Aion Has A Problem With Gold Spammers
The screenshot you see here (click it for a larger version) represents the first two seconds of global chat when I logged into my poor abandoned Asmodian priest yesterday in an attempt to finally ascend him past level 10.
The wall of gold spam that hit me as soon as I signed in was the most unbelievable sight I've ever seen in any Western MMOG post-World of Warcraft. That section was all I could fit on one screen, it scrolled well past that for thirty seconds before I was finally quick enough to block the entirety of the spammers. Though NCSoft has made changes to the way /general and private whispers work to discourage spamming, clearly this has only had the effect of pushing it to other channels.
Part of what makes this particular spam not just annoying but offensive is the behavior of the spammers themselves. In World of Warcraft or Warhammer I'll see a message or two in a public channel, which is irritating, but then it goes away. In Aion so far, it's not simply one message, but spammers repeatedly mashing the same cut-and-paste text in an effort to simply make the channel impossible to use. It's probably not a stretch to suggest this is a reaction to attempts to block their access to the players, but certainly being obnoxious isn't the best way to act if your business model is based around illicit activity in the first place.
Combating spam is always a cat and mouse affair, and usually whatever efforts are made to restrict them hurt legitimate players more in the collateral, but hopefully NCSoft comes up with something and fast. This is the first time I've had to leave a global channel because of spam and not Chuck Norris jokes.
mixvio
Posted to Miscellany on 6 October 2009
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: aion, gold spamming, mmogs, spam
Step 1: Log all text sent.
Step 2: Parse logs and ban offenders.
cat allmessages.txt | sort | uniq | cut -c 10-15 | banhammer
Did you just say that the WoW gold spamming text goes away after being posted once or twice?
Are you not paying attention when you play the game?
Sure, it may disappear from Trade Chat once a few people have logged the player as spamming but you are forgetting about the damned private whispers from level 1's that continually flood your screen, usually when trying to down a boss in a raid, about 30 times an hour.
I have suggested to Blizzard time and time again that they need to allow players to validate who they want to be able to send you pm's or whispers.. as in, you can automatically ok everyone on your friends list or guild roster or immediate party/raid... that would cut out *everyone else*, including the damned gold spammers.
However, Blizzard continues to ignore their customers desperate pleas for help on this matter, because as every WoW player knows, simply reporting spammers does zilch.. the banned players only hop onto another account in a matter of minutes and the cycle begins again.
Such inaction from Blizzard only strengthens my belief that they themselves are backing the Gold Spamming sites.. lets face it, if they were truly trying to do something about Gold Spammers, they would be trying every possible solution.. and they simply aren't.
tjgoldstein:
I was comparing one message to /2 against one or two spammers contributing to the wall of text that you see in that screenshot. There's definitely a marked difference between the two, and I've never experienced spammers rendering a channel completely unusable by virtue of recycling the same message over and over so fast that any other content is drowned out by the noise. Least of which because if a spammer attempted it, half of the players would immediately right-click and report it as spam, getting the account automatically banned in an instant. Personally I rarely get whispered by spammers anymore, either, but that could be the luck of the draw.
I also am pretty skeptical of claims that Blizzard profits off of this. I just don't think that there's any legitimacy behind it, certainly no proof, and it wouldn't really make any sense, either. Certainly when you recognize that the majority of gold sites obtain that gold through keylogging and viruses, what would be the benefit for Blizzard to support that activity? Why would they release tools like the authenticators to try and prevent it? It doesn't really make any sense. And you also have statements from people like Mythic's Mark Jacobs complaining about how much he vehemently hates those people, so it seems to be something the entirety of the industry is against. Blizzard has also brought lawsuits up against companies behind gold selling websites, too.
As you say, whenever they're banned, they simply hop onto another account and keep going. Any solutions that would really hit the spammers hard would invariably hurt players in the cross-fire. The limits they used to impose on accounts under level five were frustrating to new players and characters: I couldn't pass items from my "older" characters to a brand new alt because they couldn't use the mail or trade systems until they had reached five, for example. The suggestion you have about whispers would have drawbacks too: I don't know how many times I've been trying to find spots for an instance and I've done /who 80 for a major city and gone down the list of players available to send them a message asking if they wanted to group up. It's always been a much faster way for me to fill PUGs beyond the looking-for-group system, and if your suggestion were in place, players who deigned to ban all messages from strangers might miss out on an invite to a raid they would otherwise be interested in. (Just one example) Or if they had it on and were soliciting for trade goods in a general channel, they'd have to make sure they turned it off before anyone contacted them about their services.
Contrary to common thought this problem doesn't have a silver bullet, but it can definitely be handled a lot better than what's happening on Aion at this moment.
This applies to all EU Servers and I bet to all US as well.
The global chat is flooded with gold selling offers, leveling services, etc.
Not only that: You also periodically receive whispers where offers are brought directly to you.
Putting those whispers on the ignore list is only a temporary support.
NCsoft is currently not doing anything. Players are left alone.
All the combined problems had already many people cancel their accounts in order not to enter a subscription after the free period because no one wants to pay for such a bad (consumer) service.
But cmon...its NCsoft!
And I have to think that our gold selling problem is SOMEHOW related to the incredible amount of competitiveness live in the game today.
The spam in Aion is definitely bad, but once you block the two or three people who are spamming when you log in, you are usually spam-free for a few hours before another one needs to be blocked.
Before Aion, I played EQ2, and there was almost no spam. When I first started playing that game there was, but SOE added a lot of protections, filtering spam tells/whispers so that they never reach you and doing the same for in-game mail. Spam doesn't exist in global chats either, which I imagine is partly due to the level hierarchy (people at max level mostly hang out in 70s and 80s chat, where the spammers aren't high enough to reach).
Th fact that players are actually buying these services is a major problem as well. You can't go anywhere in the game without seeing droves of bots murdering every living creature. I'm in a the top ranking guild on Elyos side on my server and we have kicked multiple players for Botting, buying gold etc. with these companies. Play the game people, if no one bought it they would go away.