Spamming - Lets pull together and discuss SOLUTIONS only

Fact: Spamming = a lessened enjoyment of Guildwars for everyone, spammers included.

Let's do what we can to remedy this please?

A presentation of potential solutions to spammers follows a brief intro. (yes this is a long post, but it is a topic worth the time and consideration if a genuine solution can be found.)

I know there are lots of threads about spam, but there isnt a thread free of general complaints which generally ends up with the auction house type people demanding the rest of us to trun off all chat...

Please discuss and add your own potential solutions. Keep it civil, intelligent and mature. You need to believe that we can be the answer and/or provide answers to issues, even in such a large community that is Guildwars. If you have previously posted a solution, please link to it, and i will try and keep track of all ideas and present them clearly and updated at top of this thread.

Do NOT post if you do not have a solution to SPAM to offer.... I dont want to hear the same stuff again from people who think the solution to spam is an auction house. (spam is wrong. period. AAnet saythere wont be an auction house in GW, so stop flogging a dead horse and move on to present other solutions)

Dont post just to whinge about spammers or to whinge about people "whinging about spammers" *rolls his eyes*

Do post if you have something useful to add. The aim is to fine tune ideas to find the best solution to present to Aanet.

One favour please ...if AAnet staff do read this, could you be so kind as to point out to us and discount any solutions that are offered here, if you know for a fact that they will never be implemented. That will allow us to work on ideas which could be fine tuned so as to be useable by yourselves. Likewise, if company policy is that spamming isnt a concern, then also please let us know, so we can be dissapointed but not waste our time further. I imagine you can see that there are many many customers who do care and do wish for a viable effective solution to spammers. We will do what we can to help.

A favour from the Mods here too please I believe in trying to work solutions out rather than just moaning.. id love a one stop thread like this to be kept clear of any crap which is not an attempt at discussing solutions to spam, if possible thanks.

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As a new Guildwars player it took me about 1 week to start swearing at the screen in frustration because of spammers in this game. Spammers ruin the enjoyment i have ingame. Nothing else annoys me as much; even if i die seconds from the end of a 30 min mission! Only spammers.

Spammers, be they trade spam, running spam, guild spam, lfp mission+bonus spam; "gimme free stuff" spam...... all of them need to....... stop and desist! (see how restrained i was there.. i didnt swear at them heh)

Tip; If you type something, do it once. Someone will respond, or not. You typing it 5 times in a row only pushes the chances of someone responding down because so many dislike spammers.

I have tried asking 1 or 2 questions in all chat. over the last week; legit questions about some aspect of the game, only to find that no one sees my questions because they are spammed into chat history within about half a second by everyone elses useless agressive spam.

All of this drives more and more people into soloing and less interaction, which is further away from what the whole aim of co-op that is Guildwars.

Spammers have no justification whatsoever. None.

Saying that they have to spam because they want a different trade system is just like saying you have to scream at every passerby as they walk down the street because you want more pocketmoney..... which is.... ridiculous and would never be tolerated.

use creativity, intelligence, common sense and common deceny; if you want to try and trade. There are plenty of us who dont wish to trade and thus not hear your spam. You have no right to use all chat to spam us. For your own sake, learn how to sell effectively, spamming should not be effective.

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SOLUTIONS to SPAMMERS

Just a few ideas from me and others ive read on forum. Some better than others. Please discuss in a mature manner. I believe AANet staff do read these forums, how about we give them some useful discussion to which they may even be able to do something with. In any case, there are a number of things which im sure we as players can do. Please share you own ideas for solutions.

• Ban spammers

This cuts the problem at source, rather than trying to find ways around the problem, which in turn results in the spammers trying to find ways around those.. Remember - Spamming is a always choice...not a nessessity!

(this requires us to be allowed to report spammers and aanet acting on this; and also for GM's to monitor all chat and ban spammers. - this requires clear guidelines and consistant banning)

Similarily, as suggested further down this thread - instead of character bans, put in place

• chat privilages bans

- remove their ability to chat for x hours/days etc, up till permanantly removing chat ability.

AANET to use and maintain a

• heavy filter

with any and all permetations of wts etc

(when i ran a server in another game the spam filter at the backend was simply a text file to which i could add words i wanted filtered out, hence it was limitless. I also had to choice to replace the words with asterixs or actually blank the whole line, denying the person to actually utter the chat if it had the filtered words/chars.)

Have a automated system place a x mins/hours temp ban for spamming. If the engine picks up someone trying to spam - hit them with an automated warning message. They do it again... auto temp ban. Then do it again... perm ban. They obviously cant learn.

Additionaly, perhaps making clear that ANY trade messages in allchat are wrong and peristant offenders could get banned, even if not spamming. This is not meant to punish those who dont spam... but to encourage everyone who wants to trade to actually use the tradechat... atm people use both or just allchat.. which is pointless for those who do want to trade.

• Unlimited, or close to, Ignore List slots

A very simple and elegant solution - someone spams, i ignore them and dont have to ever worry about them again. They can spam their silly little hearts out and the rest of us decent non invasive people dont have to get annoyed by it. 20 ignore slots (or thereabouts) is simply nowhere near enough. I reckon i could probably have used about 200 by now.

• Chat time/ buffer limits on allchat and tradechat

Prevent messages being sent unless there is x delay between them (eg between 5-30 secs or so)

No one legitimately, in all-chat or trade-chat, needs to type multiple messages within a couple of seconds. Team chat would be immune to this as it may be required in missions etc.

• Disable copy/paste/uparrow in LOCAL chat.

• Dont interact/trade with spammers

we the players can do this one.. but it requires everyone to take part.. go a couple of weeks without buying/selling anything to any spammers...

I assume people spam because it works or they think they can get a sale that way. Change that, so that they dont get a sale. Ever.

• Ridicule/Shame/Annoy Spammers

Again we can do this. Firstly of course politely ask them to stop spamming. Often my requests get lost in spam... if they keep it up or spam even more... then there is the shame/ridicule/annoy method. Less than ideal and smacks of resorting to their level..but then again maybe thats all they will understand..?
If someone spams..imagine if then 10 of us fired a useless reply to the spammer, several times over the course of a minute.. fight back and show them it is not ok to spam.
In a quieter district when someone starts to spam... shame them in all chat. Ive done this and seen it happen. Once several people agree with you, the spammer generally stops or leaves.

• Improve Trade (additional NPCs, player stalls, auction etc)

Ive added this as an edit, only to try and make clear that we all are aware that many people want trade improved; and yes, i agree, additional NPC merchants for higher end items etc or abilty to buy our own stalls etc... that could go quite a way to cutting down on spam... However...that does not address allchat spam and does not stop people spamming other messages. Additionally, AANet have said they wont be changing trade anytime soon; so there is no point putting it forward as a solution!

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As long as spamming is merely frowned upon, or seen as a nessessary evil...then it will continue to plague us and only get worse.

I urge we the community and aanet to take action against spammers.

Hopefully AAnet will be keen too and able to do more to deal with the disease that is spammers..( i say this because the more it is tolerated, the more people do it and accept it and thus it spreads) . Additionaly we will have to take action ourselves. Is that playing nice.. nope... but by god i will not sit back and be told that i have to turn off a part of the game just because some ignorant irritating boy or girl wants to spam me.

Just because you have an item you want to sell for an arbitary number of gold pieces...doesnt mean you should be able to; deserve to be able to; or are justified in doing so by any means nessessary....

Ill close with my gaming sig..

"Play fair, dont cheat, have fun and help others do the same"

Only solution to spam is ingame mods with the power to send warnings and then ban. Anet has said this will never happen.

SPam is here to stay, and If I dont see signs it will be fixed, I wolnt buy GW2.

Give them no need to spam.

Totally agree.

I agree with lyra, we need a reason not to spam.

Given how hard it is to sell something now anyways, I'd be pretty heated up if I got banned just for trying to sell something in chat, or if I was restricted. As it is, I have a ton of stuff in my inventory that I can't sell that is worth platinums of gw money, but isn't worth the time that it would take to sell it. If spamming weren't an option, I don't know if we'd sell anything.

A "ban spammers" or "ignore spammers" solution is not possible or fair. That's how the market in GW works. If we want to fix spammers, we've got to fix the cause.

Edit: the last line was a little too harsh...I want to keep this a discussion.

One possible and simple solution is the add a counter to the chat buffer. Since most spammers use the up arrow to access the buffer just add a counter to it. If this counter exceeds say 5 (as in they just sent a message 5 times in the last 5 minutes) the system would send a warning message. If the player insists on continuing their spam they will be booted and receive a "time out" message for one hour that explicitly states the reason they are in a time out - spamming. After that hour is up they can continue their play.

This system, of course, could be worked around but it is an elegant solution that should be simple to code and keeps Anet from needing to hire mods. The chat buffer could easily have code added to compare for slightly different messages. Such as if 50% of the message is the same as the previous ones. This should just require some basic text parsing code to compare the buffer entries.


note: the numbers are arbitrary and just used as an example.

Boost the prices NPC traders offer
For example i buy dye for 100g and i sell it right back for 10g. That's not even half of it
That's why people would even spam for a sh*ty orange dye!

There's never a need to spam, nor is there a need now. Spam =/= WTB and WTS messages on trade channel. Can sell just fine with the system the way it is. The only reason people spam multiple messages in succession is that they are impatient and cant sell their items fast enough, and that has more to do with them overpricing or trying to sell things not exactly in high demand. Even though its a buyer's market, I still sell things fairly quickly without the need to spam. Anet has already said there wont be an auction house, so there is no solution along the "Give them no need to spam lines" anyway.

I'd implement an All and Trade channel time-related buffer. The same person can only place a message on one of these channels every 15 seconds or so. Its easier to implement than a filter, because a filter needs to recognize things like "\/\/TS" as well as "WTS xxx 1" and "WTS xxx 2" etc. Whisper, Team and Guild/Alliance channels would be exempt from this. There's no need to place a message on these channels faster than that in most cases. When I'm selling, I drop something in about every 30 seconds and its perfectly fine.

Its not ideal, sure, but at least it doesnt involve Anet trying to create and extensive filter system and/or a way to temp ban offenders.

current trading model

player <---> player = spam city


improved trading model

player <---> npc <---> player = less trading spam



if players had the option to drop their wares off to a 3rd party npc for trade, i believe the amount of spam would significantly decrease.

as long as players have items they wish to sell in their inventories, there will always be tons of spammage in all major outposts.

I would get rid of spammers against a fair amount of money. I would even give them a fair chance to improve on themselves.

But it still stands according the EULA that spamming is not allowed. It is not a neccessity, nor does spamming show of any respect towards others that want to sell stuff too.

I'd like to see if ANet still stands behind their EULA, and if so what they are gonna do about it. Sometimes I tell em why spamming is not such a nice method and if they don't listen I sometimes even chase em out of Kamadan. Not very respectfull too, but it lets them feel what others are feeling.

Only one measure will work against it, and that is a clear statement showing the position of ANet and some active policy that deals with the problem.

There is need to spam. Wether those needs are reasonable however.....

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There was an idea in Sardelac (which i cant find), about allowing players to make their own custom filters.

This will allow players to filter out what they dont want, and filter through what they want.

i think thats the best solution to prevent from SEEING spam.

No matter how clever a spammer is, if you had a custom filter, you could instantly add that new fangled spam line.

improvement to trade = improvement to spam issue

Even though you don't want to hear it, the solution to the trade spam is to give people a better way of trading.

Have you ever watched a movie with a bazaar (that's bazaar, not bizarre) scene in it, where all the stall vendors are yelling at passerbys to buy their stuff? Well that's all the trade spammers are doing, if ANet gave them a more efficient way of trading I imagine many of them would quit spamming.

I still think the easiest (i.e. cheapest way for ANet) way to improve trade is to make the merchants give you more for gold and purple weapons which reduces the incentive to waste time trying to trade them.

I'm also not sure if any of your solutions will work:

• Ban spammers - I guess this might work, but it seems way too draconian to me (and by the way, I don't spam, my response to the lack of a trade system is more passive than aggressive, I just can't be bothered to try to sell stuff).
• Heavy filter - it seems like a good idea but I'm guessing that the filter list will get larger and larger and still be way too easy to circumvent.
• Larger ignore lists - this seems might it like help.
• Just not trading with spammers isn't something that will work as they only need one person to trade with them to make a sale.

Part of the problem (IMO) seems to be that this isn't something that ANet wants to spend much money on, so any proposed solution has to be cheap.

Anyway, off the top of my head, here is another suggestion though it's probably not worth much.

Increase the number of Trade tabs in the chat window to distinguish between different types of items being sold. If I was doing this I'd analyse the sales and pick say four or five categories to break things down into. This might encourage people to use the trade chat.

Sorry to reply so quickly, but theus's poor post just gave me a 'wtf' moment. *sigh*

I just wanted to point out that as i tried to make clear, we should focus on the solutions rather than the cause; because the cause is people; making the conscious choice to spam, knowing full well that it is neither 'nice' nor allowed.

Some people claim the cause is a trading system that could be better..... but that is incorrect... Although spam is instantly associated with traders and in the main is.. we also know that:

a) spamming is not limited only to traders unfortunately.
(hence the solution must go beyond looking at trade only. Besides which as said, AAnet has said it is not looking at changing this anytime soon)

b) spamming in ALL CHAT under any circumstance can never be justified. (since there is a trade channel, trade should be carried out there)

These 2 points are why i believe (as do others from their useful posts) that we must come up with a solution to people spamming. Spamming is always a choice, never a nessessity.

The chat buffer concept does sound as if it could be very useful with less effort. At least that way, legitimate questions or chats made by non spammers would have a chance of being seen then in all chat.

edit: Nomen, good post thanks. Yep, while i agree that comments regarding changing the trade system could indeed help reduce trade spam.... it doesnt address all spam, and additionally, aanet has already told us categorically that trade will not be changed in the near future. Thats why i said i didnt want to discuss it - so we wouldnt waste time on it, thats all keep the good thoughts coming guys, cheers.

Remove the ability to trade with players in guild wars and add a ton of traders for everything in the game. Weapon Mod Trader, Gold Trader, Green Trader, etc. GG spam

You forgot my solution:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...9&postcount=53

Well, let me put in my 2 cents on the ideas you have so far.

• Ban spammers
• heavy filter
• Unlimited, or close to, Ignore List slots
• Chat time/ buffer limits on allchat and tradechat
• Dont interact/trade with spammers
• Ridicule/Shame/Annoy Spammers

1. Ban Spammers - Nice idea, and I'd love to see it implemented if it's done correctly. Arena Net should send out loud and vocal warnings at least 1 week before implementing letting everyone know this will happen and what the rules are. The main drawback is that a lot of people are opposed to this idea (not just the spammers) and they may lose players.

2. Heavy Filter - Sorry. Won't work. There will always be ways around the filter. If you filter every possible combination of "wts, w t s, w-t-s, VVts, etc" people will just use "selling" or "----XX Selling". Then you filter the word "selling". Next they use "For Sale: ", so you filter that. They then change to "Seling: " and "4 Sale". It's a never-ending spiral.


3. Ignore List slots, Dont interact/trade with spammers, Ridicule Shame/Annoy Spammers - I'm grouping these 3 together. They won't work because they are player enforced and it's impossible to get 3 million users to abide by these rules. Even if every single registered guru member reads your post and every single one agrees to do this, it's still only a drop in population bucket and the spammers will always have customers.

4. Chat time/ buffer limits on allchat and tradechat - Good idea. I like it. It will help, but still the bots and hard-core spammers will push the envelope on the limit. Not a solution in and of it, but a starting point that could be combined with something else.


Ok, here are my 2 ideas. They aren't perfect, but that's why you are here. Perhaps the reader can improve them.

1. Add a trade tutorial to the game. This game already has tutorials for everything from armor crafting to DP to map travel. It needs a trade tutorial. Add a "trading NPC" to Pre-Searing, Ascalon, Kamadan and Shing Jea Monastery. The NPC has a green ! over his head which launches a trading quest. You trade items back and forth with the trading npc and he gives you trade tips. He can include some of the common scams to watch for like the 5g instead of 5k switcharoo. New accounts will not be able to trade until they complete the tutorial.

2. I like the "ban 'em" and "chat time limits" idea. How about combining them with less harsh punishments. No more than 1 chat message in All chat or Trade every 15-30 seconds. 1st time violators lose their chat privileges for 10 minutes. 2nd offenders lose their chat for 1 hour. 3rd offenders and up lose chat and trade privileges for 1 hour. No need to ban anyone. Just take away their ability to annoy folks.

The reason not to spam is that it doesn't get your items sold any faster but it does irritate the majority of players, making the gaming experience less desireable.

I've seen tons of people having "Inventory clearance sales." instead of trying to sell just one or two items, advertise the whole lot. If I get 4 or 5 Axes, for example, I'll have an Axe Sale. It's a good point you make about time spend being a waste of money since it could be better spent out farming.
If the community as a whole (or very large majority) took it upon themselves to let spammers know that their behavior is intolerable, that would go a very long way to stop the nonsense (it's called "peer pressure"). And there is no need to be a jerk about it either. I've seen districts (2 & 3) in Kamadan where nobody was spamming or using local for trade chat because a few people in those districts politely spoke up and told people that spam is unacceptable.

What saddens me is the "A-Net needs to fix this, I don't have to do anything" mentality. Example: It's hard to find HM groups. People scream "A-NET FIX IT!" But very few of those people who still complain responded to the thread entitled "PUGSville," which has a nice suggestion of how the community could solve the problem themselves.

If we're talking about vending spam, you could always take a note from RO, and make it so that players can set up a store and idle their characters as merchants. Just put an icon over their head or somesuch to make note of their ... vendingness status...

The way I see things is that a large percentage of the spam we have is because people see that as the only way to get people to see their message, they feel they must also spam or their message will be lost in other peoples spam.
What this means is that we dont need such a huge change, a little should go a long way, once spamming becomes a little more difficult it will be massively reduced because people will se it is no longer necessary in order to deliver their message.

Of course this would require something to be done but it widens the possiblilities. The main thing we need to do is to encourage use of the systems we have been given. We have trade chat, we even have party search but very few people use them.
Its basically a vicious cycle, people see trade chat full of spam, they turn off trade chat, sellers cant sell in trade because noone is reading it, sellers spam all chat.
Which has led me to an idea, perhaps Anet could place some permanent anouncements on the login screen about party search and trade chat, maybe people will read them and start using the facilities weve been given instead of spamming all chat.

Buy that man a beer! Great post and as usual, a simple idea is a great one; one that requires almost no effort, could go a long way towards a shift in mentality. That's what it requires as you point out.

(when i enter an area, i almost always look at search.. and almost always it is empty... while there are people spamming for trade and pugs, all around me... lol)

If aanet could remind everyone of Search that would be great, and also we all could do our own bit to use it, so that when people do look they see more people using it, and the snowball effect could begin.

This would also help address the issue of finding PUGs as Kook pointed out (i just read that thread)

How do you expect to sell your item if you can't spam? Anet gives us only one way to sell our items... spamming. And for those of who you say "No, you can also use the party search function." Well, the random average GW player that wants to sell his blue dye doesn't know about that! Take a look at it sometime, at most theres only 10 items in there.

Yes, there was a time that everyone spammed in Trade Chat only, but the trade was gradually getting more and more competitve that... Look at it now, more people use Local than Trade to sell! And, unless you really respect the heart of the game, your not going to be the little noob that wants to sell his blue dye in Trade, your gonna go with the flow over to Local. And nowadays, people have strategies of selling their items to grab more attention, like;
//////////W T S blah blah blah\\\\\\\\\\\. It's not because they're asses, how else are they suppose to sell and get their item noticed? Don't blame the spammers, blame Anet for making such a crap way to trade. They should get more organized with trading. Something so simple like placing categories (eg. inscriptions/runes, rare skinned weapons, dyes, etc) in the trade chat so people can easily just click on the category that they want to buy/sell from and there you go. You won't have to spam your W T S BLUE DYE in Local 4 times in a row.

The problem isn't only trade spam, though the majority of it is trades. There's also idiot emote spams and phrases or announcements being spammed. Since it's hard to accidentally spam there should be a way to identify repeated entry spams. It'll be best if there were human moderators but that's probably too costly.

I support the idea of a Silencing punishment for spammers, no All, Trade, Whisper. Would be good if the length of it is a week long. A few hours or a couple days really does nothing.

It's been suggested before: a separate area for all trading, like a merchant island or something. Everyone can map travel to the island to do their trades. Keep the no spam in here. Traders use a more lengthened Party Search function. Buyers should have an easier time finding what they want. Sellers will reach more people hopefully.

Stealth, you are rationalizing that spam is acceptable, the purpose here is to say that spam in not acceptable under any circumstances.

I realize that a-net does not want to spend a lot of time here to fix what is caused by inconsiderate people. I believe an easy fix would be to expand the party window string to allow a full line or two. People can then advertise in all open districts at the same time, the categories are collapsible so people looking for groups, guilds and items to buy can streamline their window. It would work! I have sold things on the party window, put my item in there, waited a few minutes and gotten whispers for more details or to see if I still had the item.

I like the log in announcement idea and the warnings that spammers would be banned, even temporarily from all chat that gets longer each time it is initiated, then follow up with an automated system that enforces it.

Show them a better way and give them consequences for not using it. It might take a little time but it could work.

Well here's what it can't be so we can figure out what it needs to be:



An auction house or NPC, because anet has said no.

So far filters haven't worked and even if there are custom ones, a player still has to think of everything and if the word should be censored or the message omitted.

Party search window isn't working

Banning won't work because they are having enough trouble banning bots who are a bigger problem.

Time limits on reposting won't help anything.

Counterspam only makes things worse.

I'm against disabling cut and paste because there are practicle reasons to do so.

Sometimes spammers are the only people around that are willing to buy and sell what you are looking for, so you really can't expect everyone to stop interacting with them.


QFT.


Agreed, spam is bad but there aren't enough ingame avenues to trade items. The GWG forums don't let someone bump more than once a day and if no one else responsed to your thread, you are on page 5-7 by then. So the amount of trade volumn is massive. If all of those people were suddenly forced to post ingame once every few minutes per item, you've have a massive wall of WTS just as bad as normal trade spam.

Yes, they do. Hardcore trade spamming is the only effective way to sell anything in Guild Wars. That's not the spammers' fault. Spammers do not "enjoy" spamming --- giving one's self a migraine via spamming one's own items for 5 hours trying to sell it is not fun. They do it because the game doesn't give them any other way to sell anything. That's plain and simply the game's own fault, not the players'.

"Punishing" spammers is ludicrous. Spammers do the community a service by actually bothering to participate in trade and subjecting themselves to much pain and aggravation by doing so (ie: giving themselves headaches from having to spam their item and read all the spam around their item constantly). Instead of just merching their items and then no one gets it and it might as well not have existed at all. Spammers should be given medals for subjecting themselves to this torture for the sake of participating with trade even though it's not really worth the agony it gives themselves, regardless of any profit spamming might bring.

Don't blame the players for inadequate game mechanics.

There is only one suitable & reasonable solution to spammers, and that is to put in an Auction House.

You need to do two thing to stop spamming.

1. Disable the up/down arrow feature that allows you to spam the same message in the first place. Don't let the text box take pasted text either. If you have something to say, type it out. Very few people will be "inconvenienced" to any remote degree.

2. Increase the party search window's text area to be at least 80 characters. This then gives people with something to sell a reasonable sized area to post their message. In addition, if possible, allow one person to leave more than one message (limit 5?)... often people have more than one item to sell.

If these two things were implemented, spam would die. Period.

If I'm looking to buy something, I'm not going to sit around for 5 hours waiting for it. I'm either going to play the game to acquire it myself, or I'm going to move on to another district in hopes that its there. Myself, and other players I have discussed this with, have no desire or intention to wade through a wall of WTS or any variation thereof that moves so fast we can't read it. Sure, we can always look back at previous messages, but we should not have to.

Spammers have no justifiable claims to victimhood. If you are spamming Local with trade messages, you are not doing it in the proper place. If someone wanted to buy whatever it is you're hawking, chances are they're looking in the Trade channel or in party search. We are not going to get an auction house. Period. End of discussion. Instead of carrying on about the need for it, perhaps the community should refocus their efforts on something OTHER than an auction house to facilitate trade. The buyers aren't forcing spammers to spam. ANET is not holding a gun to your head demanding that you spam. Spamming is done for the sole and simple reason that you perceive it to be the only way to sell something.

Quite honestly, I would rather merch a 10-15k item or give it to my heroes or a guildmate that sit and spam for any period of time. I can make 10-15k from merch fodder in the time that some people sit and spam a single item of equivalent value.

Bottom line, nobody is making you spam. It is your perception only that drives you to do it. People have spoken out about this numerous times. When will spammers get the message that we don't want it?

First off you have too look at the reason why people spam which is for trade, providing services, guild recruitment, or just to be annoying.

As long as there is a player based trade system with no from of player market other than the main cities of towns along the way, than there will always be the trade spam. And the fact that even if they did impliment an auction house or player marketplace, youll still have the spam, only now youll see it advertising their sale in the auction house. The only game i have played where i saw little to NO spam was Dark Age of Camelot. They had a trade NPC that could hold your items for you and players could search for what they were looking for based on item type, attributes, price, materials, etc... and the NPC would collect a small (like 1%) fee from the sale of the items. Then the seller would have the funds automatically depositied into their character (no money cap) when said item was sold.

As long as there is any type of service, wether it be running, ferrying, spider capping, whatever... it will be spammed for due to player interest in that service. There is no other way to get your service out there that youre trying to provide other than advertising, and that is the only advertising that can be done.

As long as there is Guilds in Guild wars, than youll have guilds tryign to recruit people to join their guild. Sadly the only way to be able to fix this would be somethign similar to the championchip trophies in GToB. Have an npc or a meeting board where players can look through guilds and what the requirements are for joining them and have an officer or guild leaders name or list of names that they can contact for more into about the guild and ask to be accepted or for a guild tryout. This will be the only way to allow the "'XXX guild of pwnage from the land of shadows and suffering of light to the eternal brotherhood of loyal knights' is recruiting" spam to stop...

As long as there are players lookign for a group, then youll always see someone sayign they are looking for a group. There is currently a fix to this, sadly no one uses it or they are too dumb to figure it out....

Sadly since none of these exist or will be implimented into the current version of guild wars, these spams will continue. The only way youll get around it is to turn off local and trade chat, or hope to god they get it right in GW2

probably allready mentioned
disable copy/paste/uparrow in LOCAL chat only.
when changin chat window messege is reset (to avoid exploit)

Nonsense! I never have any trouble buying or selling things using only the trade channel and posting my ads once every 30 - 40 seconds. I don't use all caps or loud symbols to get attention, either. I've ususally got my things sold within 10 - 15 minutes, many times even quicker.

Common causes for trading to take too long:

1. Buyer offering too little.
2. Seller asking too much.
3. People who refuse to do business with people who use all chat for trading.
4. People who refuse to do business with spammers.

If the chat system abusers would realize the truth of #3 & 4, then they'd probably not spam nearly as much and keep their trade messages in the trade window.

BS, when u ban spammers there will be no spam.

I wish the devs cared about this half as much as we did

simply, we need an AH. But we won't get one. And Anet clearly does not value our concerns over this, and they will not develop any real trade system or improvements over what we have now. So unless Anet goes open source with GW, this thread is more a show of the disconnect between the gamers and the devs, than something constructive

I acctually like this idea. I'd even possibly adjust it to maybe adding a whole section for such things. Like possibly adding a 'Trading Post' that is available to everyone. IF you want to spam in this section, it'd be allowed. However, it would be contained to a special screen that cannot be seen within the normal 'Local' chat.

Something else that I've seen is what someone else mentioned on first page... Set up a Trading Merchant. Once you've spoken to the merchant, you'd be able put it up for sale, however you would have to carry the item with you until its sold. I dont know the exact details of how that worked, but I'm sure it can be worked out and adjusted as needed.

like the Everquest1 Bazaar zone... could work

like the Everquest2 system, though that uses housing storage... could work, set it to work off of xunlai storage I suppose

both things could work, if used in addition to the removal of pasting/up arrow or sufficient banning of people who still abuse the system...

I've done trades using the party search and it's much easier than spamming. Usually the spammers are complete idiots anyway. Instead of trying to solve the problem some people here seem to want to escalate it in supporting spammers. Newbies will continue to join and what will you want them to see?

@@@@@@@@ WTS A BIG SWORD @@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@ WTS A BIG SWORD @@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@ WTS A BIG SWORD @@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@ WTS A BIG SWORD @@@@@@@@

xxx is excited!
xxx is excited!
xxx is excited!
xxx is excited!
xxx is excited!

I've seen cases much worse where there're 2+ rows of @ or any other symbols. Search function works, though it could be expanded more. Spammers are still the players' fault more than arenanet's.

Very sensible methods, and I would love to see this implemented. However, the bolded part is simply not true. This will not stop spam. In fact, there is very little you can do short of not allowing people to chat at all or disconnecting from the internet that will stop it for good. This will most likely decrease it severely, and in a pleasant way (offering better alternatives and restrictions, rather than punishing offenders). Negative reinforcement should always be a last resort. Then again, it worked pretty well for the Nazis for a while...

What solution can be made here really?

ANET refuses to add improvements to trade that were mention before factions came out and was a selling point to many for factions, as at the time they expected if something was said to be coming they knew it would be coming.

With no improvements to trade, you either rely on getting your stuff from trade bots, out of the game, or by spamming.

Add in a viable trade system, or at least a mods and upgrade trader and spam will drop considerably as most spam is trade spam, since that is the only way to trade in game.


Anyway, think this is bad, wait for GW2 and non-instanced areas.

As Phil said, a simple solution can go a long way and along the lines of what MSecorsky said.

Increase the Party Window character limit.
The 20 character limit right now is junk. All you can really put is
"S: Green Swor" before you run out of space

Increase it to 50, maybe more. Also when the spamming "warning" comes up, instead of putting "your message was suppressed to excessive messaging"
Put something along the lines of
"Your message was suppressed due to excessive messaging. Don't forget you could use the Party Search window instead."
Or something along those lines.

To be honest, I always go to the higher districts, not neccessarily because of the spam, but because with more people in the lower # districts, the graphics take like 20 seconds to load lol

I also always check the party trade window, and as a few have mentioned, you just KNOW there's 500 people divided among district 1, 2 and 3 and yet all you see are about 3-5 messages of WTB/WTS.

If they do increase the character limit on the party search window, I hope they also add "Please leave a descriptive message" instead of just "Selling great green sord!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

The best solutions are usually several fold.

1) As everyone agrees, trade improvements of some type, such as increasing the character limit of the party window, is needed.

2) Because the spam is so far out of control, a scaling crackdown through technological means, such as my counter/buffer idea and the other very nice limitation ideas, is necessary with heavy bans. Before a ban is handed out, a 3 strike policy needs to be implemented.

These bans will need to scale to mete out punishment properly. At first, the bans should be light, no more than 1 hour (or even loss of chat privileges for a time). As repeat offenses and time under the new anti spam system continues, the bans shall become heavier. After all, people now know they are doing wrong.

3) Social engineering is also needed, such as people's suggestions on trade tutorials and party window reminders.

The technology is by no means fool proof; it will also need to be multi-faceted to catch the main bulk of spam. The technology is just a way to clean up the mess, but to do so it must be clear why the person is being punished. Aspects 1 and 3 serve as reinforcement to the new behavior.

Humorous aside: perhaps the spammers could be muted and placed in cages for the rest of us to throw rotten vegetables at. Would be a nice gold sink at least.