Spamming - Lets pull together and discuss SOLUTIONS only

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.