I noticed other day while on my human alt fighter that at talking island a toon in starter area had a name that could be taken as either a bot or adena pm spam bot name. So i thought of an idea since ton's of my fellow players have found the need to have more than 1 acct in this game.
So heres my idea and not sure if it is allowed or not but it should be since we have a situation where players might actually make a difference in game and that would take players cooperating together to do it since the game has so called politics in it.
People that own a castle and have more than 1 acct should make 1 acct high enough to pk and put that acct at starter towns where your toon starts game at and either set the acct up as a shop till the pm spammers logg in to harass and then when they do you pk the toon and if players were to do it enough maybe it could stop the pm infestation that we have gotten. Could make enough noise that it get's fixed where the culprits go legally to NCSOFT and ask them to advertise on billboards in game instead of this Immature pm spam they are doing in game.
Just an idea to clean up the game and get rid of the unneeded harrasement of pm spam. Anyone think it's helpful or harmful to game?
Alternate amongst clans as well so it isn't just a few clans doing it like it could be a part of owning a castle and a responsibility to your subjects :).
It's this companies job to stop PM-spams and botters.
I rather roast in hell then to do their job unless I get paid for it.
The idea of getting paid is not even remotely valid as I read that NCsoft Korea is considering downsizing Austin anyway.
Apparently Tabula Rasa did not make it's quota.
Besides, I own 3 accounts and I am never going to wast my time hunting spammers or botters down as it is a wast of time all around.
Furthermore I cant see why this activity could be considered "fun" and I play to have fun (of sorts).
When I still played live not a day would go by that I got some kind of spam.
Its NCS job to fix it, they just cant/wont.... they apparently don't have control of the game anymore.. we get a spam announcements every hour or so saying "please don't buy adena etc etc" which in my opinion just tells me NCS has washed their hands of doing anything about it...
First of all, the spammers are in town. You can't pk someone in town. It's a neutral zone.
Second, you can still PM while dead, which means that the spammers can still spam even after you PK them.
Third, the spammers don't care about getting or loosing XP on these spam toons, because they know they're going to be banned in a few days from all the spamming - so PKing them wouldn't matter at all to them.
Fourth, no one has the time to log in an alt every time a botter or spammer logs in. Even if some people were willing to do that - how would you know that a botter in a deserted town had logged in? And when you get that first spam, yeah, you know they're logged in - but which newbie town are they in? Are you going to have an alt stationed at every town? Plus, they usually log out within minutes of beginning their spam. (And nothing in this paragraph even matters because, as I said, you can't PK in town.)
I agree with you, I am sick of the spam too. But having PK alts to kill them won't make even the slightest difference.
Actually this post was kinda more on cleaning up our game community as a whole not just how we get harrassed in game so thanks all for the "as players why should we do ncsofts job and clean up our game community" type comments.
So what i have gathered is we are all happy with everything so we should stop crying about bots and game spam from here on out becuase it is a part of the game now and isn't going away.
It has been mentioned before but i'll just repeat the message from experience. Email that company that is doing the pm and tell them to remove you from thier mailing list. I emailed them and requested all my toons be removed from thier spam list and they did it. I have since started another toon that still gets spams but none of the toons I requested be removed from thier spam list get them anymore. Which reminds me I need to email them again and get this new toon removed from thier list. They were very promt and polite about the hole thing LOL.
i dont really care if they pm my alts, but like what was mentioned earlier, talking to the company works.
i went to their customer support and talked with a person who apologized, and removed my main's name from both ******** and ********. since then (about a week ago) i have received no pm's on my main.
its funny how bot pm spammers can get things done but uhhh...nc cant stop it ><
Number 1 why should we have to be asked to be removed from a list we should never be on in the 1st place?
I view that as getting a call from a telemarketer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemarketing). And i've used that logic on them and it's like talking to a stone wall. :eek:
Good idea if i ever decide to logg back into game before i let my acct expire . Nerfs ,no time cards in stores , harassement on pm while we play, just issues of why try and renew and play a game that's going downhill.
i did ask that. their response was something like the following:
"we apologize and are deeply grieved for your inconvenience. the whispers were intended for players wanting to buy adena and gold from our website. again we apologize for any problems this may have caused you."
that was a spam comment that the customer support person gave to me. obviously, they get many people complaining about this issue.
Game Guard musta got a nerf when Overlords been getting thier nerfs cuz it's obviouse it doesn't do anything i just logged in yesterday and within minutes i was spammed and actually managed to tell them to f%^&%^ off twice both times they spammed but i know that was wasted reply it never works.
I've decided and NCSOFT has helped me with this decision since they refuse to promote game and have stopped selling time cards that i'm letting my account run out.
Game used to be fun till this nonsense became part of the game.
Appearently NCsoft can't doing anything to these PM-bot spammers. The minute an account is made they start spamming a huge list. I even had a spam on a new toon I made that was level 11 and visited Giran for like 5 mins to get into my WS's clan >:(
Anyhw, back on story - when you report them, they might be banned (though after 24 hours the same bots keep spamming me (/block from now on...) and when they're banned (well, I hope they indeed are banned) they create new toons (as said before, prolly with trial keys) and start spamming the same list over and over again.
Possible solutions:
- Trial accounts are NOT allowed to PM (most games use this feature)
- All PM's that have more then 2 lines (max with normal L2 interface) will be blocked automatically
- Lower threshold for PM block by time limit between PMs (like 15 secs minimum between 2 PMs, so that auto-PM bot won't work). Everything faster will result in 5 minutes PM block and every PM in that time will add 1 minute extra PM block (best option IMO)
Actually that is an idea but what would be nice is if the companys had the decency to act like adults with matureity and went to ncsoft and asked to advertise in game legally.
Then instead of harassment pm's and watered down game skills ncsoft could get the money from the adena sellers and make game better and advertise the adena shops in game with billboards and ban accts not buying from official ncsoft adena shops,
LOL Nope It would be better if the advertisements were on billboards so that takes away being harassed about buying adena and NCSOFT get's money from people that are going to buy adena since it's allready to late to just outright ban players for buying game adena since it's been going on for so long.
This way you have a compromise so all of the legit non buying adena players like myself can play the game without being harassed buy these "IMMATURE PM ADENA SELLER SPAMMERS" and the people that need top +20 gear to feel adequate enough to play this game have a official ncsoft run adena seller so they can help ncsoft make this game better by collecting money from players buying adena instead of losing that extra money.
Which in turn is bringing in money so they can actually start advertising this game in america and get time cards back on the shelfs so they can keep some of the american players like myself playing this game and also use the money coming in to merge some of the american servers since all of the non north american players it seems outnumber the north american players so theres no need for so many north american servers right now.
With this idea if it worked you might see a rise in north american players again to where at that point in time you reasses the server situation and with the money you have made you update the north american servers with a higher capacity.
Honestly though if a game is called a massively multiplayer online role playing game why do you need more than 1 server?
1 Server should be all you would want with everyone playing together so you would get massive seiges like how things were designed.
2nd thought you actually only need maybe 4 servers 1 For Asia,1 for Europe,1 for North America, 1 For South America cuz of the time issues with seiging.
So with money coming in from an ncsoft sanctioned adena seller that would help cover the server updates.
LOL Nope It would be better if the advertisements were on billboards so that takes away being harassed about buying adena and NCSOFT get's money from people that are going to buy adena since it's allready to late to just outright ban players for buying game adena since it's been going on for so long.
This way you have a compromise so all of the legit non buying adena players like myself can play the game without being harassed buy these "IMMATURE PM ADENA SELLER SPAMMERS" and the people that need top +20 gear to feel adequate enough to play this game have a official ncsoft run adena seller so they can help ncsoft make this game better by collecting money from players buying adena instead of losing that extra money.
Which in turn is bringing in money so they can actually start advertising this game in america and get time cards back on the shelfs so they can keep some of the american players like myself playing this game and also use the money coming in to merge some of the american servers since all of the non north american players it seems outnumber the north american players so theres no need for so many north american servers right now.
With this idea if it worked you might see a rise in north american players again to where at that point in time you reasses the server situation and with the money you have made you update the north american servers with a higher capacity.
Honestly though if a game is called a massively multiplayer online role playing game why do you need more than 1 server?
1 Server should be all you would want with everyone playing together so you would get massive seiges like how things were designed.
2nd thought you actually only need maybe 4 servers 1 For Asia,1 for Europe,1 for North America, 1 For South America cuz of the time issues with seiging.
So with money coming in from an ncsoft sanctioned adena seller that would help cover the server updates.
But allowing such advertising is essentially condoning it.
If NC were to go that way, it would make more sense to just have them offer a server where players can purchase items and adena.
That Sovrath is a good idea if NCSOFT were to implement it's own adena shop in game it would take care of the spam in pm's cuz then they would be out of business cuz players could just go to the in game bank when they needed say over 10 million for an OE weapon and armor:) and viola have it taken care of either in minutes or have it taken care of on server maintenence day would be what would have to be addressed.
Personally if putting in a way that players could buy adena in game from ncsoft while playing the game was a way to stop pm spam i'm all for it cuz i just want the harassement to end is all i'm after.
That makes this all the more interesting. Basically, the balance of the in game economy vs. how much NcSoft would need to charge for the adena vs. how little can the suppliers afford to sell their adena for.
So, we start with the fact we have an in game economy and it is stable (to a point) and it has matured. The player migrations have, in fact, caused a lot of inflation but over all, things are settleing out.
Now, if we start out with 100mil Adena at $2.00 american, I would venture to say, you would kill the adena sells out, allow everyone to be able to afford the adena, but the economy would take a hugh hit to where 2bil adena max in a person's inventory woudl not be enough since everything would be trading at 1000x its current price.
So, NcSoft says ok, 100 mil adena == $100.00 american. Now, not everyone can afford it, economy is still stable, but the suppliers can now undercut this price and are still an issue in game.
Where is the magic point, that is the 64 dollar question. How cheap are the sellers willing to go. How much trust in them will there be when we have NcSoft selling us the adena? The tide could shift to NcSoft's side but shift it too far and the server's die because the economy is gone.
In one sense, the real crux of the issue is how to balance the game so the adena sellers have no market without the market going to pot. We suggest the increase in drops, we get inflation. A binding of items, then a player can't sell and make money off items so the market becomes stagnent and a hugh part of the game withers away (much the same as the warsmith and OL).
No, we can ban the buyers, but then developing the reporting functions needed to figure out the buyers and then the proccesses and human hours needed become unsupportable in the long run. The cost would be too high and NcSoft risks loosing those very players they want, the people actually playing the game.
Alas, I really believe that as Lineage 2 is designed and running, this problem will be here until the plug is pulled on the game. It is accepted over in Korea so the likelyhood of a change of this magnitude coming is slim to nada.
Perhaps the next generation of games will be able to deal with this within the game mechanics, but even then, you have the players that just want the end game, those that love to just play the game and others who see the marketplace and the acquisation of wealth the heart of their game play...
The real-money-trader problem is not only in L2. All games have their share of these annoying traders PMing you whenever they like.
Of all the games I played, even those with good gold and item drop (like LotRo, where I had my pony on 40 and still 1g left - which is a lot in the game BTW) ppl keep harvesting gold (and items) to sell for personal (real-life) profit.
About NCsoft selling adena... I personally think that'll kill the game. Reason is that you get a "legit" way to get adena's and economy will be ruined since everyone will be able to get (almost) unlimited adena's
I think a good way to get rid of the pesky adena sellers is to simplefy the crafting system, much like WoW has it. With less difference between key mats and base mats, players are in no need to grind for one specific material (which in most cases will be done by the 24/7 players), making whole items less hard to get. Combine this with binding items and you still won't ruin economy too much, while everyone will be able to get what they want without paying tons of adena's for it (and thus there's less need for adena-selelrs).
Well it was just a thought about the bank thing and all this talk about economy i musta gotten lost somewhere since, i've played this game since C2 with months away from game cuz of hard to find time cards.
Cuz right now only part of the so called economy that i use in game is to buy c grade shots for my lvl 52 and lvl 47 since they use the same weapon other than that i buy my healing potions from the stores in game where it's a fixed price. Cuz most of what i see for weapons and armor is nothing but over enchanted gear which i don't need since what stuff i do have that's enchanted is +3 and works just fine for me.
And apparently buying adena hasn't killed the game or the economy cuz we all know people have been doing it for awhile now and some like i've said do it just to get the +50 weapons and armor cuz they feel like they can't enjoy the game without having top grade gear at a ridiculose over enchant.
My point is not every player is gonna go out and waste money to buy game adena i for one won't and if i really need to i'll just delete 1 of my lower lvl toons and start my own warsmith becuase i make my money the old fashioned way by grinding.
It would kill the game possibly but with all the nerfing ,ncsofts doing a great job of trying to kill the game on thier own anyways.
The updates are for the high end players and a good chunk of those high end players are buying adena so it would just be another update for them in the long run.
And it would force us legit players to make a dwarf so we can craft our own stuff like right now since the gear i want noone uses or crafts it ,for example the d grade half plate or the c grade rind and dwarven chain.
Whatever they do they need to make sure that this is an issue that gets looked at long and hard when they finally get lineage 3 up and running so they don't have to listen to our "why are we getting harassed to buy adena in lineage 3 we thought you were gonna fix the issue "
And apparently buying adena hasn't killed the game or the economy cuz we all know people have been doing it for awhile now and some like i've said do it just to get the +50 weapons and armor cuz they feel like they can't enjoy the game without having top grade gear at a ridiculose over enchant.
There is a huge difference between adena's from a gold-farmer and from a GM/NCsoft:
- in the first case it's the same money flowing around once more from a different player;
- in the second case, it's newly created money, which might cause inflation.
Compare de adenaselling to illegal money in real life... Crooks have it and need to launder it, not causeing nflation. But if your central bank will press extra money without withdrawing old money from the economic system, you'll have inflation.