A proposed solution to end credit spammers once and for all

[Zaina]

Why not just have an automated function tied into spam reporting?

 

If <however many> people report a person for spam then that person is silenced for a period of time. GMs can review these reports to make sure that there aren't any guilds out there conspiring to silence innocent players, and take actions against any such people that abuse the system. If they find that the reports were valid they can take the final step of banning the account if it still exists.

 

No individuals given the power, but the community as a whole can play it's part.

 

Has to be a decently large number, though. Spamming might still be viable on low population planets, but those are low population planets... Spammers aren't going to get a lot of business advertising to the 12 people on Voss or whatever.

 

=============

 

The best way to get rid of them is to not do any business with them, but I can't control what other people do.

 

Heck, if the players that give these clowns money would invest that cash into cartel packs and products and re-sell them to other players they might find that they can get many of the credits with very little of the identity theft and account security risk.

 

There's more room for abuse that way. Too little people and it can be abused heavily, too many and you run the risk of not enough people bothering to report the guy.

[RiVaN_]

Credit Spamers:

Working as intended.

[teclado]

Why not just have an automated function tied into spam reporting?

 

If <however many> people report a person for spam then that person is silenced for a period of time.

Yeah, I actually mentioned this in one of the other credit spammer threads about a week ago. Some dude (?) thought it was a terrible idea because of the potential for abuse. I proposed solutions for negating abuse, dude thought it was too complicated. Since somebody else brought it up...I was thinking that a certain number of "unique" reports would be required (e.g. not all in same guild), keep a copy of the alleged spam text, review the text in the case of a silencing happening, punish those who abuse the system. Viola, done. But nope, some dude on the internet says it's too complicated, so my argument is invalid. Also something about my hair being a bird? I dunno.

 

With all that said, I do believe that the OP suggestion is a good one.

[Daewan]

I'd have to see some proof here. I mean its totally possible, but only a few years back I was able to be a volunteer for a crappy Facebook game and I didn't get paid or expect to. Maybe the rules are different for smaller games like that. IDK. If they do need to pay the volunteers, I'm sure they would start with offering cartel coins if that's allowed.

 

Well, there is the UO suit mentioned here: http://www.salon.com/2000/09/21/ultima_volunteers/ and the AOL Community Leaders lawsuit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program that sets a precedent that would discourage any modern game from relying on volunteers to do anything that would affect another player's account.

 

The OP's suggestion is basically completely untenable in modern MMOs. One wrong ban or report, and the entire system costs more than it could ever save. Heck there was an actual employee that failed to do his job properly in SWTOR and banned someone inappropriately, and it got the entire CS department of the time wiped out.

 

Modern players simply can't be trusted with that kind of responsibility. Take a look at the forums for today, even. How long do you think some of the posters with unpopular opinions would last before some sufficiently aggrieved person found a way to get the volunteer brigade to send out a ban?

 

And one mistake is all it takes to destroy the whole system. Imagine how swiftly the forum would turn on the idea of volunteers once the flaws in the system are exposed - and they will be. Rather than waste time on volunteers, I hope they instead focus on hiring decent support personnel and filling up the ranks again. I dream of a day when a GM or mod is logged in and accessible online 24/7/365, on every server - just like the old days of Final Fantasy XI.

 

tl;dr: I wouldn't trust anyone here with passing judgment on anyone else. Including me.

Edited January 22, 2015 by Daewan

[Zaina]

Well, there is the UO suit mentioned here: http://www.salon.com/2000/09/21/ultima_volunteers/ and the AOL Community Leaders lawsuit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program that sets a precedent that would discourage any modern game from relying on volunteers to do anything that would affect another player's account.

 

The OP's suggestion is basically completely untenable in modern MMOs. One wrong ban or report, and the entire system costs more than it could ever save. Heck there was an actual employee that failed to do his job properly in SWTOR and banned someone inappropriately, and it got the entire CS department of the time wiped out.

 

Modern players simply can't be trusted with that kind of responsibility. Take a look at the forums for today, even. How long do you think some of the posters with unpopular opinions would last before some sufficiently aggrieved person found a way to get the volunteer brigade to send out a ban?

 

And one mistake is all it takes to destroy the whole system. Imagine how swiftly the forum would turn on the idea of volunteers once the flaws in the system are exposed - and they will be. Rather than waste time on volunteers, I hope they instead focus on hiring decent support personnel and filling up the ranks again. I dream of a day when a GM or mod is logged in and accessible online 24/7/365, on every server - just like the old days of Final Fantasy XI.

 

tl;dr: I wouldn't trust anyone here with passing judgment on anyone else. Including me.

 

I think the proposed idea and the UO suit are two different beasts. My biggest reason for that thought is that this system was both in place AND working just a few short years ago, with no legal backlash at all.

 

Doing the job of a community service rep and being a volunteer who's only job is to play mute whack-a-mole with credit spammers don't seem the same thing. Plus there's no compensation and it feels like THAT is where the legal issues came in.

[Andryah]

Maybe just give them all slot machines (post patch) and let them go broke spinning it.

[Andryah]

I'd have to see some proof here. I mean its totally possible, but only a few years back I was able to be a volunteer for a crappy Facebook game and I didn't get paid or expect to. Maybe the rules are different for smaller games like that. IDK. If they do need to pay the volunteers, I'm sure they would start with offering cartel coins if that's allowed.

 

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/04/uo_lawsuit_sett.html EA sued

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program AoL sued

 

http://forums.archeagegame.com/archive/index.php/t-95112.html? references Sony getting sued as well.

 

There are others, but first two are the most famous. Basically, it is against labor law for corporations to tap and use unpaid workers. You must pay them a wage, in real localized currency. Meaning.... though you could probably get away with it if you were a small boutique studio.... the big corporations are not going to touch it with a 10 foot pole now days.

Edited January 22, 2015 by Andryah

[Bryanseven]

Sounds like a great idea if legal could work out the details.

 

Alternatively...

 

The game could auto kick anyone with roiewhjnfhjio or ghysjughg and the like as a name.

 

The game could send a "capcha" style message to anyone sending more than a specified number of mails in game and revoke mail privileges until answered.

 

Same as above but would occur when X number of reports have been sent about the player. ( Has some griefing potential but could result in a ban if abused)

 

Or, and my personal favorite...Hire 3 dedicated spam gm's to work an 8 hour shift each. All they would do is have the game running on all servers and pop from one to another to silence accounts when their software tools sent alerts. Hell they could be pro active and spend some time on the fleets monitoring gen chat. How much of a heads up would this have given the dev's on recent exploits if this guy was already in place?

 

I'm not saying this would completely stop the gold sellers...they will always find a way, but it would DRASTICLY cut down on them.

[Nommaz]

If people didn't buy credits there would not be a market, if there was no market there wouldn't be gold spammers..

This has to be one of the easiest games to make credits in, its crazy there is even a market here.

 

But that being said just a blanket ban of key words in chat like *.com certain names of business that constantly pop up.

Allowing a badboy type spam addon (not opening a whole addon debate here)

 

And actually ban these people, I see the same people spamming days on end on my alts, oh and that brings me to, a global ignore list.

[theITfactor]

Other games use this system successfully. One that comes to mind is the "Player Moderator" system employed by Jagex for RS. They hand-pick certain people, give them a shiny silver crown next to their character names, and allow them to temporarily mute players for a period of time.

[Kalfear]

I see others posted links and such for what I was referring to.

There was another one filed against Verant (Makers of EQ originally) back in day as well

 

Make sure you thank the nice posters that posted links for you because I certainly wasn't going to do web searches for you. Its a pretty easy google to find this info.

 

And yeah, some small time facebook app game might get away with "volunteers" but in the land of MMORPGs, the big studios will be hammered hard if they tried to skirt the employment laws knowingly (and they do know it, thats why you never see in game GMs anymore since years and years and years before WOW even hit market).

 

Frankly I was shocked to see EA using "volunteer moderators" on web forums here prior to launch but they must have found a way around law in regards to forums.

 

But in the end, as I said above, its a minimum wage job so any company could have in game GMs for almost no over head if they truly wanted to.

they just choose not to sadly.

[Fidelicatessen]

There is a very simple, effective way to get rid of credit spammers:

 

EVERYONE (100% of the player base) needs to stop buying credits from the sites they are advertising.

 

Is this unrealistic? Absolutely. But so is assuming that there is any way to stop this $2 billion+/year industry. If they can sell the credits, they will, because their profit margins are astronomical. They will find a way. Unless there is no market!

 

You might say that it's unrealistic to expect 100% of the player base to stop buying credits. And yet, the more successful a game is, the more credit farmers/spammers will make sure that there are credits to sell. The more folks buy credits, the more important it is to ensure that there are spammers out there gathering business.

 

Whining about it is so pointlessly pointless it makes baby jebus cry.

 

If you really want to do some good, design an MMO that takes credit farmers into account from the ground up. Get some perspective on the problem: read Cory Doctorow's FTW or Neal Stephenson's REAMDE.

 

Trying to stop credit farming/spamming is like trying to stop people from selling drugs: there is just too much profit to be had because the market is too deep.

 

Good luck tilting windmills.

[Mithros]

There's more room for abuse that way. Too little people and it can be abused heavily, too many and you run the risk of not enough people bothering to report the guy.

 

More room for abuse? How can too few people abuse it "heavily"? If there aren't enough reports then there is no silencing possible. End of sentence. Full stop. Too few people can not abuse the system.

The spammers can just spam away on the worlds where there are too few players to deal with the consequences. So it's just like it is now, yeah? Except the spammers don't much spam away on those worlds because they want to advertise to as large a group of players as possible.

 

And if there are "too many" and they decide not to report the spammers then that is on them. If there are 50 reports required within X much time and out of the 100 people on fleet at the time only 30 decide to report the spammer then I guess the majority enjoy the spam, right? So what's the problem again?

 

And all of this is ultimately reviewed by someone. If there is someone out there abusing the system then they will be found out and they will have to deal with the consequences.

 

If the only thing this does is remove spammers from fleet chat, capital worlds, and Nar Shaddaa then that is stil a good thing.

 

The majority of the players won't have to listen to the spam on the places where they spend the majority of their time.

The spammers will be advertising to a smaller crowd, hopefully cutting into their sales and possibly driving them away entirely.

 

If nothing else changes it should force the spammers to spend more time creating new characters and accounts as long as the players will just report the spammers when they see them.

 

They could even create a new "report gold seller" option to keep players out of it entirely, even if I think that the guy thet feels it necessary to spam LFG or items for sale is every bit as deserving of some quiet time to ponder the error of their ways.

 

If people didn't buy credits there would not be a market, if there was no market there wouldn't be gold spammers..

This has to be one of the easiest games to make credits in, its crazy there is even a market here.

 

But that being said just a blanket ban of key words in chat like *.com certain names of business that constantly pop up.

Allowing a badboy type spam addon (not opening a whole addon debate here)

 

And actually ban these people, I see the same people spamming days on end on my alts, oh and that brings me to, a global ignore list.

 

Because they won't just type "Site,com" or "Site dot kom" instead?

 

But in the meanwhile, if you want to tell someone to go to Dulfy.net or SWTOR.com, you will have to make a workaround, too, and the legitimate players will be the ones having to re-type things because they won't think about it..

Edited January 22, 2015 by Mithros

[Zaina]

More room for abuse? How can too few people abuse it "heavily"? If there aren't enough reports then there is no silencing possible. End of sentence. Full stop. Too few people can not abuse the system.

 

Too few people can certainly abuse that. What is to stop someone from gathering their guild and having them mass report someone that's pissing them off? How is it any different than the original system proposed, except for the fact that this power is now in the hands of the masses instead of carefully selected individuals?

[Heavensrun]

Actually the best way to defeat credit spammers is to drive the prices of all items down to the point where everyone can buy them with minimal effort. This makes it so that credit spammers don't make a profit by spamming and getting people to buy their stuff.

 

Real question is, why do we have items in the game that cost tons of credits? Do those items create more gameplay for people, or do they restrict the gameplay of people? The whole economy system in MMOs is just plain flawed.

 

Somebody here has never taken an economics course.

[marzakk]

I don't see why volunteers wouldn't work. If there were allowed volunteers being moderated by a few BW/EA employees. If the volunteers are given a specific mission for ONLY the gold bots/spammers, it could work. When they are flagged for spam/harassment, have the volunteers receive a message with the previous 10 chat messages sent from the alleged spammer with time stamps. The volunteers can then send a message to the offender and if a response is not received then they can "mute" them for a specified amount of time. The next issue is, you can ignore the character, why not be able to ignore the account. After X amounts of complaints, have the account banned from the game. It would all require a ToS change, and the only real complaints would be from the spammers themselves.

[Mithros]

Too few people can certainly abuse that. What is to stop someone from gathering their guild and having them mass report someone that's pissing them off? How is it any different than the original system proposed, except for the fact that this power is now in the hands of the masses instead of carefully selected individuals?

 

If a group of people large enough to silence someone all report them, then that is not "too few" by any definition of the word.

 

You act like one "carefully selected" person is the answer, but that one person could decide that they are leaving and never coming back and proceed to silence everyone that dares chat.

 

You think that a guild will get 50-100 people or however many it would take to all decide at the same time that they don't care if they get banned and have a permanent file placed on record for abusing the system?

 

The less power any individual has the less likely that power is to be abused.

 

You think that the chosen ones would never silence someone playing the silly "Jawa game" or expressing an opinion that they don't like? That they might not do that and then "un-silence" them later to try and pass it all off as a mistake?

 

Hard to discipline that person if they acknowledge and correct their "mistake" isn't it? Even if the person so affected had their play experience diminished for several minutes.

 

One person with the sole authority or needing 50-100 people to all put forth the effort?

 

One person that can try and pass it all off as a "mistake" and grief anyone that speaks if they want to or 50-100 people that will have to accept and answer for their actions every time someone is silenced as a result of them?

 

The mere fact that you feel the need to give the lone player an out speaks to the risks of giving one person the power.

[Icykill_]

If Bio sold "credit boxes" on the GTN... That would also reduce the credit spammers as it would put them out of business... Then people who want to pay to play... Can do so ledgitmately... Sure there is a downside to the game economy... But the people buying these credits from the spammers are doing the same thing anyway... Why Bio or any MMO for that matter hasn't tried this is beyond me... First they could be making more money themselves, while getting rid of one of the most annoying aspects of MMO gaming

[Zaina]

If a group of people large enough to silence someone all report them, then that is not "too few" by any definition of the word.

 

You act like one "carefully selected" person is the answer, but that one person could decide that they are leaving and never coming back and proceed to silence everyone that dares chat.

 

You think that a guild will get 50-100 people or however many it would take to all decide at the same time that they don't care if they get banned and have a permanent file placed on record for abusing the system?

 

The less power any individual has the less likely that power is to be abused.

 

You think that the chosen ones would never silence someone playing the silly "Jawa game" or expressing an opinion that they don't like? That they might not do that and then "un-silence" them later to try and pass it all off as a mistake?

 

Hard to discipline that person if they acknowledge and correct their "mistake" isn't it? Even if the person so affected had their play experience diminished for several minutes.

 

One person with the sole authority or needing 50-100 people to all put forth the effort?

 

One person that can try and pass it all off as a "mistake" and grief anyone that speaks if they want to or 50-100 people that will have to accept and answer for their actions every time someone is silenced as a result of them?

 

The mere fact that you feel the need to give the lone player an out speaks to the risks of giving one person the power.

 

Where are you getting the idea of a lone person? Every mention of this I have used the plural form. It wouldn't be ONE person. It'd be many. If only just for the fact that some servers are active 24/7 and need people from different timezones.

 

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea of a single person, but its wrong.

[bitshifter]

a simple effective way to get rid of the symptom and make lives easier for players on fleet would be to implement a legacy ignore feature. once done, its good for all your toons no matter who you log onto. although this doesn't solve the actual problem it could be a decent band aid in the meantime. I really don't see why BW cant have just ONE single employee spend just two hours logging onto a copied toon on fleet on every server for both imp and republic and with dev abilities to just immediately ban the spammer and all other toons associated with that account. seriously, just one person could do this. I would do it for some CC or some special title or something.

[TUXs]

-Be 18+ years of age

-Be active in both the game AND the forums

-Be in good standing, without any prior infractions

Oh come on...NO infractions?! That's overly harsh...moderation here hasn't always been what it is now. These forums are generally a "fun" place to spend time (these days)...in the past, BM (Before Musco), they weren't quite as forgiving.

[Darth_Wicked]

Oh come on...NO infractions?! That's overly harsh...moderation here hasn't always been what it is now. These forums are generally a "fun" place to spend time (these days)...in the past, BM (Before Musco), they weren't quite as forgiving.

 

He pretty much killed his own idea at birth.

[TUXs]

He pretty much killed his own idea at birth.

 

ikr?! Active on the forums without infractions?! HA! May as well throw in something about owning a unicorn too

 

Although...I do like the proposed idea. How they go about selecting people to carry it out is up to them. It worked well in SWG, it would work well here too I believe.

[branmakmuffin]

Giving players any kind of administrative and/or moderator-like power is a bad idea. Favoritism and griefing would ensue. Look how quickly TOR's AC rep thing died.

[TedderUkan]

My ignore list is crowded with bots spamming general chat advertising credits for dollars. My ability to ignore real people is shot. (not that ignoring players is a good thing, but an unfortunate necessity) Every time I log in I have to ignore 2 to 3 credit spammers, and I have to do that for all my alts. I report all credit spammers as well through the chat options. But they're cranking out more spammers than you guys are deleting them. Now if I want to ignore people who are actually players I have to choose and remember which players just offended me and which ones loot ninja'd/trolled/couldn't hack it in an operation/flashpoint. Add to this the annoyance of having to ignore the same 3 spammers on all of my alts every time I log in. Could we get a legacy ignore option? Also perhaps could you do some serious revamping of your character/account creation system so the spammers aren't capable of making so many accounts so quickly?

 

Perhaps you could require a bank account be provided in the creation of new SWTOR accounts. Free to play or not, if you have a bank account on file then the same spammer is screwed from ever creating another player account without having to open multiple bank accounts. This also provides another excellent benefit. No child will be able to access the game without implied parental knowledge and consent.

 

But honestly, at the very least we need the option to place someone on ignore for our entire account. That way we don't have to ignore the same spammer a plethora of times every time we log into an alt.