Can Blizzard ban ingame gold spammers?

#0 - April 14, 2007, 9:07 p.m.

I am not sure if this has been asked before, it probably has but I am probably not alone when I say im sick of getting about 40-50 messages a day from these people. The gold spammers use completly unrealistic names like faskja or something like that, then delete their characters. Can Blizzard track down deleted characters, because I don't believe if they could there would be this many. I have reporting so many of them and it seems there is increasing numbers now.

Tseric

#2 - April 14, 2007, 9:28 p.m.

We've been dealing with gold sellers, botters and hackers since before this game was ever released. It is an ongoing process, with each side always developing new tactics to outwit the other side.

Unfortunately, it does not appear there is a "magic bullet" that makes this all disappear. We continue to strongly address this particular area, as we always have.

We're in the works of developing more tools to address the problem of gold selling spammers and we expect to add more tools for our hacks team to use, as time goes on.

It is still an important part of the process for players to inform us of this type of action, so that we can document and build a case for removing account status from spammers.

Tseric

#23 - April 14, 2007, 9:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
No, really, I'd like to know.

Trial accounts exist to give someone interested in a game a taste for things to come. That means there will be certain things they CANT do. Chatting, whispering and sending in-game mails should be amungst those things you CANNOT do in a trial account. You dont NEED to chat to go through the starter quests, the tutorial teaches you everything you need to know. You dont HAVE to trade, you dont HAVE to ask people for where things are because the quest log says it all.

So show me a downside.

That someone who plays a trial account is so inhibited by restrictions that they have a negative experience. Then, what is the point of a trial at all?

I realize it may be simple to say "everybody under level 10 shouldn't be able to whisper anybody", but that seems like you simply forgot what it was like to be new to the game. The first fifteen minutes of a game are probably the most crucial moments of a gamers life. That is when people decide to play or not.

We've already placed large restrictions on trial accounts and may continue to add more. However, there is a point at which you are demoing a broken game, because you deliberately broke it to prevent this.

Also, don't assume that trial accounts are the sole source of this problem. The issue wouldn't go away even if we discontinued tiral accounts completely. I'm hard pressed to say how much that would actually do to the problem. In the end, I think Blizzard would have more to lose than the gold sellers.