Catching goldspammers

[Mansikki 0]

This is suggestion with a chance of being dumb and with chance of being useful thought. Worth.

Monitor spammers by having lv1 in starting area, you receive instantly bunch of blatant unintelligble spam whispers when you create a new character and with my testing experience, same characters seem to be online at least for an hour.

I also want to note that hurting and discouraging gold selling business is very efficient strat and there's bunch of people on internet who are open about being in the business and telling how to hurt their business.

[Lawinn 9]

First of all, you need to be level 8 in order to whisper other players.

Secondly, they've made some chat restriction to reduce the gold sellers spam by a lot, something like a week ago. Now you cannot send more than 4 messages in the chat every ~minute or something like that or you'll get the mute state.

To finish with, 99% of the spammers are hacked accounts. Yes, they are, and it is the same on retail, and this is why Blizzard takes the time to investigate botters/sellers accounts before banning them, because they are players' accs.

[Zargoth 3]

What we really need is an effective reporting mechanism. On several occasions now I have noticed a group of 5 mages with names like Yssqc, Ysqcs, etc. multibox farming around the Defias camps near Stormwind. I have attempted to report these characters via tickets but the system is so overloaded that they don't get seen in  time to prevent the resulting spam.

Last night I observed a group of 10 level 1 warriors grouped outside the guild creation shop in Stormwind. A quick response to a ticket may have prevented the resultant problems today with guild invites to a gold seller's guild.

I don't know what form  of reporting mechanism to suggest but something more effective is definitely needed. Even if these characters proved to not be gold sellers, they are at least guilty of multiboxing in an obvious manner and could be banned out of hand just for that.

 

[Mansikki 0]

4 hours ago, Lawinn said:

First of all, you need to be level 8 in order to whisper other players.

Secondly, they've made some chat restriction to reduce the gold sellers spam by a lot, something like a week ago. Now you cannot send more than 4 messages in the chat every ~minute or something like that or you'll get the mute state.

To finish with, 99% of the spammers are hacked accounts. Yes, they are, and it is the same on retail, and this is why Blizzard takes the time to investigate botters/sellers accounts before banning them, because they are players' accs.

lv8 or not is irrelevant. Creating a character or logging to random character will net whispers. Random GM doesn't have tools to monitor random whispers according to suzerain's reddit post but any random GM can create a toon and wipe multiple spammers for hours.

/say filter is hurting legit players more than receiving spam and worse economy. Every day I RP or see people discuss in /say and someone receives a mute - you may think they use abnormal amount of lines which isn't true at all.

Hacked or not, whisper spam is easy to get wind of even without tools to monitor private whispers. When you receive unintelligible messsage about gold it's obvious it's in hands of goldseller and in that situation it should be account lock/suspend obviously.

[Mansikki 0]

11 minutes ago, Mansikki said:

lv8 or not is irrelevant. Creating a character or logging to random character will net whispers. Random GM doesn't have tools to monitor random whispers according to suzerain's reddit post but any random GM can create a toon and wipe multiple spammers for hours.

/say filter is hurting legit players more than receiving spam and worse economy. Every day I RP or see people discuss in /say and someone receives a mute - you may think they use abnormal amount of lines which isn't true at all.

Hacked or not, whisper spam is easy to get wind of even without tools to monitor private whispers. When you receive unintelligible messsage about gold it's obvious it's in hands of goldseller and in that situation it should be account lock/suspend obviously.

/edit

Afaik you can not even post dmg meters and use /RW, or either, in current state of mute filter, which obviously isn't stopping MULPTILE spam whispers in a second of logging in. Everyone will rather be able to comminute and receive spam than not being able to communite and receive spam.

[Lawinn 9]

7 minutes ago, Mansikki said:

lv8 or not is irrelevant. Creating a character or logging to random character will net whispers. Random GM doesn't have tools to monitor random whispers according to suzerain's reddit post but any random GM can create a toon and wipe multiple spammers for hours.

/say filter is hurting legit players more than receiving spam and worse economy. Every day I RP or see people discuss in /say and someone receives a mute - you may think they use abnormal amount of lines which isn't true at all.

Hacked or not, whisper spam is easy to get wind of even without tools to monitor private whispers. When you receive unintelligible messsage about gold it's obvious it's in hands of goldseller and in that situation it should be account lock/suspend obviously.

But then what do you think they should do ? I am unsure it is possible to change the filter for only some kind of chat, aka I don't know if they can only restrict whispers and global channels, for instance.

Anyway they're working on a solution right now, that's for sure. They're getting so many complains about the spam (and it's legit, at level 60 you don't get spammed but before that it's AWFUL) that they're most likely looking into a long-term solution, but to be honest with you even tho I'm working in IT, I am not a good developer enough to tell you if it's possible to do this simply.

[Mansikki 0]

25 minutes ago, Lawinn said:

But then what do you think they should do ? I am unsure it is possible to change the filter for only some kind of chat, aka I don't know if they can only restrict whispers and global channels, for instance.

Anyway they're working on a solution right now, that's for sure. They're getting so many complains about the spam (and it's legit, at level 60 you don't get spammed but before that it's AWFUL) that they're most likely looking into a long-term solution, but to be honest with you even tho I'm working in IT, I am not a good developer enough to tell you if it's possible to do this simply.

I don't know what they should do but I know what they should not do and that is, hurting legit playerbase more than illegitimate playerbase with this chat mute system and disabling whispering completely.

I fear this whisper change either promotes antisocial behavior in game that is built upon social behavior or solves nothing as most players should enable it. Nothing kills me more than in outdoor doing something and trying to whisper person X based on location or anything for help but not being able to because of this. I hope I'm wrong here and this works exactly like what I originally suggested.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Lawinn said:

To finish with, 99% of the spammers are hacked accounts. Yes, they are, and it is the same on retail, and this is why Blizzard takes the time to investigate botters/sellers accounts before banning them, because they are players' accs.

This is the only - not so accurate - statement in your post. Spammers and Gold Sellers/Botters are two very different things - and they function very differently.

As for the OP - this can certainly be of value. However keep in mind that our logs show everything anyway. Having a level 1 in the start zones is the same as have any player in the start zones (for filter purposes).

[Golempl 1]

I can preffer add some filters:

1) Depending on char lvl or item lvl , hard limit amount of whispers, some higher limit for not answered whispers ,

2) do some honeypots

3)Login on account from different IP lock account until re-enabled on website after captha.

I see mostly 1-30lvl spammers