Guild Wars 2

I thought of a simple solution for gold farmers, apply a filter for the word “.com” in the chat filters. The gold farmers seem to link to outside web pages, and really there’s no compelling reason why honest players would have to be able to do that, so just filtering “.com” and similar terms out could make it more difficult for them to operate via map chat.

Then you get DOT COM or (.)COM or other variations that are simply worse to look at than .com. Just right-click > ignore.

Like I said, they could cover the necessary variations on the terms, and add new ones as they show up.

I post links to people all the time, so that would be a major inconvenience to me and the people I post to.

Why would you need to post links ingame? And even if you do direct people to sites, couldn’t you just say “go to youtube,” or “go to the Guildwars forums,” or something else like that?

‘Go here’ is too vague and people are lazy. Also, I post links to stories/songs I have written about my in-game experiences or links to help people. The people I give links to want the links. They do not want to be told, ‘Go find it yourself’ and I am not giving random links to random people.

Ok, fair enough, since Robinsiebler wants to promote a blog, goldfarmers are here to stay.

I’m sure they could create some type of regex that could search for variations of certain sites like egin and fasteve, even if they have spaces between them or something.

another issue that can arise with the auto censoring of .com messages and variants like “dot com” in particular can cause problems with grouping with people with names that can be shorted into “Dot” or are named “Dot”

like say you have a group member everyone calls “Dot” for whatever reason… you try to type “Dot come” but typo and say “Dot com” instead suddenly your whole message sensors because it was interpreted as a website linking attempt.

While I do agree that something should be done to hender goldspammers to the point that they give up and leave but unfortunatly, this seemingly simple solution causes more problems to legitimate players than it’s worth.

And as Robinsiebler pointed out, some of us have legit reasons to link people to websites, more often than not on request. Other websites people may link to are guildsites.

Ohoni.6057:

Ok, fair enough, since Robinsiebler wants to promote a blog, goldfarmers are here to stay.

Wow! I am so powerful. I should submit moar feature requests.

I will sacrifice 5 kittens to Arioch for bestowing this blessing on me!

Only a few things really help against goldsellers. First off all a very good warning to never go to such a site. Even if your account doesn’t get hacked, your creditcard doesn’t get hacked and you get the gold. The price will be higher then the legal in game shop and you risk loosing your account for breaking the rules. Secondly over advertise them. Although the spams claim to have lower prices, they have not. So advertise the official gemstore for example a bar above all trade windows and in the Black lion window (all tabs) with the current gold-price in your local currency. I know it is annoying, but the goldspammers can’t advertise there and we will soon enough get used to it and learn to not see it.

Last off all is a dedicated gold seller report option in the report window. Besides it will report and auto block the spammer, it should also automaticly block access to map-chat when atleast 2% of the maps population clicked it (wich can only be overruled by a support specialist looking into the matter (and punishing people misusing the function to silence someone with false reports).

Same goes with the ability to sent mails to people. too much reports that its a gold spammer means you loose right to sent mails in the game.

I know all these measures are very hard, but imo the only way to get rid of gold spammers quickly.

“.com” is a top-level domain, or TLD. There are, according to a survey done by NANOG members in March 2012, 313 TLDs currently. A website can exist in any of them. And with ICANN allowing many more new gTLDs, that number will rapidly grow into the thousands.

Not to mention the fact that they could simply use an IP or an integer in place of the domain name. Both resolve as well as domain names.

You’d have to filter out all integers.

And this doesn’t begin to get into ways to mask domain names using Unicode.

like say you have a group member everyone calls “Dot” for whatever reason… you try to type “Dot come” but typo and say “Dot com” instead suddenly your whole message sensors because it was interpreted as a website linking attempt.

Yeah, but as you note it’s only likely to result from a typo, and it’s something that people could fairly easily work around if it was a known issue. I mean, typos can happen all the time when you have characters like “Schmit,” “Duck,” etc., you can’t design your censoring mechanisms to ignore potential typos.

Not to mention the fact that they could simply use an IP or an integer in place of the domain name. Both resolve as well as domain names.

You’d have to filter out all integers.

I bet if they were clever they could design the system to filter out anything that resulted from “###.###.###.###”, or something along those lines, nobody would be typing out IP address configurations of numbers and periods unless they were trying to depict an IP address, and if they were, they should stop it. And of course any system they put into place, gold farmers could figure out a way around it, but so long as it doesn’t cause significant problems to normal players, it would be worth the effort.

At the very least they could use filters that detect net addresses and automatically report the post. Yes, they would get “innocent” uses of web addresses in the net, but they could manually filter each of those out, I’m sure they would catch a much higher ratio of gold farmers than legitimate uses, especially if they had a second filtering process that prioritized duplicate posts.

What about when I’m a pug for a dungeon or whatnot and the rest of the group wants me in on TS/vent? They have to give the server address somehow. Ignoring and/or reporting gold spammers is the way to go.

@mcl

And integer/IP is completely impractical for their purposes, given that copying text is not possible from chat.

I don’t think this can be done efficiently without affecting player communication either way.

I’m already seeing gold sellers mangle the .com part of their URLs. Problem is, that is the easiest part for buyers to figure out.
If ANET works on filtering the part before the .com, then the gold sellers will have to mangle it, then ANET will block the mangled form, then they mangle it some more. The end result being a URL too mangled for buyers to figure out, forcing a dip in the gold sellers income until they spend money getting a new URL.

Much more effective than just forcing them to change .com to .c0m, .c()m, .c_m, etc.

Ohoni.6057:

like say you have a group member everyone calls “Dot” for whatever reason… you try to type “Dot come” but typo and say “Dot com” instead suddenly your whole message sensors because it was interpreted as a website linking attempt.

Yeah, but as you note it’s only likely to result from a typo, and it’s something that people could fairly easily work around if it was a known issue. I mean, typos can happen all the time when you have characters like “Schmit,” “Duck,” etc., you can’t design your censoring mechanisms to ignore potential typos.

Not to mention the fact that they could simply use an IP or an integer in place of the domain name. Both resolve as well as domain names.

You’d have to filter out all integers.

I bet if they were clever they could design the system to filter out anything that resulted from “###.###.###.###”, or something along those lines, nobody would be typing out IP address configurations of numbers and periods unless they were trying to depict an IP address, and if they were, they should stop it. And of course any system they put into place, gold farmers could figure out a way around it, but so long as it doesn’t cause significant problems to normal players, it would be worth the effort.

At the very least they could use filters that detect net addresses and automatically report the post. Yes, they would get “innocent” uses of web addresses in the net, but they could manually filter each of those out, I’m sure they would catch a much higher ratio of gold farmers than legitimate uses, especially if they had a second filtering process that prioritized duplicate posts.

You missed my point. Stub resolvers treat integers as valid, because they get converted to dotted-quad internally. People wishing to advertise a website could simply tell people to visit http://1134830191/gw2gold .

You’d have to filter any mention of any number.

NOTE: That’s not actually a gold-seller website. It’s just an example, using an integer that successfully converts to a valid IP address.

You missed my point. Stub resolvers treat integers as valid, because they get converted to dotted-quad internally. People wishing to advertise a website could simply tell people to visit http://1134830191/gw2gold .

You’d have to filter any mention of any number.

NOTE: That’s not actually a gold-seller website. It’s just an example, using an integer that successfully converts to a valid IP address.

Maybe, but you’d have to be a bit brave (or stupid) to click on a raw link like that from someone you don’t know. That’s virus-bait.

everyone just need to do their part and report those gold sellers / botters in order to make guild wars 2 a better place for every legit players.

i thought anet already made it very convenient for players to report gold sellers / botters via the in game report function?

Ohoni.6057:

Maybe, but you’d have to be a bit brave (or stupid) to click on a raw link like that from someone you don’t know. That’s virus-bait.

And are we now thinking that people who would visit a goldseller to begin with are intelligent?

-1
What if I want to link a cool site to my guild?

Please continue to report gold sellers and I hope that Arenanet does a little better job of promptly giving them permanent bans until it is no longer worth it for them to buy additional copies of the game.

There is another solution, than a global filter. Create user customizable spam filters. Add any phrases you like, and messages containing them will not reach you. Gold sellers will never know what phrases you’re using, so they won’t create new ones all the time.

zerospin.8604:

There is another solution, than a global filter. Create user customizable spam filters. Add any phrases you like, and messages containing them will not reach you. Gold sellers will never know what phrases you’re using, so they won’t create new ones all the time.

+10k to this idea!

<offers zerospin an entire box of precious cookies of über chocolate goodness>