This is the usual scenario on USPC. You block one new one pops up. Will new UI able to filter words and automatically filter chat?
I know. I meant will there be custom word filters to block certain chats, like in other mmo. If not, they should add it.
Veteran players in DCUO have had to either /ignore spambots or just suffer with such text popping up so there is no reason for new players to expect fancy custom chat filters that other MMOs have here in DCUO... (Wanted to get that useless reply out of the way for your thread.)
These annoyatron bots have been around for years and nothing has been done, though I am sure Daybreak and Sony before them must have lawyers on retainer and could easily get a cease and desist order drawn up directed at the URL's the spambots tell you to go to. So I guess the obvious answer would be : Don't hold your breath.
There's very little point in expending resources going after these things to be honest, unless you actually are willing to devote enough time/resources tracking the accounts (and the actual storage accounts) and driving them off altogether and that is hugely time consuming and usually very expensive and may still not have the desired effect. If you block them, they route around it. If you add their sites to the chat filter they just edit what they say and still get their message across. If you ban them they create new characters. Once upon a time, in an MMO far far away I watched a GM ban these and saw them replaced at a rate of a new one approximately every two minutes. It became a sisyphean task trying to get rid of them. We did impact the ones there for a while by going after their sources of gold and the accounts they stored them on/used to transfer stuff to players but it was a huge amount of effort and it had to be kept up constantly to have even a minor impact. Just add them to your ignore list, sigh and accept them as an annoying side effect of the game still being reasonably successful. When they voluntarily leave a game... you know it's dead.
Oh that has been such a pain. It did work for maybe a few days to a week but they came back with a vengeance. They now have farmers on planets taking all the treasure chest with some sort of teleport glitch (and that guy that just sits in one spot on Quesh hours/days on end). Then there's the new way they are sending their pitch, PM and mail. Well I guess at least this proves that it isn't f2ps fault, sense money trades and mailing are paid things. I do enjoy making a game of beating the farmers to the chests, its so funny to see the bot try to figure out what happened. It only takes a few seconds then they port away but still its amusing.
Blocking won't help. I wonder how these bots register new toons, is it manual or automatic. If its automatic they can add a captcha like feature to character creation. Chat filter should work well imo. Lets say they filter messages containing EGPAL and MMOOK, most of the time they input numbers around it, but they always post the full word EGPAL and MMOOK. Simply block EGPAL and MMOOK with wild card character *. That's why give users their own word filters so devs don't have to manually create filters. The users can do themselves and the bots won't figure out who is filtering them nor will they be able to workaround it.. Not taking care of spambots issue just because they have existed for past 2 years is not a good excuse and poor software quality management.
