Take a cue from Elder Scrolls Online re: RMT spammers

I appreciate reading the occasional posts on the launcher where SE points out how many accounts have been banned for RMT activities in their latest round of crackdowns. All the same, with Gil Spammers hitting us at a rate of about one spam every two minutes it's obvious that SE is performing at the level of the little Dutch boy: only so few fingers to plug holes in the dam, and the water's coming from too many spots.

One of the most annoying features of The Elder Scrolls Online could be used here to great effect, however, is taking action on ACCOUNTS, not on CHARACTERS. In ESO, if you friend someone, you friend their account. If you join a guild, your account is what joins. All future characters of yours are automatically on people's friends lists and automatically placed into guilds whether you want that or not. As I said, annoying.

However, if someone is hassling you and you /ignore them, you ignore the ACCOUNT.

Tie that in with a daemon on the server counting /ignores against the same account. Should the same account receive, for argument's sake, /ignore requests from 50 different players, then the account is banned from communication on ALL servers temporarily until SE can further investigate the matter.

What SE could do with such a system would be to automatically ban RMT accounts within a few batch /tells on a few servers before those accounts got silenced.

Sure, RMT companies can just buy more accounts. But if an RMT company can only send out only one or two batch tells before an account gets banned on all servers, will they have any sort of profit margin left? Even if they could manage to make money under such a system, their profits would surely drop considerably compared to the situation now, where they can create as many characters per account as they can add then delete, knowing it may be a month or three before SE gets back to banning them.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EllemEnopee

Sure, RMT companies can just buy more accounts. But if an RMT company can only send out only one or two batch tells before an account gets banned on all servers, will they have any sort of profit margin left?

---

But then how would SE make money from RMT buying new accounts?

I haven't seen RMT spam for ages on Tonberry. In fact I only have a handful of them in my blacklist. Must be different from server to server.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by blowfin

I haven't seen RMT spam for ages on Tonberry. In fact I only have a handful of them in my blacklist. Must be different from server to server.

---

You are soooooooooo lucky.

/jealous

Spam isn't anywhere near this big of a problem on Balmung. I get at most two a day now.

They immediately get /blist add <r>

GW2 does this too.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gardes

But then how would SE make money from RMT buying new accounts?

---

1) RMT companies would try, I imagine, to see if it was still profitable for them to send batch tells. If they could make enough to justify buying new accounts left and right, then SE would actually make a lot more money by doing this.

2) If you're not quite so jaded, however, and believe that SE is actually trying to cut these nuisances out of the picture, you might think that SE could be quite happy enough with the 1.8 million accounts they now have and not at all concerned about losing 0.03% of their business to make the other 99.97% of their customers more happy.

[ In the various launcher posts about RMT accounts banned, the number is usually around 500 per action. 500 accounts out of 1.8 million comes to 0.0003 or 0.03%.]

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Freyar

Spam isn't anywhere near this big of a problem on Balmung. I get at most two a day now.

They immediately get /blist add <r>

---

That's not the case on Adamantoise. If I don't blist, I get spammed roughly once every 2-3 minutes. 5-15 if I do blist. It's insane that SE is letting this crap go on.

The simplest system, which a lot of MMOs use, is one that was basically mentioned above and works quite well. If an account hits a set number of ignore/blists in a short period of time that account loses the ability to communicate with anyone outside of thier friend list until the account is cleared as being legitimate or is banned. It has to be at the account level though, not character. RMTers basically lose thier forum in short order.

Yes... take a note from the game wherein the RMT managed to create spam that could effectively make it so you couldn't under normal circumstances, block the character because they made their message so large it literally made it so you couldn't see who was doing the spam .

No offense intended, but ESO is far from perfect, though I do sort of like the account-wide idea, it is rather clear that going for accounts doesn't matter - they are often using stolen credit cards and accounts, as was evident in the pre-release.

While this didn't impact my decision to cancel my pre-order for the game, what made me decide to cancel my pre-order was the sub-par gameplay.

The only problem with this, is that fact that 9 out of 10 times, the account used for spamming is stolen, the account used for botting is expendable, and the accounts used for transferring currency aren't used for much so as not to draw too much attention to them. Because when you get banned for RMT they DO bann the account not just the character, stealing an account to use for spamming is far more cost effective for them, then constantly buying new ones.

as long as we have players that are so lazy to get gill the right way in game and there is plenty to go around ex quest, duty roulet, and selling dl and other gear drop from dungons one can make a lot of gill we will keep getting gill spammer /rmt

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pandastirfry

The only problem with this, is that fact that 9 out of 10 times, the account used for spamming is stolen, the account used for botting is expendable, and the accounts used for transferring currency aren't used for much so as not to draw too much attention to them. Because when you get banned for RMT they DO bann the account not just the character, stealing an account to use for spamming is far more cost effective for them, then constantly buying new ones.

---

here is a good way to stop you account from getting hijacked my work dose this 1 password change every 180 days 2 password requirement goes for example F!nalF@nt@syX!V you see its a lot harder to crack instead of ones like monkey123 or a birthdate like monkey1919

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by dragorian

password requirement goes for example F!nalF@nt@syX!V you see its a lot harder to crack instead of ones like monkey123 or a birthdate like monkey1919

---

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/password_strength.png

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyrinn

GW2 does this too.

---

There's also a report button that allows you to instantly blacklist the account while basically red flagging the account in GW2. Imagine if we could do that with all the spammers here. We could effectively shut off all the spam really fast and get rid of them.

I missed responding to a GM yesterday because his initial message was sandwiched between gil seller spams...

sargatanas i still get that /tell website,com 10% off code:iuyioewyuio good till 2020 pretty much everyday.

Well the Nice thing is I heard legendary servers are locked, so one se bans the currents on them, then those servers will be nice and peaceful.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyrinn

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/password_strength.png

---

for one you should quote me using the entire quote i said and not a part of it and i am not shur if you are trying to insult me by using part of what i said it is not hard to remember things that we use over and over again its called muscle memory and for those who cant remember thier password one should wright it down

For one, I omitted the first part because it was sound advice while the second part was not. Two, you should step back from your computer if you feel a well-known comic insulted you. Finally, you should probably actually read the comic.