Novel Way to Combat Gold-Seller Spam

It's either sell their kidneys on the street or gold farm.

/signed

That's actually not a good idea. Bots can be programmed to whisper people automatically as soon as they enter a district (they actually do exist, I've had it happen to me in game).

Edit: Then sell your kidney! You will save a life instead of grief others and ruin an economy.

/signed

very good idea. To bad anet doesnt wanna race

~the rat~

/signed now those gold sellers pm you....i was doing eternal grove and one of em pmed me...wth lol

If I can pull in 6 digits a year like that woman from Second Life for selling in-game items for real life cash, I'll take it. Standard capitalism, there's 2 types of people, the exploiters and the exploited, I'd rather be the first.

anyway, to OP
good idea, but they would just change their URL's, but they would lose business
/signed, anyway

/signed

good idea i don't have much else except that i for once agree with kanyatta and that scares me more then a little O_o

/signed
great idea, it could be really good to reduce spam and profit for the farmers, as for tell bots, lets petition for an unlimited size ignore list.
kidney less gold farmers sounds like a great advancement for humanity.


Actually when WoW started banning for goldselling spam, this 1 site made gnomes with all their accounts and had them jump from the zeppelin to spell out the site's name on the ground with dead gnomes.

Way to be racist...

Disable PM capability on trial accounts.

Companies whose only business is to create email anti-spam filters still can't pick everything up. Do you actually think a video game company can just throw something together to adequately filter this type of stuff?

Wake up! It will never work effectively, as the means to bypass such filters are easier to come by than the filters themselves.

A better option would be to do things like require a series of "type in what you see in the graphic" boxes in order to get a trial account, then consider adding in random "gm tests" - where you have to type an answer to a simple question or get kicked out of the game. This would eliminate bots and at least slow down gold farmers. Those challenges would only exist in the major towns & outposts.

You either misunderstood the OP's proposal or read it too quickly: it's about hashing (****) the gold-sellers' website urls. They can't easily bypass this, and there's no valid comparison with spam emails. Filters can be bypassed but this means that their ads will be less effective, thus less RMT in the game.

As I said before, at best it's going to decrease the problem, at worst it won't change a thing. So it's benefitial isn't it?

Not easily doable without limiting player's gameplay. Already discussed in other threads on this forum.

If there's one easy thing that Anet could do, it's this filter! I hope more people will come here and sign. We should have 20 pages of /signed as in the mini-polar-bear threads!

None of these poses a significant technical hurdle. It's trivially easy to design a filter that disregards arbitrary spaces between characters. It's only marginally harder to make a filter that ignores any arbitrary string between characters. Insofar as "leet" is limited to a very few ciphers, it's also pretty easy to make the filter catch that too.
In short, coming up with a filter that, when given "website.com" as a blocked string, stops: "website.com," "www.website.com," "w eb s i t e . co m," "w XX e XX b YY s YY i XYX t YXY e X .com," and even "vv 3 |3 5 1 + 3 . ( 0 ^^" is something a competent university student of computer science could do. (I might add that those last two examples are so near to unreadable that business would be lost if that's what spammers were forced to rely on.)

The idea is that it's more costly to register a new url and host a new site on it than to put the new url on the banned list. It's an arms race, but, for once, it's an arms race that favors a-net.

That would solve the problem of gold-spam PMs, however
1. It would still leave the gold-spammers in control of local chat, and
2. It would probably impoverish the experience of legitimate users of trial keys, who I would presume are often helped along by friends in-game and might like to be able to whisper them. (Exp User: "What dist are you in?" Trial User: <you cannot send private messages because this is a trial account> Exp User: "What dist are you in? It's in the top left of the screen.")

Oh lets copy the system from WoW then
With a WoW Trial Account you can't whisper to random people, but you can reply if you get whispered. I'm not sure how it works with players, which you add to your friendlist though. There could be restrictions, too.

Besides, I think gold sellers won't dare to spam their advertisment into the local chat, because that draws much more attention to them (unless they are really desperate). More than whispering to players that might put them on their ignore list and can't be bothered to send a support ticket.
And I think A.Net doesn't record how often you send the same message over the Whisper-Channel. The local channel ist another story.

/signed btw

Good. That solves #2. Now we've got to get them out of public chat.

Have you been to great temple of balthazaar recently? You can't go 5 sec without a PM spam and a load of public chat spam.

I was wondering if anyone but me is going to wake up and realize that nothing has been done about gold sellers for almost 3 years, unless you count loot scaling and farming code, which hurts the legitimate players more than the botters, imo. I haven't heard of any mass account bannings like WoW had about a year ago. 20,000 accounts were banned by WoW for automated actions and such, and nothing even close to that scale has been done for Guild Wars. Anything significant like that would definitely be big news. Although, it's hard when gold sellers use trial accounts. Maybe if they made it so you could only use one trail account per IP or something like that?

Basically, nothing has been done about this issue, and I can't imagine anything being done in the near future.

That is my personal experience. I have never seen any gold seller who spams the local chat of the Temple, German district that is. But thats not the usual place I hang around.

Mankind will never get rid of certain "diseases". If a demand for gold exists, there will be also gold sellers.

A.Net bans accounts, too. But they usually don't brag about this like Blizzard does.

Scrambling anything that resembles a website address will solve this problem.

Of course, your drift-net will have bycatches like www.guildwars.com www.guildwarsguru.com and gw.gamewikis.org and guild forum websites you might want to tell a new player.

have URLs only appear in Guild Chat and between Friends (is that possible?)

You mean it leaves them in a literal war of words with the preteen cybersex culture that exists in GtoB? Fine by me.

NOTE TO USERS

Could all users please take note of the Sardelac Sanitarium sticky which asks users to not simply post "/signed". Any attempt to by-pass the 12 character limit will lead to post deletion.

Repeat offenders will be noted.

/signed

A way I have been getting around those gold sellin mooks from whispering me when im in a town is to put up my "do not disturb".