Constant plat spam in channel.

They're not only using General chat. They're also in LFG and Auction. I honestly hate them.

BURN IN THE POWER OF THE SUN, FOUL DEMONS!!!!!

Yeah. I kinda have those on tabbed windows as well. The only ones I actively monitor most of the time are Guild, Main, and Loot.

That is the way it is supposed to work but with the "investment company" and lack of CS to follow up I would be willing to bet dollars to donuts that the attitude is becoming Hey if they Pay they stay.

i don't know. that doesn't seem to be the attitude with the sudden crop of banned accounts- some of which are paid up for months and the only crime seems to be they decided to resub a bit early.

I would love to see your evidence of a sudden crop of banned accounts since the spam started.

i am getting 1 or 2 direct tells a day(from ftp accounts i assume) . I am not nice to them

i didn't say since spam started- those are your words. i was talking about customer service. but you can read this thread and decide for yourself

They are on Everfrost this morning. I was running through my apprentice quests and kept having to re-report and re-ignore as I switched toons. I wasn't on overly long but believe there were 3 different spammer names and were varying between General, LFG, and Auction just like Charlice had noted above.

I also agree with Atan. If this requires a /petition then it is not worth my time to bother. Clicking the name and selecting /report spam is about as much as I'm going to do other than ignoring a bunch of different toons.

Suka, exactly *none* of them are sucking it up and paying a sub fee, ever. They are routinely blocked by gamers within an hour of them starting to spam the chats, not to mention the accounts they hack into to temporarily use for spamming are also banned quite quickly in games with support departments, so these hackers are used to coming back with different accounts every couple hours. That's why blocking them is so useless: By the time you even block their name, they're coming back with slews of other automated macro-run accounts.

Poor Suka, gold farmers are HACKERS. It's organized crime with millions of dollars in backing and technology behind it. They could care less about the two dollars that someone pays for in-game gold: They want the credit card numbers and the personal identity that is behind the two dollars. The gold sale is just a lure, a ruse to get at what they really want. Online games are frequently targeted as they have huge pools of victims, typically young and foolish ones at that (using Daddy's credit card, while Daddy may very well not even know) and poor security measures.

Usually, the gold-buying victims are sent embedded key loggers in their "thank you for buying our gold" confirmation emails, at which point the hackers go back in and wipe the gold back out of the victims' game accounts. And if the victims complain to the game devs about getting hacked, the devs then look at the account, see the huge dump of gold in there from Xxkrrrryyyyyfff, and just ban the victim for cheating, lol. So the gold farmers know that either way, nothing will happen to them.

Now you know. Have a nice day!

Meow! Rawr!

Cat fight!

/teasing

Unfortunately, not only do Chinese gold farmers not typically speak English, but these accounts are run in groups of hundreds of them at a clip, via macros and malware-infested-unsuspecting-PCs across the internet at large. Seriously-- it's organized crime at its finest, with millions in backing.

And when they do "buy" gold accounts to spam from, it's by using stolen credit cards, which means charge backs for Daybreak once the card owners get wind of it on their statements....

it seems to me, like the database conversion they have been doing is probably the culprit as to how they are getting through. cause that's what they've started setting up, which is why a sever like every day has a 4 hour downtime. I imagine once they get this all back in order, they'll put the hammer back down on these guys.

Just right click 'Report as Spam', been there for years, this one is already gone on Guk.

/report does sometimes work without a /petition. You won't get a response from anyone but you can sometimes see the result of your reports. Over the years I have reported some very bad names, including ones that are politically motivated, and the folks were gone within minutes of the report. With plat spammers you probably wouldn't see any result at all but the report may still be acted upon.

i don't have the info Siren seems to have on how they work nor have i found it on the internet. from what i have been able to find, the farmers are not the ones who sell the gold. they only farm it and the retailer buys it from the company the farmer works for. in IGE's case, i remember years ago seeing ads everywhere of them wanting to buy plat for a ridiculously low plat from people who had plenty so they could turn around and resell it.

the articles i have found may be old and outdated but they seem to indicate kind of a computer sweat shop environment. of course now days with tons of programs out there and the people who create them being so smart they seem to often be ahead of the games, there probably are some who run bot teams. i have seen maybe 3 teams of people in all of my time on the games who were obviously bots. one was run by a person who had like 8 people following her as she ran around killing. i remember thinking how does she get so many in one group? there were no mercs in the group- just a bunch of people following behind one person in a very automatic way. as though she were the one leading with every single one on follow. it was a lower level area so i wasn't sure what they were doing there.

other than those, i have really seen very little evidence of botting. and i always figured there had to be other ways for people to get plat because that looked like a lot of work. yeah someone in china might would be willing to work for such a low wage, but not anywhere else.

i did find this though http://www.azzor.com/article/2006/05/general-news/truth-about-ige-and-gold-industry

and don't make the mistake of thinking i endorse them. i don't. i am totally against buying and selling ingame currency in any form.

what bothered me most about the above website is that a lot of our favorite fansites are owned by IGE and it has collaborated with SOE among other games in the past for control of other gaming assets and sites. if you ever thought that gold selling - not farming but selling - was a small business and run by only peons who got their money by hacking, you should do yourself a favor and really read up on the history of the top plat seller and what their assets are. it is a small miracle that we didn't get sold to them instead of CS

I'm not nice to them either, it just isn't in my nature.
Originally in Rift the default setting for PvP was ON. Yes you could, and still can, open world PvP on all shards.
Gold farmers and bots used to spend hour after hour killing and skinning mobs. They'd even follow you and skin the ones you killed. I worked out that the bots moved in squares and the farmers ran when they saw me coming.

I devoted many hours to following them, skinning their mobs and killing them at every opportunity. It warmed my heart that most of them were too stupid to change their default setting to off.

wtg - too bad you can't do that on eq2. i would love to see that happen but only against the bot armies

zam.com happens to be one of my favorite sites just behind eq2wire. this article really saddened me.

but i was really glad to see that as of Aug 2009 it is illegal to farm and sell ingame gold. so now where do they get their gold? i am researching further. it is called "know thine enemy" and gold sellers are definitely our enemy.