spammer
Latest
Facebook limits News Feed links to scammy ad-filled sites
Facebook regularly tweaks your news feed to make sure you only see "quality" posts and ads. It's banned fake news sites from using the Facebook ad network, added an easy way to report false news posts, and has even hired third-party fact-checkers. Today, however, the company announced that it would focus its efforts on websites that contain "little substantive content and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads." The news feed update is meant to help reduce the "incentives of financially-motivated spammers."
Trion's games DDoSed again
E-thugs are at it again: Trion's MMO services are once again under attack. Last night, the official RIFT twitter account announced, "Ascended, our servers are experiencing a DDoS at the moment. We're working to restore network stability as quickly as possible." On the official forums, RIFT Executive Producer Bill "Daglar" Fisher confirmed that ongoing RIFT lag problems are compounded by the attacks: "Adding on top of the oddities that people are reporting, we've also been under DDOS attacks and our network team has been working to minimize the impacts of these." Overnight, even the first few pages (five, as of the time of this writing) of the RIFT general forums were flooded with spam from attackers. Several low-traffic forums on the ArcheAge boards have also been spammed early this morning. [With thanks to Omedon for the tip and apologies to Daglar for the temporary demotion!]
ArcheAge boasts two million registered players
ArcheAge's local launch has gone pretty well, according to producer Scott Hartsman. A recent letter to the players confirms last week's whispers that over two million players have registered for the game, which certainly goes a long way to explaining those launch queues. Between North America and Europe, the game currently has 21 active servers in total, and Hartsman stated that character creation restrictions are being rolled back as the populations begin to stabilize. The letter goes on to address the issue of bots, many of which have already been unceremoniously ejected from the game. The game's most recent patch restricts chatting in several channels (Faction, Trade, Nation, Shout, and Need Party) to characters who are level 15 or higher, and a learning anti-spam feature is on track to be integrated into the base game. There's also discussion about catching up with holiday content and the like, so those two million registered players should have plenty of stuff to do.
Blizzard warns against buying gold
If it wasn't already obvious, Blizzard put together a page on their official website making clear their stance towards buying in-game gold, and have just recently given it another big push. To put it simply: don't. The page outlines what we at WoW.com have known for quite some time (hence our collective stance against buying gold) -- that gold buying harms other players. The site doesn't go into specifics other than to say that gold selling companies often acquire their gold through unscrupulous means. They sum up their statement by saying that "players who buy gold are supporting spamming, botting, and keylogging." Basically, if you're a gold buyer, you're part of the problem. No, seriously. Gold sellers acquire gold by hacking into other players' accounts, taking their gold, selling all their items, and sometimes maliciously deleting their characters. That gold you think some Asian spent hours farming in Nagrand or something is more likely to be some other player's hard-earned gold and the seller is just as likely to be some dude from Jersey. As tempting as buying gold may seem -- and I've read many arguments towards why people buy them -- the bottom line is that it is harmful to the game and you're not doing yourself any favors in the long run. Blizzard says that it "diminish(es) the gameplay experience," but that's putting it nicely. Gold selling and power leveling are against the EULA, anyway, so anybody who patronizes these services are in danger of getting banned. And if you don't believe in buying gold (go you!), protect yourself by getting an authenticator or reading up on account security.
Aion's spam filter is bigger, stronger, faster
Gold seller spam got you down; keeping you from purchasing Aion? Fret not, fair... uh, would be Aionites, because NCsoft is working towards fixing the solution through improvements and good will. We already know that essential 24/7 GM support is on its way, so the news that the recent 10.5.0.10 added an improved chat spam filter is delicious, vengeful frosting on our Crytek-powered cake.By our observations, spam has been reduced to the occasional whisper or channel message from a character with an odd umlaut or whatnot in their name. Hopefully the update continues to hold water, and the gold sellers simply recede into the darkness from whence they came. Should the spammers ever return in force, we hope that NCsoft is ready to sweep an otherworldly banhammer of justice across their maw in a manner most pleasing to all of us in the community.
Public service announcement from WoW Europe discourages gold buying
Timmy is sick and tired of lagging behind his friends and guild-mates, all because of his inferior flying mount. He decides to purchase some gold with real money and buy his epic mount. Timmy thinks to himself, "It doesn't really hurt anyone, does it?" The answer to that question is, "Yes Timmy, it does". The European World of Warcraft site has listed a gold-selling FAQ that aims to educate players like Timmy on some of the consequences of purchasing products and services from a gold-selling company.The site lists the obvious stuff, like spammers and bots, which both annoy people and take up Blizzard resources that could be put to better use, but the article also brings up some things that aren't always mentioned. Much of the gold that these companies trade in comes from hacked accounts, and many accounts are hacked after the owner enlists the aid of a power-leveling service. When the companies have access to the account, the unfortunate victim may also find their personal details being used for identity theft and credit card fraud. The bottom line is, without people using these services, the companies could not continue to operate. We here at Massively are also vehemently opposed to gold-selling, and agree wholeheartedly with Blizzard's message. Just say no, Timmy.
PotBS devlog discusses the gold-spammer issue
"Do you annoy not afford new ship?" Anyone that has played Pirates of the Burning Sea since launch will have received countless private messages similar to the above, soliciting the sale of in-game currency. The latest devlog from the official PotBS site talks about how they are working to combat the spamming -- well, they tell us what they can, because if we can read it, so can the spammers.Some extremely good news is that a new command is on the way that will make reporting spammers a breeze. Currently players have to leave the game or alt-tab out to condemn these nuisances, but those days will soon be over. The process for Flying Lab Software to actually receive and act on these reports is being streamlined as well. Behind the scenes, they say that they are looking at better ways to catch the spammers before they even get to spam, but as per the above reason, don't expect these methods to be made public. FLS has attemped to deal with this problem from the very start, and it looks like the beginning of round two is on the horizon.
Armory changes URLs
Just a quick note: the Armory, which used to be located at armory.worldofwarcraft.com (and still is, actually), can now be found at wowarmory.com. Neth confirms that it's not a bug or a hack or a spammer or anything-- apparently Blizzard just wanted to simplify the URL.Well, that, and "wowarmory.com" is a lot closer to "wow.com." And we all know that's what you think of when you want to find your favorite information about World of Warcraft, right?
Trying to beat in-game spam
Polonaise over on Suramar has defeated a lot of enemies in Azeroth, but there's one she can't beat: the in-game spammers that flood the chat channels with nonsense crap and links to their websites. These guys are tough to beat because they do it by rolling level one alts (usually with nonsense names so that they can make them quickly without having to come up with a unique name on the server), /joining the chat channel they want to spam in (chat channels have no level or space restrictions, so a level one alt can spam the Hellfire Peninsula chat), and then ditch the alt before players can react.Neth, as an official Blue response, says Blizzard is working on it, and the best thing to do is simply report the spammer through the usual channels. Works for her, but it lacks the instant revenge factor, and even if the GM deletes the offending account, most of the spammers use free accounts to do their dirty work anyway. Some other players suggest doing a little vigilante work (feels better, I agree, but could probably get you in trouble eventually). There's always the option of leaving chat (which I'm doing more and more lately), but then there's the chance you might miss out on something important).In the end, we go back to Polonaise for what seems like the best solution so far: allow players the ability to turn off messages from every character below level 10, unless whitelisted on your friends list. At the very least, it would make spammers play for two hours before running spam messages, which might push their investment over the top of profitability. In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest giving players the option to ignore all messages that don't come from friends or guildies. I doubt that'll ever happen (Blizzard wants this to be a social game, and shutting everyone out goes against that), but it's a definite solution to the problem of seeing spam all the time.
