Inside scaming.. A very enlightening interview

[Plaxidia]

Its long.. 38 minutes.. Well worth the watch though.. Makes you think.. Even if you take precautions.. And his voice.. It could be anyone you talk to.. Well not me but yeh.. you get the idea


http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index ... Thief.html

[Divil]

yeah, well I hope most people know by now that alot of goldspammers, itemspammers, etc are indeed scammers.

I once talked to someone who had bought a bot to do the pvp renown points leveling for him, because he was fed up with doing the pvp instances all the time. So the bot would do it for him.
But the bot was very obvious. It walked a predesignated path, cast some heals and stuff and then walk back to starting points.
This was so obvious that people noticed and he had to stop using it or risk getting banned.
I actually saw him on a few occasions applying the bot.

I then asked the guy what he was doing now to gain his renown points fast and he told me:" There is no easy way, it is all hard work."
And I guess that is what stuck by me is that there really is no easy way to get to the top, all you can do is work hard, be honest and most f all have fun.

In the end it will catch up to you, except if you are playing Aion. Then you can spam, scam, bot all you want apparently. I reported people daily there for spamming, botting and stuff, but never saw much result.

[Nishka]

Players needing to bot is a sign of bad game design if you ask me.

The moment players are forced to do such behaviour it means your game is boring or just too repetitive.

[Divil]

You have a point there

[Czin]

In the end it will catch up to you, except if you are playing Aion. Then you can spam, scam, bot all you want apparently. I reported people daily there for spamming, botting and stuff, but never saw much result.

You reminded me of the video showing a GM playing as a large rabbit obliterating gold seller stores in Aion that was posted on YouTube a little while back. Can't find that link for the life of me. Otherwise there is only so much the GMs can do considering the size of the player base and their stretched out man power. Visibly watching gold sellers getting blown to bits was pretty satisfying though.

Back on topic, the scary issue is how far behind the legal systems of internet saturated countries are on intangible property like video game characters and in game items. There aren't very many cut and dry cases setting a standard in regards to property with many hours of invested value but no literal monetary value or proof of purchase. Combine that with a gold selling industry that is without regulation making billions (admittedly not a verified number though at least a few hundred million world wide yearly is considered reasonable.) of dollars and it isn't surprising scamming is so common. Interestingly there is a very relevant post from the same website you linked submitted on January 11th 2010 regarding a ruling by the South Korean supreme court legalizing the exchange of real money for in game money. Hopefully that will point the way for controls on an otherwise shady and ill understood industry, though the international law and game developer sides of this whole thing are well beyond my reading level.

[Enterprise-D]

In the end it will catch up to you, except if you are playing Aion. Then you can spam, scam, bot all you want apparently. I reported people daily there for spamming, botting and stuff, but never saw much result.

Don't hold your breath. It's NCSoft that we are talking about here. I have been playing their most popular MMO (Lineage II) until Aion came out for almost 5 years and 80-90% of the server population (all servers) there are botters, e-bayers, spammers, scammers, exploiters etc etc...

You should had seen how it was when they opened a new server and the GMs said that they would keep an eye on the server for the first few weeks. Did they do that? nope. There was 2 live players and 100-300 bots in each starter area killing each others mobs. Legit players didn't have a chance to level up until a few weeks after the servers opened because the bots had taken all the grinding spots.

[Nishka]

In the end it will catch up to you, except if you are playing Aion. Then you can spam, scam, bot all you want apparently. I reported people daily there for spamming, botting and stuff, but never saw much result.

Don't hold your breath. It's NCSoft that we are talking about here. I have been playing their most popular MMO (Lineage II) until Aion came out for almost 5 years and 80-90% of the server population (all servers) there are botters, e-bayers, spammers, scammers, exploiters etc etc...

You should had seen how it was when they opened a new server and the GMs said that they would keep an eye on the server for the first few weeks. Did they do that? nope. There was 2 live players and 100-300 bots in each starter area killing each others mobs. Legit players didn't have a chance to level up until a few weeks after the servers opened because the bots had taken all the grinding spots.

That's just another reason why I love the heavy instancing in STO. The way the game is setup this is something we'll never be bothered with.

We may see some gold sellers, perhaps even bots, but the damage they can do is very limited, apart from spamming zone chat which will be annoying.
Luckily the STO economy is barily worth exploiting.

[odingrey]

City of Heroes has a lot of spammers.

You could easily get 5 emails a day offering powerleveling of influence (gold). The bad thing about STO is the mail box is tied to your forum account. Let's just hope there will be some form of a spam filter.

[ccol1492]

I remember there being an article about EVE where they had a corporation that was taken over by a person and the real dollar value of stuff taken was something like 130,000 dollars. EVE I think has adressed the gold spamming/farming the best- develop a way to sell it themselves through the use of timecards- buy a time card for isk... Speaking of Aion- the reason I quit was because my account was hacked and everything taken and it took them soo long to respond and then they opened my account then the next day banned it, 2 weeks later opened it back up with a general message that they still needed to do more checking into it to replace the items and kinnah lost. Funny thing about this is I have three different anti-virus scanners and a tight firewall, and scanned my com and have never found anything... My guess is that since it looks like there have been quite a few account hacks there that I think ncsoft itself was hacked. The only thing I think I could have done differently was changed my pass once a month. It does look like it will be harder to sell creds/money etc in STO as there is alot more instancing. I do love the fact that I log in and I think it's been an hour of playing and look at the clock and it's 3 hours. In aion I would almost fall asleep at the keyboard from the incessant grinding(they do have beautiful graphics though).

[Nishka]

I remember there being an article about EVE where they had a corporation that was taken over by a person and the real dollar value of stuff taken was something like 130,000 dollars. EVE I think has adressed the gold spamming/farming the best- develop a way to sell it themselves through the use of timecards- buy a time card for isk... Speaking of Aion- the reason I quit was because my account was hacked and everything taken and it took them soo long to respond and then they opened my account then the next day banned it, 2 weeks later opened it back up with a general message that they still needed to do more checking into it to replace the items and kinnah lost. Funny thing about this is I have three different anti-virus scanners and a tight firewall, and scanned my com and have never found anything... My guess is that since it looks like there have been quite a few account hacks there that I think ncsoft itself was hacked. The only thing I think I could have done differently was changed my pass once a month. It does look like it will be harder to sell creds/money etc in STO as there is alot more instancing. I do love the fact that I log in and I think it's been an hour of playing and look at the clock and it's 3 hours. In aion I would almost fall asleep at the keyboard from the incessant grinding(they do have beautiful graphics though).

I hope you realise that with virus scanner more = worse.

If you install more then 1 virus scanner on a single pc then the virus scanners see each other as a threat and try to hack each other, this is due to how virusscanners operate. Years ago I had 2 virusscanners installed on a single pc, figuring that what the 1st didn't cover would be covered by the 2nd, instead I was getting error messages left & right and the virus scanners seeing each other as a threat.

After deinstalling 1 of them the problems were solved. A couple years later I read the reason why this happened and how virus scanners really work, so that explained their behaviour as well.


I played Aion till I reached level 30 or level 31, after that the grind became so mind numbingly boring, I just couldn't bother myself anymore to level up further.
I was also victim of some high level eloys who thought it funny to gank every lowbie with 5 on 1. I know that I should have expected that and it's part of the game, but it annoyed me so much that it was just more reason not to play anymore.
In the end I didn't even use up my full free month and quit after 3 weeks of playing. I haven't touched the game since.

According to a friend of mine about 50% of the people there are bots and there is a total lack of end-game. He gave up after playing at level 50 for a couple months.

He's gonna play STO as well now, he would have even bought a lifetime sub if Cryptic didn't put on a skill cap all of a sudden.