(edited by Calvary.2946)
Gold spammers
Much as I want to stop spammers, I’d balk at blocking mail for new characters. After all, that’s how one trades items. I suppose one could work around it by mailing useful starter gear and bags to a more leveled alt so they could put it in their bank and then pick it up on the lower character assuming they can get to their bank. But isn’t that punishing all the honest players by encumbering their game? Plus it assumes the new character you want to help is an alt of someone higher.
Report + delete takes much less time than relogging and trotting to a bank. Less money, too, given waypoint costs to get to the bank.
As to blocking chat, egad no. I’m in an RP guild. People might make a temporary character to play a role, but not if they have to put in hours of game play before they can even talk to anyone! Besides, for non-RP purposes, how social of an experience will it be if you can’t interact with anyone for 10 levels? First impressions matter too much to prevent joining the community that long.
How about this, they can’t SEND mail, but can recieve it and they can’t use any Zone Wide chat or Whisper/Tells, just local chat, emotes party and guild chat.
That would ease the pain quite a bit. Still, I foresee the spammers standing in LA using /e to get a large “hearing” area loaded with their nonsense, leading to more draconian restrictions on all players.
Me, I’m hoping for the return of Dhuuming. Spammer gets reported, ANet rep verifies they have been broadcasting “buy my gold” messages, and WHAM. Scythe to the face, account gone.
I’d also hope no one would be stupid enough to buy gold from third parties given the gem shop option along with the limited use of gold in this game, but after many years in the criminal justice system I don’t have that much faith in humanity.
I too fully despise gold spammers. The other day I started a brand new character to try out a Sylvari and see how I like it. Within 2 minutes of finishing the tutorial instance I had received NINE mail messages from gold spammers! This is not acceptable.
However, as much as I want to see those sorts of annoying messages go away entirely, so I never have to see them, restricting mail and chat isn’t the answer. No matter what restrictions you choose to enforce, the gold spammers will simply deal with the restrictions. So say you restrict them from sending messages until they are level 10. Well it doesn’t take very long to get a character to level 10 if you know what you’re doing, so they’ll just level to level 10, spam as much as they can before they get banned, then repeat. You may slow them down very slightly, but it would be an insignificant impact. In the end, their messages will still get through to annoy the rest of us. On top of that, you would also be restricting perfectly innocent players.
What we need is a system that automatically detects spam messages in both mail and chat, automatically blocks them so they never get delivered to mail or chat channels, and automatically reports the spammers for investigation. This would mean that their messages would be prevented from ever reaching regular players, rendering the “advertising” completely null and useless (an advertisement can only be effective if it is seen by the target audience). Not only would that make the advertising ineffective, but it would also save regular players from the annoyance of ever seeing the messages, and would further simplify things by making it so that we regular players never even have to take the time to report the spammers, because they will have already been reported.
Such a system is possible through message filters/triggers. Basically, you create a database of filters. Every message is checked against that database for typical spam content. If a message contains spam content, then the filters trigger the blocking and reporting mechanisms. As spammers come up with new ways to try and circumvent the filters, you update the filter database.
Such a filtering system has been used successfully in other games, such as WoW and Runes of Magic. This is often accomplished through addons, but could be implemented on the system level in the core server code. With such a system, if a spam message successfully gets through, we could still report it, and that would provide information that could then be used to update the filter database. False positives could be possible (though a good filter database would minimize them), so investigation of spam reports would still be necessary, and I do not advocate automatic suspensions or bans, however, if a character sends more than 2 such messages within a certain time frame, say 15 minutes, then they should have chat and mail access suspended for a time (maybe 30 minutes) and their investigation for possible banning should be prioritized.
Basically, what I’m saying in short is that as long as the spammers can still successfully get their “advertisement” messages through, they will continue to do so. We need the system to prevent those messages from reaching us, thus preventing them from being effective, and saving regular players from the annoyance of it.
How about a mailing list? You can approve or reject any person to be on your mailing list and all guild members are automatically approved on it unless otherwise by guild function/option. And about private/map messages you could implement a chat feature in which can option to not see any chat from a character level of your choice from 1-80.
So in other words we all dont like it but we arent willing to deal with a little aggrevation….but you think they are day after day willing to level to 10 just to have to do it all over again.
So i guess arenanet, dont worry about it, you good players are lazier then the spammers who cant get a real job…
Much has been said already.
What I miss is the block option from mail. That will help a lot.
It is a shame that so many resources need to be spend on preventing spammers instead on developing our great game.
- Make it so characters cannot send mail until achieving level 15.
- Make it so players cannot send on map chat until level 15.
- Add a help channel.
- Add mail filters, so players have the option to only receive mail from contacts and guildmates. Make this the default.
- Remove most BLTP merchants from the game. Increase BLTP presence in hub locations (such as Lion’s Arch). Make travel to these hub locations inexpensive or free.
- Make full remote access to the BLTP easier for players to get, especially as they increase in level.
RMTers need to advertise. The above suggestions would curtail and funnel their advertising efforts into controlled areas, making their accounts much easier to identify and remove, while also improving the overall quality of life for legitimate players (at the cost of some minor initial restrictions).
RMT email spam is just a nuisance right now, but the rate at which I receive these emails is increasing. I used to get 1 here and there, now I’m having instances of getting 2 and 3 at a time. I suspect it’s only going to get worse from here, unless steps, such as those listed above, are taken. Reporting individual emails is an inefficient approach to the problem.
(edited by Hydrophidian.4319)