Discussion: Zero Tolerance RMT Tells and Spam

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I got 2 of these annoying messages & used /ignore & /gignore & reported the lowlife of a parasite via petition. It was very annoying to have this tell smack me in the face in the midst of fighting a Ritki zone invasion with heavies surrounding me & having to not lose my temper over such sickening behaviour in game.

Anything PlayNC can do to reduce such exploitation is a step forward in my opinion. Good riddance!

As for suggestions? Here are mine:

(1) I like the brilliant idea that Luerim12 gave, to better moderate exploitation on the auction house. Show the prices max, min & average for the last month!

(2) What about the option of imposing minimum & maximum selling prices on auction items?
Eg - rare hamigoo salvage - min price 5,000inf, maximum 500,000inf. Set with the rule - first maximum bid wins. Yes, I can see people missing out, but how is that different to the current market? The only difference is instead of selling it for 2million, it is dropping to 500k. (My price is just a mere example). By imposing a max price, it helps to reduce some of the extreme exploitation that goes on in the auction house. Sure, it may continue, but with a lower return, it will discourage some of these gold diggers.

(3) Track any banned accounts back to their credit card number - and ban their credit card on trying to open any PlayNC account. This means they have to go to the trouble of getting a new credit card - that in itself will help to discourage the spammers.

(4) Increase the drop rate for the rare precious shiny things.
For example - Numina's convalescance, or any other recipe, or rare salvage that sells for over 1million. Increasing the drop rate means the sales price will lower. This is a good thing for all players, and is only bad for someone who expects to profit on the auction house.

(5) Alter TF completion offering of the rare recipe!
Modify it so you can pick from a certain area - heals, Targeted AoE damage, defense, etc. To give you a higher chance to get what you really need. The screen could be modified to click "rare recipe" which opens up another screen, and you click "Heals", and a random rare heal recipe is given to you.

(6) Alter TF completion to offer you rare salvage!
The screen pops up at the end of the TF. You can pick from SO, recipe, salvage. So you click Salvage, and you can then click "Arcane" or "Tech" to get whichever side of the rare pool you are after, which offers you a random rare from that type.
(When I say arcane, I'm referring to stuff such as Mu Vestment, Pangean Soil, etc, I'm not sure on their real classification).

(7) Level restrict Peregrine Island.
OK I will upset some people here. But this is how I feel. Please, change Peregrine Island to have a level restriction - make it level 40+ for example (just a suggestion). Yes, people will farm in other zones, but eventually those farm leaders will level up & have to move on as it affects xp. It just makes it that little bit more difficult, and will slow the farms down some.

(8) Paying to join a farm!
I have been in Peregrine Island and regularly seen messages on broadcast such as "Battle Maiden Farm, 1million influence per run" and shockingly people pay this per run. They pay even more to do arcane runs for the rare salvage drops. And the farm teams are led by the same build. I'm not asking to "nerf" the fire kins (I have one & it's not 50 yet!). But being able to run an 8 man team set on invincible with only 1 or 2 fire kins is rather disturbing. It would be interesting to investigate the banned RMT's accounts & see if they were running fire kins to grind up their cash.

Maybe a fix to this would be to stop the "mapping" - that is, after the map is explored out & the 6 other people quit, allow the mobs to reset down to the number left on team. Yes, coding is required, but it fixes the problem without having to nerf anyone.

I don’t mind farming when the people grinding away are experienced players & helping their friends level up without any catch, and everyone is *learning* how to play their hero (not just sitting AFK...). Paying to join a farm bothers me. And when people PAY to have their level 2 levelled up in PI and go from 2 to 50 in a week & have no clue how to play, that sickens me. And surprisingly there are accounts sold with alts PL'd up to 50, and I get stuck teaming with some idiot who has no idea who to play his level 50 fire/kin, and I check out his info to see he is a 2 year veteran yet has no idea how to send tells... and then realise he bought the account from some leech that PL'd it... and that upsets me. The game to me is about playing & *learning*, which unlocks your potential to be worthy of level 50, the pinnacle of your success, a super hero.

Zloth summed it up nicely for me:
"Paying $500 to have somebody PL your hero up to 50 is like paying somebody $50 to tell you the end of the latest Harry Potter book.

So long as farms charge people to get PL’d and people are willing to pay for it, it encourages RMTs to exploit this for their own gain. This is why I think the zone restriction & fixing the “mapping” can help a bit to reduce this problem.

These are just my suggestions, please don’t crucify me. I was asked for my opinion, so this is my feedback & in no way a criticism on anyone.

Thanks for your time.

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I have been asking for numbers 6 and 7 for an eternity. Although I would make PI a 35+ instead of 40+ because some late 30 characters have run out of missions and use the low end PI spawns to get them to 40.

Rare salvage is too rare, it needs to be fixed.

Look what I just found:

Go to ebay, and search for: City Of Heroes/Villains Account
Found 2 accounts for sale. One for $202.50, and the other for $535.

This is the URL for the page i got (I'd put a link in but I don't know how):
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll...illains+Account

Details showed there are several level 50s on each account.

Agreed before inventions we didn't "care" that this was happening. Now these guys can buy enough influence to effect the market. I play enough where money isn't a concern and if I need some plenty of 50s to make some.

We all have multiple toons and most would like to customize them. Opening up the markets with an in game suppling NPC would achieve the cash sink NCsoft wanted and also provide us with the pieces we grind to find. You don't need to fix drop rate that way.
Not a single player would be opposed to an open market that received artifical stimulation every now and then would they?????
I mean you need a new TV it might cost alot but when you go to the store they'll have one for sell.
For the past month I have tried to obtain decimiation on villain side and its not there. Need to change name to FLEA MARKET cause the only recipes there are the stuff noone wants.

I don't know why anyone ever doubts Ectomy. I do look up stuff before I post

While you all post good points and ideas on this, one thing to point out is that RMT's for this game have existed long before I9, the only reason we are seeing spam on this is because of I9, there's more money to be made now with the introduction of the AH/BM. I received several of these spam messages, /gignored them and whatnot, however I got the same spam message from different toon a few days later. Thing is people are going to spend their money how they see fit, if that includes RMT's, then so what, not like you would want your parents (kids) or some authority figure like the IRS (adults), telling you how to spend your money. However I support NC's stance on the spamming, it's ridiculous, if someone wants that kind of thing, they can go find it themselves, and deal with potential risks. If your account gets jacked or your credit card charged up, that's your problem, and if someone complains to GM/DEV's about it, they can just reply with an SoL type email. Treat it like they do people playing on bootcamp macs, you can do it, but if anything happens, it's your , not theirs. I stand behind NC and their Zero tolerance on spam, if I want advertising I'll go play a game on my console, mmmm.......Burger King......drool.

As I mentioned in my post, the listings were in the Sponsored Links Section, not actually listed auctions. They may not list them in auctions but they'll list them as sponsored links. I imagine if one were to look close enough behind "masked" listings they could find characters and/or imfamy easily enough.

[edit] Just noticed Kat_From_Oz's post. `nuff said.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Only spam I like is the oily meat substitute I eat when me belly aches...chase dat down wit a cup o' joe...good fer tha day.
Good ta see tha neighborhood weedin' out tha scumbags! Makes me all warm and fuzzy.../eats powdered donut

I have received three tells total from spammers advertising their RMT sites and such. Each time, I petitioned them.

Tell spam==SO NOT COOL.

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I would feel a lot better if you had also said at the same time that the actual RMT, not just the spamming for the RMT, was also zero-tolerance. Any account believed by NCsoft to have sold inf or items for cash should be deleted and the IP address banned, any account believed to have purchased inf or items for cash should have the items deleted and the inf debited from the character (on first offense) or deleted and IP banned themselves (second offense).

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Unfortunately, the only thing here, iirc, is that they are advertising in the game itself. What I have been told before by many a MMOer that knows more about this than I, is that when you "purchase IG money" the seller has it set up so you are paying him/her for the time spent, not the money/item itself.

A lower level character send me a tell while I was on a small team and asked if she could join. I don't like beggars but one more wasn't gonna hurt and I felt like being nice. They got great XP and as a "thank you" (it was not solicited) they gave me a decent chunk of inf. Now, I was, in essence, paid for letting her on the team. Something of value was exchanged. Is this ok? What if my roommate asks for 10mil inf and I say "buy me taco bell and its a deal." Then money in the real world was exchanged technically, so where would you draw the line?

Thats my interpretation, so for now, it appears that only advertising IG is illegal. If anyone else can elaborate on this, that would be great.

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Need to change name to FLEA MARKET cause the only recipes there are the stuff noone wants.

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lol, AND it still goes for WAY more than it ever should!
I see this problem mostly on red side, where something that would get you 250 inf at any QM, going for 10,000+ at the BM!? How is that possible, esp when there are like 20 bids and 1400 for sale!?
Blue side, not so bad.. only thing I have to complain about there would be the wing price drops lol
AND I HAVE YET to get a single costume redipe drop since the start of this on ANY of my toons How RUDE!

Hmmm. I think what I'd do is alter the tool the GMs have, by tweaking the expletive filters with a pre-step.

All the chat text gets passed by an expletive filter already, most like whether the player has it "on"... and assuming this is done server-side (it might be handled by the client, in which case this approach would be unfeasible without daily client patches, and thus should be rejected)--it means there is already a bottleneck through which all chat text is passed, so why not exploit that bottleneck further?

1) Some pre-determined number of subscribers send harassment petitions to the GMs when a tell is received. These tells contain a website address. If enough instances of the same website URI are referenced, the policy is enacted.

2) The website address, such as "123games.com" then gets typed into the pre-filter scan list by the on-duty GM responsible for this task.

3) When a text line is received by the chat engine, it now runs that string through it's list, and substitutes out "########.###" for that particular string.

4) Altered text line is passed on to the expletive filter as normal for futher checking.

By removing the ability to get potential customers to their storefront, the economic viability of the activity would be destroyed in simple manner.

It would slow things down in miniscule fashion, but string manipulation tends to be one of the fastest things a computer does--I'd write the system because it is so simple and then look at the possible performance hit with actual data, rather than dismiss it out of hand.

You mean:

Stuff like this?

Post deleted by Martys_22

I have no issues with someone going into RV and farming influence/salvage for their own benifit.

I do have a issue with the whole farming, rmt, pling, anchoring/bridging bs. It has killed the whole PUG experience for my 50. Prior to 46 I had no trouble getting a good team together to go hunt avs for fun and xp. Once I hit 46 it was all raiding/bridging/farming/pling crap. Can't get a TF together because lazy people just want to be pled or they are on a raid.

I soloed from 46 to 50 and busted my 50 all alone. And I was a tank, so most of my enjoyment stemmed from running into a huge mob and keeping agg under control for a whole team.

Every once in a while I get a good team of like minded people who actually enjoy the game, but there will always be an issue with rmt as long as their are stupid lazy people who subscribe to a game they have no interest in actually playing.

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I'm doin my share to help. I continuously kill the chinese farmers in RV (even though they decreased since the heavy nerf).

If they hide in the afk zone, I just confuse my dom and kill them.

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I was in RV preventing some farming last night, I looked at the information center and went after the top victor in there...and sure enough he was there farming on poor little npc's. Maybe they should rid the zone of npc's all together, wouldn't that be great. I never really attacked the toon but his heavy, dropping it's hit points to 5-30 and moment he would go after an npc I would drop it.

Yeah penalize those of us who actually play the game because of stupid people. Brilliant!

I to am glad to hear they are cracking down on this since I got a spam tell once from a player asking me if I would be interested in buying inf for real money. Well I can tell you I was not happy to get this damn message and decided it would be best not to reply back. But instead ignore the player and report this player for their actions.

When you think about it, we all signed an agreement with NCsoft about what things we can and can not do. But like many of us we do not read it, except for a small hand full. I myself have read a small part and I think I remember them saying something about what Lighthouse is talking about.

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The IRS has a commission to look at things like this and decide how to tax it, and I do mean specifically RMT. It was created in the last year or so.

Obviously, the people receiving money should be taxed. However, there is case law that receiving something that has real world value (as indicated by RMT) is taxable in and of itself.

E.g. if that Miracle: +Recovery unique has a real world value thanks to RMT, you owe taxes on it *whether you sell it for actual cash or not*.

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"Please enter the equivalent dollar value (EDV) (reference charts on pages 57-65) of the reward items you received from running Accellerated Croatoa Zone Task Forces (ACZ-TF) in box 11b"

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The guy said he bought account for wings which we all know any level 1 can now get.

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HOW does a lvl 1 get wings without a vet reward?

I recieved my 1st RMT harrassment 2 nights ago Australia time (really early in the morning PT) it came from IP 216.89.109.146 which won't resolve as a URL but that's the IP that a tracert gives my for the DNS.

I petitionned and ignored (both flavours) I got a response back within an hour from NCSoft so was quite impressed.

We as a community have to fight this. NCSoft can do what they can but they'll only continue to flog a dead horse as long as it's profitable.

I guess I don't understand what is happening. Are folks buying items and then trying to sell them for "real money?" I have never experienced this type of spam. I've seen some things on ebay where folks are selling accounts with premade characters, and you can pay someone to level up your toon for you, has this now continued to buying in game items and selling them? What about the folks who hire out their services to level up your toon? Should that be banned as well, or is that too difficult to track?

Basically people are spamming players offering to sell influence, power leveling, and invention salvage for real money. The act of doing this is in violation of the EULA and hence this thread.

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Sigh excuse me if they can block words that could be offensive anywords would it be so hard for them to find the offending person since they can see the original copy of the logs.

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Not quite sure what you are saying, but -

When you send anything in through the chat system, it goes out to the server exactly as you typed it - this is what is logged on NCSoft's end.

Then, it is sent to the recipients (yourself, and whoever else it is to) and that is when the individual client censors any banned words.

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(7) Level restrict Peregrine Island.

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No - it can be hard enough to team with SG mates and friends as it is without adding another level-restricted zone hero side.

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You calling me out Janlee???

Yeah I believe this is bad for in game. Yeah I think such things most be earned.

However a market place for that exist its called e-bay they don't need to advertise it in game.

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Actually, e-bay no longer accepts those kind of sales and there are none currently up there. It is now against their terms-of-use.

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Using the search term "city of heroes imfamy" I found this

Granted that was in the sponsored links section and I imagine a further search would find "masked" sales in their listings.

If City were truly zero tolerance on this matter I would think they would go after these sites and those reported via petition. Then again it may just be a legal hassle that they don't care to pursue.

...just sayin



.....just sayin

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Actually, I just clicked that link.. and got "0 results" .. I even did one for influence for the same.. and again... "0 results"

Guess they aren't as slow as you assumed?

Peace

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He was refering to the ads below that.

Thing is, the "sponsored links" are not links that eBay actually sponsors, but rather sites that have paid to be advertised by whatever service eBay uses.

Someone might want to send a letter to eBay referring to those ads on their site and the fact they are at odds with their policy./