to let anyone post multiple lines of text ever. There should be a 30 second to one minute limit on posting lines in gen chats.

Somebody needs a friend to talk to, that's what /w and /g are for.

Bansheedragon · April 2014

Harkrider wrote: »

Bansheedragon wrote: »

Harkrider wrote: »

Bansheedragon wrote: »

I find it difficult at best to find something to say about this, but I will give it a try anyway.

I keep hearing people say and reading posts about how this was a smooth launch.
Even the people at Zenimax have said so.

Yet I see countless posts on the forums here daily, about people not being able to log in, the subscription BS, broken quests that prevent people from progressing, bots and gold sellers.
And now they start doing this?

This game should never have been released when it was, it should still be in beta, and it dont look like much is being done to stop this either.
Zenimax is only being reactive, rather than proactive.
Instead of thinking ahead and trying to prevent things from happening, they wait until things go wrong and then they fix it.

Maybe in a year this will be a good game, unfortunately by then it will be far too late, most people will have left and the game will have gone F2P, most likely also P2W for them to be able to even sustain the game for the few people who do play it.

To be fair, they are not hacking the game or anything of the sort. They're just using a clever tactic that makes it appear as though the names can't be clicked and ignored. Those names are simply decoys, where the real spammer lies in the lines above.

[real spammer] <bunch of empty spaces to create a false line of text below>
[fake decoy name] <gold spam here>

I never said anything about hacking, I never even mentioned the word.
I know what they are doing, but it dont make it any less annoying and frustrating for legitimate players.
I was talking about how Zenimax waits until there is a problem before they even begin to do anything about it, rather than try to think ahead and then try to prevent it from being a problem in the first place.

It should never have been possible for it to be possible to do something like what is described here in the first place, there is no reason for anyone to have that many spaces before they type anything.
Make it so there can be max 5 spaces before a sentence and the problem is solved, I dont see how that is difficult to do.

This thread was originally titled 'gold sellers have hacked chat' and I assumed you were referencing that when you said 'and now they start doing this?'.

I see how you could have misunderstood me there.

I actually took the time to read the thread, and my response was aimed towards the explanation of what they are actually doing rather than what the OP thought they were doing.

But you could not have know that of course.

Thorarin · April 2014

What makes this thing really bad, is that the game client actually treats the [decoy name] bit as if it's an actual player name. You can right click it and report that "player" like you would any other.

Anyway, why are newlines allowed in chat text at all? With spaces and wrapping you can probably still fool some people, but newline characters make it *** easy.

Arwyn · April 2014

Harkrider wrote: »

Bansheedragon wrote: »

I find it difficult at best to find something to say about this, but I will give it a try anyway.

I keep hearing people say and reading posts about how this was a smooth launch.
Even the people at Zenimax have said so.

Yet I see countless posts on the forums here daily, about people not being able to log in, the subscription BS, broken quests that prevent people from progressing, bots and gold sellers.
And now they start doing this?

This game should never have been released when it was, it should still be in beta, and it dont look like much is being done to stop this either.
Zenimax is only being reactive, rather than proactive.
Instead of thinking ahead and trying to prevent things from happening, they wait until things go wrong and then they fix it.

Maybe in a year this will be a good game, unfortunately by then it will be far too late, most people will have left and the game will have gone F2P, most likely also P2W for them to be able to even sustain the game for the few people who do play it.

To be fair, they are not hacking the game or anything of the sort. They're just using a clever tactic that makes it appear as though the names can't be clicked and ignored. Those names are simply decoys, where the real spammer lies in the lines above.

[real spammer] <bunch of empty spaces to create a false line of text below>
[fake decoy name] <gold spam here>

The problem is you can actually click the decoy name and report it, a bug in the chat i guess that just recognises [name] in the right place.

Arwyn · April 2014

To add, im sorry for the original post heading, I reworded it as soon as it was pointed out what this was, the original reason for posting was still the same, an exploit has been found, I will be very concerned if they start using real account names as the fake names and if innocent people get banned because it looks like its them in the chat. I think Zenimax needed to be aware of this.

daemonios · April 2014

I'm up to 64 players in my ignore list (see below). I'm fed up with reporting, not only because of the time waste, but also because each report spams my IRL inbox with a confirmation email. Seriously, could you maybe give an option not to receive these?

Now I just ignore gold sellers, but they keep coming up with strategies to make it harder to ignore in chat, not to mention the increasing number of in-game mails and fake guild invites.

I hope a banhammer is coming to all of these spammers, and sooner rather than later.

pmn100b16_ESO · April 2014

What about a right click option to report gold selling that doesn't open any windows or send any tickets/emails. And if the player is reported say 50 times by individual players, their chat privileges get automatically revoked. Then a support tech can look at these names popping up in a database and see if its genuine and if a ban is required.

Saint_JiubB14_ESO · April 2014

there is also an easy way to get around the current tactic ZOS could likely implement. Using a specific color not available for text to designate character names instead of blanket colors for all of the chat text.

Doesn't fix the larger problem, but it would fix this. and since we are talking about gold spammers.

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom any chance you guys could disable the emails for incident reports? you are literally sending me an email for every report to inform me that I will receive no information regarding the complaint. It is completely useless and unnecessary. If it was about complaints against me or a dispute that needed more follow up I could understand, but all it says is

"The dwellers of Tamriel thank you for taking time from your adventures to report this offense. Maintaining the integrity of the land is a priority; we will investigate this matter and take appropriate action.

To protect individual privacy, we do not disclose the outcome of our investigation."

Darzil · April 2014

Or just once per player. as after the first one I know I won't hear anything.

deheartb14_ESO · April 2014

Im not seeing these problems because of my 2 addons that filter out all the gold spam. It really works. I only have to manually ignore a few a day now insead of ignoring constantly.

Jim_McMasterub17_ESO · April 2014

[quote=

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom any chance you guys could disable the emails for incident reports? you are literally sending me an email for every report to inform me that I will receive no information regarding the complaint. It is completely useless and unnecessary. If it was about complaints against me or a dispute that needed more follow up I could understand, but all it says is

"The dwellers of Tamriel thank you for taking time from your adventures to report this offense. Maintaining the integrity of the land is a priority; we will investigate this matter and take appropriate action.

To protect individual privacy, we do not disclose the outcome of our investigation."
[/quote]

+1 to that.

starkerealm · April 2014

Saint_JiubB14_ESO wrote: »

It is completely useless and unnecessary.

Mostly useless. You can use the ID numbers to track CS's volume for each day, if you're inclined to.

drake1980 · April 2014

The real worry here is with them using the fake names on new lines in chat, if its letting people right click it like its a real player on the fake names what happens if they start to take and use random real in game player names in their stuff and players start reporting other players falsely? You should not be able to do this in chat with the fake names like this, this really needs to get patched and fast.

Pyatra · April 2014

After I left Auridon, I haven't seen a gold spammer since.