Why Credit Spam is ACTUALLY out of control - A.K.A. Spammers For Dummies

[Karaiblis]

Exactly. I deliberately left out specific information on how they circumvent the system in regards to detection, as that is not something Bioware would want me to throw out there.

 

Suffice to say, there isn't someone sitting there waiting to get banned, and then creating an entirely new account the moment they are. That is all I will say on the matter.

 

Obviously I didn't mean use a new one as in "roll up a new account right then". No one here is that braindead. We all know they have accounts waiting and ready to start spamming, it's not a big secret you need to keep.

Edited May 21, 2015 by Karaiblis

[Loomi]

Obviously I didn't mean use a new one as in "roll up a new account right then". No one here is that braindead. We all know they have accounts waiting and ready to start spamming, it's not a big secret you need to keep.

 

That part was already mentioned, yes, in point 2. But the specific means of circumvention after detection I will keep vague. Just know that it is more like trying to plug a hole in the Hoover Dam with Silly Putty

Edited May 21, 2015 by Loomi

[Aelflaed]

Ok, I read the volume, colored fonts & all. It's out of control because the spammers aren't in a place you can get them (no one's going to break down their door & take their computers.) The technology allows them to get around any precautions... Bioware doesn't put much of a gate on account creation. Etc.

 

So why not go after the buyers? Seriously go after the buyers, not a little slap or 3 day suspension. No market, no spammers. If people are in the High Nitwit category and don't care about the bleeding obvious, the viruses & malware they'll be getting by visiting these sites, they might care about the in game consequences. (if you spent real life money to buy in game crap, I assume you'd be sorry to lose your characters entirely, for instance, so 'make a new account' wouldn't be enticing.)

 

(And yes, as I write this, it *does* mirror a life situation involving buyers-sellers... Extra ew. ) Anyway, since 'disease ridden' and 'you'll be sorry' isn't enough to stop *that* enterprise, it's probably not going to stop this one. However, 'You'll lose your money, & whatever you bought with your money" might.

Edited May 21, 2015 by Aelflaed

[leegrisham]

All of this is half measures! You're all too afraid to go far enough,

 

It's time for real action. If we can't stop the spammers themselves we'll strangle them out by cutting their life blood. The credit itself.

 

Credits act - BOL and only can be mailed without a COD to characters within your legacy guild.

Credits can still be traded but only within formed parties or raid groups.

Any credit transaction outside of the GTN and outside of your legacy; over 1 million credits triggers flags to the Galactic SEC for investigation.

A special clearing house established for sending more than 1 million anonymous credits where the sender will pay a 30% fee for sending,

 

Draconian says you? No says me, I am suggesting real change with teeth to put these criminals down.

[Loomi]

So why not go after the buyers?

 

Good question. I refer you back to the "If there aren't any buyers, there won't be any sellers" idiom. In theory, it works. In practice, it fails miserably. Creating an environment of fear towards the buyers doesn't stem the problem, it only drives it to the dark corners of the scene. The advertisement is still going to be there, it will still persist, as the current measures does nothing to slow it down. The only thing that is going to affect is where the actual transactions take place. As one person said "people won't really care who buys or sells credits, as long as the spam go away"

[AdrianDmitruk]

Spammers are a problem because Bioware (or perhaps more accurately EA) won't invest in a QOL patch to streamline the tools that we the community do have to deal with spammers, let alone give us more effective tools. Some of this is really basic stuff.

 

"Report spam and ignore"--one click. Literally the simplest thing they could do.

 

Allow for a toon to be ignored across an entire legacy. I recognize there are privacy issues involved in being able to ignore someone else's entire account including all their alts, but being able to ignore a single toon across all of your characters is no privacy violation at all. It simply automates the act of writing down the spammer's name and logging in all of your toons and ignoring from what you wrote down. No functional privacy issue, huge QoL buff. No more logging into an alt and thinking, "sigh, I ignored that same spammer five minutes ago on my main and ten minutes ago on my slicer alt..."

 

Allow us to set notes for our ignore list like we can our friends list. That way we can easily differentiate people we ignore for antisocial conduct (loot ninjas, trolling, harrassment, etc.) from the gold spammers--the latter are so numerous we're likely to not enter separate notes for them. That makes it easier to purge ignore lists when they fill up because we don't have to worry about accidentally unignoring someone we ignored for something far more serious than spamming.

 

Similarly (though this might be slightly more difficult), add a button to purge ignore lists of accounts that no longer exist.

 

And lastly, my dream, the Holy Grail of spam reporting. Reporting someone for spam goes back through your chat window(s) and removes any messages sent by that reported spammer from your client. We'd actually be able to see fleet chat again.

 

I remember the day that EVE Online implemented only the first and the last suggestion above, together with a single patch. Players basically declared war on the spammers and mass reported them--because by doing so they could immediately cleanse the spam from their own clients even if it took CCP staff hours or days to act upon all the reports. Spam fell by orders of magnitude until I could play the game for months on end without ever seeing a credit spammer. Yes, RMTing did endure, but buyers had to go through unofficial channels to find their currency suppliers. Spammers could never advertise in game without literally everyone in the local chat where they were spamming mass-ignoring and reporting them almost instantly (clicking "Report ISK spammer" took maybe a quarter-second in that game and completely removed the problem for the reporter). Regular players scarcely had to suffer at all, and it got to the point where new players didn't even know what "Report ISK spammer" actually did.

 

And this is before we even get to setting up content-based spam filters, you know the kind that spammers love to change a single character or add a single space to work around, or allowing players to do the same.

 

I hate to say it but Bioware can do much more to improve anti-spam QoL. They (and/or their EA overlords) just don't care.

Edited May 21, 2015 by AdrianDmitruk

[Aelflaed]

Good question. I refer you back to the "If there aren't any buyers, there won't be any sellers" idiom. In theory, it works. In practice, it fails miserably. Creating an environment of fear towards the buyers doesn't stem the problem, it only drives it to the dark corners of the scene. The advertisement is still going to be there, it will still persist, as the current measures does nothing to slow it down. The only thing that is going to affect is where the actual transactions take place. As one person said "people won't really care who buys or sells credits, as long as the spam go away"

 

Well, that doesn't say much about humanity, which isn't surprising. However, I think fear might work better than you suggest, as a deterrent . But that means no slap on the wrist. It means, characters deleted, account closed. Make a new account if you want, but you're starting from scratch, and your 'investment' has failed.

 

I don't see how they can go after the seller source, if that source is, say, in China. If it's in some guy's Florida basement, maybe (but good luck getting that to happen) No matter how annoying they make it for the sellers, if there's profit, they will get around it. Make some minion stay up later, work more hours - but they'll do it.

 

The community itself *could* help, by condemning this sort of behavior, but in general, we're not in a period of high integrity, so I'm guessing this won't work. People don't care if you cheat, as long as they don't get hurt themselves. Depressing, but probably true.

 

So, the upshot is - I guess we can get used to spam whispers until we develop a higher premium on integrity. I don't see anything else that would make a real difference, & a gaming company can't be expected to set that standard for us, if we don't set it for ourselves first.

[Loomi]

Spammers are a problem because Bioware (or perhaps more accurately EA) won't invest in a QOL patch to streamline the tools that we the community do have to deal with spammers, let alone give us more effective tools. Some of this is really basic stuff.

 

"Report spam and ignore"--one click. Literally the simplest thing they could do.

 

Allow for a toon to be ignored across an entire legacy. I recognize there are privacy issues involved in being able to ignore someone else's entire account including all their alts, but being able to ignore a single toon across all of your characters is no privacy violation at all. It simply automates the act of writing down the spammer's name and logging in all of your toons and ignoring from what you wrote down. No functional privacy issue, huge QoL buff. No more logging into an alt and thinking, "sigh, I ignored that same spammer five minutes ago on my main and ten minutes ago on my slicer alt..."

 

Allow us to set notes for our ignore list like we can our friends list. That way we can easily differentiate people we ignore for antisocial conduct (loot ninjas, trolling, harrassment, etc.) from the gold spammers--the latter are so numerous we're likely to not enter separate notes for them. That makes it easier to purge ignore lists when they fill up because we don't have to worry about accidentally unignoring someone we ignored for something far more serious than spamming.

 

Similarly (though this might be slightly more difficult), add a button to purge ignore lists of accounts that no longer exist.

 

And lastly, my dream, the Holy Grail of spam reporting. Reporting someone for spam goes back through your chat window(s) and removes any messages sent by that reported spammer from your client. We'd actually be able to see fleet chat again.

 

I remember the day that EVE Online implemented only the first and the last suggestion above, together with a single patch. Players basically declared war on the spammers and mass reported them--because by doing so they could immediately cleanse the spam from their own clients even if it took CCP staff hours or days to act upon all the reports. Spam fell by orders of magnitude until I could play the game for months on end without ever seeing a credit spammer. Yes, RMTing did endure, but buyers had to go through unofficial channels to find their currency suppliers. Spammers could never advertise in game without literally everyone in the local chat where they were spamming mass-ignoring and reporting them almost instantly (clicking "Report ISK spammer" took maybe a quarter-second in that game and completely removed the problem for the reporter). Regular players scarcely had to suffer at all, and it got to the point where new players didn't even know what "Report ISK spammer" actually did.

 

And this is before we even get to setting up content-based spam filters, you know the kind that spammers love to change a single character or add a single space to work around, or allowing players to do the same.

 

I hate to say it but Bioware can do much more to improve anti-spam QoL. They (and/or their EA overlords) just don't care.

 

That is all well and good, but let me throw something out there for you - EVE Online requires not only an email account upon registration, but email verification before allowing you to log in. SWTOR, on the other hand, requires nothing of the kind, which is the basis of this thread. When coupled with these initial verification steps, yes, the report and ignore features can be very powerful, after they have taken the time to create those email accounts and verify them.

 

The whole idea is to make them waste enough time that it isn't worth their time to continue.

[AdrianDmitruk]

That is all well and good, but let me throw something out there for you - EVE Online requires not only an email account upon registration, but email verification before allowing you to log in. SWTOR, on the other hand, requires nothing of the kind, which is the basis of this thread. When coupled with these initial verification steps, yes, the report and ignore features can be very powerful, after they have taken the time to create those email accounts and verify them.

 

The whole idea is to make them waste enough time that it isn't worth their time to continue.

 

You can have all of the recaptchas in the world; gold farmers will simply pay someone a buck an hour to register 40 F2P accounts in an hour (assuming it takes 90 seconds to spoof an email and answer a captcha). Making registration more difficult, by itself, won't fix the problem.

 

We need more effective ways of dealing with the spammers who come through as well. EVE's verification requirements and its player-based anti-spam tools form a very powerful synergy; yet before they implemented the player-based anti-spam tools, RMT spam was a problem there as well. Really, the problem should be attacked from both ends, making it as difficult as possible for bots to mass-register, and making spam reporting as painless (and, to some extent--i.e. immediate client-side removal of spam--rewarding) as possible to catch what does slip through.

 

Spamming is pointless in EVE precisely because, even if you make it through initial registration, hundreds of people will ignore/report you within a few seconds if there are enough players in local, because reporting spam is so unobtrusive to the gameplay experience. Here, reporting spam is quite invasive to gameplay, so spammers have more room to thrive as fewer people will bother to report hem.

 

(I started playing EVE about two months before they patched in their present tools.)

Edited May 21, 2015 by AdrianDmitruk

[Loomi]

You can have all of the recaptchas in the world; gold farmers will simply pay someone a buck an hour to register 40 F2P accounts in an hour (assuming it takes 90 seconds to spoof an email and answer a captcha). Making registration more difficult, by itself, won't fix the problem.

 

No, it won't, but you can see how it is two sides of the same hammer.

 

We need more effective ways of dealing with the spammers who come through as well. EVE's verification requirements and its player-based anti-spam tools form a very powerful synergy; yet before they implemented the player-based anti-spam tools, RMT spam was a problem there as well. Really, the problem should be attacked from both ends, making it as difficult as possible for bots to mass-register, and making spam reporting as painless (and, to some extent--i.e. immediate client-side removal of spam--rewarding) as possible to catch what does slip through

 

Absolutely agreed. The two-pronged approach is the superior method that will ultimately get the results players are looking for. Tackling the issue from both ends is exactly what is called for in this situation.

 

With this thread I merely wanted to highlight the severe inadequacies of the one end, the initial, as there is almost nobody talking about it, and focusing almost exclusively on the side they see day in and day out.

[Icykill_]

Spammers are a problem because Bioware (or perhaps more accurately EA) won't invest in a QOL patch to streamline the tools that we the community do have to deal with spammers, let alone give us more effective tools. Some of this is really basic stuff.

 

"Report spam and ignore"--one click. Literally the simplest thing they could do.

 

Allow for a toon to be ignored across an entire legacy. I recognize there are privacy issues involved in being able to ignore someone else's entire account including all their alts, but being able to ignore a single toon across all of your characters is no privacy violation at all. It simply automates the act of writing down the spammer's name and logging in all of your toons and ignoring from what you wrote down. No functional privacy issue, huge QoL buff. No more logging into an alt and thinking, "sigh, I ignored that same spammer five minutes ago on my main and ten minutes ago on my slicer alt..."

 

Allow us to set notes for our ignore list like we can our friends list. That way we can easily differentiate people we ignore for antisocial conduct (loot ninjas, trolling, harrassment, etc.) from the gold spammers--the latter are so numerous we're likely to not enter separate notes for them. That makes it easier to purge ignore lists when they fill up because we don't have to worry about accidentally unignoring someone we ignored for something far more serious than spamming.

 

Similarly (though this might be slightly more difficult), add a button to purge ignore lists of accounts that no longer exist.

 

And lastly, my dream, the Holy Grail of spam reporting. Reporting someone for spam goes back through your chat window(s) and removes any messages sent by that reported spammer from your client. We'd actually be able to see fleet chat again.

 

I remember the day that EVE Online implemented only the first and the last suggestion above, together with a single patch. Players basically declared war on the spammers and mass reported them--because by doing so they could immediately cleanse the spam from their own clients even if it took CCP staff hours or days to act upon all the reports. Spam fell by orders of magnitude until I could play the game for months on end without ever seeing a credit spammer. Yes, RMTing did endure, but buyers had to go through unofficial channels to find their currency suppliers. Spammers could never advertise in game without literally everyone in the local chat where they were spamming mass-ignoring and reporting them almost instantly (clicking "Report ISK spammer" took maybe a quarter-second in that game and completely removed the problem for the reporter). Regular players scarcely had to suffer at all, and it got to the point where new players didn't even know what "Report ISK spammer" actually did.

 

And this is before we even get to setting up content-based spam filters, you know the kind that spammers love to change a single character or add a single space to work around, or allowing players to do the same.

 

I hate to say it but Bioware can do much more to improve anti-spam QoL. They (and/or their EA overlords) just don't care.

 

Best ideas... I've suggested some of these in other threads and seen some others suggested too... It's good to see them all in one post...

I like your example about EVE... If Bio are pretty much going to leave it to us to report spammers instead of being proactive... At least give us the tools to combat it... What the players did on EVE shows that the community can come together to fight a common problem

Come on Bio please read this

[Liquor]

High GTN prices are what is driving the credit sellers. It's a community issue. Not BioWare

[Adwynyth]

If I may add another "thing they could do" to your list, it would be this: start keying on the websites they advertise. Make the websites have to constantly change domains by focusing on the domain names.

 

Right now, "gamer easy" (without the space) seems to be a big one. Add that to a "this is a bot" filter and, along with a couple other criteria, that would force a change that the spammers wouldn't be willing to stomach for long: having to register new domains over and over and over because their old ones would be unable to be spammed.

 

I'm sure they'd eventually find a way to adapt, but it's something that would take them a while to defeat at least. You can't really change the spelling of your website without breaking what you're trying to accomplish: getting that one moron in a thousand to actually visit and buy your "product".

[AdrianDmitruk]

Hell, I'd be happy with the ability for players to set custom filters through their UIs...

 

Right now, spam mail with the subject Hi_999 (random 3 digit number) is a problem and has been for several weeks. Imagine if I could set my own spam filter.

 

Now imagine the spammers not just having to try to circumvent Bioware's (seemingly nonexistent) filter, but custom filters set by every player in the game. Bioware could, in turn, look at their metrics to see what the custom player filters caught and use that data to improve their own.

 

"But, but, the filters will become so broad we won't be able to communicate with each other!"

 

No, they won't. Did that kind of spam filter communication breakdown happen with e-mail? Nope.

[GythralSWTOR]

Why is it taking weeks for someone to look at and clear reported spam?

 

Or is it that the very vocal & spamming site is in fact an EA subsidiary, hence the reports are being ignored?

Edited July 14, 2015 by GythralSWTOR

[BBQedGamer]

Why is it taking weeks for someone to look at and clear reported spam?

 

Or is it that the very vocal & spamming site is in fact an EA subsidiary, hence the reports are being ignored?

 

There are a lot of alts reporting and blocking the same individuals, over and over again. That makes for a lot of superfluous reports to wade through. Just one more reason why ignore lists should be account-wide.

[GythralSWTOR]

There are a lot of alts reporting and blocking the same individuals, over and over again. That makes for a lot of superfluous reports to wade through. Just one more reason why ignore lists should be account-wide.

 

There is no need for a human to wade through every single report, gold spammers always have the site in the message in a way a human can see, therefore it is not THAT hard to look at 1 - then use pattern matching thereafter to clear all the reports of that site, this is minutes work, not weeks (for a true programmer)

Edited July 15, 2015 by GythralSWTOR

[Steelarion]

Check in game mail....see credit spam...click delete....go play

 

As far as fleet chat...I'm never at fleet...unless I'm picking up new raid gear from tokens...which is happy time and I don't read chat anyways

 

Not dismissing it as a problem...it apparently IS a problem...guess I just do not let it affect me *shrug

[Asheris]

^Didn't read the post

 

You can be banned if caught buying credits. I have heard of people being banned, and a previous guildie had to create a new account because he got caught and his account banned.

 

I just wonder how on earth do devs track those things. How do they know if I don't get a huge amount of credits from a friend I talked out of the game?

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm against selling credits or any other thing but I imagine a lot of mistakes can be made druing a witch hunt

[AdrianDmitruk]

I just wonder how on earth do devs track those things. How do they know if I don't get a huge amount of credits from a friend I talked out of the game?

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm against selling credits or any other thing but I imagine a lot of mistakes can be made druing a witch hunt

 

I would imagine they would be looking at the seller's transfers as well.

 

If you received a large amount of credits from a friend, he probably only transferred credits once. Gold sellers, on the other hand, probably transferred to many customers.

[Haxxsaw]

There are a lot of alts reporting and blocking the same individuals, over and over again. That makes for a lot of superfluous reports to wade through. Just one more reason why ignore lists should be account-wide.

 

Right, they need to count 1 million spam complaints first just to make sure it is spam.