The Dot spam and Bots

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Shppy wrote:

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Nasynne wrote:

So just cause some people are too lazy to type '/clear' command (6 characters SUCH KEYSTROKE) in chat they rather use their upper body muscles to spam '.'? I feel like with the spamming of the dots you could use the /clear command... That's a weird mentality.

Take a look at the chat sometime when the dotting happens. It's not one person repeatedly doing it, it's dozens of people making a quick press of Enter then ".". Takes a couple fingers from one hand. Typing out /clear takes much more effort, and like i said, when you're actually playing the game (instead of standing around in a town or hideout), that makes a big difference in a game where oneshots are rampant.

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Nasynne wrote:

So just cause some people are too lazy to type '/clear' command (6 characters SUCH KEYSTROKE) in chat they rather use their upper body muscles to spam '.'? I feel like with the spamming of the dots you could use the /clear command... That's a weird mentality.

Even faster.
There is /cls command which does exactly the same.

So much effort...
Put /cls into macro along with /hideout, /dnd # and such.
That's what clever people do.
Instead of stupid ("sheeply") dot-spamming.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

General question: What is dots?

It's people in global all posting 1 or 2 characters at the same time after a bot posts an 8-liner wall of text to push the bot spam out of the chat box

Easy solution:
1) Require level 10.
2) Require account age of 1 hour.
3) Act 1 completed.
The thing about whether they're banned or not doesn't delete the message, meaning their job is done.
It's enough for one person to actually read the message and fall for the rmt and they win.

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Jaille wrote:

They could shadow mute posts containing RMT websites or very obvious things. Bots wouldn't know for a while and they'd keep going even though no one sees their shit.

Maybe before, but they'd quickly realize what is happening if nobody spams dots anymore.

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jikavak wrote:

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Jaille wrote:

They could shadow mute posts containing RMT websites or very obvious things. Bots wouldn't know for a while and they'd keep going even though no one sees their shit.

Maybe before, but they'd quickly realize what is happening if nobody spams dots anymore.

Who would realise? It's not being done by hand is it.

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RandallPOE wrote:

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jikavak wrote:

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Jaille wrote:

They could shadow mute posts containing RMT websites or very obvious things. Bots wouldn't know for a while and they'd keep going even though no one sees their shit.

Maybe before, but they'd quickly realize what is happening if nobody spams dots anymore.

Who would realise? It's not being done by hand is it.

The spammer, monitoring his spambot, i don't know.

Anyway, I assume the spammer knows his bot has little chance of posting more than 1 message without being banned/removed/whatever. So any kind of muting would be useless, since once the bot is revealed, damage is already done.

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Jaille wrote:

I remember GGG commenting on that.

One of GGG's biggest fear is to scare noobs away.

Yeah I remember that too. Pretty funny when everything else in the game does its best to scare them away.

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Hey there, I'd like to chime in about this.

The Support team gets rid of spambots in-game within a few seconds of their first line of spam, so there's actually no need to spam chat with full stops in order to "combat" the spammers as they're already gone.

The full stops are very disruptive to chat: they do constitute as spam, and if you spam chat then your account may be muted.

Make it sound like we had no idea that spam bots are banned with in a split second of posting,
like we're all thinking maybe after the post they are ya know, leveling up...maybe doing a lab run here or there...

Yeah they get banned, we ALL KNOW THIS. People do it to scroll the text away to make it harder for others to read(yeah, yeah I know but still..) and make the ad "wasted" in a way.

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"We have a number of ways to stop them (RMT SPAM) and we stop thousands a day, most are banned with in seconds of their first post"

Thats like the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dam, only someone is behind him, shooting the damn with birdshot.

These spammers could care less if their banned or not. It's pretty much the same two websites who are doing the bulk of it, and obviously banning is not working, because well...they keep coming back over and over and over and......"No, no..we got this, we ban them AS SOON as they post so there is no need to spam it yourselves because the spammer is already gone" Yeah but the text is still there, and maybe doing the flash bang or the dots will bring attention to an already known problem but bring in new ideas to end it.

Look, most of these "Gold Farmers" come from developing countries and when you buy/sell allow them to fester it supports other underbelly shit, and they have their hands in some pretty gnarly stuff, from credit card fraud, money laundering, Child exploitation(!) etc etc.
Most of these "Farmers" (tho not themselves but are in sweatshops working) work for organized crime and god knows where that money is going towards or what it's funding.
These aint kids running websites and spam bots trying to make some money in moms basement.
These are some very hardcore evil mother fuckers.

PC Gamer (UK) and IGN both did an awesome write up about this and is why they stopped running "gold farming" ads (remember those!) and I suggest tracking that down or the two documentaries on the subject (Tho one of them does not really go much into the organized crime aspect like the write ups in PC gamer did)
This is why RMT Bots are a serious cancer

The only way to stop this is to make global chat level restricted (which may scare noobs away,unlike the MASSIVE SKILL FOREST AND EVERYTHING ELSE IN GAME)
OR have some type of authentication in place.

But ya know what's worse than child exploitation, credit card fraud AND other organized crime? Fucking dots being spammed in chat while I'm TRYING to do my daily's.

tfw sarah doesnt allow us to post pelicans

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HarukaTeno wrote:

Even faster.
There is /cls command which does exactly the same.

So much effort...
Put /cls into macro along with /hideout, /dnd # and such.
That's what clever people do.
Instead of stupid ("sheeply") dot-spamming.

/clear and the like remove ALL chat history, meaning you'd lose out of your entire conversation you might have been having (whether in global or guild or whispering)... you can still scroll back up to that through dotting.

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Dacar92 wrote:

My suggestion to make spambots less effective is to make it so that accounts (or perhaps even each character) are unable to chat in global until act 1 normal is completed. That takes what, 30 minutes, maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more? Spammers will think twice if they have to actually play part of the game. Their return against time spent will be harder to realize.

Not a great solution, because it makes new players unable to ask for help from one of the the only in-game places they could find it.

However, to branch off of that, they could impose a character limit on posts (in global only) to accounts which have not made it to a certain level... it cuts down on the disruptiveness of bots (doesn't get rid of them, but one line is way less of an eyesore than 10), and new players would still be able to ask concise questions or say something like 'can anybody help a new player' to get someone to whisper to to speak at greater length.