Trading Spams in Local

I think that spamming trade "ads" in local is annoying and a huge pester. Heres an example: People looking for groups generally go to the first or second districts, therefore to find more people and a wider variaty. But, its a huge pain with 20 people chanting out "ads" while one tries to find a group. The text goes down so fast you can hardly read, and it's generally a pain. I have two ideas of fixing this.
1) Make a way that traders can only use the trade channel, and not the local. Or, add a filter (like for curses) and let users choose whether they want to hear trades or not. This way, they can see them when they want and not seem them otherwise.

2) Make parties, in towns, have a larger number of people. This way, friends and guildies can talk to each other. But when you have more than the normal party count to go outside of towns, then there should be a window come up to the head of the party that lets him/her choose who to keep or kick. Or simply, just dont let them go (like PvP players).

I wonder why people just never started to do normal chatting in trade channel since most of trader only use local chat anyway.

I know a lot of people have trade channel off because its annoying. But i'd find it very funny to see all normal chat in there while trader spam the local.

Why not incorporate a squlech command? Like /squlech <username>

And when a certain number of people in a town has squleched a particular person, that person is kicked out of the current district into a special district filled with other people like him...

To prevent abuse just make the threshold large enough.

Especially with Ascalon and Lion's Arch, the notion of District 1 as trade districts has been around since the beginning of the game. I believe much of the traffic in those two districts comes from people who want to buy or to sell. I don't think that will change (not saying that it is good or bad, but am saying that it's true).

It's also interesting watching the people who complain (not you, the ones who use the local chat channel to complain in game). They're often more annoying than the traders ... obscene, repetitive and persistent. That takes up more of the text bandwidth in many cases than any single trader.

I don't think either notion would work technically. In a way it's the same as trying to come up with technology that fights spam. A filter sure wouldn't work, because you'd just get mispellings designed to slip past the filter. And I don't see how you could enforce the idea of preventing traders from using the local channel.

Collect call from 'Bob Wehadababyitzaboy'.

The only way to effectively ban trades from the local channel is to not allow WTS WTB...but we all know that is not the only way to sell or buy.

LOL. I remember that.

I find it annoying, too, to see the Local channel full of WTB, WTS, WTT and the like.... I don't mind going into Dist. 1 of LA or Ascalon City and seeing it, but if I'm in District 5 or 6.. or 11... I filter out the Trade channel for a reason, and I actually like talking to people without that spam filling up my window. I would love to see a solution to this issue, but I'm afraid that we won't see one before the advent of Auction Houses.

Its a big problem, in any district or place. Like said above, in the major cities this causes a big problem.. Ever tried looking for a group for Defend Droks, or Defend Kryta ? Everyone is spamming your message up before people even get to look at it in local. I still believe people will attempt to sell things outside the Auction houses since there are going to be so many players selling things at once there.

I saw a guy doing that in ToA yesterday. So I asked him if he'd stop spamming. He didn't. So I talked to him (one sided) for a while just to bug him and left.

As I was preparing to go to UW today guess who I saw? Same guy! So I asked him if he liked spam, which he replied "yea i do" except considerably less grammatically correct. Either way, he asked me about 3 hours later if I'd like to buy an unID Chaos Axe.

What really should be done is have an area like for the arenas but for just trading. I think that would be a nice fix, however the filter thing would do nice too, since you cannot really full proof the trade spam in local chat even if there was a Trade Spot.

An arena just for trading hmm? Why... we could call it an auction house! And we could put it in Chapther 2! (Maybe)

Aw damn... this sounds familiar.

My wish for this problem would be a code that would allow everyone in a district to PvP the spammers - and a bonus would be to make the spammer drop whatever object he was trying to sell.

The code would activate once the spammer used key words or letter combos (WTS, WTB, etc.) a certain number of times in the local channel. It would also lock the spammer into the district, so he/she couldn't zone out until fully ganked.

Ahh, the dreams of former youth ;}

Hanok Odbrook
Real Millennium Group Guild
http://www.realmillenniumgroup.com/guild.html
Truth * Knowledge * Peace

I must say the amount of trade spam is quite simply becoming obscene. Only a few months ago it was at least tolerable in post searing Ascalon, but even there it has become infected to horrible levels.

Lion's Arch ok fine that was apparently the trading hub of the GW world, but now it's all over Ascalon, Droknar's Forge and LA. Creeping into other areas too!

It's a real pity Anet didn't put in some kind of auto ban (if only temporarily) for spammers, the EULA/RoC specifically mentions people aren't supposed to spam messages over and over, yet it happens every day all day. The worst offenders seem to be the "shop fronts" for the industrial farming groups. The same few people with Chinese/Korean sounding names who spam massive amounts, often using annoying characters both in trade chat and local chat.

It's become so awful I barely go to those towns for anything anymore if I can help it, and I hate to think how people who need to do quests from those cities are getting along. Their "LFG quest.." is more often than not drowned by 10 million "WTS gold item for 100k" crap.

p.s. and yes I have used Ignore, but it isn't long before it happens all over again. Gah!

I found the part of the eula that talks about spamming chat channels interesting.

(j) In Guild Wars, characters have the privilege of sending server wide messages called 'Chat Messages.' With this privilege comes a high level of responsibility on the part of the user. Due to the fact that this communication channel has the ability to impact every player on the server, NC Interactive will not tolerate any inappropriate behavior of any sort in this chat channel. This includes but is not limited to: inappropriate language of any sort or any attempt to escape the profanity filter, inappropriate or vulgar content of any sort, repeated 'spamming,' or 'flooding' of the chat messages channel, or any other conduct determined to be inappropriate by NC Interactive Support, in its sole discretion. Any violation of this term or rules of conduct may, in the sole discretion of NC Interactive, lead to the temporary removal of the character’s ability to communicate, the account being suspended for a set period of time, or lead to permanent account closure.

I've been thinking that this part of the eula doesn't amount to a hill of beans as EVERYONE seems to ignore it.

ANet need to do something about this problem before it gets too late. IMO the easiest solution would be stripping all lines that include 'WTS', 'WTB', 'WTT', and such.

the amount of trade spam in local channel is getting really ridiculous these days. for instance in LA D1, messages appear faster than you can actually read them.

PS: perhaps the solution we all want is Auction Houses, but even still, we won't see them untill Chapter 2 is out.

still..would people even use the auction houses?

Spammer: HEY! everyone is selling at the auction house! I will sell my stuff here in town to get people to buy from me so I can beat out those trying to sell in the auction houses.

A suggestion would be, to help enforce use of the auction house, to use a filter to block out WTS/WTB/WTT in general with a message directing the spammer to go to auction house and/or a in game moderator enforcing the rule of using the auction house.

But how in the world would you create a filter list that would contain all the possible ways to say that you want to sell or trade. Think of how e-mail spammers use mispellings and phonetically spelled words to get around the same sort of filters and into your e-mail in-box. A person would not have to be very clever to come up with alternate ways. And if the filter was created with really strict rules it would end up filtering legit conversations. I'll never forget - years ago - when an AOL filter blocked access to a group that was discussing breast cancer.

no you are right, i have never tried to form a group for defend drok and defend kryta in major cities, cause defend droks is easily done with henchies in citadel which doesnt have alot of spamming short of IDS groups and you form groups for defend kryta in bergen or toa, which bergen has almost no trading going on, and toa sans-favor does not have alot of spamming.