Thanks Administrator for your quick response - I took your advice and slightly modified my reply.
spawni wrote:
One reason for the high prices: Goldseller
I have one question: Why are the frogster-boys doesn´t do anything against goldsellers?
If it is so easy to catch the botters - why is it so damn difficult to get all accounts out of the game, which are selling gold via a char in public areas - alway shouting in different color´s they are offering.
First, I need to include a disclaimer - all my comments are based on FAI and their policies. EU is in charge now. I have no idea how they run things so keep that in mind...
I had a long post typed up to answer every one, only to have the forum say that it was spam...
the gold selling/spamming industry is a multi-billion dollar deal. They have the time and resources that only a game company like Blizzard would have.
Some time go to Pioneer Colony and stand where players appear for the first time. See if you can see players just appearing and then vanishing, one after an other.
Those are seller/spammers being created - a regular player will take of running.
We have concluded that these guys use an automated process of registering accounts.
One of my tasks when I first joined the team was to go after the gold seller networks. What I would do is fire up the login logs for a spammer name.
You can search the logs based on IP or account name. Entering in an account name, we can get all the IP's that access that account for the given time range. I would jot down all those IP's.
Then for each IP, I would search that IP to get a list of accounts, and jot those down. I would do this back and forth until I stopped getting new accounts and new IP's - as I came across the accounts, I would ban them.
These logs list 30 records per page and records just the login/logout.
One day I was given an IP to ban the accounts off of. 700+ pages. For every 5 pages I cleared - and all I did was just hit the ban button - 10 more were added.
We only got the ability to mass ban in the past few months. IP bans are out of the question as EU had to ban them. Plus they use proxies.
Hundreds of accounts would be created an hour.
Spammers is an never ending battle. You could have a team on it all day and still not clear them all out.
I wrote an addon that is 99% efficient at blocking spam. Administrator had cautioned me about revealing to much about my self (in case Frogster staff are reading), so if you are interested just shoot me a PM.
The GM's try to keep the spammers out. there was one GM who's primary job was the spammers. He would mac address ban spammers left and right, banning hundreds of accounts instantly.
it is an never ending battle that will always exist until the developers decide to implement things them selves.
@Budzer - Bots can escape dections for a couple reasons:
1. First and for most - 95% of bots banned by FAI were due to player reports. The other 5% are ones found while hunting the first 95%, or found based on Ah sales or miller ranch activity - yes, we can pull up a list for every zone/instance and see who has visited it and how many times. And every so often i would pull up miller ranch and just work down the list.
2. Of the reported names, a few get missed due to misspellings of the botters name. Even better is if you have a hex character in the name and the reporter fails to mention that.... I spent a month tracking down Assasin (hope that was the correct spelling) - never could find him online... only to find out after some one sent in a screen shot that the "i" in Assasin was a hexed version. Of course I then found him instantly lol
3. Time of botting - if one is smart and only bots during certain hours, it minimizes the risk of detection. GM's can't just sit in a server for 24 hours waiting for you to show up. I usually ran through the servers once in any given day. If I checked it at 10:30am my time, and you show up at 4pm my time, I missed you. I would however try to randomize the times I checked, including even once a week pulling an all nighter to nab any who bot while I sleep.
4. The botter is actually playing and not botting - I don't know how many times I teleported to a suspected botter only to find my self in the middle of a big fight in HoS, HodL, etc. Or just standing in your house, town, etc - if you aren't actively doing some thing I move on.
Some things got away with due to our last boss being more relaxed. The GM in charge of harassments/bad names was basically told to only step in if it was really bad. This was a change from previous bosses where just saying "wtf" could get you silenced for 24 hours or so. It bugged the GM that more harassment issues couldn't be dealt with.
I don't know how many GM's EU has.
I do know that 90% of the GM's did every thing they could for the community. We were asking for diamonds to be given out with the last chest issue. But was denied. It was the GM's who got the policy of "one time item return" for those items lost due to user error.
But every thing ultimately comes as the result of higher ups - we fought to get diamonds back in the AH - we were shocked to hear that the new General manager for GAI was fighting for that - but then he had to focus elseware: Rumor had it EU wanted to shut down gifting from the Item shop due to fraud. I do not know how true that rumor is...
Fact is, EU controls every thing that happens with the US servers - if we wanted to compensate a server with diamonds - EU had to approve it. there was some lea way that the support staff could do on an individual basis, but we had to be careful with that.
Now EU controls support so who knows what else will change.
The GM's did a great job of accepting all the negative comments about poor support, etc when really it was all out of supports hands.
Now I'm sure there were occasions where a couple GM's did provide bad support - but with out knowing the issue and the response given, I can't say if that was GM failure or company policy - i do take comments about poor support with a grain of sand - any player who doesn't get their way is going to think support is poor.
But I know 4 of the GM's (my self included) worked 16 hour days for free for a year to help the community - they would not knowingly do any thing to hurt players.
@rock - Frogster wants the botters gone. or at least they did. They just have to prioritize the resources. If they didn't want them gone they never would have agreed to the policy of 30 days first offense, perma second - for all accounts on a given IP. I have seen players banned to had just spent $50 on diamonds the day before. Lots of players think that saying "i have spent money" will get you better service or keep you from getting banned. It doesn't I treated every one the same. I never banned a player with out being as sure as I could be that they deserved it.
What is funny is when a player claims to have spent "thousands", yet you look at his history and only see $200, maybe $400 in purchases.
new players are coming in all the time. So most who may quit will be replaced pretty quickly. that is why seeing threats of "make this change or I and 20 of my friends will leave" don't matter to FAI... by the time you have posted it we have already had 100 other accounts sign up.
Plus we constantly see players who ragequit showing back up 3 months later.
Of the botters, most do not spend that much money, or of the accounts that get banned. I have seen a few big spenders, but it is on the low side. Often the money they spent was more then 4 months ago - that is ancient history.
Personally, I have no problem with a paying customer getting priority service - but I also believe the the TOS/EULA applies to all.
I understand the game being boring - it got that way for me after 6months of working. Who wants to play the game after spending 8 hours that day working the game. I got to the point that when I try to play, all I do is stand for 2 hours staring at the back of my character's head.
Botting for me wouldn't help keep my interest. Yes, i have the resources and computers to do it. But I'm so bored of the game that I wouldn't know what to do with the stuff I gathered. I can see the fun in coming up with the scripts or finding the new memory addresses - but the actual botting process to me seems pretty boring at this stage. Yippie - I just collected 100 golden eggs. I can sell them but what am I going to do with the gold? lol
Only reason why I'm even still paying attention to RoM is because I'm curious to see how badly RoM burns with EU running things completely. And I am the webmaster for a guild in Govinda. The RoM forums are so ingrained into my daily web browsing habits that I check it 10 times an hour.
And of course, now that I'm not a GM any more I can more freely speak about some of the stuff that before now I had to bite my tongue - especially since it is all in the past lol
