Orbital78 wrote: »

This may have even been all done within the ESO API

Yes, it would be very easy to write a simple addon that auto-invites anyone who says anything in zone chat as well as anyone who happens to enter your reticle. No need for macros or external software. So instead of comparing this to automated fishing, which someone did earlier in this thread, the more appropriate comparison is with automated writs. Automated fishing is bannable because that requires external software, while automated writs is kosher.

And there are existing safeguards against spammy abuse of this: there is a cooldown that you must wait between each invite that you send (My guess is that it's in the ballpark of a minute? But I've never acutally stopwatch-timed it.) Of course, to the people receiving the automated guild invites, this cooldown probably doesn't mean anything to them since it doesn't matter to them if the previous person who received an invite received it 6s ago or 60s ago. But it does place a limit on the person doing the inviting.



And FWIW, when I started playing the first guild I joined was someone just inviting random people out of the blue. (This was also years before the Guild Finder existed.) While I didn't stay for long--I dropped it after a few weeks after I joined a number of better guilds--it was still useful for me as a new player who didn't know anyone or anything.

To the OP's original complaint, my impression on PC NA is the invites from "that guild" are not coming from the usual bot-like stuff, but rather from specific players. As they showed up, I just blocked the player. It took several blocks to do it, but I haven't seen an invite from "that guild" in quite a while.

LennaTheRussian wrote: »

Just because the API allows it, does not mean it can't be abused.

Also if I get an invite and decline it and tell the account not to invite me anymore, there should an expectation that I do not want to join and don't want to be spammed with invites to the guild. But no, I decline the invite and a few hours later a new throwaway account pops up and invites me as soon as I spawn in a town. This is harassment.

This, this, and THIS. Tagging and @ZOS_Kevin and quoted for truth and all that. Just because something is "legal" doesn't mean it's "right." Something mods of almost every community seem to have trouble remembering is that you have the enforce the spirit of the rules, not just the letter of the law. Rules/laws/TOS's exist to maintain harmony and good behavior in a community (and cover the owners' backsides, of course). If someone is doing something to disrupt any of that, they need to be held accountable, even if their actions are not in direct violation of any specific rule. AKA things I've learned from over 30 years of modding various online communities, from IRC to eGroups mailing lists (later Yahoo! Groups) to forums and beyond.

I've seen communities crumble and implode too many times, just because the people in charge kept saying, "Well, they're not breaking any rules, so we can't do anything!" (As if they themselves didn't MAKE the rules they were hiding behind, and could alter their policies at any time to restore peace. We call these people "cowards.")

Also, just wanted to point out the Vulkhel Guard spammer I keep seeing/getting spammed by on my under-5-guild alt accounts is using a character name that ends in "suckstoes." Pretty sure that's a name that could be reported for sexual content. (The first part of the name, which I'm not mentioning due to the name-and-shame rules, makes it clear that it's the alt account of someone who has been spamming for this guild group for a very long time because I've seen that name many times before.) I'm normally against reporting such names in a game with an adult rating, but when it comes to the owner of said name participating in harassment, I'm willing to jump through a loophole and play dirty too. I've been taking screenshots of every single time I get hit with a spam invite as well as the exact location of the spammer. It's time to go to the ESO Support page do a mass-reporting from each of my accounts. Everyone else should too. Annoy ZOS till they finally do something, if they won't act when they should.

Also, I agree that it's not just the individual spammers who need to be actioned. The people running these guilds need to face consequences too. The founder in particular is infamous for abusive behavior; that's been documented right here in some of the previous forum threads about this guild group.

Oh, and Kevin/ZOS mods, don't ignore this post about the guild group's suspcious behavior:

spantifical wrote: »

One of my old officers was also an officer there and she used to brag about how effective the script/macro was. She was told she had to get x number of new recruits a week or month to stay an officer. But this was easily 5 or 6 years go.

Back then, it seemed like their primary goal was just to be the biggest conglomerate on PC NA. I just googled and found their website. They boast over 38,000 guild members across 3 games and now are a "leading platform that provides computer science resources and coding challenges for programmers and technology enthusiasts, along with interview and exam preparations for upcoming aspirants" and boast over 12M registered users worldwide. Yet everything on the website is apparently about those 3 games (and nearly empty). So...that's interesting.

Is the spam for clout? So it looks like they have a huge network and can be trusted? So odd.

I got one of these just yesterday in Shadowfen, near the Stormhold wayshrine. They hang around wayshrines and do this.

ZOS doesn't care. I spent an entire month reporting them after asking them to stop inviting my characters every time I logged into Daggerfall. The response from ZOS was that no violation of their terms had occurred. They will spend time in this thread acting like they might do something about it and then ignore it just like last time.