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Bio, Please Act Quickly And Aggressively Against Credit Selling Spammers


finelinebob

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Guess you missed the first round of gold seller bannings? They happened en masse before, presumably with IP blocking. Andryah is correct in that they came down very hard on them last time, just took a while.

As an Early Start veteran, I can confirm that TOR never had gold sellers.

 

They did have credit sellers for a while though.

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As an Early Start veteran, I can confirm that TOR never had gold sellers.

 

They did have credit sellers for a while though.

 

Don't be naive. TOR has had credit sellers all along. The only thing bans did was force some to re-start.

 

Yes, they're still here but they're hurting because players can now do $ for Credits without having to dirty themselves by dealing with them.

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Don't be naive. TOR has had credit sellers all along. The only thing bans did was force some to re-start.

 

Yes, they're still here but they're hurting because players can now do $ for Credits without having to dirty themselves by dealing with them.

 

He was making a joke because swtor dosn't have "gold" sellers because we don't have gold in game, the currency is credits

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I rate the current customer "service" an F-.

 

You report and ignore them and they continue on for hours on end - because you know when you log on your alts and again report and ignore. Ignore needs to be account-wide please.

 

We had a guy on the Bastion spewing racist/anti-semitic/homophobic/vile profanity-laden slurs in general chat for 2 days. A ton of people reported him and on and on he continued. I finally looked up the phone number for BW and had to make several attempts to weed through their difficult phone interface to finally speak with a human being in the Tech Support department. They escalated my ticket and the player was soon silenced.

 

Had a bug with the HK part not dropping off of HK in the normal mode False Emperor (I think it was that one) and a guildee filed a ticket and they closed it saying they only were helping people with class-related issues.

 

Just pretty fail. They need to learn from SOE what word-of-mouth can mean to an MMO.

Edited by pooks
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Last night on The Shadowlands Server you could hardly read general chat due to the massive amount of credit sellers spamming advertisements for their scummy websites. Lots of people, myself included, reported them, but seemingly no one is reading or acting on those reports because it went on all night.

 

Please do something.

 

TBH, it's next to impossible to read general forums on Shadowlands server for a number of reasons. The amount of inappropriate comments alone drowns anything out. Credit spamming is an improvement to the overall quality of Shadowlands general forums. :rolleyes:

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The "gold" sellers are clogging up fleet and it gets quite annyoing having to ignore each new one on every different toon you log into. There should be something in place that if say 50 different people report one person for spam, that person has their chat privileges removed and will have to contact customer service to have the restored. This should be an automatic process as currently, if I chose to not ignore the spammer, they go on for hours and hours without any repercussions. I have even seen the same person spamming 8 hours later.

 

In addition, sending a spam report should also put them on your ignore list without having to click on their name again.

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Congrats to all the people who fought so hard to get F2P going. Now live with the consequences.

 

It's more likely these "Spammers" are corrupted accounts rather than Free to Play accounts. The Free to Play chat funcality is very limited preventing mass spam, whispers, etc. However, a perfered or supscibed account doesn't have as many limitations. So a corrupted account is not the same as a Free to Play account. And yes credit spam is bad, but to bash Free to Play as the root of all evil is foolish. As many have said credit spammers were here before Free to Play.

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It's more likely these "Spammers" are corrupted accounts rather than Free to Play accounts.

 

I doubt it. At least the ones I saw were not spamming chat as fast as you'd expect from someone without chat restrictions.

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It's more likely these "Spammers" are corrupted accounts rather than Free to Play accounts. The Free to Play chat funcality is very limited preventing mass spam, whispers, etc. However, a perfered or supscibed account doesn't have as many limitations. So a corrupted account is not the same as a Free to Play account. And yes credit spam is bad, but to bash Free to Play as the root of all evil is foolish. As many have said credit spammers were here before Free to Play.

 

As someone who once bought gold in a few different games I know a bit about how the system works and your wrong. There are 2 ways these companies can get the gold they sell the first and least impactfull way is they set up a system that allows people to sell gold to them and pay you real cash for it, the second way which I don't think we have even seen the impact of yet is setting up macros to farm out areas and sending the gold to another account to hold it. Now the last game I bought gold in was rift and the people who I bought from had an office in china, had about 20 different computers in that office that would spam their message in game all day long or create a new account when they were caught, while 1 designated account was used to finalize transactions with buyers in the game. The problem is that a few things need to be done, first off IP bans need to entire areas but this cuts potential players out of the game. Secondly they need to reduce the amount of credits a free or premium player can acquire, but this will lead to a feeding frenzy on the forums from those groups. Thirdly the restrictions on chat need to be harsher, again feeding frenzy. Lastly the company itself should be going out to actively try to buy credits in order to find and identify the websites selling and have the legal teams chase them down or IP ban the neighborhoods where this is all originating. The last idea is exactly how the record companies deal with music file sharing, they hire kids to download specific songs and record the ip addresses of everyone connected to a specific file and send the legal team out to do their job.

 

Back when this game started there was a surge in gold sellers, most of us will remember getting the 1 credit mail adverting a site to buy from, Bioware did a great job of shutting those accounts down but with it so easy to create an account now you can expect the same thing and worse. Back when Acclaim was still putting out 2Moons the general chat would fly by so damn fast you could barely read anything. And considering how much money there is to be made from selling gold in games, if a broker spends 5 bucks to get a permanent premium account forever they are making a great investment. Bioware has dropped the ball by giving in too much away to the free players and they will learn from this hopefully and readjust things to be more restrictive if they are smart. Fact of the matter if your not paying for the game then you should not have a voice in the f2p side of things.

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I doubt it. At least the ones I saw were not spamming chat as fast as you'd expect from someone without chat restrictions.

 

I agree, they're using /say to circumvent the restrictions and spam every second on our server. It makes chat unreadable. The character is level 7, the earliest you can take the shuttle to the fleet. Highly likely that this is not a corrupted but an F2P account.

Edited by KyaniteD
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I agree, they're using /say to circumvent the restrictions and spam every second on our server. It makes chat unreadable.

 

This seems like a low-effort solution. Assign 1 CSR with ban rights to chain-log into servers. Visit each side's fleet. Swing the ban-hammer. On the account, obviously, not the toon. Move on to the next fleet, then the next server.

 

Rinse & repeat that for a few hours.

 

That's one body for a few hours. Surely EA has THAT much staff?

 

These spammers need to take time to get toons to fleet so they can spam. If they get shut down daily, they'll stop. Or at least slow down.

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how about EA just moderate the game

 

EA does moderate the game on the only issue they care about. If you're a subscriber and don't pay your bill, they shut down your access. If you're F2P, they put their shackles on you and restrict what you can do. Do you really think that EA's decision makers care if credit sellers spam in their games if those sellers are paying for access? Do you think they care enough, if those spammers are staying within the limits of what a free account can do, to put in the extra effort and expense to stop them?

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EA does moderate the game on the only issue they care about. If you're a subscriber and don't pay your bill, they shut down your access. If you're F2P, they put their shackles on you and restrict what you can do. Do you really think that EA's decision makers care if credit sellers spam in their games if those sellers are paying for access? Do you think they care enough, if those spammers are staying within the limits of what a free account can do, to put in the extra effort and expense to stop them?

 

Yes, I do. And let's not pretend that they don't, either. I've already seen spammers shut down on my server.

 

As per the Rules of Conduct you may not:

 

Buy, sell, transfer or auction (or host or facilitate the ability to allow others to buy, sell or auction) , or offer to transfer, sell or auction, or buy or accept any offer to transfer, sell or auction, any game Account or game Content, including (without limitation) game characters, character attributes, items, objects, currency, credits or copyrighted material, or any other intellectual property owned or controlled by the Services, or its our licensors, without first obtaining our express written permission, nor may you encourage or induce any other player to participate in such prohibited transaction(s).

 

And it's not just about the Rules of Conduct, either. Do you really think that BioWare/EA wants people to purchase credits from these spammers? Of course they don't -- these people can and will have an impact on revenues at BioWare/EA.

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Last night on The Shadowlands Server you could hardly read general chat due to the massive amount of credit sellers spamming advertisements for their scummy websites. Lots of people, myself included, reported them, but seemingly no one is reading or acting on those reports because it went on all night.

 

Please do something.

 

Welcome to Free 2 Play.....

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This is becoming a growing concern. For example, on Jung Ma, the credit spammers have gone from spamming with the same account every opportunity, to changing character names every hour, then half hour, and now they're even whispering random people on Fleet.

 

Help us Bioware...you're our only hope!

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the credit spammers have gone from spamming with the same account every opportunity, to changing character names every hour, then half hour, and now they're even whispering random people on Fleet.

 

This is a clear sign that they are being actively hunted and purged by Bioware. If they stay out in the open day in and day out for weeks at at time. then you can conclude there is no attention to address them.

 

Soon they will be back to sporadic mail spam to random characters and that will dwindle off as well probably.

Edited by Andryah
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Having credits sold for cartel coins I think would result in disaster. Cartel packs work simply because it's a gamble, and there is no guarantee you will get your money's worth which protects the price value stability for rares. If they sold credits for RL cash, the GTN would crash harder than the 1929 stock plummet.
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