Discussion: Zero Tolerance RMT Tells and Spam

thanks for bringing us that information. Its reassuring to hear that something is being done... and by the sounds of it, something extensive. Thank you for letting us know.

I have not been bothered as much as other, but I don't want that kind of stuff in our community.

Hopefully, all goes well and this will get in game before too long.

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Member: Mutant Force Five, Chaos Legion & Team Awesome

Thanks Lighthouse, I for one would rather the 'right' fix than a 'quick' fix.

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@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617

Oh, I agree. However, while most of these e-mail addresses are unable to be reproduced by a sane person, they can by forwarded. Apologies in advance, but I've attempted to forward one or two to you, LH. Would it be possible to release a, say, GM_RMT_KILLER e-mail address that we could forward these to? As it stands now, I have to delete a dozen or so every time I log on--and they get away.

At least if I could notify someone about it, that account could be flagged for banination.

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There are no words for what this community, and the friends I have made here mean to me. Please know that I care for all of you, yes, even you. If you Twitter, I'm MrThan. If you're Unleashed, I'm dumps. I'll try and get registered on the Titan Forums as well. Peace, and thanks for the best nine years anyone could ever ask for.

Ban not only the account, but the account that generated the trial code, TOO. I'm guessing this may be the farm account, anyway. At the very least, ban the parent account from generating more trial codes. While this may not stop the spam altogether, it will generate a lot of revenue if a paid account is taken out of the loop each time someone spams.

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Oh, I agree. However, while most of these e-mail addresses are unable to be reproduced by a sane person, they can by forwarded. Apologies in advance, but I've attempted to forward one or two to you, LH. Would it be possible to release a, say, GM_RMT_KILLER e-mail address that we could forward these to? As it stands now, I have to delete a dozen or so every time I log on--and they get away.

At least if I could notify someone about it, that account could be flagged for banination.

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Im with Dumple on this one, a "Attn Spam" address we can forward email to would be ideal.

Side note, isn't it some how possible to take legal action on these sites as a violation of some law, somewhere?

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@PlasmaStream
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Oh, I agree. However, while most of these e-mail addresses are unable to be reproduced by a sane person, they can by forwarded. Apologies in advance, but I've attempted to forward one or two to you, LH. Would it be possible to release a, say, GM_RMT_KILLER e-mail address that we could forward these to? As it stands now, I have to delete a dozen or so every time I log on--and they get away.

At least if I could notify someone about it, that account could be flagged for banination.

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Im with Dumple on this one, a "Attn Spam" address we can forward email to would be ideal.

Side note, isn't it some how possible to take legal action on these sites as a violation of some law, somewhere?

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Yes, but good luck with the cost and how successful you will be. If Blizzard the 100 pound gorrilla can't stamp them out, you think a smaller mmo company can?

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Oh, I agree. However, while most of these e-mail addresses are unable to be reproduced by a sane person, they can by forwarded. Apologies in advance, but I've attempted to forward one or two to you, LH. Would it be possible to release a, say, GM_RMT_KILLER e-mail address that we could forward these to? As it stands now, I have to delete a dozen or so every time I log on--and they get away.

At least if I could notify someone about it, that account could be flagged for banination.

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Im with Dumple on this one, a "Attn Spam" address we can forward email to would be ideal.

Side note, isn't it some how possible to take legal action on these sites as a violation of some law, somewhere?

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Yes, but good luck with the cost and how successful you will be. If Blizzard the 100 pound gorrilla can't stamp them out, you think a smaller mmo company can?

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Part of the problem is that it's not up to the NCSoft or Blizzard to determine what is legal or not legal in other countries. Regardless of what the law of the land is in the US or Canada or Great Britain or France, the law that generally is the one applied is the law of the country where the spam is originating from. Since it's RMT spam and not terrorism or pedophiles, it's unlikely that intelligence organizations in various countries are going to take the time to investigate. The best an MMO can do is to ban the accounts of those who break the rules. And, with the anonymity of trial accounts, it may not help all that much.

I'd be happy to have a place to forward all the in-game e-mail spam, and the suggestion for banning the account generating the trial codes also seems like a good one. I'm hoping there is something they can do in those areas.

Storm

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Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm ...

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Oh, I agree. However, while most of these e-mail addresses are unable to be reproduced by a sane person, they can by forwarded. Apologies in advance, but I've attempted to forward one or two to you, LH. Would it be possible to release a, say, GM_RMT_KILLER e-mail address that we could forward these to? As it stands now, I have to delete a dozen or so every time I log on--and they get away.

At least if I could notify someone about it, that account could be flagged for banination.

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Im with Dumple on this one, a "Attn Spam" address we can forward email to would be ideal.

Side note, isn't it some how possible to take legal action on these sites as a violation of some law, somewhere?

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Yes, but good luck with the cost and how successful you will be. If Blizzard the 100 pound gorrilla can't stamp them out, you think a smaller mmo company can?

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Part of the problem is that it's not up to the NCSoft or Blizzard to determine what is legal or not legal in other countries. Regardless of what the law of the land is in the US or Canada or Great Britain or France, the law that generally is the one applied is the law of the country where the spam is originating from. Since it's RMT spam and not terrorism or pedophiles, it's unlikely that intelligence organizations in various countries are going to take the time to investigate. The best an MMO can do is to ban the accounts of those who break the rules. And, with the anonymity of trial accounts, it may not help all that much.

I'd be happy to have a place to forward all the in-game e-mail spam, and the suggestion for banning the account generating the trial codes also seems like a good one. I'm hoping there is something they can do in those areas.

Storm

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This makes me think of something I was hearing on Discovery Channel "The rise of Video Games". Tho companies(MMOs) do say they are trying to get rid of spammers when actually they allow a few . Dunno if that is true for this game but it would look like they do.

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Currently, one of the hurdles in addressing e-mail spam...is the fact that the game doesn't know if you are on a Trial or Regular account.


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LH, I find this pill a little hard to swallow...if the game knows how many 3 month badges I have then it knows that I don't have a trial account.

Create a new badge: 1 Month with 2 new cool powers: email and tell

Heck, I would'ld mind one bit f you guys did a "quick" fix tomorrow and disabled all email capability in the game until a "final" solution is in place.

Draconian tatics such as that might just make more people use /stop_playing_to_snitch_on_jerk_hacker

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Tho companies(MMOs) do say they are trying to get rid of spammers when actually they allow a few .

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Although I didn't see this broadcast I can't believe that MMO's would benefit by allowing such annoyances to their playerbase. On the other hand, MMO's do benefit by allowing trial accounts which a percentage of turn into paying accounts and cost the company virtually nothing. By allowing current users to give out trial accounts, the MMO's get free advertising to boot.

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Currently, one of the hurdles in addressing e-mail spam...is the fact that the game doesn't know if you are on a Trial or Regular account.


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LH, I find this pill a little hard to swallow...if the game knows how many 3 month badges I have then it knows that I don't have a trial account.

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Ah yes... The ol' "I am just a regular user and know far better than the actual staff how the code works and interacts" routine.

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http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

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I started a thread in suggestions about how to dramatically reduce RMT spam from CoH/V. It's my opinion that you can't build enough barriers to stop RMT spam within CoH/V (or MMOs in general) that won't end up also alienating a portion of your new users. Blocking Trial Accounts from the email system will simply see RMT spam moved to /tells. Blocking Trial Accounts from sending /tells just leads to new legitimate players being unable to communicate with friends and then RMT will move to Broadcast spam in the most populous zones.

If you want to reduce RMT spamming, you have to make the external RMT process no longer cost effective for the companies. Given that you can't really raise the cost of RMT services for RMT players only, the best way would be to lower the price players would be willing to pay RMT organisations for their services. A (comparatively) very simple way of doing this is that NCsoft starts up its own RMT services within CoH/V, where you can buy inf (and maybe - MAYBE - autolvled characters) through purchasing NCcoins (which already exist for NCsoft's Exteel).

I know that some people are against RMT altogether so won't like the idea, and I recognise that it will have some impact on the in-game economy should such a system be implemented, but it's the only feasible way I can see that would drive external RMTers out - if it's not financially viable, they won't be in-game, spamming you.

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"Create a new badge: 1 Month with 2 new cool powers: email and tell "

That has got to be the best suggestion I've seen about this. Knowing code like I do, yeah, that should be very easy to implement, and be expeident.

The only thing I can see is an issue with /t not being available to the n00bs, they might not be able to join a team or something like that, or respond to friends...

Spam tell detection might be fairly easy to do. Simply count the /t from any user... add a /t per minute factor... If the thing sends 10 /ts a second (I don't know if I can do it) and each one is more than, oh, 20 characters (arbitrary), then that is a bot or a *really* fast person... so you stop accepting /ts from them for a few seconds, with a warning, of course.

Something like "Whoa, whoa, whoa... slow down, Tex."

And it's all from gagora, so why not put a search on that? If you see it more than 20 times by one person in 10 consecutive /ts or emails, ban stick.

Just my thoughts on it. I don't get the /ts but I do get the emails.... and really, it's not a huge bother... yet.

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August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
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Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012

Normally i ignore the stupid spam tells for RMT. They piss me off to no end but theres nothing that works as of now to block this crap.
Usually its tells posting infamy then real price of money to buy the infamy. Most cases few minutes later they spam completely different add at higher rate. Go figure.

I get these stupid e-mails and delete them. It was until today I felt I needed to share what kind of e-mail I received from these people. Gagora.. I was so pissed and agravated and what made it worse theres nothing I could do at time but complain about it.
Keep in mind I was just logging in to show my 11 year old son a costume I made. I logged In and seen the e-mail and went to delete it. On my fault i opened it instead of deleting right away. Here is what it said.

10%Bonus (70+7) inf 50=$50.85!!
30 min delivery
Buy gold to gagora.com
Red, White, and Blue Christmas
Q: Whats red, white and blue and makes the entire community happy?
A:Smurfette deep throating a candy cane.

Now tell me what the hell is going on? What is it going to take to remove this horse crap of spam? This is the kind of crap they are sending us and what will it take to rid this problem???

And yes i can /ignore but what good does that do?? when they make up a name its nothing but a bunch of gibberish. they make a new toon log back in and do it all over again with some other gibberish name. This is bs and needs to stop some how.

There should be some way to track a single person sending out massive e-mails and tells and record it. There has to be a way to track the same account name then watch how many e-mails they send out to random people per day. After a while their account needs to be shut down.

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Also I have a screen shot of this e-mail if this gets anywhere and a copy of proof is needed.

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remove e-mail access from trial accounts.

[/ QUOTE ]Long story short - we hear you and hate the spammers as much as you do. Thanks for your patience as we work to put more roadblocks up against them.

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I would hate to lose a potential player over the limiting of any part of the game during their trial! I can delete the spam until a working solution that does not call for gimping the accounts of potential new citizens of Paragon is found.

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well...trial accounts already limit you to one side of the game and denies access to SG bases I think it's lucky enough they don't deny trading to trial accounts like in WoW.

I dunno how many people actually make use of the Email System in game...I know I've barely ever used it.

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Hey Gigawatt, if it makes you feel any better, I've been submitting complaints about GAGORA.COM's site to their domain registrar, their hosting company, and their email provider explaining that the site is the focus of a spamming campaign.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but the Gagora.com site is now down. Again. As it has been since I started my own little... um... vendetta against them. Along with my husband's help.

And the owner of the site's email address has already been provided to PlayNC's support team, along with all the details of the site's owner, so we'll see what they make of it.

Just doing what I can to even the playing field...

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

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Good Job on that one!!!!

It is a shame though that you had to do something about it, and we are just now hearing something from the rednames after, what four or five months of this crap going on?

Dark_Respite my new hero!!!

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What a hoot it would be if it was in fact the game publisher that was doing this to pad the coffers.

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I used to report this RMT spam.
And now I am sick to death of it.

I have reported over 20 RMT spams so far, and each time it takes me a good 15 minutes, to /ignore, /gignore, /ignore_spammer & send harassment petition to support. The petition requires me to put detail in from the RMT message, so I have to /copychat chat, paste into notepad, copy out the RMT message, paste into my petition, etc. Not fun. I wanted to have fun & play -- NOT petition RMTs. Then I get an email back from support, usually followed by a survey...

I don't particularly enjoy having to use my "relaxation time" to petition these parasitic vermin. They piss me off, I get stressed out & angry at the game appearing to be full of jerks. (Until I settle back down).

Lately, it seems RMT methods are evolving. Things I'd like to point out from my experience include:
- Original RMT message was received by /tells, from level 1 players in breakout.
- Last 2 months, I have received an increase in RMT spam, via ingame emails. The /tells have reduced, but I'm getting twice as much in emails, mainly on the Virtue server, villain side, whilst my characters were OFFLINE. (I log in & tend to have up to 6 messages on my alts...)
- If I receive an ingame RMT spam email whilst online, the offender is also in breakout.
- I had not received any of this nonsense until the i9 Market & "lewt" was introduced. I don't mind the market, but it brought some vermin with it.
- I was invited to a team (PUG) and met some new players. One of them bragged how he'd just bought millions of influence, and commented to us how it worked without any issues and that he would do it again. I had no idea whether to petition him or not. I was mad as hell.
- Last 2 weeks I have had players walk right up to me (usually in WentWorths), and send me tells, asking me to pay them to get myself power levelled. Maybe the gold farmers are losing paying customers over Xmas or to the winter event.
The most recent example -- a stranger standing right next to me inside the Atlas Park Wentworths, sent me this tell: "If you give me 10million I will PL your alt to 50".... I replied with "no thanks". Then he sent me the EXACT same tell again, which I responded with "I don't need to PL my alt, I'm in no hurry to get to 50 & can get there myself. Go bother someone else." He then moved on to the next player at Wentworths. I'm pretty sure he had a keybind, and was the type of 'gold farmer' that runs the PL farms in Peregrine Island. Go visit PI on freedom server any time, and the global chat is full of messages about paying farms, 1million per run etc... which is where the RMTs are making all their gold to be bought online.

This RMT nonsense is unhealthy to the community environment & forcing players to become anti-social in order to avoid RMTs.
So far the only solution I can find is to go into /hide, and sadly I miss out on a lot of good teams, and rely on my friends being online.

I've seen some good solutions in this thread, agreeing on many of them, I agree with the following, which I'm sure of course will upset some, but I'm at the point that I just don't care any more, please just stop the spammers.

SERIOUS suggestions:
- Stop trial accounts from being able to send /tells and email.
- implement code so as soon as you receive spam, instead of having to know how to /copychat chat, paste notepad, edit, etc, too complicated especially for those new to computers. Put a new button in the petition screen for RMT, allow a function for it to snag the text/SPAM in your message box AND/OR email. Trust me, some of those spammer names are bloody hard to type correctly.

HUMOUR:
- Nerf the fire kins. Turn fire imps into 1 pet instead of 3. And put shackles around its feet. (Hahaha.) Yes I have a firekin. But I KNOW all the gold farmers use them, take a look at WHO is running the paying farms in Peregrine Island, and odds are they are also a RMT agent. However I know this won't solve it, they'd find the next best farm build. I just had to say it.
- Someone make some "Gagora VooDoo Dolls" and put them up for sale. Every time you get a SPAM, you can stab the doll & it screams with Thai Profanity.
- If playNC can catch a spammer in action online, they get caught on video (eg FRAPS) showing their level 1 character in breakout being beaten to a pulp by a GM logged in-game (eg Positron) and this gets played ingame at various projector screens (eg outside wentworths/theatres/train stations) so we get to laugh as they get their account blocked (for voluntary viewing if you so desire).

Please, make the spammers stop.
That's my 2 bobs worth.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Forbin_Project I was thrilled with the Science pack cuz I finally got payback on the creepy guy that kept trying to ERP with my tween heroine, by hitting the costume change and turning into a 10' tall monstrous escaped prisoner and telling him, "You gots a real purty mouf, now bendover and squeal like a pig fo yo daddy, cuz you my little puppy now!" Haven't seen him since.

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They need to find a way to krack down on the players giving this site business. Period.

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"I'm not scared of anyone or anything Angie. Isn't that the way life should be?"
Jack Hawksmoor, The Authority.

I'd find them denying people to send /tells a very bad idea.

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I'd find them denying people to send /tells a very bad idea.

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Agreed. And if they can't send tells or can't send email, the next simple step is to go into a well populated zone and spam in Broadcast. Once every sixty seconds would do.

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Good Job on that one!!!!

It is a shame though that you had to do something about it, and we are just now hearing something from the rednames after, what four or five months of this crap going on?

Dark_Respite my new hero!!!

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*bows*

Thank you, thank you. I intend to find other ways to wreak havoc on their site as time goes along. Besides, what else would you expect from the player who, after reporting them to the devs and using the /ignore_spammer option, sends THEM a tell saying "Hello, dufus. You've been reported for spamming, since you have the brains of a bagel. Have a nice day"?

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If playNC can catch a spammer in action online, they get caught on video (eg FRAPS) showing their level 1 character in breakout being beaten to a pulp by a GM logged in-game (eg Positron) and this gets played ingame at various projector screens (eg outside wentworths/theatres/train stations) so we get to laugh as they get their account blocked (for voluntary viewing if you so desire).

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Now THIS has potential. It's too bad there's no /em spastic command (where we can show the toon banging his/her head against some hard object), otherwise I'd be keeping a character parked in Atlas at all times, just waiting for these guys to show up, demorecord them, and start making videos of their toons looking like idiots.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

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