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Quarterly Producer Letter for Q2 2024 ×

The Credit Selling Ring Bust Worked! Result? 150% Increase in Credit Spam. Why?


Papazmurf

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On the subject of "live moderators" Would any of you who suggested it be willing to sit in at a screen watching general chat ALL DAY LONG not doing ANYTHING else (probably for not much more than minimum wage)? It is one of the most BORING jobs ever. Believe me I know, because I HAVE DONE IT; not monitoring chats but live event logs. I lasted a week and that was at $20/hr.

 

I would do it. I don't care how boring it is, for 20 bucks an hour I would watch paint dry.

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Have to be honest, you are not alone in that sentiment

 

On the subject of "live moderators" Would any of you who suggested it be willing to sit in at a screen watching general chat ALL DAY LONG not doing ANYTHING else (probably for not much more than minimum wage)? It is one of the most BORING jobs ever. Believe me I know, because I HAVE DONE IT; not monitoring chats but live event logs. I lasted a week and that was at $20/hr.

 

I have no problem doing it. I volunteered a lot of time at SWG to help make that game better. While yes being a correspondent/senator allowed me more time to do warden stuff because I was spending most of my live game time in chat talking to players, I still did it all for free. I'd have no problem doing it here. I'm not even asking for anything.

 

Look there are a lot of us that would not want to see this game fail (sometimes albeit a bit over zealous)... I'm in game anyways, I'm on the fleet a lot. I'm also on many different planets. I have time. Why not do something worthwhile for the game.

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Keep in mind....that when the CM first launched, these gold sellers were advertising $27 for 1 million credits. That has steadily dropped down all the way to around $3 per 1 million credits. So that should tell you about the demand problem they are facing and why the selling efforts have been so ramped up. I'm sure a lot of this activity is done through some sorts of bots or scripts. But there isn't a big market for credit sellers because anyone who wants to buy credits can just safely buy stuff off the CM with cash (usually CM packs or hypercrates) and then sell that stuff on the GTN for credits.

 

 

 

Yep, they really should limit the ability to post in general chat and whisper more than they do for free players and premium players below level 20. Those people don't need to be flooding general chat or spamming whispers to other players. That would at least make these credit sellers have to spend a lot more time with what they are doing and that makes their enterprise less cost effective to operate.

 

 

Credit sellers are subject to immediate account closures and IP blocks. If they had to purchase subs to have any account, then you'd likely see less credit selling spam. Sure, you'd have some but it would be much more difficult for them to create mass accounts to spam from.

 

i think you fail pretty horrible at math....

 

reason why it was 27.00 per 1mil was due to how hard 1mil was vs 1mil takes 25mins to make on one toon. now image them & they run hundreds they repeatly Max Their F2P account then trade $$$ to a subed one .

 

just big FYI. Credits when CM hit were rare. most players never passed 2mil or hit near it in a day...it took ages.

 

now take look years later after item prices rise. credits looted rise.....Simple

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Just start selling credits for CC, boom, no more spammers.

 

doubtful because some games have tried this & its failed horribly. guess what happeend They undercut the Game & kept at it till basicly money became worthless then people just started doing Item To Item or get lost.

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Easy solution, limit the amount of characters an account / IP can create for a certain amount of time, and have moderators IN GAME actively banning the gold sellers / bots. Those 2 things together destroyed the gold sellers and bots in ESO. It is a simple fix.

That right there would destroy the spam quickly...

 

If you have even just one person sitting at the comp, getting ALL the spam reports on his screen, and semi-investigating them obviously (after a few reports, account gets a 24 hour or something, continued action gets worse..), you could really cut down on it... Be even better if you have 1 for every 1 or few servers...

 

Perhaps you already have this but... as i've never heard a single peep out of and actually heard many times there are NO server admins online, ever.. I doubt you do. It would deff help with spam.

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Hey Papazmurf,

 

This is a great question. One of the things that we will often deal with is credit sellers. As you referenced, we took down a very large ring that was using a very specific method of credit farming and selling. As part of the "on-going battle" between us and the credit sellers, they will constantly change their tactics to avoid our detection and action.

 

We are aware of the issues going on right now and the new methods they are using to contact folks. I can't go into specifics as I don't want to tip our hand on anything, but we are working on stopping this as we speak. We know that the spam can be frustrating. We thank all of you for your patience as we work through it and for your continued reports to help us get them.

 

-eric

This is welcome news,however, I hope this is better inforced than the no hacks in PvP.

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Eric, I have a simple solution. Why not just allow us to /ignore whole Legacies? This would not only allow us to stop spammers from just creating new characters to spam with, but it would also stop greifers dead in their tracks.

:rak_02:

 

Spammers aren't getting a character banned, they get the whole account banned, so legacy ignore wouldn't make a difference. And you think it would stop griefers? Just wait until they can pop someone on their ignore list and use the legacy feature to learn every character someone they want to harass has on their account, and you'll see more.

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Hey Papazmurf,

 

This is a great question. One of the things that we will often deal with is credit sellers. As you referenced, we took down a very large ring that was using a very specific method of credit farming and selling. As part of the "on-going battle" between us and the credit sellers, they will constantly change their tactics to avoid our detection and action.

 

We are aware of the issues going on right now and the new methods they are using to contact folks. I can't go into specifics as I don't want to tip our hand on anything, but we are working on stopping this as we speak. We know that the spam can be frustrating. We thank all of you for your patience as we work through it and for your continued reports to help us get them.

 

-eric

 

How about some long-awaited quality of life improvements to spam reporting, Eric?

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what they really need to add to help fight the whispers from credit seller whispers is make an /anom command that hides you completly from /who,this was in star war galaxies and it worked 100% of the time from being whispered from credit sellers. problem solved
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Can you at least reduce the clicks to report/ignore someone? That seems like an easy step. I click to report, and it automatically ignores. no confirmation. Done.

 

Yes, this. If I report someone for spam, it means I don't want to read what they are typing. Auto-ignore should have been the default for spam reporting all along.

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Here's what I recommend:

1: Sell tradeable subscription tokens for real money or cartel coins, similar to the PLEX, CREDD, or WoW Token systems, and with similar safeguards to the WoW Token system.

2: Allow us to auto-ignore whispers from low level players unless they are in your guild, friends list, party, raid, etc.

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That right there would destroy the spam quickly...

 

If you have even just one person sitting at the comp, getting ALL the spam reports on his screen, and semi-investigating them obviously (after a few reports, account gets a 24 hour or something, continued action gets worse..), you could really cut down on it... Be even better if you have 1 for every 1 or few servers...

 

Perhaps you already have this but... as i've never heard a single peep out of and actually heard many times there are NO server admins online, ever.. I doubt you do. It would deff help with spam.

 

Yep, it works very well, I play ESO as well, and the bot / gold seller problem is all but non existent now.

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I can't go into specifics as I don't want to tip our hand on anything, but we are working on stopping this as we speak.

 

You should consider the option for players to disable tells from anyone outside of friendslist or guildlist.

Edited by Icestar
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Some of us like to be more social than typical MMO player.

 

If you read my suggestion you will find that I present it as an option that should be easy to turn on and off. There are many reasons why legit players need to be able to communicate with everyone, guild recruiters for one is a good example.

 

However the spam is out of control. Last night I did an OPS and while we explained boss strategy for new players the spamming started disrupting our gameplay. I would very much like to have an option to disable random tells while doing OPS or FPs because recieving several lines of spam is very annoying when you have to concentrate on reading strategy or communicating with the group.

 

As many players have stated, the spam is out of control and whatever they do I hope they have a good solution for it.

Edited by Icestar
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You should consider a option for players to disable tells from anyone outside of friendslist or guildlist.
The closest thing they have right now "which I have done on all my alts." is cut your general & whisper chat channels off, it sucks if someone out of your guild tries to get ahold of you but as of right now Me and my guild mates found this is the only solution...
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what they really need to add to help fight the whispers from credit seller whispers is make an /anom command that hides you completly from /who,this was in star war galaxies and it worked 100% of the time from being whispered from credit sellers. problem solved

 

wrong. SWTOR works like this

F2p/Prefered cant /who . but Subs can.

 

therefore every seller is screwed ...the way they do it i know because i have a friend who works for a US Gold/credit selling ring is they target people who use /say /gen /trade. and whoever walks by on fleet thus you have hundreds who get targeted. as he has said to me. you can cut off 100 spammers or sellers 1,000's more take it's place.

 

clearly if your going to go down on sellers hard then EA/BW better be willing to touch PlayerAuctions guys cause 2 of the posters in this thread actually have usernames over their & sell credits on Shadowlands.

 

. but TBH just admit it. you wont touch them blizzard has spent 8 years trying to Rid them & bots each time they fail. this game isnt as popular and has quite alot sellers. i very doubt they'll give up. as is it atm.....credits would need to be removed. or game shutdowning to kill off their market 100%.

 

till money becomes worthless they will never stop.

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The closest thing they have right now "which I have done on all my alts." is cut your general & whisper chat channels off, it sucks if someone out of your guild tries to get ahold of you but as of right now Me and my guild mates found this is the only solution...

 

Yeah, but that only works if you have your team mates in voicechat. Turning the chat off makes you miss lot of information from friends and guild.

 

I will however follow your advice until Bioware finds a better solution.

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Your theory makes sense OP. It has gotten really bad lately to where I am getting several private whisper spams per session. It's really annoying but I try and report it every time it happens. The gold spammer increase combined with the recent server lag issues makes me think about stepping away from this game for a while until they get some of these issues sorted out.
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Your theory makes sense OP. It has gotten really bad lately to where I am getting several private whisper spams per session. It's really annoying but I try and report it every time it happens. The gold spammer increase combined with the recent server lag issues makes me think about stepping away from this game for a while until they get some of these issues sorted out.

 

While things have been quite annoying I don't think anything has happened that would make me step away from the game. I'm not going to blame BW for running a successful game, trying to manage it properly, and due to that having all sorts of credit sellers trying to get around their system.

 

In a perfect world this would get sorted quick, but when it comes to money, people will do all sorts of things to make sure the income keeps flowing.

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Yeah, but that only works if you have your team mates in voicechat. Turning the chat off makes you miss lot of information from friends and guild.

 

I will however follow your advice until Bioware finds a better solution.

Not if you leave your guild chat on and ops chat that is how I keep up with them..
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Not if you leave your guild chat on and ops chat that is how I keep up with them..

 

Yeah I am sure with Biowares help we will get some kind of ending of all that insane spam.

Edited by Icestar
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