Posts with tag goldspam

We covered the story of the dead goldspam gnomes in Ironforge the other day, but now, direct from Alice (complete with Benny Hill accompaniment), here's video footage of exactly how it was done. How incredibly strange.

As far as anyone can figure out, they created these gnomes using a bot, and then used a client-side teleport hack to put them in exactly the right place above the Ironforge floor. They also had to kill them somehow of course, but who knows how that was done. Did they send newly created gnomes out to the trolls in the lowbie area (because most starter mobs are actually neutral, so won't attack normally), and then wait until right as they died to teleport them away? If you went to the starting area while this was happening, would you see little gnomes disappearing? As I said: how extremely strange.

Update: You commenters are so smart-- that's why we keep you around. Jesse and hookkick80 instantly recognized that they probably die from the fall damage after the teleport.

In today's breakfast topic, I noted that I haven't gotten any gold spam in the time I've played since patch 2.1.0 came along. And oh, what a change it is! I was always a good little player, taking the time to report any gold selling spam to a GM, but usually by the time a GM got around to looking at my ticket, I'd have gotten at least five more piece of spam -- and that was if I opened my ticket during off-hours.

So what's the magical change that's stopped spam in its tracks this patch? Obviously, there's the new spam reporting system, which makes reporting anyone an easy task: just right-click on their name and select the "report spam" option. You'll no longer get whispers, see text, or receive mails from that player for the duration of your game session and the incident is automatically forwarded on to a GM. But even if every player were duitifully reporting every spammer, I wouldn't expect such a dramatic change in the level of spam. CM Drysc notes that as of the patch, trial accounts can no longer whisper other players -- at least not without players whispering them first. I don't know about you, but I think this simple step may have been the magic bullet.

We've all had at least a day (our European friends are a bit behind us, but I have no doubt they have also managed to form their opinions) to play with patch 2.1.0 and digest the many changes contained therein. While the Children's Week quests (and the non-combat pets you get from them) are super fun, but what I'm enjoying most is the lack of gold selling spam. At least for me, this near-constant nuisance has completely vanished since the patch came out -- though perhaps I'll have a different opinion tomorrow. So, I ask, what's your favorite aspect of patch 2.1.0?

If you've been using an addon like Spam Sentry to quickly and easily report ingame gold whisperers, it turns out Blizzard might not be completely happy with you.

You'd think Blue might be happy players were helping them get gold spammers out of their game, but apparently Spam Sentry isn't actually helping... at least in the way Blizzard wants it to. Blue poster Kaone says, in a thread repeatedly linked to by Coreiel, that reports need to be submitted as soon as possible (Spam Sentry collects gold spammers, and then either lets you report them when you click to do so, or all in one go at the end of the day-- apparently more players have been going for the easier option). Addons, Blizzard says, aren't cutting it, because they aren't hearing about the spam quickly enough to catch the accounts while they're logged on.

Which is kind of understandable. But what's not understandable is that Blizzard is going to remove the ability of addons to create a GM ticket as of the next patch. So as of 2.1, we can pretty much say goodbye to Spam Sentry in its current form.

The good news is that Slouken (the addon CM, if there is one) promises that Blizzard is working on a "much easier-to-use method" of reporting gold spammers in 2.1. However, as we all learned from the LFG system, what Blizzard thinks is easier doesn't always match with what the players want to use. And my guess is that if Blizzard is getting "spammed" with Spam Sentry warnings now, their system will be a lot more full when everyone has access to a quick-reporting ability. It seems like a better plan to help Spam Sentry fix itself by building functionality into the addon system, rather than remove that functionality for a tool that players aren't familiar with.

The gold spammers are out of control. Since SpamSentry messes up my FuBar addons, I'm subjected to ten tells an hour from "Zuoipwher" and "Mwersdc" telling me that it's a pleasure to meet me and asking me to consider purchasing some of their lovely gold. Some of my guildies whose anti-spam addons are also lacking have been going through the same thing. And our guild has a long, glorious tradition of turning bad things (mildly insane raid leaders, server crashes, etc.) into good things with the use of our old friend alcohol. So now we present: The Gold Spam Drinking Game!

• After you get a spam tell, yell out the name of the spammer in Vent or guild chat. Everyone else who got the same spam at the same time takes a sip.
• Take a sip if the spammer has no vowels in his or her name.
• Take a drink if the spammer has ONLY vowels.
• Take a sip if the spammer is a rare class/race combination, like dwarf rogue or troll mage.
• Take a sip if you create a macro of your own and spam them back until they log off.
• Take a drink if you send them obscene messages back.
• Take two drinks if you manage to get all the swear words in the English language into one sentence.
• Take a drink if you start talking about your personal life.
• Take two drinks if you get them to respond to you.
• Finish the bottle if they report you to Blizzard.

Do you have any suggestions for the drinking game, or for games to play with spammers?

Like Sniffledoo, I'm done with it. This ingame gold whispering is getting worse and worse, and it's time something drastic was done about it.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can consider yourself lucky, but I'm guessing it's become pretty widespread by now (at first, I'd just chalked it up to being on a high population server). Spammers are almost constantly sending whispers ingame to buy and sell gold and powerlevel characters. Blizzard has of course said that they are banning players who get reported as spammers, but, also like Sniffledoo, I think it's time they went another step-- it's time to go after the sites that are doing it.

As always, IANAL, but clearly we know where these spam messages are coming from-- they are being sponsored by the sites advertised (I can, unfortunately, list a few of them off the top of my head, but I won't link to any of them, because they just don't deserve it). Does Blizzard have a legal claim against these sites for ruining the player experience and consistently breaking the TOS? If they have documented this activity, couldn't they take it to court and at least sue these sites for ruining the game experience?

It's gotten to the point where I would almost be willing to agree to a TOS that says "I agree to be sued for spamming" if it means Blizzard has a better legal footing against these idiots. Reporting these players is the best thing to do right now (even though these are alts that are just created and deleted, maybe even in a matter of minutes), and there are even addons now that will block and report this stuff for us, but why can't Blizzard do more? Why haven't they gone after the sites sponsoring this junk?

Update: A couple of people have already mentioned the gold links on this site-- in case you missed it, we are constantly working to get rid of them. WoW Insider does not condone or endorse any activities that are against the TOS, including powerleveling and gold buying and selling.