Right, so I’ve just had 4 different gold sellers whisper me in PvP in the last hour. Reported them and blocked them, but this seriously isn’t enough.
I reckon ArenaNet should implement a feature that allows us to not receive any whispers from anyone not on our friends list or on our guild lists. This would be like a switch that could be turned on and off, but I am 100% sure most of us would keep it on.
This feature would pretty much stop Gold Sellers from advertising in a private chat, or at least slow it the hell down.
+1 to that idea. give us option to filter whispers so we will be getting whispers from firends, guild mates, and ppl we will add to list. You have to do something with those gold sellers something soon. Getting 4 spam whispers in 5 minutes is just a joke.
Its not a bad idea, but goldsellers would start writing ingame mails or something.
I dont think they will stop, as long as people buying gold from a none-anet-website.
Well… i also think reporting and blocking wont stop it too, (i hade around 15 pms only yesterday) its just becoming worse and i feel already very harassed by such pms.
Even a rule of ‘under lvl10 char may not pm players’ wouldnt be useful, because the most goldseller-chars are from hacked accounts who visited wrong websites.
It is indeed becoming so boring … I’ve had enough, I removed whisps from my main window, could not stand them anymore, a shame for real people who will whisp me … but anyway, the problem is more complex than that, the reasons there are so many ?
1) Because people do buy their stuff, otherwise they would not exist
Why they exist ? Because …
2) Game is unrewarding as hell : rewards are always very poor in the game, RNG is absolutely everywhere, you’re always under the impression of playing for nothing.
So this is the great opportunity for gold sellers : who would not want, in an unrewarding game totally based on RNG, use some money to have guaranteed good reward ?
Well of course it’s definitely not the case for everybody (not for me either) but it’s easy to understand their success …
For a short term solution, yours to only accept whisps from your friends and guildies seems good (even if it can block real people trying to whisper you but meh …. no other choice).
Another solution that would limit that would be to simply remove the ability for low level/low achievement characters to whisp people.
Like you need at least level 10 to whisp (I personally don’t really like this one) or, better, you need at least 100-500 (random numbers) points of achievement to whisp people.
Or it could prevent flood : while under those conditions, you can only send X whisps within Y period of time.
They need to implement a filter that blacklist accounts who send excessive ammounts of whispers/email in a short period.
I don’t know how they do it really. Yesterday i zoned into Divinity’s reach and got 2 gold selling spam msgs less than 5 seconds later. Later on i saw the same lvl 2 spam bot (with less than 100 AP) standing around in a totaly different side of the town.
How the heck did they know i zoned into the zone and sent me a whisper mere seconds later? is there a command that lists people in the same map? If yes why not simply disable it?
2. Block anyone who has been blocked by X users before.
That way any gold selling char will become useless after pming 2-3 ppl
This is a great idea. I guess they’d have to make a feature that removes all blocks you’ve gotten when your account is restored after getting hacked, so it’s not quite as easy as it sounds, but probably still easily doable.
I think it’s a bad idea. Yes, we need something to shut of the gold sellers, but blocking communication should never be the solution. And it would do harm to organisation attempts on big events, and those organisation efforts already have plenty to deal with from troll and AFKers to Megaserver quirk.s We need all and more means of communication, not less!
Why we absolutely need to whisper strangers?
TEQUATL organisation of Defense Parties. While a lot of people know how to run Teq event, there are always a few who choose to AFK near the turrets. If they are not in defense parties, and they don’t go to DPS groups, they will scale up the defense, champions will spawn, defense will be harder, we might loose the turret, zerg won’t be cleansed, people will die, not enough DPS will be dealt on the dragon. The event fails due to a few AFKers/trolls. Happened a lot. And Megaboss guilds in the early days (and still occasionally) keep WHISPERING said AFKers/trolls or new players that don’t know what’s going on and are not reading map chat or say chat and refuse to come to TS.
Wurm and WvW also require whispers.
Future Megaboss and events a la Marionette / Knightfall and Boss Blitz WILL REQUIRE EXPLANATION TO THOSE THAT CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ ANY CHAT. Whisper at least prods them.
While we don’t have instanced raid content, and the means in game for a few to spoil the event for many, /w at least prods them, and it is necessary.
Good example of why blocking any communication is a bad idea is the Megaserver Tower of Babel and the hastily introduced option of blocking messages in other languages. Does that solve the issue? Nope. If you have it on, you can’t see the messages and you might not be confused by “foreigness”. However, that doesn’t mean those messages aren’t there! For any kind of organisation, not just megabosses, just take a look at the Pavillion, player communicaiton is vital.
If block is installed for whispers, it will have negative effects on the rest of the game.
[QQ] – ex RoS, current Piken Square
[DV] – megaboss community
I heard they were going to implement a system to suppress anyone from sending out more than 4-5 whispers too quickly, sort of like map chat suppression. I don’t have a source, though it sounds like both a blessing and a curse…
Saw the suggestion the other day on reddit to block whispers from people using a filter list of words you can add to it. Soon as the gold sellers send 1 whisper to you, any and all other sellers can be blocked until they use another variation of your filtered word (use their website as a filter and their options will run out fast).
Hmmmm never been Whispered anything about gold thats strange. What are they trying to do get you to go to a homepage to buy gold or is it all in game gold buying or something.
{Knights of Revengence} [KoR-Lord]
“Nothing is true! Everything is Permitted!”
Keep the chat options open, the game NEEDS this so -1 to OP idea.
The sellers always tell you the site address, so why doesn’t ANet maintain a filter list for those? Additionally, if you message the site to anyone you automatically get banned (maybe temp 72hr first, perma second). That list would be a lot easier for ANet to maintain than investigating gold-seller reports.
Keep the chat options open, the game NEEDS this so -1 to OP idea.
The sellers always tell you the site address, so why doesn’t ANet maintain a filter list for those? Additionally, if you message the site to anyone you automatically get banned (maybe temp 72hr first, perma second). That list would be a lot easier for ANet to maintain than investigating gold-seller reports.
Because the list is going to inflate instantly. For example, if the gold site was Gold.com (it’s not, it’s a redirect to Kay’s Jewelers store site), you’d need to include:
gold.com
gold.c0m
g0ld.com
g0ld.c0m
go1d.com
go1d.c0m
g01d.com
g01d.c0m
go|d.com
golddotcom
gold dot com
gold dot c0m
and then stuff as stupid as gee oh el dee, dee oh tee, see oh em.
Keep the chat options open, the game NEEDS this so -1 to OP idea.
The sellers always tell you the site address, so why doesn’t ANet maintain a filter list for those? Additionally, if you message the site to anyone you automatically get banned (maybe temp 72hr first, perma second). That list would be a lot easier for ANet to maintain than investigating gold-seller reports.
Because the list is going to inflate instantly. For example, if the gold site was Gold.com (it’s not, it’s a redirect to Kay’s Jewelers store site), you’d need to include:
gold.com
gold.c0m
g0ld.com
g0ld.c0m
go1d.com
go1d.c0m
g01d.com
g01d.c0m
go|d.com
golddotcom
gold dot com
gold dot c0m
and then stuff as stupid as gee oh el dee, dee oh tee, see oh em.
And this is for_just_ one site.
They’re just words. In this day and age it’s not a problem at all to manage a huge list of names. Heck, my Windows Host file itself contains a crapload of these.
You think a server can’t manage a filter with a hundred thousand names in it? This is not 1980.
You can’t filter all whispers from strangers, even from low level ones, because then no one will be able to talk to you for the first time. No more “hey, buddy, where do you get that armor” chat, and no more newbies crying for help.
But auto-filtering the whispers from someone who get 5 or 10 reports sounds nice. Or you can add some “filtered words”. That way, you can auto-block any whisper from a stranger with the word “gold”, or some similar words, on it, for example.
They’re just words. In this day and age it’s not a problem at all to manage a huge list of names. Heck, my Windows Host file itself contains a crapload of these.
You think a server can’t manage a filter with a hundred thousand names in it? This is not 1980.
Couple hundred million actually. And managing the list is one thing, running every single chat message entered in the game through the complex regex necessary to find a match, then forward it to the rest of the chat system, is another thing entirely.
Even dealing with just the “.com” part of the whispers/chat messages requires filters set for .com, dotcom, ,com, .c0m, dotc0m, d0tcom, d0tc0m, and any other permutation of it. On top of that, you need a regex set to ignore all intervening whitespace (t h i s), as well as ignore intervening non-alphanumerics (t……….h………………i………………..s and [t][h][i][s]), and eventually ignore letters (TaHaIaS), and finally any combination of the above ([t]……… a……..[h]………a. ………[i]….. ….a………[s]).
Because the list is going to inflate instantly. For example, if the gold site was Gold.com (it’s not, it’s a redirect to Kay’s Jewelers store site), you’d need to include:
gold.com
gold.c0m
g0ld.com
g0ld.c0m
go1d.com
go1d.c0m
g01d.com
g01d.c0m
go|d.com
golddotcom
gold dot com
gold dot c0m
and then stuff as stupid as gee oh el dee, dee oh tee, see oh em.
And this is for_just_ one site.
And a very simple algorithm can relate these all as the same string. Just the same way as dictionary attacks on passwords don’t really care if your password is ‘password’ or ‘P455W0rD’ or any other combination.
Much easier than maintaining a team of report investigators!
It’s not really much different to the in-game profanity filters
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