WOOT another plat seller joins the fight

[sayitaintso]

OK I read where they made a lot of changes to reduce the plat spam...Tonight I am getting plat tells from a completely new company..I have recieved more tells in the past 2 nights that I got in the last 2 weeks...What's up with that?

[nitrous]

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

OK I read where they made a lot of changes to reduce the plat spam...Tonight I am getting plat tells from a completely new company..I have recieved more tells in the past 2 nights that I got in the last 2 weeks...What's up with that?

For every better mouse trap there will come a smarter mouse.

[Savanja]

nitrous wrote:

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

OK I read where they made a lot of changes to reduce the plat spam...Tonight I am getting plat tells from a completely new company..I have recieved more tells in the past 2 nights that I got in the last 2 weeks...What's up with that?

For every better mouse trap there will come a smarter mouse.

Exactly.  They can combat the problem, but the fact is, they will never cure it. Its kinda like e-mail spam.  I'm not getting as much as I used to because companies have been pretty good at patching the problems as they go, but I certainly get less.  But there will always be smart lil critters that can find a way around anything.

[sayitaintso]

Savanja wrote:

nitrous wrote:

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

OK I read where they made a lot of changes to reduce the plat spam...Tonight I am getting plat tells from a completely new company..I have recieved more tells in the past 2 nights that I got in the last 2 weeks...What's up with that?

For every better mouse trap there will come a smarter mouse.

Exactly.  They can combat the problem, but the fact is, they will never cure it. Its kinda like e-mail spam.  I'm not getting as much as I used to because companies have been pretty good at patching the problems as they go, but I certainly get less.  But there will always be smart lil critters that can find a way around anything.

No they can cure it..It's called chat filtering..they give US a chat filter and we filter the chat WE want to recieve. A few key words, such as the plat sellers .com URL can cure it. What are they going to do invest in a new domain everytime people add their curent one to the filter? Once again SOE takes the easy way out and [Removed for Content] the game for those who are honest players in hopes of stopping a few plat advertisers. They need to give us the tools to manage it ourselves...But they won't.

[Kendricke]

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

Savanja wrote:

nitrous wrote:

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

OK I read where they made a lot of changes to reduce the plat spam...Tonight I am getting plat tells from a completely new company..I have recieved more tells in the past 2 nights that I got in the last 2 weeks...What's up with that?

For every better mouse trap there will come a smarter mouse.

Exactly.  They can combat the problem, but the fact is, they will never cure it. Its kinda like e-mail spam.  I'm not getting as much as I used to because companies have been pretty good at patching the problems as they go, but I certainly get less.  But there will always be smart lil critters that can find a way around anything.

No they can cure it..It's called chat filtering..they give US a chat filter and we filter the chat WE want to recieve. A few key words, such as the plat sellers .com URL can cure it. What are they going to do invest in a new domain everytime people add their curent one to the filter? Once again SOE takes the easy way out and [Removed for Content] the game for those who are honest players in hopes of stopping a few plat advertisers. They need to give us the tools to manage it ourselves...But they won't.

People self-policing spam aren't the same people likely to go to those websites.  ...and someone IS going to those websites.  If it didn't work, the plat spammers wouldn't use the tactic.

[Savanja]

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

Savanja wrote:

nitrous wrote:

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

OK I read where they made a lot of changes to reduce the plat spam...Tonight I am getting plat tells from a completely new company..I have recieved more tells in the past 2 nights that I got in the last 2 weeks...What's up with that?

For every better mouse trap there will come a smarter mouse.

Exactly.  They can combat the problem, but the fact is, they will never cure it. Its kinda like e-mail spam.  I'm not getting as much as I used to because companies have been pretty good at patching the problems as they go, but I certainly get less.  But there will always be smart lil critters that can find a way around anything.

No they can cure it..It's called chat filtering..they give US a chat filter and we filter the chat WE want to recieve. A few key words, such as the plat sellers .com URL can cure it. What are they going to do invest in a new domain everytime people add their curent one to the filter? Once again SOE takes the easy way out and [Removed for Content] the game for those who are honest players in hopes of stopping a few plat advertisers. They need to give us the tools to manage it ourselves...But they won't.

You do realize that e-mail spam works the same way?  They have filters enabled to weed out certain words or phrases.  Spammers get around this by tossing in a random letter, word, or sometimes an entire randomized body of text to fool the filter.  I get a spam email into my inbox occasionally that goes something like this "Visit yaddacrappywebsiteyadda com.  whoops, forgot the dot!"  This fools the filter until someone adds it. If they filter out the url, well then..they will find a way around it.   Random domain names are cheap, buy tons of em and redirect, get around the filters, etc and they are back in business.  You'll still get the spam, tons of words and phrases will be filtered, and eventually you'll start missing things you actually wanna see. Just about anything you all can come up with as a solution, they (or even I) can think of a way around.  It's their JOB to.

[Duave]

Wait so you guys are calling the devs dumb and not smarter than simple plat sellers? [Removed for Content] this is tolerated?

[liveja]

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

No they can cure it..It's called chat filtering

Apparently, you don't understand that filters can be easily bypassed.

[ChildofHate]

livejazz wrote:

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

No they can cure it..It's called chat filtering

Apparently, you don't understand that filters can be easily bypassed.

They also appearantly dont know / understand there are other threads addressing this point as well.  (not a slight against the OP...  just people saying "we need chat filters".)

I have found putting on /roleplay or /anon works wonders.  Haven't had 1 single spam msg in 2 weeks.  It also has not affected my ability to get groups in the least.  So that arguement has as much worth as a fart in a windstorm.  Level chat channels work great for finding groups or *gasp* starting one yourself has nothing BUT positive results.

[ArivenGemini]

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

Savanja wrote:

nitrous wrote:

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

OK I read where they made a lot of changes to reduce the plat spam...Tonight I am getting plat tells from a completely new company..I have recieved more tells in the past 2 nights that I got in the last 2 weeks...What's up with that?

For every better mouse trap there will come a smarter mouse.

Exactly.  They can combat the problem, but the fact is, they will never cure it. Its kinda like e-mail spam.  I'm not getting as much as I used to because companies have been pretty good at patching the problems as they go, but I certainly get less.  But there will always be smart lil critters that can find a way around anything.

No they can cure it..It's called chat filtering..they give US a chat filter and we filter the chat WE want to recieve. A few key words, such as the plat sellers .com URL can cure it. What are they going to do invest in a new domain everytime people add their curent one to the filter? Once again SOE takes the easy way out and [Removed for Content] the game for those who are honest players in hopes of stopping a few plat advertisers. They need to give us the tools to manage it ourselves...But they won't.

A filter to stop the plat spammers shouldnt be implemented at the player level, that requires each and every player to participate...  it should be implemented at the server level, which allows SOE to then add in confirmed URLs of plat selling sites to do a oneshot takeout of that url in all their channels. Yes, filters can indeed be gotten around, and yes this isnt a solution to the whole problem, but it sure would cut down on the spam, and a bit on the customer service resources needed to respond to the /petitions resulting from spam...just because it isnt a perfect solution doesnt mean that it shouldnt be done... because there would be some benefit to it. Since you can connect to the chat system via a jabber server I have to guess that their chat system is based in some part on Jabber.. so most likely they have similar functionality to the pure baseline jabber servers in that they could code a filter module.. making it easier to maintain than if they had to recode the server itself..  the question then becomes whether or not the email setup uses the same codebase allowing it to take advantage of that filter module.

[UlteriorModem]

Sometimes I feel like Im stuck in a revolving door.

Or driving in circles.

Keep seeing the same things over and over and over and......

I can nearly gaurentee you that the folks that patronize these "plat sellers" do not read these forums.

I can gaurentee you that SoE are aware of the situation.

(Here come the consparicy posts)

[ArivenGemini]

ChildofHate wrote:

livejazz wrote:

Stinkii@Guk wrote:

No they can cure it..It's called chat filtering

Apparently, you don't understand that filters can be easily bypassed.

They also appearantly dont know / understand there are other threads addressing this point as well.  (not a slight against the OP...  just people saying "we need chat filters".)

I have found putting on /roleplay or /anon works wonders.  Haven't had 1 single spam msg in 2 weeks.  It also has not affected my ability to get groups in the least.  So that arguement has as much worth as a fart in a windstorm.  Level chat channels work great for finding groups or *gasp* starting one yourself has nothing BUT positive results.

I have noticed that /role helps a bit over going without.. but then I use /role for another reason..to stop guild poachers from trying to recruit me to a raiding guild just based on my class 

[rbritz]

Sony said they were going to implement this months ago, so I have no idea why it hasn't started yet.

 Block all outgoing emails/tells from Beginner Isle to start this off right.

 Allow us to block emails and tells from anybody we choose based upon criteria: Levels, Non Guildie, Non Paying player, Not part of friends list, etc.

 Me personally, this would fix 99.9 percent of all spam in the game. If your not a guildie of mine and your not on my friends list. Guess what, your not going to be able to do anything to me.

 Sony promised us a fix months ago, the ball is in their court, they need to stop giving us holiday events and use that programming department to write the code to fix the spammers. If they are not fixing this problem, then the conspiracy is GMWorker and Vsales and any other website is paying Sony some cash under the table.

[UlteriorModem]

See told ya

[Dasein]

SOE never promised a fix, they promised to implement certain things to combat the spam, like restricting tells from Trial accounts and adding the Spam button to automatically report mail. None of these are foolproof, but are intended to make it more difficult to spam players. Blacklists and filters are not very effective, as your filter cannot tell the difference between www.goldseller.com and ww. goldseller . com. Furthermore, it is possible to create subdomains as needed, so the URL could easily change. One day, it might be gold.goldseller.com and the next it would be plat.goldseller.com, and they'd all point to the same place. Filters are also insensitive to context, so substring filters cannot tell the difference between 'gold' in the URL of an RMT website or gold in the context of a crafter negotiating a sale.

[Zagats]

I dont buy plat.  It's ridiculous to spend your hard earned money on something that isnt real.  (Paying to play the game is real world entertainment.)

To any of you who buy plat:  Just remember that you're one of the jerks fueling this problem.  If players dont buy plat, people will not be selling it.  You're allowing these people to spam your fellow gamers.  You're saying : "I'm a liar, and will not abide by the terms of the EULA that I accepted when I started playing".

[nitrous]

rbritz wrote:

Sony said they were going to implement this months ago, so I have no idea why it hasn't started yet.

 Block all outgoing emails/tells from Beginner Isle to start this off right.

Ummmm........you might want to go back and re-read some of the update notes.   Sony did take action on this months ago.   http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=253127.  Even more recently they took simlar action like this on buddy accounts.     That means that the spam plat seller tells you are getting are from paid accounts.

[ChildofHate]

Zagats wrote:

I dont buy plat.  It's ridiculous to spend your hard earned money on something that isnt real.  (Paying to play the game is real world entertainment.)

To any of you who buy plat:  Just remember that you're one of the jerks fueling this problem.  If players dont buy plat, people will not be selling it.  You're allowing these people to spam your fellow gamers.  You're saying : "I'm a liar, and will not abide by the terms of the EULA that I accepted when I started playing".

LOL, wow... do you need a towel clean that up or you just gonna let this self-gratification post stay on your own hands and face?

[SteelPiston]

I don't think that SOE endorses the Plat sellers in any way, otherwise the problem would be much worse than it is. However, I do think they drag their heels when somebody is reported. I think they get sick of taking turns playing "Whack-a-mole" everyday, trying to kick the plat sellers faster than they pop up again.

I would have thought by now that a big company like SOE would have issued a "Cease and desist" order to these companies and to threaten them with legal action if the don't stop bothering their customers. Filters are too easily defeated and I don't see the benefit of messing with them.

I personally have not had any "Tell" spam in quite a while. I do get several mailbox flyers every week.

[electricninjasex]

When certain content is more conducive to Chinese plat pharming than to regular player consumption, that content needs to be changed.

[liveja]

SteelPiston wrote:

I would have thought by now that a big company like SOE would have issued a "Cease and desist" order to these companies and to threaten them with legal action if the don't stop bothering their customers.

If those companies were subject to American or Japanese law, SOE almost certainly would have done just that by now.

[liveja]

Icedaze@Permafrost wrote:

When certain content is more conducive to Chinese plat pharming than to regular player consumption, that content needs to be changed.

That's a wonderfully ambiguous assertion. Care to elaborate a little?

[sayitaintso]

How about this....Now tell me why this hasn't been done... <> Greetings Norrathians...This is lead GM SOANDSO. It has come to the attention of our GM staff and game developers that many of you find that it is appropriate to circumvent the rules of the EULA and have purchased in game coin for real life currency. As of tomorrow's update we will be taking inventory of all coin on every active EQ2 account. This will give us a data base of who has what amount of in game cash. We will be taking this census on a weekly basis. Any large transfers of in game coin will be investigated to see if the transaction was legitimatley conducted. Any player recieving or giving amounts of coin TOTALING more than 50 PP in one weeks time will be contacted in game by a GM and will have to provide a reasonable explanation. All inquiries will be checked against transaction logs. All descrepencies will be investigated and any found to be out of bounds will result in the immediate confiscation of in game coin and a 3 day suspension. Any subsequent abnormal coin transaction will result in the permanent ban of your account. All banned accounts will be listed on the EQ2 forums. Thank you NOW that said...this could all be done...And it would catch just as many plat sellers as it would buyers. Sure the plat sellers would try to find ways around this...BUT do you really think that too many plat buyers would take the risk and continue to buy? Will SOE do this...NOT A CHANCE....They may not be in bed with the plat sellers, but they sure turn a blind eye to them. Instead of doing what needs to be done in order to put a hurting on the plat sellers they [Removed for Content] the game for any new players that might want to join their friends in game....

[Decad]

This issue could very well become a very moot argument. Anyone else read this?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,1...70/article.html

Long and short of it is that the Feds are investigating the virtual gold market, and looking into ways of taxing it. Problem is that the author is hinting at the fact that the old fogies making the laws don't realize that in some games, virtual gold is illegal, and these fogies don't realize that. Some ideas apparently, or the impression I got from reading it is that if a rare sword is "illegally" selling for $50, whether or not you are going to sell it, or can even sell it or trade it, you would have to pay tax on $50.

Yeah, yeah I know it seems pretty far fetched. But seriously, we're talking about old men making laws about video games being played on computers. How much information can they seriously have on the topic besides seeing the cash register ringing up none stop.

I think this would be the quote of interest from the story:

---

Taxing Trades

But as any accountant can tell you, real-money revenues are not the only kind of income that draws the tax man's eye. The labyrinthine U.S. tax code includes many provisions that can leave you owing income taxes without ever earning a dollar.

Consider "bartering" and "prizes" as outlined in IRS publication 525 ("Taxable and Nontaxable Income": Anyone who acquires goods or services either in trade or at play must report as income the "fair market value" of those goods or services. Give your plumber a rare baseball card in exchange for fixing your pipes, and you both owe taxes on the dollar value of your respective ends of the deal. Win an SUV on Wheel of Fortune, and the government will want its share of the sticker price, whether you sell the car or not.

So if virtual loot can be sold for real money and therefore has real value, what's to stop the government from concluding that every time a fallen virtual monster gives up its prize, or a fistful of Linden dollars is traded for a virtual hair weave, a taxable event has occurred?

Don't ask the IRS. Pressed for an official opinion on the taxability of virtual trades, IRS spokesperson Nancy Mathis would say, via e-mail, only that "whether exchanges constitute bartering depends on the facts and circumstances of each case." As to whether that magic helmet won from a slain dragon is a taxable prize, the answer was similarly noncommittal. "[The] bottom line," Mathis wrote, "is this: You can receive income in the form of money, property, or services. Generally, your income is taxable unless it is specifically exempted by law."

Translation: The IRS is keeping its options open. And according to former IRS lawyer Bryan Camp, now a professor of tax law at Texas Tech, those options definitely include taxing virtual gold. "Section 61 of the Internal Revenue Code says that gross income is any income received from any source," says Camp. "And if someone in the IRS thinks that a [virtual-world] transaction represents the receipt of either cash or services or property, and that has a fair market value, then yes, that's going to be income." When and if that that decision is made, Camp explains, there are only two ways to override it: Take it to the courts, which may or may not disagree with the IRS's interpretation of the law, or take it to Congress, which can pass new laws that leave no room for interpretation.

[zaun2]

Dumb filters won't get the job done mainly because its easy for sites to add spaces, replace letters with numbers. However, all spammers fit a ruleset: 1:  The account is either just created (which means a low age), or it was broken into. 2:  The character or characters are very low level. 3:  Likely the account will not have fae access (demo accounts from playthefae don't count, as /tells are not allowed.) 4:  The character will do a LOT of /tells or Norrath Express mail in a short time, to many different people. 5:  Generally, /tells are not replied to. 6:  There is a burst of /ignores or /spam clicks. This will take some server side coding, as it would require the server to keep track of the number of /tells to DIFFERENT people in a period of time. Possible solutions that can be handled automatically server-side. Add a delay if someone is sending out a number of /tells past a threshold.  Say if a person sends more than 30 /tells in a minute, add a 10 second delay between typing in a /tell and the server pushing it out until there is an inactivity timeout of 30 minutes or so. Disconnect someone if they hit a higher threshold of different people /told, with low replies back and high /ignore or /spam commands with the offending character name.  Perhaps temporarly block the account from having access to the game for 15-30 min. Allow people to automatically ignore people who /tell them if the person sending /tells is on the newbie island, no expansions on the account, and the character is under level 5.  Perhaps add functionality so one can allow a friend to send /tells with alts on his same account, or maybe perhaps a password (/tell person password hi this is my new character.)  Have this feature toggle-able, so one can turn this off, if a friend is creating a new alt on that server, and wants to send a /tell. Slow down /who functionality similar to what WoW does.  WoW does not let people pull everyone's name from online all at once.  For someone to do an inventory of people playing, one has to keep doing multiple /who commands (which have a 10 sec delay between them). Add a /roleplay-like flag that removes people from /who lists (just like /role or /anon), but will show level and class if someone does a /who on them directly (/who playername) as opposed to an indirect search (/who necro 40-45) Have the server automatically disconnect the account (and perhaps lock them out for a time) of someone if they send out a threshold of /tells to DIFFERENT people, and a large percentage of people report the person with /spam.

[Noaani]

livejazz wrote:

Icedaze@Permafrost wrote:

When certain content is more conducive to Chinese plat pharming than to regular player consumption, that content needs to be changed.

That's a wonderfully ambiguous assertion. Care to elaborate a little?

As an assumption, he is refering to areas of the game such as The Oblisk of Lost Souls, the first floor in particular.

Any area in the game where plat farmers (or those whom can be reasonably expected to be plat farmers) pervail is an area of the game that is broken, and provides too much of a monetairy reward for the time and effort put in. If all said areas were fixed to the point where these farmers needed to mix in with the regular population (either by reducing the rewards in those areas, or giving actual players a reason to be in there), we would see an increase in the time needed to farm in game coin, thus an increase in the cost of said coin, and hopefully a reduction in the number of people willing to pay for said coin.

Put simply, if farmers are always farming Oblisk of Lost Souls, and no other player is in there for anything other than Borxx or the runes for Speak as a Dragon, that says to me something is broken in that zone. Fix it to the point where it is no longer a haven for farmers.

[Bramwe]

I would be happy with a /tell level filter that can be bypassed by people on your friends list.  I do not need or care about tells from people who are lower than level 65 or so and who are not alts of my friends/guild members.

[Leatherneck]

SteelPiston wrote:

I would have thought by now that a big company like SOE would have issued a "Cease and desist" order to these companies and to threaten them with legal action if the don't stop bothering their customers. Filters are too easily defeated and I don't see the benefit of messing with them.

And they very well might have.

What I find amusing is (and I'm not directing this toward you, SteelPiston) people claim "Sony isn't doing anything"..."Sony doesn't care"..."Sony's turning a blind eye blah, blah, blah"

I'd love to see some proof of this assertation.  Sony doesn't tell us when it bans someone for harrassment or exploiting or other offenses even when it directly affects you.  Why on earth do you think SOE's CEO is going to send you an email every time it takes a step against plat sellers?

[liveja]

Noaani wrote:

Put simply, if farmers are always farming Oblisk of Lost Souls, and no other player is in there for anything other than Borxx or the runes for Speak as a Dragon, that says to me something is broken in that zone. Fix it to the point where it is no longer a haven for farmers.

Quite frankly, I think people should be very afraid of the idea of SOE "fixing" these zones so that farmers no longer find them a haven.

[liveja]

Leatherneck wrote:

What I find amusing is (and I'm not directing this toward you, SteelPiston) people claim "Sony isn't doing anything"..."Sony doesn't care"..."Sony's turning a blind eye blah, blah, blah"

I'd love to see some proof of this assertation.

The very "proof" you seek will most likely turn out to be the fact that SOE doesn't & won't tell us specific details about bannings & other disciplinary measures.

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