So NCsoft came in the dead of night over the weekend and dropped the wicked ban hammer on a lot of accounts. Now the purpose of this was to take advantage of their server lockdowns to wipe out a large amount of players that were violating the EULA. In other words, botters and gold spammers. But they failed. I give them an A for effort but ultimately there’s still a bunch of spam and still prominent and obvious bots in game, but there’s an added twist. It seems that somebody fucked up big time because a lot of players who didn’t do anything wrong also got banned.
Before you ask, no my account is pretty much bulletproof, but that still sucks. Can you imagine trying to log on and fidning your account banned? Worse off you never did anything at all against the EULA that would constitute a ban and you’ve never been reported by another player. That’s some fucked up shit folks.
Sound off, what do you think. How would you fix the gold spam and RMT problem without completely shitting on customer service. I’d like to get a bunch of replies to compile and forward them up to NCsoft.
Good morning/day folks,
A couple of threads on this topic appeared during the night and rather than replying to each one of them I thought I’d create a new one.
We have, as you know, recently banned a large number of users for violating our User Agreement. If you found yourself unable to log in after the night, that would be the reason.
If you are 100% sure you have not been involved with any activity that would violate our User Agreement (this would also include anything related to RMT), then we suggest contacting our Customer Support team at Support | NCsoft who will be able to look into your case.
We understand that the timing is very inconvenient and will make sure that inquiries on this matter are made top priority. Our GMs will be working through the weekend to sort this out as quickly as possible.
- Ayase
Whatever they did or didnt do, its not helping a lot, I still login every day to channels that get spammed nonstop by 15 different goldsellers meaning that every day I spend about 5 minutes blocking people. Its really gotten completely out of hand, ive never seen anything this bad in any mmo Ive played before.
Are you sure that lots of people who did nothing wrong really got banned? Not to be a jerk, but I can’t tell you how many times in my years of mmo playing I’ve seen people play that card when they get banned.
Yet everyone I’ve ever known in a game who got banned was someone who had some odd things going on like an inexplicably large amount of in-game currency, frequent logins into the same instance for days on end, etc. They always then come into vent and go, “wtf I got banned for NO REASON! I swear!!”
Not saying it isn’t possible to be wrongfully banned, but there’s also no reason why people who deserved to get banned wouldn’t make a desperate attempt to get unbanned by hopping on the “NCSoft screwed me over!” bandwagon.
As for the spammers and botters, there’s still a ton of them out there on my server but it’s gotten a whole lot better lately.
As far as the gold spammers on my server [Ariel] I would actually say it has gotten worse. They also figured out how to make colorful images in the text which just makes it obnoxious. lol Getting rid of the infestation of gold spammers and bots is not going to be easy and I don’t expect to see an immediate improvement. These ‘companies’ make so much money from people BUYING the gold [kinah] that they can afford to continually make new accounts. I constantly see people selling crap items in the middle of the night for multiple millions of kinah and those are the ones that are continuing this vicious cycle. As far as I am concerned there should be GMs sitting around and account banning any message that advertises RMT as well as the people selling junk items for multiple millions. And no matter the whining do not reinstate the account. Because I can guarantee that a lot of these gold spammers got their accounts reinstated by jumping on that band wagon and immediately went back into business.
im with the above, USE our money and employ live gms, that ban people onsite for chat spamming give that a week and the “gold spamming” would not exist if there paying 50$ US to spam a server and its getting banned instantly they would not be able to afford it, shut up shop and fuuckkkk off…
imo
Wouldn’t take rocket science to bank RMT spammers pretty much on the fly and automatically. When your account gets blocked by more than say 100 people in an hour (generously low rate to allow for people simply being jerks), your activity gets logged for 15 min and then account gets disabled temporarily automatically (no making an alt to rinse and repeat). Then a CSR reviews activity in the 15 min logged and bans if it’s against EULA, re-enables if someone it was legit. That’d mean a spammer would get banned after 15 min basically. They’d have to make those 15 min of advertizing pay more than $50. It’d actually make more money for NCSoft if spammers have to buy new accounts so it’d be in everyone’s interest. Chat filter upcoming would possibly help (just filter the websites, specific words. Yes those can be defeated but every bit helps.
Fot bots, most players can tell easily a bot from normal gamer. So just create a simple command for reporting bots. Again CSR would later review activity of accounts reported and ban accordingly.
wait after the server maintenance today… now, for ncsoft, they have to look at other games like Conquer Online or even GuildWars (from NC itself!), the first one had a Marketplace (like Pandemonium) where you had the channel to sell or buy, everywhere else in the game: GM’S who are contacteable anytime to report.
GuildWars has one of the better systems: When u start chatting with lfg , lf , wtb, … you get directly in another channel.
I mean, something like this would be a great help,
anyways, there should be more GM’s CSR or whatever you want to call it
I like that idea Protack of the whole Marketplace thing, though isn’t it a little restricted? Either way if they just eliminated one worldwide channel (currently LFG) then the spam would significantly die down because as it stands now, botters get to level 5 and sit in the starting zones spamming in the LFG channel as well as the class chat channels. I love the idea of a class only channel since that can be direct help/advice/discussion but the spam only looks bad because it’s being broadcasted at the same time over 4-ish channels every 30 seconds.
I still think they need to Immediately localize Poeta’s LFG channel there is no reason people in Poeta need to broadcast to everybody. After that the next step would be to localize all LFG channels and mimic Warcrafts LFG system. So you can still find people across zones. No global channels means no global spam. Third step would be to step up enforcement with either real live people or make the scripts more aggressive.
I believe I could have blocked some innocent people the first day or two that I began playing the game. The spam was scrolling fast and I might have clicked on some names that were near the spamers names by mistake. I no longer make this mistake.
If NCsoft looks at who players have been blocked by another player, to ban accounts, they should look at how many people have banned a name. If someone gets banned 100 times within an hour that is probably a spamer, however, if someone gets player blocked a couple of times during an entire day that person is probably not spamming. Probably wrote a short note that happened to be at the top of someone elses multi-line spam and an innocent person got placed on someone’s personal block list.
This assumes that NCsoft looks at players block lists.
Another problem is, what if a 10 year old kid is playing on his dad’s computer and game and decideds to contact one of these spammers, says something wrong and the spammer blocks the 10 year old kid 100 times? [Add - remove. Who knows, someone may be insane in this world].
In any event, there should be a prerequisite of some kind that screens the number of blocks by players, if NCsoft is actually looking at player blocks.
Another thin NCsoft could do is simply add a program to their next upgrade that will block spammers. I know there are some devious but smart minds that could get around an anti-spam program, however, something needs to be done.
WoW has been out for years and has made their billions and still does not have a perfect game, Aion is new, so new that I think their forum recently got their first moderator. Talking about a thin staff…
Let’s hope a solution can be found soon.
just logged in and the gold selling spam is the worst i have seen in a long time. I do think NcSoft are doing something about it, though i think they are going after the farm bots (and as such having more of a effect, but less obvious). A GM in chat during peak hours is a simple and cheap method to temporally deal with them and more importantly do something that players can observe. Until them im just reporting all bots i see (the action tab under skills, the /autoreporthunting icon can be dragged to hot bar) though i tend to go though my 10 reports per day withing 5 mins if im near a good farming location.
I think the Gms should play a bigger role in the game. Instead of waiting on tickets or whatever else they do get ingame, watch the chats interact with players. At least this way theres a chance they would be coming across players botting. As for gold farmers, i dont know what to say about that except if you buy it they will come.
They did ask people to block spammers to help identify them. This net also sweeps up those who inhabit the chat channels and make caustic remarks that annoy people trying to play the game.
My account just recently got banned i wasnt even gold spamming or botting i dont know why it got banned this is stupid i payed with my credit card for no reason OMG NC SOFT Dont Ban people for no reason i played other MMO like WoW AoC WAR etc… but none of them had this problem it only you that has this problem comeon NC SOFT i wanna play Aion but you banned my Acc
Well funny thing is…
I play on spatalos and i didnt saw more then 3 goldspammers in a whole month…
i think u guys r blowing things a bit up…
Btw Ncsoft can’t ban u for buying gold only for SELLING gold -_-
[Israphael] Server just crashed, down for a matter of minutes, can’t log bakc in, only one in my vent who got banned. No reason for it, no excuse, no contact form NCsoft support via email, no responce to MY email TO them, their customer support hotline is worse than HP’s.
At least when I call HP the guy can sort of speak english even if he’s incapable of turning on a computer much less assist my elderly grandmother with troubleshooting.
No indicent reports on account management either… This is what happens when they bill you on a monday and decide to screw shit up because they alrdy got the cash.