Temporarily IP Ban trial accounts of spammers

It's nice having the ignore person as spammer feature, but the gold sellers keep coming back. If a particular IP range is getting flagged as a spammer though, and it happens to be most, if not all trial accounts, can't we just temporarily ban that range from creating a temporary account until it's approved by a customer service agent? If gold spammers want to buy new boxes, let them since it only benefits us.

Banning IPs is an empty gesture since so many people have dynamic IPs. All you'll end up doing is banning the IP range of a particular provider and in so doing screw over legitimate customers using said provider.

*edit*
For instance, I have to re-verify my identity and approve a new IP every time I log into my PlayNC account because account security requires a static IP to recognise you, and my provided assigns one to me randomly each time I connect.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Stop playing under Atlas on Freedom?


I haven't had to ignore a gold spammer in ages - I have ONCE recently, and before that, pretty much 9 or 10 months since the last time I even SAW one. I play Protector. *shrug* I don't see the need. Your global ignore list can safely be purged of most of the names on it every couple weeks, if you're really that set on ignoring spammers. Most of them will get banned and that will be the very end of them, so.. ignore and delete, doesn't matter.

If you don't want to see them at all, don't play on the busiest server...

I'm not seen goldsellers for months. They came in to Defiant about year ago or maybe two but I think we actually driven them away If people ignoring them and never buy anything they are eventually going away.

The trial accounts isn't the problem. The RMTers are using REAL accounts (usually stolen from someone who wanted to buy a PL) to spam people.

Trial accounts are so limited in what they can do that they aren't very useful to RMTers aside from being a means to collect names.

If you ban an IP address, you will be screwing over anyone who is a legitimate player who happens to play from near that location.

I just saw my first RMT spammer in about maybe 6 months just the other day on Virtue. I was passing through AP and stopped off in the auction house to sell a few things when this guy started spamming in Local every 30 seconds or so.

Now admittedly I pretty much never spend any serious time in AP so I don't really know how bad the problem still is there. But the fact that I don't see RMT spamming anywhere else AT ALL is a good enough indication that the problem is sufficiently contained to not need any more attention at this point.

There are rolling goldspammers from four different companies (though one of them is particularly incessant) spamming up the Atlas WW at all times of the day. They also often spam in the help channel. Repeatedly.

Aww we are using help channel at mothership raids :/

I see them almost everytime I log into Freedom Atlas Wentworths to get on my mule there.
They show up in pairs. I have an ignorespammer macro now. I used to file a petition each time, but I am over that now.

A much better way to ban spammers would be to blacklist the MAC address of the network adapter used to connect to the internet, since that is stored in the hardware itself; you would be banning a specific computer. Unfortunately, it's likely that tech-saavy scammers would just install a driver to spoof the MAC address and change them every time they're banned.

IP addresses are worthless for blacklisting, especially in these days of wifi everywhere. I can take my laptop outside and connect to five different open networks, with five different IPs.

So, essentially, we're not preventing spammers from registering accounts, but rather from logging into the game? Huh... I suppose that could work.

People are not very likely to have duplicate MAC adresses on their network cards, are they?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.