Gold Sellers

any game the has a gil/gold or anything for that rate that takes time to accumulate is ganna have people looking to score on it

in truth you can't really do much of anything about them because they will never be the same one twice always different characters
black list them all day long you will get a big black list and their still making char these people have nothing to do but scam and con having every game they can make a buck off of

Actually I know of two MMOs that have 0 gold spammers or bots. One is Tera which is a Korean game (famous for rmt issues) and The Secret World. Tera blocks anyone from posting in chat or in messages or in shout any thing with an email or web address. There are ways around it but for some reason and what ever else they did there are no gold spammers and no bots anywhere. For The Secret World, the way they designed the game made gold spammers and bots a non issue. Not sure how they did it but I have never seen a one in that game.

Im on EU Cerberus and have only blacklisted about 8-10 RMT's since starting to play nearly a month ago

I'm not the first to notice this, but the RMT spam seems to target classes below level 50. I can get several per day if I'm not on one of my capped classes, sometimes within minutes of switching.

Would it be so hard to stop anyone under the level of 15 in either DoW/DoM using the /tell system. I know this wouldn't stop the scabs but it would certainly thin the problem to a more manageable situation.

I think the system EVE Online uses is pretty effective for combatting RMT.

Firstly, you can't initiate a conversation with people who aren't on your friends list without paying a small fee. It's nothing prohibitive to the average player as the fee is really small, but to RMT companies, the cost would be huge if they sent hundreds or thousands of such messages at a time.

Secondly, they have a system where gamers can convert game-time cards into in-game currency, and vice versa. What this means is there is literally no market for third parties to come in and sell in game currency. The huge bonus of this is that CCP get all the proceeds from selling the time-cards in the first place. It's win-win. If you really need to buy in-game currency, then you can, and the the publisher benefits too.

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Originally Posted by ArkhamNative

I'm not the first to notice this, but the RMT spam seems to target classes below level 50. I can get several per day if I'm not on one of my capped classes, sometimes within minutes of switching.

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While I thought that might've been the likely case at first, I don't think it is now.

They target everyone, even 50s. I could be logging in on one of my 50s and in my FC house and within a minute of logging in, I still get /tell spam from them.

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Originally Posted by Sparky

I think the system EVE Online uses is pretty effective for combatting RMT.

Firstly, you can't initiate a conversation with people who aren't on your friends list without paying a small fee. It's nothing prohibitive to the average player as the fee is really small, but to RMT companies, the cost would be huge if they sent hundreds or thousands of such messages at a time.

Secondly, they have a system where gamers can convert game-time cards into in-game currency, and vice versa. What this means is there is literally no market for third parties to come in and sell in game currency. The huge bonus of this is that CCP get all the proceeds from selling the time-cards in the first place. It's win-win. If you really need to buy in-game currency, then you can, and the the publisher benefits too.

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Also this bought game time (called a plex card) could be stored in the ship and if it was pew pew'ed, you could loot free gametime! Otherwise taking advantage of those who want to throw money at you (like CCP did) is a great idea.

To be honest SE seams to no care about its members, If they did they would at least ban some of these RTM Here is a few things they could do

1.) If more than 50 people blacklist someone, it should auto ban there tells,yells,shouts, for 5 hours or se investigates that person.
2.) make it so any alt lvl 10 and below can only send 1 shout,tell,yell, ect ect every 5 seconds
3.) Have a button that will make you anonymous, so these RTM's can not tell you thru the search feature.
4.) Have more than 200 block list mine is full has been for weeks and I report every RTM so I know SE is not doing a dam thing about them.

Below is extreme ways to get ride of RTM's

1.) SE to sell gold. I hate the fact but it would drive them out of business.
2.) If you black list a person it auto black lists every alt on that account.
3.) Have a feature that that will auto blacklist someone that sends more than 5 messages via shout,yell,tell, in 4 seconds
4.) Hire more GM's that will do nothing but ban rtm's and botters.
5.) Have a players council, that has the ability to do the following.
a. block RTM's from sending tell's, yell's, shouts, ect ect.
I would not go beyond that, some people get power hungry and to keep them from overreaching there power
limit it to that, If they ban someone for any other cause they loose there Mini-GM powers.
6.) Last but not least I would be willing to pay an extra $1.00 a month to be able to hire more GM's to combat the RTM's
These message day after day are really getting on my last never. What really upsets me the most is when you report someone
u get the same dam message from SE. I am sad to say but the SE staff is doing a crappy JOB on this subject.

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Originally Posted by ArkhamNative

I'm not the first to notice this, but the RMT spam seems to target classes below level 50. I can get several per day if I'm not on one of my capped classes, sometimes within minutes of switching.

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It is because they have a program that searches thru the search feature for a certain class/level/ect,ect. If they made it so people could turn anonymous on and off you would get allot less tells/ Most mmo's have this feature for that purpose. Right know anyone can search a certain class/lvl/ and tell anyone

This is my biggest complaint about the whole game. I am paying money to be constantly harassed.

A. you should be able to be anonymous.
B. right click-->Report spam, and should also insta-blacklist the name.
C. NO BLACK LIST LIMIT wtf, why does that even exist??

Also, the FC and player bullshit PMs are equally annoying. I can't play for 10 minutes without getting spammed by either a gold seller or some tool who wants to pad his FC numbers and is willing to PM rape everyone in the zone to achieve it.

Of the dozens of MMOs I've played, this is the WORST P2P MMO I've ever experienced as far as avoiding constant harassment.

People are dropping their subs over this. I quit for two months hoping it would die down and now that I'm back it's actually worse. Why is SE ignoring this issue? It's costing them money.

It's really frustrating thing even on phoenix server (EU).

They also whisper and when i tried to block 'em all..a message appeared (character could not be find) or something like that...

:(


To the staff..

We pay fee to play this game...Please don't let em wasting this awesome game like every MMORPG these days..

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Originally Posted by Simbuul

It's really frustrating thing even on phoenix server (EU).

They also whisper and when i tried to block 'em all..a message appeared (character could not be find) or something like that...

:(


To the staff..

We pay fee to play this game...Please don't let em wasting this awesome game like every MMORPG these days..

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I was told today that this is not a real Tech Forum, just a place for people to rant issues, and share with others problems that can't be solved by SE.

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Originally Posted by Oestaira

Of the dozens of MMOs I've played, this is the WORST P2P MMO I've ever experienced as far as avoiding constant harassment .

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Totally agree, im getting about between 2 -5 pms a session, and since the messages are so big they take up my whole chat box sometimes twice over. Gettings incredibly annoying as a new player to be having this happen so often. IDk what they can do to try and fix it, but a report spam button like others have said is very much needed. Or have to be of a certian level to Pm.

My blacklist is over 1/3 full with ONLY Gil sellers. I've probably added 80 and about 10 of them showed deleted status so I was able to remove them. How do you not catch gil sellers? All they need to do is create a character and watch the PMs, which they obviously don't do. It's almost as if they only ones who get caught are using shouts, but private whispers are OK with SE.

It would be so easy to fix, yet they don't care. For all we know SE owns the websites selling the gold. It's the only logical explanation for why nothing is done about it.

Scanning the Marketboard for out of line sales and purchases is not efficient and traps too many innocent people =. Just because some doofus puts a common item up for 100 times it's value doesn't mean he's buying gil. He could just be stupid or preying on other lazy or stupid players. We've all seen that vendor item on the market for 10 times what it sells for 20 steps away in the next booth.

Concentrate on the sellers, not they marketboard. Implement software that scans all messages and ban those ip addresses or accounts that sell gold.

Make it unprofitable and it'll go away.

Most of those gil sellers on your blacklist were probably banned within hours of being reported. "(Deleted)" means the character was deleted, probably by the owner of the account.

It's been really bad lately!

I use to report every one. Now I just black list. I just don't see the point any more. I have to stop playing cut, paste, send an email, when this could easily be done automatically. If there was one feature that I wish they added it would auto report.

Yeah, I think it is getting worse. 100% agree that there should be a right click report.

As far as the limited number of characters one can Ban, I understand there are performance reasons why there are limits on filtering. So the best thing to do is give us a fast way to report the problem.

What I fail to grasp, is why they can't shut down the sites. Obviously they are violating the TOS, and EULA with Square Enix, by using bots, and farming gil, only to be resold in microtransactions, which, to my knowledge, should be illegal if they do not have SE's permission to do so. So, crashing the sites and suing the people running them, in theory, should be the way to go. Not to mention completely banning the IPs they are logging in from. Yet, the bots continue to spam, spam spam, with little to no letup. Strange no?

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Originally Posted by moudoka

What I fail to grasp, is why they can't shut down the sites. Obviously they are violating the TOS, and EULA with Square Enix, by using bots, and farming gil, only to be resold in microtransactions, which, to my knowledge, should be illegal if they do not have SE's permission to do so. So, crashing the sites and suing the people running them, in theory, should be the way to go. Not to mention completely banning the IPs they are logging in from. Yet, the bots continue to spam, spam spam, with little to no letup. Strange no?

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The thing is, most of those sites are hosted in countries where SE nor its daughter companies have any kind of legal power.
Aside from that, even if SE is succesful in shutting down a site the site owners will simply move to a different host and set up shop again.

Several ways square could handle this, the current way is banning accounts/characters. In all honesty that kind of works but as we have all seen the seller just deletes that account and creates another one at very little cost, a month in the game is what 12.99 for entry or 14.99 for standard for the first month. Also was hearing about a special on steam for a while something like $5 for a 30 day subscription. Either way it really isn't costing the gil sellers any major income to delete and create another account or character. Especially if the banning seems to only happen once a month. So for 14.99 they can create a character on 40 worlds. From this stand point square is loosing the battle. Even if they ban 1000 accounts a month that isn't deterring the gil sellers from creating another account.

A few other methods would be to reduce the number of worlds that you can create characters on to say 3. I mean honestly how many real players need 40 characters on 40 different worlds? Most really players have at most 3 to 5 characters max, usually or 3 on a world. So you could say 3 characters max per world rather then 8, and say 5 separate worlds max. So for a total max of say 15 characters. Being that when you ban an account you ban all characters associated to that account. It isn't profitable to have multiple characters on the same server for the gil seller. Its more productive from an advertisement stand point to have multiple accounts on multiple worlds. By limiting the number of worlds an account could have. It will limit the number of gil sellers because it would be more of an investment on their part. Also it would generate more revenue for Square.

Another method that could be changed to the banning process. Would be rather then ban accounts, ban activation keys. So not only would the gil seller have to invest in the 14.99 per account per month. They would have to invest 29.99 for another activation code. This may impact number of codes for players but I believe that the 3.8797312*10^27 codes that are potentially available with the current registration code system yes thats 3,879,731,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 registration codes that could be potentially available at one time. The banning of registration codes shouldn't have an impact on player sales. Not to mention at $29.99 USD thats roughly around $1.16353138688*10^29 so big time potential money maker for Square.

Only other way to remove gil sellers is so some how set up the coding to prevent 3rd party bots but then again that has been a fight since the beginning of online gaming.

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Originally Posted by FlorinTinytoes

I'm on the japan realm hades, I didn't exactly know how to register this complaint. So basically a character named Willelm Beak shouting in La Noscea is trying to advertise spamming for gold sales and its flooding the chat constantly. The site he is spamming is mmoaa.com. This kind of thing drives me nuts. Plus the spamming is really annoying.

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Sadly the only thing you can do is what we people of 11 did when they tryed to take us over.Report them and if you see like 4 people with different names write them down and send a bluk report to a gm.trust me look on google se took legal action on the big one that was on 11.it is now back but not as strong as it was so it is just a pain(not a realy problem) now is all.

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Originally Posted by pdillard

Several ways square could handle this, the current way is banning accounts/characters. In all honesty that kind of works but as we have all seen the seller just deletes that account and creates another one at very little cost, a month in the game is what 12.99 for entry or 14.99 for standard for the first month. Also was hearing about a special on steam for a while something like $5 for a 30 day subscription. Either way it really isn't costing the gil sellers any major income to delete and create another account or character. Especially if the banning seems to only happen once a month. So for 14.99 they can create a character on 40 worlds. From this stand point square is loosing the battle. Even if they ban 1000 accounts a month that isn't deterring the gil sellers from creating another account.

A few other methods would be to reduce the number of worlds that you can create characters on to say 3. I mean honestly how many real players need 40 characters on 40 different worlds? Most really players have at most 3 to 5 characters max, usually or 3 on a world. So you could say 3 characters max per world rather then 8, and say 5 separate worlds max. So for a total max of say 15 characters. Being that when you ban an account you ban all characters associated to that account. It isn't profitable to have multiple characters on the same server for the gil seller. Its more productive from an advertisement stand point to have multiple accounts on multiple worlds. By limiting the number of worlds an account could have. It will limit the number of gil sellers because it would be more of an investment on their part. Also it would generate more revenue for Square.

Another method that could be changed to the banning process. Would be rather then ban accounts, ban activation keys. So not only would the gil seller have to invest in the 14.99 per account per month. They would have to invest 29.99 for another activation code. This may impact number of codes for players but I believe that the 3.8797312*10^27 codes that are potentially available with the current registration code system yes thats 3,879,731,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 registration codes that could be potentially available at one time. The banning of registration codes shouldn't have an impact on player sales. Not to mention at $29.99 USD thats roughly around $1.16353138688*10^29 so big time potential money maker for Square.

Only other way to remove gil sellers is so some how set up the coding to prevent 3rd party bots but then again that has been a fight since the beginning of online gaming.

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I must say the only way they are really going to weaken the RMTs is just take legal action on them again and let the law work it out.It worked really well on 11 like i said i see 1 tell every few weeks now so it is just easy to report them now and go on with my day.

I know this is a re-hashed issue, but please, allow us to have an easier way to report spammers (I'm on PS4, and this is nearly impossible to accomplish). I'm on Jenova, a new server, and even during beta I was receiving "services". Please allow it to be easier to report, and have someone investigate multiple reports against a single account, in an X amount of time. Also, make any reports of spammers go to their own black list. I'm a new character, on a new server, and I'm almost full on my black list of spammers. Devs, please take this seriously.

Spamming could be a lot harder. WHY IS IT NOT HARDER?

I generally get tells. I can infer that these people send a LOT of tells- they open player finder, look for people (lvl 50 usually) and go nuts.

MAKE THIS HARDER. After 5 blacklists (blacklists from clicking the tell message, you can't just get your FC to mute someone) from a level 1 character, remove the ability to tell until a GM reviews them. DONE.

And put a limit in- 5 shouts in 60 seconds. If more than... 5? 10? people in the zone blacklist your message, AUTOMUTE until GM review!


Why is this not a thing?

I blacklist the "tell spammers" and later report everyone in the list using the support desk.
During April I had to blacklist only 1 spammer, March was hell, though.

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Originally Posted by Monkey404error

I know this is a re-hashed issue, but please, allow us to have an easier way to report spammers (I'm on PS4, and this is nearly impossible to accomplish). I'm on Jenova, a new server, and even during beta I was receiving "services". Please allow it to be easier to report, and have someone investigate multiple reports against a single account, in an X amount of time. Also, make any reports of spammers go to their own black list. I'm a new character, on a new server, and I'm almost full on my black list of spammers. Devs, please take this seriously.

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Don't worry about "re-hashed". The problem is that it's an ignored issue. Make noise if you don't like it.

I'm probably in the minority here, but being an EVE veteran, I like the idea of game time being sellable for gil. it keeps a gil standard, balances the economy, and if someone wants more in game money, they have to pay for it. SE wins, Gil can only buy so much so hardcores win, and the player selling wins. plus the person too poor to buy game time IRL wins, because he has a way of funding his account.

The only losers of this situation are RMT vendors, because SE just took all of their business.

RMT spam in this game is absurd.

SE, what I need is a simple "ignore by level" function.
Since most whisper spammers are lv 1, a simple "ignore everything below lv 10" setting should provide some quiet.

In wow I use the addon WIM to do that, but in this game it seems that I'm screwed because no addons here.

Oh I forgot: RESTRICT THE FRIEND INVITES! It's ridiculous that I have to use like 7 clicks to remove a gil sellers friend invite and block him.

I just recently joined the game and to be honest,I wasn't that much frustrated from all the gil sellers spamming that was going on.I'm more frustrated because of the impact it has on the economy of the game.I hadn't realised how bad things were until the last update,that released personal housing.In three days,there were all sorts of people buying up houses like they are nothing.Now I know that there are some people that have been playing for a long time and have the amount of gil to actually buy houses on their own,but I have seen some obvious gil buyers,such as people/Free Companies that I've seen starting in the game two-three weeks ago having large personal housing or multiple Free Company houses.Also,I have been farming botany gatherings for two weeks now,seeing bots running around at almost every node area,consistently farming,then selling huge quantities of every possible farmed item at ridiculous prices.Most of these bots belong to gil sellers,since it's the easiest and fastest way for them to make the gil they're selling.This issue has to be addressed,since not only the housing,but also the economy in general is currently degraded to a "cheat to win" and "cheat to get what you want" madness.I understand that some people might view this post as just some new person being whiny,but when you spend >10 hours a day farming for stuff only to go back to the market board and see the same bots butchering the prices,no matter if you're old or new,rich or poor,you are pretty much at your wits's end.The game itself is wonderful so far,but the economy system and every feature that has to do with large sums of gil are currently completely hostile and unapproachable by new players.

Given that it doesn't look like SE will be able to solve the spam problem any time soon, it would be nice to have a single-click blacklist/report method.

Every time I get a spam message, I currently:

1. Go to my blacklist (which is full of 200 "active" spammers) and delete a spammer from it to free up space (many clicks.)
2. Go to my friend list to decline the spammer's friend request.
3. Go go the log window to blacklist the spammer using the "add to blacklist" pop-up.
4. Select mouse mode on the PS4
5. Expand the log window so that I can find the original spam message.
6. Select it and copy it using PS4 mouse mode and control-C on my keyboard.
7. Go to Support/FAQ, wait several seconds for the window to pop up, and select "How do I report RMT?" in the FAQ section.
8. Click on the "report" button.
9. Wait for the report window to pop up and become usable (usually a few seconds.)
10. Paste the spam message into the body using control-V.
11. Add an appropriate message subject line such as "Blacklisted! RMT Gfdfdsdf Fdsdssh 'www.gilspammers.com' (diabolos)" (which I have to type manually)
12. Hit "send" and verify that I've spelled the spammer's character name correctly.
13. Hit "send" again.
14. Some minutes later, receive a "reply" to my message, which causes an icon to blink on my screen.
15. Check replies under "support" only to get an irritating piece of boilerplate which advises me that I should add the spammer to my blacklist (what part of "Blacklisted!" did you not understand, support person?) and that this is only a "temporary measure" while they are busily (not) working toward a more permanent solution to the spam problem.

I have probably done this over 300 times. It's kind of like mining, but not nearly as rewarding. :(:mad:

I wouldn't expect them to do anything about gold sellers since they don't do anything about the bots. On my server, Leviathan, I have found a bot in the Spineless Basic and report it just about daily. Even the coordinates where this bot is. I even ran into another individual there and he told me he reported the same bot a month ago.

They can say they're against gold sellers and bots but let's be honest - A sub is a sub no matter how they get them.

I've tried reporting these gil spammers, mostly because my tells/whispers get flooded time to time, I'm almost to my max on the blacklist, but the way it's done is so confusing. Plus some of them I don't even remember dates and time.

SE should try and make a program where if players have their blacklist maxed, they get a message to ask for a reason, thus sending all those names straight to SE with a tag of Gil Spamming. Same if a name gets blacklisted so many times they're automatically written up/banned.

There is a bigger underlying issue.

Has anyone ever come across a /tell from a RMT or see a bot, only to have to open up this window where all this information is required from the end-user that could be heavily automated, this is why 1 Click Purchases are a thing.

Because lemme tell yu this: people will want a Coil win if it pops, rather than wait to finish their huge arse letter to SE, thinking these bots will be taken down? This is the majority of the problem, lack of efficiency in reporting.

As stated previously, the cost of entry into the game is low. Banning the account will only create a minor setback for the RMT folk. What S-E needs to do, as much as an inconvenience as it would be, is to target more finite resources when it comes to dropping the banhammer. Ban by CC number or bank account number. Better yet, allow new accounts a 30-day grace period and require an authorization code sent by POST to the account owner's physical address. Sure, the RMT account can operate for 30-days, but once that account gets reported for RMT and banned, no further accounts can be generated from that address.

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Originally Posted by zenmetsu

As stated previously, the cost of entry into the game is low. Banning the account will only create a minor setback for the RMT folk. What S-E needs to do, as much as an inconvenience as it would be, is to target more finite resources when it comes to dropping the banhammer. Ban by CC number or bank account number. Better yet, allow new accounts a 30-day grace period and require an authorization code sent by POST to the account owner's physical address. Sure, the RMT account can operate for 30-days, but once that account gets reported for RMT and banned, no further accounts can be generated from that address.

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It sounds easy doesn't it, SE of course numerously defends their lack of resources, hence ban waves, the above idea would create too much administration on their end, they need to get player$ in the game ASAP. In all seriousness and efficacy, SE should just monitor the MB a bit closer and better work out the numbers for who the botters are and who are the real deal, this will see their precious gil fall away a bit more easier as we would like it to be, and in the long run it will regulate huge-gil-sink items like Housing which is a direct reflection of group data centers' wealth.

I see alot of the gold spam using massive amounts of symbols and such. Really shouldn't be a problem for square to give the player the option to filter out tells that feature over a certain amount of non letter characters.

My blacklist fan club is becoming bigger. I'm pretty amazed with their marketing and sales techniques, first we get /sh msgs then evolved to /t msgs and now further evolved to friend invites! So what next, private chambers?

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Originally Posted by beckyslater

I cancelled my subscription tonight because of the gold seller spam. Completely ridiculous. Simple solution...right-click report spam or ignore. Bad enough they get away with flooding chat so nobody can read , but then I have to remember their silly scramble of letters they call a name and use my game time to type it in. How was this not taken care of already?! And when I hit escape while I am typing I expect it to CLEAR what I was typing and then decided not to say when I hit escape. But nope, gotta go delete it or backspace it. Beautiful game with a broken chat log.

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It's quite immature to cancel a subscription based on a small minor problem such as gold sellers as it is hardly a great inconvenience, you must live quite the privileged life if your willing to stop playing something based on a minor demographic of the player base.

That said some people seem surprised FF14 has them despite being P2P, the simple answer is that if no one supported them they would go away, people purchase gold from them, so it's an investment to them to create a subscription for these bots, it's that simple. I know for a fact some servers are worse than others and it's purely because of this, we need to crack down on the players forking out money for in game gold as well as the ones creating these false accounts otherwise its just a vicious circle. It would be a terrible waste of time and money even for gold selling groups that do this full time if no one bought from them, if theres no market for profit then they wouldn't hang around. "Say no to gold sellers kids."

maybe I'm wrong, but i think there was a way to turn off public chat
+ gold maybe will let you buy somethings better, but at the end game - you can get good (120lvl) items for poetics, or from Turns of coil