removing player search would be big blow to gold sellers

[Djindra]

i'm sure we've all had this, gold sellers sending you /tells or friend requests, you blacklist and hopefully report them just to get another message from the same group with another character but how are they finding you? The only way i can think of is the player search option.
Now, i understand what its ment to be used for, if you need a group or maybe a crafter you can look for people to ask for help. However we can (and mostly everyone does) get on with the game without it. People will do things like use party finder or shout in towns for groups or crafters and this works out just fine, not many people (if any) actually use the player search.
Also, i'm not saying this will stop gold sellers all together, we know they'll try others things and they have done before but being able to play the game without getting lots of gold seller friends requests and /tells would be much nicer and removing player search would take away the biggest way for the gold sellers to advertise themselves

[Enkidoh]

It wouldn't actually solve anything removing the search function - all that would do would be to handicap players by removing a legitimate portion of the game. It would be like saying to shut down the internet to stop online bullying, the problem will continue regardless using a different means and legitimate players will be even more inconvenienced.

If search was hypothetically removed, the gilsellers would still find ways around it, such as using random character generators to auto fill character names without even using the search function (which they probably already use anyway), exactly like how email spam is generated. Unfortunately this is a problem that has no easy fix.

I hate to say it, but as tedious and annoying as it is, manually blacklisting and reporting them every time is the only real way you can deal with them.