I’m a returning player, who’s been playing off and on for the past 17 years (Happy Birthday AO!) , beginning about a month after release (friends from EQ reported it was unplayable at first, due to overload - so many of us wanted out of EQ).
So I waited a month. And playing more off than on since then, because EQ taught me that pain was not fun. And AO hurt a lot at first (the balancing nerfs, PvP spawn point camping,etc).
I’ve spent a day or so playing on low level toons not in the newbie zone, and it’s been fun.
I decided to log in to a toon still in the newb zone, and the chat was ugly with gold sellers.
I’d link the screenshot, but this forum won’t allow me to, which is bogus.
Just wanted to let Funcom know because gold sellers spamming chat is the biggest turn off for me as a new player in games. It suggests that the devs aren’t up to par.
Even more egregious is that I suspect they’ve targeted noobs, since noobs don’t know that selling Grace is a safer bet.
Because I didn’t see their spam outside of the newbie zone.
And it’s real new players this game needs to recruit to survive, not us old, jaded players.
To qoute Lazy. Edumacate Urslf, my d00d … i think I screwed that up :3 but, Yes I do agree those are very annoying, and I believe harmful. To take some action against I would start using filters. you can even ask some folks if they have the clickable script around like ICC, OAG, or Bor . I know this does not solve the problem but at least it can help.
So if you’re watching carefully when those credit spammers start up, there’s usually a bot that spams with them telling you how to set up filters to block all of them forever. The community has your back.
You WILL see the cred spammers almost EVERYWHERE in the game, not just the start up areas, the seller companies don’t care who they sell to, they just want to sell as has already been mentioned there are player made bots that will give you instructions on how to block them.
SL/AI areas are not accessible to f2p accounts at lvl 0 -1, which is why you don’t see the credit sellers there.
The game has changed massively since the time period you’re talking about, and is now in maintenance mode Dev’s rarely become involved.
Within 2 minutes of seeing a credz bot, I saw a helpful notice from a kind bot explaining how to set up filters. I did it and never saw a cred bot ever again. Just set the filter up bro, takes 30secs
Honestly, as ridiculous an answer as this might seem, it’s REALLY not worth the trouble of the devs doing it. This is a free-to-play game, and I personally know creating accounts can be automated, meaning the credsellers can literally bulk-create accounts faster than FC can nuke them. And any technical solution involving server-side filters would be trivial to circumvent, and quite realistically would just result in even more annoying, more spammy messages (now the credsellers will just make sure they have 5 bots in every region instead of 1, to be steps ahead of any banning anyway).
The current solution of using the community-provided solution (a solution that works well, might I add) is by the far best and easiest for everyone involved.
I never said you were stupid for paying your subs? I pay for 6 subs every month.
What I said was that as a fellow player, I disagree with you on this being a big deal. And provided you with some of my thoughts as to why that’s the case.
You’re welcome to your opinion of course. Of all the things to point at when talking about this game’s demise, however, I PROMISE YOU, “cred seller spam” won’t even make the Top 100.
And I can tell you that having played MMOs since Everquest was in beta and AO since August 3, 2001 , that devs who allow gold seller spam are incompetent.
It sends the message that the devs don’t care. While I’m sure that there are a lof of things that high level characters need, not satisfying the needs of new players is sure death to a game.
And I do so want AO to stick around for a long time.
But I do get the self-fulfilling prophecy that Funcom is conveying to us.
I just think it’s short sighted.
It’s the only old school game that exists that is anywhere near the original, although substantially easier than it used to be.
The game is in maintainence mode. I would argue that if they really didn’t care then AO would be shut down.
Given their extremely limited resources to make changes to the game, it’s pretty incredible that they keep on top of most exploits, let alone devoting time to banning spam accounts that can be automated.
It works because the player solution operates player-side (targeting who you want to see on chat channels) rather than game-side (banning accounts). It’s easier block someone’s phone number from calling you than have the telephone company shut down the whole line.
And why should you trust other players? Well then, why trust anyone offering you a solution to anything? Playing an MMO without trusting other players will be a very lonely experience.
Look at it this way: If you’re a credseller, and FC starts nuking your ads, you’re going to do something about it. However if the players are nuking the ads on THEIR end, it’s pretty safe to say that player is not, and will never be a potential customer, and the credsellers won’t even make the effort of trying to get their ad seen by those people again (which is exactly what the situtation is atm). You can EASILY argue now that I’ve thought about it actually, FC actively trying to stop this problem, would literally make the problem worse (examples given in my previous comment).
