Tree of Savior Forum

(Another) but hopefully better suggestion to combat gold spam in chat

General Discussion
#1

I’m just working on existing ideas here but on top of enforcing a level 50 requirement to use the megaphones why not allow a reporting function as well. However this reporting function works a bit differently. Instead of banning the player or w/e it instead flags the accounts for GMs to take a look at and (here’s the important part) disables their megaphones.

In the unlikely event that a legitimate player got flagged their only impediment would be their megaphone usage. Bots on their other hand would have their spam stopped in its tracks. This suggestion doesn’t get rid of the bots, but it should make the spam situation a lot better without much policing on the part of IMC.

#2

Look if 100~500 players block the same person within 10 seconds of their first shout… it’s obvious the system should auto mute/ban them.

False positives can send in support ticket.

Also no anti-spam system in the chat system… how does that even happen in modern games…

3 Likes
#3

Well that’s what the system isn’t doing now lol. I don’t think I’ve seen other people suggest this auto mute thing yet though. Most have the suggestions have just been going towards auto ban.

#4

I’ve seen lv50+ bots. This won’t cut it. All they gotta do is have a set a bot account leveling to 50 in the same interval that takes devs bann those accouts.

Bots ain’t going away and even big companies can’t remove them from their games. Don’t expect IMC to be any different. All they can do is fight them, and know this is an endless fight.
The ONLY way to remove bots from a game is to create a community that fully support the developer and absolutely never uses gold sellers service. EVER.
But people don’t do this. Out of ignorance or stupidity, either way a long time a ago bots came to the mmorpg worlds to sadly never leave us.

The only REAL problem bots have brought to us are the counter measures that IMC has implemented. Those hurt us more than them, and therefore they hurt the game. I can only hope IMC will realize this soon enough and focus more on their players rather than their bots.

As for a temporal solution for you, right click -> block. Yes, you will have to do this provably daily, but hey, once you took those 5 seconds you can forget about it and enjoy the day :wink:

Cheers

1 Like
#5

Community reporting / flagging does not work.
Setting level requirements to shout does not work.
Filtering certain words like “www” or “.com” does not work.

About the community flagging possible solution:

Maybe the first bots will get flagged 100 times and be banned.
But the spammers will keep making new characters to spam.
After a while, people will just get tired from flagging and not flag as much.
Then the spammers won’t be getting 100 flags and being banned as often.

Plus this system is very vulnerable to abuse. You could have big guilds (later in the game, ofc) using this system with all their members flagging other rival guild members to ban them.

Spammers and botters exist in every MMO. The people behind them aren’t stupid. The solutions aren’t as trivial as you people think.

#6

I don’t think I’ve ever stated that it was a solution though. Its more of just a quality of life change for players. What we’re already doing is right clicking and blocking the bots. People HAVE to do it or else their games lag. What I’m suggesting is just changing what players click from one button to another. Block-> report.

This also solves the problem of players being unable to block bots while they’re in dungeons (causing their fps to drop) because others would have reported said bot and prevented any further spamming.

With this change, players won’t have an entire block list full of bots that they need to frequently clear out and re-add.

Regarding what you’ve said about potential abuse: I’m not sure whether you’ve even read through what I’ve written because what I’ve suggested just limits the usage of megaphones and nothing else. Even if there are guilds that for whatever reason want to limit your use of megaphones, affected players can just have their accounts unflagged by GMs once they come in and take a look.

Also, adding a level requirement obviously isn’t going to deter bots in any way. But hopefully the delay it creates allows more players to spot the bots and report them before they can start spamming. Even if it doesn’t, at least botters face more downtime as opposed to being able to instantly flood the shout channel.

Again, this is not a fix. I’ve never said it was. Its a suggestion to mitigate the effects of bots in game that doesn’t require much effort on IMC’s part; since they seem so loathe to provide additional manpower to a game that’s struggling not to go under.

#7

Why not just remove megaphones then? I’m sure over 90% of megaphone uses are from spammers and not normal players.

Why implement a system that will eventually give you more work to do in the future? Manually checking the reason of bans? Have you ever been a dev? Do you know how complicated and pointless it is to have to mediate two groups of people with each one saying a different story about the situation? Do you have any idea how many times situations like this could happen a day?

Devs already have plenty of work to do with the current bugs in the game already. Complicated solutions aren’t real solutions (or you may call it quality of life).

Just kill megaphones and let’s have only the cities lagged by normal chat spammers instead of global chat spamming everywhere (hey, it’s quality of life).

1 Like
#8

Nice idea but i have to block about 30 different gold seller spammer each day.

1 Like
#9

And the game isn’t even F2P yet.

#10

Yea. That’s a little of the megaphones fault, but even on games like FFXIV you get that problem every day and you have to block them manually every day. You should blame the gold farmers though, not the devs. There is only so much you can do to hinder gold sellers spam without affecting your real players.

IMO the trade restrictions are useless. They should instead remove megaphones from the Free TP for starters… bots won’t go away, but it can become less annoying for the community.

#11

I for one am all for completely disabling megaphones, but it’s a choice they’ve decided on and I’m just providing a suggestion that’s in line with what they’re going with.

Pray tell, how is adding in a level requirement to use megaphones and a report function a “complicated” fix? Even if you were to talk about it requiring the GMs to sift through the reports, its not much different from requiring them to actively sit in game 24/7 looking for bots and banning them. Which they aren’t doing.

Like you’ve said, I’m not a developer. But I can provide suggestions. I’m not demanding for anything to happen. If looking through the flags is not viable then maybe they can work upon the idea and do it a bit differently.

Maybe upon being by a group en masse at around the same time, 1-2 screenshots could be taken out of the entire group of reporters and sent to the GMs as evidence automatically. That way it’d be a clear cut answer as to whether it was a legitimate flag or not.

#12

I don’t blame the devs at all, but it’s just a annoying, that i have all this game restrictions (which are in the game to stop those gold sellers), like not being able to trade without a token and still have the same spam problem like in all the other games.
Like you said they should change something about the megaphones, not the trade system.
I think what annoys me the most and what i blame IMC for is, that they don’t give a statement about these issues.

1 Like