I guess it must earn enough customers to be worth it, because I, too, have noticed the upsurge in spam — personal tells pointing you to a website for PLing, farmed influence, etc.
While I’ve usually /petitioned their asses, the devs have put in a new command (per the patch last night):
This version includes a new chat command.
/ignore_spammer
By using this command, a user will let our customer support know that they consider the person they added to their ignore list as one that is “spamming.” For example, if a player receives an in-game tell advertising for a real money trade web site, they can use the /ignore_spammer command, followed by the name of the character they received this advertisement tell from to put them on ignore.
Ideally, the user can then follow up with a /petition to also let us know of the disruptive behavior via that method.
I’m not sure how useful this is, if it’s still suggested that folks /petition with more details (evidently Customer Service can’t easily pull up the chat logs to see what the kerfuffle is about). And I actually only rarely /ignore the spammers because I’ve only rarely gotten any follow-up tells from them.
Still, if it makes it a bit easier to point the annoying gits out, I’m willing to take the extra step.
This is a horrible problem in LotRO! Every day, I log in to find a new in-game mail advertising a particular gold-selling website. The mail is always from a new character. In any given play session, I’ll receive multiple tells, one apiece, from gold sellers advertising their sites.
I respond to each tell, informing them that I report all spammers, which I promptly do (creating a ticket for “harassment” which includes the text of the tell, laboriously typed in since you can’t paste text in a ticket). But it doesn’t matter because the characters are replaced by new ones as soon as they’re banned, if not in advance (I occasionally report spam mail only to find that the character doesn’t exist, just a day after the mail was sent).
Yesterday I got a tell that started with “Sorry to disturb you.” I thought somebody needed help with something, but it turned out to be a gold spammer. “Sorry”? Right…
It’s getting to be an incredible nuisance, and there’s nothing we can do about it. No point ignoring somebody when they’re going to be on a new alt the next time they spam you. I wish they could shut the websites down, but as they all seem to be places like China, that doesn’t appear to be possible.
This never happened to me in CoH. I’m sorry to hear that it’s a problem there now.
It’s not a frequent problem so far. And, fortunately, they haven’t been making use of the mailbox (or else the mailbox stuff gets autowiped when the accounts are squashed by customer support).
Both WoW and EQ2 have autoblock on any Tell/Shout/general channel (except local for some odd reason) for anything that contains certain words or phrases. EQ2 for the past two years has had a spam report for mail, tells and general channels so that all you had to do was click and flag it and that account would be banned if it was spam.
This led of course to folks spamming, and the quickly lgging off and deleting the account before it could be deleted by Blizzard or SoE.
But, for the most part over the past couple of months Spam has all but ceased in WoW and EQ2, so maybe they see CoX (and LotR, apparently) as an opportunity since it does not have the blocks like the other two do.
Given the goofy way the obscenity filters work in CoX, (both “slit” and “God” are filtered, for example, but any number of other ways of saying things that folks would possibly consider naughty remain), I wouldn’t have much faith in that sort of thing. I’m not sure what terms or phrases might appear in a spam tell like that which I’ve not seen, legitimately, in a ton of other messages/broadcasts.
CoX was living in happy oblivion until they created an economy. A distinct downside to Innovations.
But there was an economy beforehand, and I know there were PL services and the like, too. You’re right that the growth of the economy has provided further opportunities.
Another thing to criticize I9 for. 🙂
SOE is taking serious steps to stop the spamming in Star Wars Galaxies. Players can volunteer to become Wardens.
“With the use of a simple command, a player in the program can target a spammer offering credits or power leveling services and squelch their ability to speak through all chat channels, spatial emotes, spatial chat bubbles and in-game mail for a period of 6 hours. Meanwhile, an automatic email will be sent to our Customer Support Team, who will follow up on each incident and take further action against the account of the spammer.”
Not only that, but it flags the spammer for PvP! Mwa-ha-hah! See Brasse’s comic about it at http://www.thebrasse.com/index.php
I beat Avo to it!
Woot! ;P
I think a tool like this in CoX would be pretty cool (with, of course, consequences for abuse of the tool).