Are Credit Spammers ever going to be dealt with?

[AscendingSky]

Limit in game mail to those in your legacy, guild, and mutual friends list. Every other use case can be dealt with by the players themselves. /problem.

 

I think that would be a good solution, with one caveat: they should let people friend or ignore eachother by the account, not just by per character. You can have a few friends with tons of alts, and those can take up a lot of your friends list space. Increasing the size of your friends and ignore lists would be good too.

Edited February 3, 2017 by AscendingSky

[PiiTarr]

I doubt the perpetrators can tell how the accounts were identified before they got banned.

 

I apologize if my wording made it appear as though this was even a factor, but it's not, it's totally irrelevant to the point I was making about how investigations are conducted in this case. An investigation is like putting together a puzzle, only you rarely have all the pieces and often times don't even have a picture of how it's supposed to look when finished. To find additional pieces, you have to establish patterns. The only way to establish patterns is to discover which accounts are connected to other accounts. By leaving the accounts operating, you can track any interaction they have with others, monitor the IPs being used, etc. This allows you to add pieces to your puzzle and find other accounts that are not part of the spamming activity, but are still involved either as banks or controller accounts of some sort.

 

Ive heard those methods many times and they have proven to be ineffective and cause the damage the devs pretend to oppose. The perpetrators never have to change their methods because they already know that they can do their thing for a few months and then they start from scratch. By forcing them to change their methods and killing their supply at every turn, you actually harm them more and waste their time instead of doing nothing for months.

 

How much whisper spam have you received recently? It comes back every now and then, but it's drastically reduced from what it had been. Also, you do not want the perpetrators to change their methods until your investigation is complete. Once you know their methods, it is easier to find/identify them. Each time they change their methods you lose a valuable tool in your investigation. It takes them less time to come up with a way around whatever measures are put in place than it does for the investigators to discover the new method, so rather than harming the credit sellers, the investigators are harming themselves.

 

Removing billions of credits after months of investigation only demonstrates that they let the farmers accumulate immense amounts of cash which they sell in the meantime before they take action.

 

It also demonstrates how large/widespread it is, beyond bots using mailboxes on starter planets. As I pointed out to you last year when you made your mailbox thread in the suggestion forum, the spammers aren't just using level 1 characters. I was seeing spam mail from level 7s as well as insta-60s. Both of those easily circumvent the removal of mailboxes from starter worlds.

 

Even tho they provide zero evidence for the claim that they actually banned hundreds of accounts and removed billions of credits. And the yellow poster who posted is doesnt have a credible posting record.

 

The same can be said for your claims that removing mail boxes from starter words will do anything to curtail spam. As you yourself said to another poster:

Just claiming it doesnt make it true, regardless what you personally think.

 

Therefore, there's really no point in further discussion with you on this subject, since you can make that statement about anything I, or anyone else says. You've made up your mind, and it's either your way, or you are convinced nothing is being done. That's fine, your opinion is no less valid than any other opinion. I've tried to provide you with some facts on how investigations work. You can believe them or not, that's totally up to you.

[Joonbeams]

I think that would be a good solution, with one caveat: they should let people friend or ignore eachother by the account, not just by per character. You can have a few friends with tons of alts, and those can take up a lot of your friends list space. Increasing the size of your friends and ignore lists would be good too.

 

Agreed, should be by the account which is how I believe it is now anyway. It's a very simple to implement fix if BW is serious about spammers.

[Vego_Mohenjo]

You know, it occurs to me that the Rakghoul virus can be used by the playerbase to be rid of the spammers.

 

Just get infected, then stand next to a spammer until you explode. They'll be infected and eventually explode too. Ah, blessed silence.