Right now, East Luterra on Avesta has about 10 different gold spammers all competing with each other, just afk spamming chat. Every single player in the area has to report and block them one by one to be able to use the chat, and most don’t bother. The chat is completely clogged with this spam and nobody even tries to chat through this spam. Additionally, the spammers take some time to be kicked from the game after being reported.
I’m pretty surprised you guys don’t seem to be taking this more seriously as they’re actually cutting into your sales for royal crystals.
Suggested Fixes:
- There really should be at least one person whose job it is to monitor the chat for multiple servers (set up a few monitors and open multiple clients/ computers around this person) and just simply ban and kick these spammers. Currently there seems to be no real time moderation happening, as the same gold spammer names have been spamming for a couple hours (and presumably were spamming before I logged on).
It’s a very bad idea to rely on your own customers to mass report someone for them to get kicked from the game. The customers aren’t your employees and have no incentive to do this task for you or to do it with proper ethics. Some will report the right thing, some will abuse it, and a lot will just eventually get tired of it, having it be a contributing factor to when they quit.
Having full-time staff kicking and banning gold spammers in real time won’t generate you direct revenue, but it will be a significant contributing factor to player retention and in how the company’s management of the game is perceived.
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There needs to be a timeout on how often you can send messages in area chat. There’s no need to make it so easy for these spammers to completely clog the chat. An example that I can bring up is again WoW, which struggled with the same issue a lot in the past. One of the steps they took (I think this was one of the more impactful ones) against gold spammers was the timer on sending public chat messages.
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All that said, if you MUST rely exclusively on player reports for someone to get kicked, you can make it a better process.
3.a. Add a right-click report option of ‘gold spamming/ gold website advertisement’ or whatever. It has to be specifically about gold. (Also, do not require a text input–it’s tedious and unnecessary doing this for every gold spammer)
3.b. Have the player be kicked immediately upon having the following variables match:
- x number of players report him specifically for gold spamming
- the system checks his last x number of messages and sees they’re all exactly the same message sent x times within x amount of time
