I originally wrote this article for the popular Australian games site, Games.on.net - Since a recent change has caused the original to become irretrievable, and since the problem seems to be getting worse, I thought I would post it here. I hope this gets some constructive conversation going around the problem.
Spam is one of those everyday occurrences in modern gaming, that most people are pretty much used to by now. No matter the game you’re playing, if it’s a persistent online world there will be someone trying to make a quick buck from you. The problem comes when you have a company who has an extraordinary amount of experience dealing with spammers, and yet do anything about it. And that, is what’s happening in Diablo III.
The Problem
It all started in Diablo II, twelve years ago. Item farmers got the idea to setup chat bots to promote their trades. Then came the gold and item sellers, who had built websites around the idea, and it snowballed from there. Despite the number of people complaining about this to Blizzard, their hands were tied - with only a skeleton staff and no regular money coming in from the game to fund development costs, nothing could be done.
It took them until a patch about two years ago to implement a rudimentary block system into the game, that to this day frequently wipes itself when you leave. Spam bots still run rampant in the game, and third party programs designed to maintain a blocklist would frequently cause Blizzard to ban your account, despite helping you maintain a quiet peaceful online experience.
And now Diablo III is upon us - and on the third day of its launch, the spamming began. It was a trickle at first, one or two bots that would post about once every 30 minutes, but quickly it got to the point where for every three lines of dialogue, chat bots would completely flood the window. Why is this happening? Well for one thing, Blizzard, bizarrely, has allowed guest accounts to chat.
That’s not all they did, however. For some reason, they haven’t even included the URL blocking feature from their other massive online game, World of Warcraft. They also still don’t have a report option for goldsellers, instead relying on the generic ‘Spam’ tag that most people abuse to report others they simply disagree with.
So how does Blizzard fix this? The answer is surprisingly simple.
The Solution
You might think an easy solution would be to simply stop guest accounts from using the chat service. While this would work, the solution would only be temporary at best. If a gold seller can make more money in the time it takes to get banned than the cost of the game itself, they’ll simply purchase keys over and over and over again.
It also would not be incorrect to assume that the Real Money Auction House will curb many of the sales that go on, and make gold selling less profitable... except that there will still be groups of uneducated masses who do not even know the RMAH exists, and will likely continue to provide a regular customer base for gold sellers. This needs to be fixed now, before it gets completely out of hand.
Step 1: Provide a report option specific to gold sellers, or advertisers, or whatever you want to call it. This is important! While a single person being an idiot and spamming random insults in general chat can be annoying, we can block him and know he won’t bother us anymore. We need a specific way to deal with the problem.
Step 2: Initiate a group reporting system. Say four different people who aren’t on each other’s friend lists (and therefore can be assumed to not be working together) report someone for gold selling. This triggers an automatic muting and flagging of the reported person. Leave them muted until a Blizzard rep can look it over. Make sure that their account is muted, and their IP as well if possible.
Since it’s a temporary mute, you’re unlikely to run across issues with other legitimate people using that IP, and if you do, it’s temporary for a reason.
Step 3: This is the big one. See those URL’s people are posting? Setup a server side filter that prevents those messages from being displayed. Don’t mute the people saying them, and don’t inform them that the message hasn’t gone through. Every time a bot makes it to Step 2, find the unique wording in his message, add it to the filter. Make sure anybody hitting that filter more than once in an hour period is immediately flagged.
This would help immensely, and pretty much make it financially impossible for gold selling bots to do business. A spam bot has put spaces in their website to fool the filter? Add it to the filter, and all of a sudden w w w. b u y m y g o l d . c o m will no longer work, and the people running the bot will be none the wiser. As far as the gold sellers will be aware, Diablo III must just not be a profitable market anymore, and they will move onto other games.
The reality is that Blizzard has had 12 years of experience with spammers, five games, and a whole host of expansion packs to figure this out somewhere in the development cycle. It is disappointing that spam problems still continue to plague their latest title, despite the advances in protecting against it that they’ve demonstrated in their other games. For the good of the community and the health of the game, Blizzard needs to address this sooner rather than later.
I actually like the filter against the spam sites, though it'd quickly grow enormous, hopefully not so big that the database check alone would start lagging the server, but it's a risk.
@Swirlyball - Would you like a tinfoil hat? Blizzard running the 3rd party goldsellers would be insane. As soon as they fix their crap, the RMAH is going to be selling gold, and the last thing they want is competition from anyone. They don't want a price war pushing the value of gold below their acceptable threshold of profit which leads to further destroying the value of gold.
I actually like the filter against the spam sites, though it'd quickly grow enormous, hopefully not so big that the database check alone would start lagging the server, but it's a risk.
@Swirlyball - Would you like a tinfoil hat? Blizzard running the 3rd party goldsellers would be insane. As soon as they fix their crap, the RMAH is going to be selling gold, and the last thing they want is competition from anyone. They don't want a price war pushing the value of gold below their acceptable threshold of profit which leads to further destroying the value of gold.
You'd think it would grow enormous but I doubt it would grow to more than 30k entries or so before they start seeing spam as non profitable for them, and instead resort to the 'friendlist add' which Blizzard needs to fix.
@Swirlyball Blizz don't run goldsellers, they have no need to, RMAH is providing them WAY more income than even the best of the current goldsellers are capable of at their paltry 1.4 per m price.
It was pointless muting spammers in D2 and also in WoW because they just constantly create new accounts. And any kind of filter is easily gotten around, they put spaces and special characters in the names etc etc. Blizzard has been in a neverending war with them in WoW, you can't beat them. As long as they can make a few bucks off it it'll always be worth doing. The RMAH is actually the best shot they have of undercutting their market enough to make the activity unprofitable. We'll have to wait and see.
WoW actually has a group mute system like your 2), which not many people are aware of. Just think of the abuse if they were!
It was pointless muting spammers in D2 and also in WoW because they just constantly create new accounts. And any kind of filter is easily gotten around, they put spaces and special characters in the names etc etc. Blizzard has been in a neverending war with them in WoW, you can't beat them. As long as they can make a few bucks off it it'll always be worth doing. The RMAH is actually the best shot they have of undercutting their market enough to make the activity unprofitable. We'll have to wait and see.
WoW actually has a group mute system like your 2), which not many people are aware of. Just think of the abuse if they were!
I can't accept that in 12 years Blizzard has not been able to come up with a solution to this problem. They have to make over $50 per account on average to make it profitable. By muting but not making them aware of the mute, they could easily EASILY screw over a lot of goldsellers straight away.
Muting people who put the same line in their post multiple times is another way, and still to this day www.sitenamehere.com repeated five times in a post can be shown. You can't tell me removing this wouldn't help alleviate the situation.
Maybe they're letting the spammers be to prove the point that chat channels nowadays would also turn into a spamfest?
Not that I approve of it, but they did have a point in removing these. WoW and WC3 still have a ton of bots/spammers nowadays, so maybe they actually have no idea how to deal with spammers without harming legit customers. Just a thought.
Blocking links won't work.... i said this in another thread stating how "simple" it would be....
www.fakesite.com would turn into
www . fakesite .com
vv vv vv . Fakesite . c0m
fakesite. c0m
fakesite. <om
etc etc, they will just butcher the link each time to bypass the filter.
If you think you can come up with a fool-proof way to stop spammers, i would LOVE to see you code it, and implement it in a little text-imput app where people can "attempt" to type in a website link or bypass your filters =)
TL:DR
There is no easy way to stop spammers, they will always find someway to bypass the filter.
Stopping trial accounts from talking in general and trade would help a lot. At least if they get banned, they will be giving Blizzard another $60. It's in their best interest to spend resources doing this.
Second, they need to limit the number of characters people can post in one message. Bots repeat things over and over in the SAME message so it fills up the chat box. This means we have to use the up arrow to find their name so we can report spam or block them. They know most people won't take the time to do this so that's why their messages are so long.
Third, we need a spam filter like whats on Warcraft. If someone spams too much in trade we just don't see it with the filter on. The game itself stops the spam. This will curb the different companies trying to get their message at the latest and pushing up the competitor gold seller.
Is there a spam hotkey we can use? It would be nice if we could mouse over the name and push one key to report spam them instead of right clicking and then using a menu to do it.
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Spam is one of those everyday occurrences in modern gaming, that most people are pretty much used to by now. No matter the game you’re playing, if it’s a persistent online world there will be someone trying to make a quick buck from you. The problem comes when you have a company who has an extraordinary amount of experience dealing with spammers, and yet do anything about it. And that, is what’s happening in Diablo III.
The Problem
It all started in Diablo II, twelve years ago. Item farmers got the idea to setup chat bots to promote their trades. Then came the gold and item sellers, who had built websites around the idea, and it snowballed from there. Despite the number of people complaining about this to Blizzard, their hands were tied - with only a skeleton staff and no regular money coming in from the game to fund development costs, nothing could be done.
It took them until a patch about two years ago to implement a rudimentary block system into the game, that to this day frequently wipes itself when you leave. Spam bots still run rampant in the game, and third party programs designed to maintain a blocklist would frequently cause Blizzard to ban your account, despite helping you maintain a quiet peaceful online experience.
And now Diablo III is upon us - and on the third day of its launch, the spamming began. It was a trickle at first, one or two bots that would post about once every 30 minutes, but quickly it got to the point where for every three lines of dialogue, chat bots would completely flood the window. Why is this happening? Well for one thing, Blizzard, bizarrely, has allowed guest accounts to chat.
That’s not all they did, however. For some reason, they haven’t even included the URL blocking feature from their other massive online game, World of Warcraft. They also still don’t have a report option for goldsellers, instead relying on the generic ‘Spam’ tag that most people abuse to report others they simply disagree with.
So how does Blizzard fix this? The answer is surprisingly simple.
The Solution
You might think an easy solution would be to simply stop guest accounts from using the chat service. While this would work, the solution would only be temporary at best. If a gold seller can make more money in the time it takes to get banned than the cost of the game itself, they’ll simply purchase keys over and over and over again.
It also would not be incorrect to assume that the Real Money Auction House will curb many of the sales that go on, and make gold selling less profitable... except that there will still be groups of uneducated masses who do not even know the RMAH exists, and will likely continue to provide a regular customer base for gold sellers. This needs to be fixed now, before it gets completely out of hand.
Step 1: Provide a report option specific to gold sellers, or advertisers, or whatever you want to call it. This is important! While a single person being an idiot and spamming random insults in general chat can be annoying, we can block him and know he won’t bother us anymore. We need a specific way to deal with the problem.
Step 2: Initiate a group reporting system. Say four different people who aren’t on each other’s friend lists (and therefore can be assumed to not be working together) report someone for gold selling. This triggers an automatic muting and flagging of the reported person. Leave them muted until a Blizzard rep can look it over. Make sure that their account is muted, and their IP as well if possible.
Since it’s a temporary mute, you’re unlikely to run across issues with other legitimate people using that IP, and if you do, it’s temporary for a reason.
Step 3: This is the big one. See those URL’s people are posting? Setup a server side filter that prevents those messages from being displayed. Don’t mute the people saying them, and don’t inform them that the message hasn’t gone through. Every time a bot makes it to Step 2, find the unique wording in his message, add it to the filter. Make sure anybody hitting that filter more than once in an hour period is immediately flagged.
This would help immensely, and pretty much make it financially impossible for gold selling bots to do business. A spam bot has put spaces in their website to fool the filter? Add it to the filter, and all of a sudden w w w. b u y m y g o l d . c o m will no longer work, and the people running the bot will be none the wiser. As far as the gold sellers will be aware, Diablo III must just not be a profitable market anymore, and they will move onto other games.
The reality is that Blizzard has had 12 years of experience with spammers, five games, and a whole host of expansion packs to figure this out somewhere in the development cycle. It is disappointing that spam problems still continue to plague their latest title, despite the advances in protecting against it that they’ve demonstrated in their other games. For the good of the community and the health of the game, Blizzard needs to address this sooner rather than later.
@Swirlyball - Would you like a tinfoil hat? Blizzard running the 3rd party goldsellers would be insane. As soon as they fix their crap, the RMAH is going to be selling gold, and the last thing they want is competition from anyone. They don't want a price war pushing the value of gold below their acceptable threshold of profit which leads to further destroying the value of gold.
You'd think it would grow enormous but I doubt it would grow to more than 30k entries or so before they start seeing spam as non profitable for them, and instead resort to the 'friendlist add' which Blizzard needs to fix.
@Swirlyball Blizz don't run goldsellers, they have no need to, RMAH is providing them WAY more income than even the best of the current goldsellers are capable of at their paltry 1.4 per m price.
WoW actually has a group mute system like your 2), which not many people are aware of. Just think of the abuse if they were!
I can't accept that in 12 years Blizzard has not been able to come up with a solution to this problem. They have to make over $50 per account on average to make it profitable. By muting but not making them aware of the mute, they could easily EASILY screw over a lot of goldsellers straight away.
Muting people who put the same line in their post multiple times is another way, and still to this day www.sitenamehere.com repeated five times in a post can be shown. You can't tell me removing this wouldn't help alleviate the situation.
Not that I approve of it, but they did have a point in removing these. WoW and WC3 still have a ton of bots/spammers nowadays, so maybe they actually have no idea how to deal with spammers without harming legit customers. Just a thought.
www.fakesite.com would turn into
www . fakesite .com
vv vv vv . Fakesite . c0m
fakesite. c0m
fakesite. <om
etc etc, they will just butcher the link each time to bypass the filter.
If you think you can come up with a fool-proof way to stop spammers, i would LOVE to see you code it, and implement it in a little text-imput app where people can "attempt" to type in a website link or bypass your filters =)
TL:DR
There is no easy way to stop spammers, they will always find someway to bypass the filter.
Second, they need to limit the number of characters people can post in one message. Bots repeat things over and over in the SAME message so it fills up the chat box. This means we have to use the up arrow to find their name so we can report spam or block them. They know most people won't take the time to do this so that's why their messages are so long.
Third, we need a spam filter like whats on Warcraft. If someone spams too much in trade we just don't see it with the filter on. The game itself stops the spam. This will curb the different companies trying to get their message at the latest and pushing up the competitor gold seller.
Is there a spam hotkey we can use? It would be nice if we could mouse over the name and push one key to report spam them instead of right clicking and then using a menu to do it.