Trade spam enforcement

For those who don't know, the update of May 23 added an (unmentioned) feature to the chat system: any message that contains the words "wtb" or "wts" in isolation gets automatically shunted into the trade channel. (guildwiki has more info on the specifics.)

Granted, this is a very minimal filter and is easily evaded, but it is still a filter that must be consciously defeated. It is the first concrete codification of channel usage policies in-game. No longer can someone claim to have sent a WTB/WTS trade message to the local chat channel by accident.

My question is: will there be any enforcement now of channel usage policies? Can I report people who evade this filter by bowdlerizing WTS/WTB? More importantly, should I expect my reports to be taken seriously?

how are u gonna report people that evade it,
theres so much people that will do it and Anet wont take it so seroiusly anways

Hoo. F**king. Ray.

It's not going to stop people adding a number to the end of their channel or as you say, evasion, but it's a ruddy start.

Up next, personal filters and an ignore list that holds more than 10 people.

Just to illustrate, this is the result of the filter (LA dis 1):



Did anyone at Arena Net expect the outcome to be any different? Even the trade bots have adapted.

I'm seeing this as a start, just like scroll improvement in inventory system.
Tweaking couple months and before anyone notices, we have no trade spam in local chat & in-game auction house

I might be little bit too positive though

What a world we live in.

Adaption, who would have thought.

ANet needs to make it a bannable policy not to abuse global chat for trading items (and allow reporting of global trade spammers). Maybe institute a temp ban of a certain period or something. After ANet lays down the law on a few "examples", word will spread and global chat will get cleaned up pretty damn quickly IMO. This is a rough road to take, but it's probably the only way that will work.

Filters won't work in the long run. People who circumvent filters are more annoying than the original WTB/WTS global spammers, because they now know ANet doesn't want them to do it, yet still are. Off with their heads.

You can read my thoughts at: http://gws.echoshift.net

Worth reading in my (biased) opinion.

We(me and a couple friends) had an argument with some people who insisted on using WTSell etc. in the all-chat, claiming it was "for trading". They never answered when I asked them what the trade chat was for...

God, I wish I'd taken screens of that.

Hey at least they're trying, albeit seemingly not very hard. Sellers adapt. Some in game moderators would be nice...

And that was quite amusing robrobrob.

An in-game Savio! o.o

/rant on

People seem to take this crap way too seriously.

Let's put it this way....there is no easy way to sell anything in GW. There is no auction house. Players need to adapt in some way.

Everyone (AFAIK) turns off trade chat.

Thus, in order to sell anything, players must sell in the local chat.

Ideally, players will restrict selling advertisements to LA dist 1 (for example). Going to dist 4 to sell something shouldn't happen.

So, the optimal answer is - let the buyers and sellers live in district 1 of LA. Boom, there is your friggin auction house. Want to get a group together to do a mission? Fine, go to dist 2. don't want to see trade messages? Fine, go to dist 2.

Whatever.

Just quit acting like whiny babies over this issue. You have a gripe about the whole trading issue, not just people spamming WTS in local chat, so please adapt so that traders have SOMEPLACE to go to trade.

Sheesh.

LA has been the defacto trading place since the game came out. Learn to compromise a bit.

Out of purely intellectual curiousity I have taken screenshots the last 15 minutes worth of trade spammers in Kaineng American 1 and submitted a report to Arena Net's support site. Let's see how it goes.

Maybe... players who turn off trade chat do it because they don't want to buy anything someone else has to sell...

So, they should have the power to do that.

And something should exist to keep people who sell outside of the established means of selling from doing so.

YAY!!! Finally, the trader spammers got a hit - even if it's a small one that's easily circumvented.

I like it not because I have great hopes that it will stop those people from polluting local chat, but because it sends a clear message to those annoying jerks that the community doesn't condone what they do.

Now, drastic punishment measures against those who try to circumvent the redirection have to follow. Perma-Ban them on first offense, I'd say!

PS: Mimi, people who turn off trade chat off do it for a reason. I will never trade with anyone at any time for any reason - that's why I have trade chat off all the time. Is that really so hard to understand that no matter how hard you spam, harrass and annoy me, there is no way you can make me buy anything from you??? But people will always find excuses for violating rules, all criminals do that, too.

That is just so sad... lol!

A step in the right direction, good.

Much better if it was user customizable tho, and not forced so the filter would be actually useful and something you can't go around of, as people would adapt their filters along the people who adapt going around that filter.

I miss AO where you got the stuffings flamed out from you if you posted WTS/WTB on the OOC chat channels.

Maybe that is because those people aren't trying to buy anything? When I'm looking to buy something, I turn on the trade channel, and ONLY buy from people spamming on the correct channel

Just add a real way to buy and sell goods This is a more important issue than just spam problems.

You give a friend a trail key to play Guild Wars. He logs on while you are at work or busy with guildies to play the game. He goes to find a group and start his adventure!

What does he see?
WT s
WT b
WTS
Selling
Buying

SPAM

he logs out frustrated seeing that the game is full of nothing but spammers who use local and assumes the game is just a big farmer fest.

This does not put the best face of the game forward! It makes GW look dumb.

If you want to be considered a POWERHOUSE like a certain OTHER MMO your going to have to outdo some of the features it offers.

Namley a centralized trading network that is fast, intuative, stable, Ebay and farmer proof, and dupe proof.

We understand that Anet is trying to make it harder to for massive amounts of gold to change hands in order to promote a stable economy.

Adding more gold sinks that would effect farmers more than players. Like a zone tax if you try to enter the same mission or zone more than 5 times in a row you get popped for 500 gold to enter every time after 5. This would have little effect on serious players, but could help slow farming.

Other ideas are to add more stance and enchant breaks. Adding Disrupting chop to the minotuars in Elona would shut that farm down in a matter of hours.

It is a challange but it needs to be done and has been needing to be done for a long long long time. In fact the Frst release of the game should never have been released without it.

Quoted for truth.