What is the point in taking down a credit selling ring?

[mmobrew]

I know that there may be other threads similar to this but I think many people just read the first post then reply. Therefor I made this thread because I tired of seeing the same clueless information and solutions. I hope that as many people as possible will see this thread and learn some things on credit/gold sellers and the current situation with them in SWTOR. This also applies to all mmorpgs and not just SWTOR.

 

Lets start off with the credit spammers. These guys have no credits and they don't transfer credits in any way.

Their only purpose is advertisement, to get buyers to their site. Once the site gets a sale, they will then contact their

"suppliers" aka "credit/gold farmers". The supplier will then deliver the goods and the site will pay them around 30%-50% of the sale.

 

Now for the credit/gold farmers. These guys are the root cause of the spam, inflation, farming things that effect regular players, and pretty much everything bad. They can be American, Russian, Chinese, Japenese, etc. They do it because it is possible to make a lot of money no matter where you are from. Basically get it out of your heads that it is always some poor Chinese guy in a slave camp trying to make enough to eat. They use bots/hacks to farm credits/gold. They find dupes to mass produce credits/gold. They phish accounts to steal credits/gold. They may even be legit players selling off some of their credits/gold. Any way that they can get large amounts of currency they will do it. Normally 90% of the credits/gold comes from botting.

 

They can bot credits/gold in many different ways. In SWTOR's case their biggest/easiest source for the past few years has been security chests.Specifically using a bot with teleport hacks to gather chests quickly on higher level planets.

 

Now within the past few months, these bots have expanded on a MASSIVE scale to teleport farming the HEROIC 4 [breakthrough] quest instance in Belsavis. It seems that they farm it untill quest reset cap then go offline or use another set of bots. Therefor they may not be online all the time. If you notice an abnormal number of snipers in Belsavis all around the same level these are the bots. They start at level 43 and max out at level 53. Harbringer being the highest population server has the most of them. Anywhere from 30-40 bots during the day and another set of 30-40 bots during the night maybe even more.

 

If you have noticed an increase in spam over the last few months especially the past week. It is because those spammer web sites now have a bigger supply of credits due to the massive bots in Belsavis. Also combined with the fact that less people are currently playing so they are spamming everyone to death to get as many sales as possible.

 

Bioware's "Taking down a credit selling ring" was on these credit farmers that are teleport botting the quest phase in Belsavis and security chests. They did in fact wipe out these bots and they were gone for at least a week. They made no changes though and it appears they aren't going to constantly ban them quickly. The bots are back now and have been going for a week.

 

Which leads me to the title of the thread "What is the point in taking down a credit selling ring?" because doing 1 banwave along with a forum post and nothing else isn't going to change anything. Is there changes coming to stop these bots? Is there changes coming to help prevent spammers? Are more customer service employees coming to keep banning them quickly? If not then what is Bioware going to accomplish? A thread full of people on this forum praising them when most hadn't seen or even know what they truly done? Publicity from sites reporting how they took down this credit selling ring?

 

There hasn't been any changes in the past few years to deal with bots/spammers. It also doesn't help that reporting these teleport farmers usually resulted in "thanks for your report, we will look in to it." and watching them continue on for months. It is time Bioware started making changes to fight/control botters and spammers like most other top mmorpgs do.

 

They can deal a big blow to those belsavis bots farming the quest instance by simply removing the credits from the mobs. They can deal another big blow by either changing Security chests loot so that they don't give credits but items that would be useful to actual players. They could also just remove security chests (at least on high level planets). They wouldn't need to be gone forever, they could reintroduce them later in a way that bots can't take advantage of them. Those 2 easy changes alone will crush a majority of the site spammer's supply which will end up reducing spam.

 

As for changes to prevent spamming itself, the first steps should be making it require as much work as possible for the spammer to get an account ready to spam. For example things like raising level requirements and requiring certain class quests be completed. If possible they should make it so that after a certain amount of people "report spam" it checks to see when the account was created and current level. If the date is within the past month and/or the level is low it should automatically ban them or not allow them to talk in general/whispers at least.

 

Whatever Bioware decides to do it is better than them doing nothing about it for the past few years. Realistically you are never going to 100% remove spam/bots. The goal is to minimize it as best as possible.

 

Some things people keep throwing around won't change anything. For example...

 

"F2P is a curse! All the spammers are here cause they don't need to pay."

 

All of these spammers aren't using F2P accounts. They can't mail, mass whisper, and spam general faster than 1 min on F2P accounts. Even if they have to pay to advertise it makes no difference. They'll gladly pay to spam when they are making tons of money off of it. They might not even be paying in the first place and committing fraud instead.

 

"Bioware just needs to monitor chat and ban them or let players monitor!"

 

They don't have the resources to do this and it is just plain stupid doing it this way which is why no one does it. They also aren't going to give players power to do it since who would they give it to? What if they abuse it? What if they aren't online when spammers are? No big MMOs these days give players this kind of power. Why have players do this when Bioware can and should do something to handle it?

 

"Bioware should just sell credits!"

 

It won't change anything because they will just undercut Bioware's price just like they undercut when the Cartel Market came. Not only that but I think straight up selling credits is bad for any mmo.

 

"Bioware should just bind everything to accounts!"

 

Yes it would stop "buy credits" spam and farmers at the cost of butchering the game. Then you would have farmers pimping out accounts and spammers advertising accounts and other account services.

 

"Ban everyone that buys credits!"

 

There is a reason why no other big MMOs do this and that is It is completely dumb to ban actual players. The servers would be even more empty right now. You go after the spammers/botters who are the ones actually causing problems.

[branmakmuffin]

After skimming (and reading the title), looks like the tl;dr is "Cred selling/buying is no big deal." Edited May 22, 2015 by branmakmuffin

[hearthbone]

After skimming (and reading the title), looks like the tl;dr is "Cred selling/buying is no big deal."

 

You need better reading comprehension or skimming skills then. To be honest people like you don't actually read anything is why the same wrong information and solutions get posted around. He pretty much hit the nail on the head in regards to how spammers/botters work and what they are currently doing in game.

 

tl;dr would be "It's time for Bioware to stop ignoring the bots/spam and make actual changes to reduce them."

[branmakmuffin]

You need better reading comprehension or skimming skills then.

No, the OP needs to make smaller posts.

[Fleurdelis]

No, the OP needs to make smaller posts.

 

Why? Do you have ADD?

[Bobs_YourUncle]

You need better reading comprehension or skimming skills then. To be honest people like you don't actually read anything is why the same wrong information and solutions get posted around. He pretty much hit the nail on the head in regards to how spammers/botters work and what they are currently doing in game.

 

tl;dr would be "It's time for Bioware to stop ignoring the bots/spam and make actual changes to reduce them."

 

thanks for suming that up, I hate novels that aren't sci-fi/fantasy.

 

I agree, they need to get rid of the spammers. Op should consider short and concise posts or at least a tl;dr.

[Djiini]

There is none.

 

/thread.

 

None of your points cover the fact that credit spammers don't hurt anyone and that blocking them is sufficient to the amount present.

Edited May 22, 2015 by Djiini

[mitchsts]

i don't think they are going away. just report them and maybe bioware will do something.

[AdrianDmitruk]

There is none.

 

/thread.

 

None of your points cover the fact that credit spammers don't hurt anyone and that blocking them is sufficient to the amount present.

 

The ignore lists of all my main toons are full, with 95% of the ignored being credit spammers.

 

It used to be that when I placed an actual player on ignore, I knew why even a month or two later. Now, the trolls I ignore blend right in with the spammers. Pruning my ignore lists risks unignoring players who should be on there and exposing me to their trolling/loot ninjaing/other shenanigans that caused me to ignore them in the first place. That also means I can ignore fewer trolls because the spammers take up so much real estate on my ignore list. And that means I must spend time managing ignore lists instead of playing the game.

 

When I'm looking for an ops group, the credit spammers scroll off information in general chat that might be relevant to my interests. Reporting them doesn't remove the spam that's already there.

 

After reporting them, I have to deal with a gameplay-interrupting popup. If I'm in combat, it'll probably cause me to miss a GCD. If I'm in a PVP match or in an ops, that can be really bad.

 

In short, credit spammers are a detriment to the QoL of this game and they do harm players. Granted Bioware could do more to ameliorate this harm by improving various aspects of the spam reporting tools. Some players might be more annoyed than others, but ultimately we all log into this game to play it, not get spammed.

Edited May 22, 2015 by AdrianDmitruk

[OddballEasyEight]

Why? Do you have ADD?

 

I actually do (and I even have ADD, not ADHD), what of it?

[Gonalius]

I actually do (and I even have ADD, not ADHD), what of it?

 

Not everybody does. We can't just make posts of 30 words or less so that you can feel more comfortable reading them. That would be stupid. If you thing a post is too long, then leave the thread rather than get annoyed that its too long to bother reading.

 

On the subject at hand, I've given up adding the spammers to my ignore list, these new ones all have names like they headbutted their keyboards (gawtwy, gowrtyqweryh and the like), and I'm pretty sure I've never seen the same one twice, so I suspect those characters are deleted as soon as they finish whispering.

 

I do however invite them to group. No idea if it annoys them or not, but I like to imagine that it costs them a couple of seconds to clear.

[ZETA_SCORPII]

Just make it so security chests can only be opened with CC's. Problem solved, more profit for Bioware.

[sxykitten]

cant stop them. no game has goodluck.

[protecttheking]

I always thought the spammers and farmers were the same people/websites so I learned something from this post. I agree that it is time for Bioware to start making changes. There may be no 100% way to eliminate spammers/farmers but that doesn't mean you let them have a free ride.

 

Should always be making changes as often as possible to make it as hard as possible for them. When they banned all those belsavis farmer bots 2 weeks ago they should of at least hot fixed the mob's drops like OP said. It not like that change will hurt people playing the game and is easy to do.

Edited May 22, 2015 by protecttheking

[Loomi]

The ignore lists of all my main toons are full, with 95% of the ignored being credit spammers.

 

Reporting and ignoring does nothing. Reporting each and every single post actually sends up red flags that increase priority. Stop ignoring and start reporting.

 

Should always be making changes as often as possible to make it as hard as possible for them. When they banned all those belsavis farmer bots 2 weeks ago they should of at least hot fixed the mob's drops like OP said. It not like that change will hurt people playing the game and is easy to do.

 

Hotfixes don't work like that. That will have to wait for the patch next week.

[Loomi]

There hasn't been any changes in the past few years to deal with bots/spammers.

 

All of these spammers aren't using F2P accounts. They can't mail, mass whisper, and spam general faster than 1 min on F2P accounts. Even if they have to pay to advertise it makes no difference. They'll gladly pay to spam when they are making tons of money off of it. They might not even be paying in the first place and committing fraud instead.

 

Few years? So, no changes ever, then?

 

Yes they are using F2P accounts. The mail accounts are not, the whisper accounts are not - which their spam scripts just deletes the toon and recreates another one to do the same thing, and there are multiple F2P accounts spamming general every 60 seconds which to the average person appears to be less than one minute.

 

You make a lot of assertions but provide no solutions other than "Bioware can do better".

[mmobrew]

Few years? So, no changes ever, then?

 

Yes they are using F2P accounts. The mail accounts are not, the whisper accounts are not - which their spam scripts just deletes the toon and recreates another one to do the same thing, and there are multiple F2P accounts spamming general every 60 seconds which to the average person appears to be less than one minute.

 

You make a lot of assertions but provide no solutions other than "Bioware can do better".

 

They haven't made any changes changes towards fighting bots/spam in the past 2 years. Prior to that maybe they did something but nothing I remember. Hell the security chests have been plagued with bots since launch and they never done anything. They weren't even banning bots in a timely manner when reported. Some of the same bots have been going for 8+ months until their recent "taking down a credit selling ring" took them out.

 

Not sure why you are going on about F2P accounts when I never said they don't use F2P. I simply said not all spammers use F2P accounts. Point is if they have to pay that isn't going to change anything. UNLESS they also banned them quickly so that it paying to spam wasn't worth it. Even then that still wouldn't matter if they were committing fraud.

 

I didn't post no solutions? I guess you just skimmed it like everyone does.

 

They can deal a big blow to those belsavis bots farming the quest instance by simply removing the credits from the mobs. They can deal another big blow by either changing Security chests loot so that they don't give credits but items that would be useful to actual players. They could also just remove security chests (at least on high level planets). They wouldn't need to be gone forever, they could reintroduce them later in a way that bots can't take advantage of them. Those 2 easy changes alone will crush a majority of the site spammer's supply which will end up reducing spam.

 

Very easy solutions to cripple the farming bots which is root cause of the spam. Sites can't spam and sell what they don't have.

 

As for changes to prevent spamming itself, the first steps should be making it require as much work as possible for the spammer to get an account ready to spam. For example things like raising level requirements and requiring certain class quests be completed. If possible they should make it so that after a certain amount of people "report spam" it checks to see when the account was created and current level. If the date is within the past month and/or the level is low it should automatically ban them or not allow them to talk in general/whispers at least.

 

Things to deal with spammers. To be honest it is hard to give a solution to this when you don't know how Bioware's systems are set up and what they are able/have resources to do.

[ThorgrimLutgen]

Until players stop being stupid enough to buy from these people, BW are wasting their time, they will come back, over and over again.

[KevinQCowart]

Saw wall of text. Did not read.

 

Taking down credit selling rings is important to Bioware because it cuts into their profits. Argument resolved, next topic please.

[theUndead]

What is the point of this thread? I mean honestly, this issue has been dealt with and people have moved on. Why are we still talking about it?

[Robtheace]

Bioware wont ban these credit farmers. Most of them are level 60...which means they bought SOR.. and thus put money in Biowares pockets. Bioware only cares about getting money and unfortunately these farmers contribute to it.

[-Snakesan-]

After skimming (and reading the title), looks like the tl;dr is "Cred selling/buying is no big deal."

I'm also getting a pang of desipration from the OP, as if his precious business model is being trampled on.

[NoahRedden]

Kind of off topic but, no one is gonna read that whole post, summarize a little. Edited May 23, 2015 by NoahRedden

[doublefreeze]

Wow you people act like the OP published a book here. It takes literally 2-3 mins to read everything, you people are just sad. Looks like the OP was wrong about "I think many people just read the first post then reply. " Many people just read the titles and reply. This is the best post on the forums in regards to what spammers/teleport bots are doing and changes that need to be made.

[Llama-Eight]

One thing BW could do is to make the security chests only lootable if the mobs that usually spawn with them have beenkkilled. Though this would have some effect on stealthers & people who run in to loot the chest while ignoring the mobs.