I no longer wish to receive tells from anyone under level 10.

[TheSmoo]

And then they have to parallel process, since even without auto-ban from excessive blacklisting, they get blacklisted by everyone, they need new characters, so they'll need backups. And if they can't just slam out a fresh level 1 anymore, they need a LOT more. And that means the annoyance of botting or leveling, PLUS they have to have what, 10-20 accounts idling at any given time? That's a large amount of connections, unless they go through proxies and such, which is yet more annoyance. Also, something that might be noticed, and acted on before they can even START spamming...

I'm not thinking this will end anything completely, but at least you'll have the knowledge that it's MORE annoying for them to tell-spam you than it is for you to blacklist them! There's a line as well, once it takes more money (and time IS money) to spam adverts than they get back from the adverts, they no longer have a financial incentive to DO it in the first place.

[BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY]

for starters SE can't punish an account for simply being AFK 24+ hours. it doesn't matter how long they AFK for. it don't matter how suspicious it looks. SE can't punish someone for being AFK.


and i am not sure about their policy for proxies. i would imagine they are allowed.




all a level or time restriction will do is delay the inevitable. and just leaving it at one time or level restriction most certainly won't delay their efforts for too long. SE would have to start out small and constantly make the counter-measures larger and larger. which will force the sellers to constantly change their scripts. which slows them down. but eventually SE won't be able to push the counter-measures any further. and we will right back where it all started.



basically these type of counter-measure will only be considered short-term. they will never last. and to boot they will eventually cause a huge restriction to the social community in-game. which will cause many and many players to leave.








it has also already been suggested to allow players to take themselves out of the results in the Player Finder. though SE has stated they don't want to do this. they don't want people removing themselves from any of the social aspects a MMORPG can offer.

[Haprimac]

I'd love this to be implemented. Or at the very least more blacklist space or an option that removes all (deleted) characters from blacklist automatically. I'm constantly at 200/200. :/

[TheSmoo]

*see above*

You have no idea what you are talking about. I NEVER SAID anything about punishing for AFK. If a BRAND NEW CHARACTER is AFK for their first 24 hours when that is the PRECISE behavior that would be needed to beat anti-spam countermeasures, that would be SUSPICIOUS. Simply a red flag the GMs could look at. If a single IP, or credit card is running a bunch of accounts that do this, they're probably spammers. And once the first couple characters start spamming, the GM could just blanket ban everything.

None of this can one-shot spammers. Pretty much NOTHING can do that. It would simply contribute into HOPEFULLY making spammer activity more trouble to carry out than it pays off.

And none of it would be permanent. A new character would hit the level/time marks, and just keep playing, with tell restrictions gone. How many new people open up player finder, and start mass-telling all the lvl 50s? Heck, how many players PERIOD spam-tell the player finder results?

[TheSmoo]

Lets look at now versus desired:

Now: Spammer makes an account. Makes a new character. Pounds the keyboard for name entry, hits "all random" for appearance, skips the cutscenes, lands in a city, opens player finder, and starts sending tells. Total elapsed time, what, 5 minutes MAXIMUM?

Proposed: Spammer makes an account. Makes a new character, garbage name, random appearance, skip cutscene, enter city. They cannot send tells from player finder until level 10 and 24 hours played time, so they have to actually run around questing or spamkilling, and then idle until 24 hours. And after the 5th or 10th tell-blacklist combination, they get auto-muted until a GM reviews their tells. Total elapsed time is HOURS of actual "play" for 10 levels, and an entire day for the one character, unless they log out to make it look like a real person, which is even LONGER. Total time? 24 hours MINUMUM. For 5-10 tells.

[TheSmoo]

So they would have to do this with multiple accounts at once for much spam, idle them all while leveling new ones, and hope the entire IP isn't blanket banned. It's not perfect, but it makes it a LOT less efficient, and makes them waste their time. If they lose enough time to this process, and enough money from multiple account bans, it might just not be worth it for them to keep doing it!

[Ilitsa]

A nice, simple alternative would be to give an option to allow /tell's from people on your friendlist/FC list only, so that no strangers at all can whisper you

Edit: I use the term "simple" adjectively here, I know it's not really -easy- to add in entire functions.

[TheSmoo]

A nice, simple alternative would be to give an option to allow /tell's from people on your friendlist/FC list only, so that no strangers at all can whisper you

Edit: I use the term "simple" adjectively here, I know it's not really -easy- to add in entire functions.

Why settle for that, when things that are NEARLY as simple can be used to make the spammers lives more difficult? If spamming gets hard ENOUGH, they might just give up. Saying " just blacklist them" or using half-measures will just fail pathetically because the spammers are OBVIOUSLY willing to throw character after character and account after account into the ban-grinder.

[Jonny_Tapas]

If RMT can't "tell" you with a brand new level 1 character... They will become more efficient in the fine art of hacking and stealing developed accounts!

However I totally agree with this idea!

[TheSmoo]

If RMT can't "tell" you with a brand new level 1 character... They will become more efficient in the fine art of hacking and stealing developed accounts!

However I totally agree with this idea!

Oh, completely. But that takes time. And will get harder. If anything makes their "jobs" harder, that's for the best. :P If spamming gets hard ENOUGH, it stops being worth doing. If it costs them X dollars in time and accounts, and if they get less from spamming ads, they might stop bothering.

I get tells. PLURAL. Within 60 seconds of logging in.