Aion (Open Beta, Launch Day Info too!)

[Morfiend]

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[Shatter]

I got 2 tells from 2 goldspammers few days ago for 1 million Kinah, the first was $46.00 the second was $29.00 so I sent a tell to the first guy that his prices were high :P

[Draegan]

A legion mate of mine got a in game letter from a gold spammer telling him that he was sorry for spamming him.   

[Shatter]

They need to make it so you cant sent a tell to anyone until level 10 or something, make em work for their spam rights

[Draegan]

I heard they made it level 5.

[Venkman]

Level 5. Which is as much a joke as it was back in, err, wtf was that other MMO that did it this way too? Was it WoW actually?

And I recommend now what I recommended then: data mining to flag for human review:

1. If a character name has more than five consonants in a row, take a look at the account.
2. If a character sends out ten tells in a row that are exactly the same, take a look at the account.
3. If a character sends out five tells in a row with a $ sign in it, take a look at the account.
4. If a character sends out a tell with a URL in it, take a look at the account.
5. If multiple characters send out a tell that are exactly the same, determine if those characters are under the same account, and if not, if they're from the same region. If they are, take a look at the account.

Now, companies could already be doing this for all I know. But for a game that arrived in NA with a working AH, working private stores, working loot distribution (old school that it is, particularly on quest items), largely balanced, and pretty refined due to having been live for a year, you'd think something like the above would be part of the default rollout.

[gryeyes]

Late at night I will receive 2-3 whisper spams while anonymous every 30 or so minutes. Ive received 2 emails, Im sorry to bother but blah blah.

[Sobelius]

Level 5. Which is as much a joke as it was back in, err, wtf was that other MMO that did it this way too? Was it WoW actually?

And I recommend now what I recommended then: data mining to flag for human review:

1. If a character name has more than five consonants in a row, take a look at the account.
2. If a character sends out ten tells in a row that are exactly the same, take a look at the account.
3. If a character sends out five tells in a row with a $ sign in it, take a look at the account.
4. If a character sends out a tell with a URL in it, take a look at the account.
5. If multiple characters send out a tell that are exactly the same, determine if those characters are under the same account, and if not, if they're from the same region. If they are, take a look at the account.

Now, companies could already be doing this for all I know. But for a game that arrived in NA with a working AH, working private stores, working loot distribution (old school that it is, particularly on quest items), largely balanced, and pretty refined due to having been live for a year, you'd think something like the above would be part of the default rollout.

In response they:

1. Start seeding random vowels between each consonant.
2. Randomly vary the content by enough characters to not get flagged as "the same each time"
3. Stop using $.
4. [Too generic a technique; too many false positives.]
5. See #2.

A possibly bit easier and more reliable method? Look at accounts that 25 or 50 (or whatever number proves reliable enough) *different* people have flagged to "block" within past 24 hours (or whatever time period proves reliable). This could alert not only to spam but also abusive chat/TOS violations.

[01101010]

Late at night I will receive 2-3 whisper spams while anonymous every 30 or so minutes. Ive received 2 emails, Im sorry to bother but blah blah.

pish...

/fail []

[Venkman]

In response they:

1. Start seeding random vowels between each consonant.
2. Randomly vary the content by enough characters to not get flagged as "the same each time"
3. Stop using $.
4. [Too generic a technique; too many false positives.]
5. See #2.

Yea, forgot the coincident-block thing. That's a good one too, as would be the more robust /report command Aion still lacks.

But your above solutions only apply if the gold farmers know those are the rules being used to track them down. In that event, nothing short human monitoring of all chat would catch it. The point here is to create a filtering method that isn't published but which flags GMs et al to look closer into an account. And none of the rules are designed to stand on their own. You wants at least 50% of your rules violated before a flag is elevated.

And multiple people /block'ing someone

[gryeyes]

Anyone a weaponsmith or know of a link that shows me the path of least resistance to skilling it up?

[IainC]

Anyone a weaponsmith or know of a link that shows me the path of least resistance to skilling it up?

Do the gathering quest from the weaponsmith master then do work orders from him till your eyes bleed, you run out of money or you reach a skill level that's useful.

[Threash]

Do we have any idea how the game has been doing in sales and such? Haven't heard anything after the 400k pre orders stuff.

[tmp]

Do we have any idea how the game has been doing in sales and such? Haven't heard anything after the 400k pre orders stuff.

According to the article posted on their web page the queues are at least in part a result of game being in bigger demand than the calculations based on the pre-sales + safety margin would indicate. How much of that is just PR though is anyone's guess.

[gryeyes]

Do the gathering quest from the weaponsmith master then do work orders from him till your eyes bleed, you run out of money or you reach a skill level that's useful

I was thinking more along the lines of "do nails till 35,then get a recipe for platinum panties make those till 75 etc". Any noteworthy recipes that require relative few/cheap mats for the skill level?

[Venkman]

Same difference though. At least with Work Orders you get the mats for free and a little bit of an extra XP bump as well. It's not like the crap you'd grind up on would fetch much return on the AH either.

[Checkers]

Tonight I had that moment where you suddenly appreciate that the novelty has worn thin, and then begin to wonder what the point of playing yet another one of these games is.  I rarely experience such an immediate need to withdraw from, say, a shooter.  I guess it's the commitment required in MMOs that makes it so difficult to continue with a game in the genre.  Also, I'm old now, and I get sleepy grinding mobs.

[gryeyes]

Same difference though. At least with Work Orders you get the mats for free and a little bit of an extra XP bump as well. It's not like the crap you'd grind up on would fetch much return on the AH either.

Does crafting exp scale to your level? If it not its a great way to afk a few early levels.

[Xanthippe]

Work orders are the only way I know to get the recipes that the vendors don't sell - or pay an inflated rate for them at the broker.  Oh, and they drop off mobs too sometimes.  I don't know about armor or weapon crafting, but I'm up to about 140 alchemy.

Also re the gold spammers - I was wrong.  Maybe they banned yesterday's but this evening we got a new crop.  I wish they'd give us tools to report them with.  Their petition design needs work. 

[Threash]

The constant warnings to switch channels and not click links are a lot more annoying and common than the occasional gold spammer.

[gryeyes]

Its so bad on my server that most of the channels are completely unusable. A different gold message every 15-30 seconds thats a paragraph long. Also, the inability to change the opaqueness of the chat box is destroying my eyes.

[tmp]

Does crafting exp scale to your level? If it not its a great way to afk a few early levels.

It increases depending on --i believe-- skill requirement to craft an item but you only get access to crafting after your "ascension" at lvl.10 and at that point 150-400 xp per item advances the xp bar very slowly. You might be able to gain 1-2 levels if you afk whole day but it'd cost more money (on the additional materials) than it's worth, imo. Of course unless your goal is to have a crafting monkey.

edit: on separate note, it appears a recent patch added the "Block" command to the right-click menu you get when clicking on names in chat, so you can mute the spammers easier. Pretty amazing the game been out for months without it and it took few days of EU/US launch to get it 

[gryeyes]

Well i meant does it "decrease" with character or skill level. Its relatively trivial to save up 1,000 ore and it costs 20-30k to smelt that. If the exp doesn't decrease with skill level thats 140k exp. Level 21 requires 1mil, im not sure what the exp curve was like at 10 but thats gotta be a couple levels id imagine.

[Ashamanchill]

Its so bad on my server that most of the channels are completely unusable. A different gold message every 15-30 seconds thats a paragraph long.

What? Do you have lazy gold spammers or something. I am not exagerrating when I say on my server it's every 5-10 seconds. Until y'all filled me in on making a new chat window filtering olny what you want, I couldn't read what my group said to each other. It was devoured by the spam too quickly.

[Redgiant]

Its so bad on my server that most of the channels are completely unusable. A different gold message every 15-30 seconds thats a paragraph long.

What? Do you have lazy gold spammers or something. I am not exagerrating when I say on my server it's every 5-10 seconds. Until y'all filled me in on making a new chat window filtering olny what you want, I couldn't read what my group said to each other. It was devoured by the spam too quickly.

On Fregion, you can't even see who is LFG in /3. /1 is a fucking mess anyhow, if it isn't gold spammers its Chuck Norris/Barrens chat noise or penis size comparisons.

But the right-click and Block option on a name in chat was the easy way to silence all of them in about 30 seconds. I have not received a new name not already blocked all day, so at least that option helps shut that shit off in a makeshift way.

Now trade and general are pretty necessary for free text, but why can't they enhance the LFG panel to allow a short comment text and filters for matching quests? LFG is the sort of thing that is really very declarative in nature given the right allowance for describing what you want. No one seems to be using the LFG panel at all given how I have found grroups into the early 20s.

[gryeyes]

They are starting to use real names now. 

[Jerrith]

The interesting thing I started seeing two nights ago is that they're getting into the class specific (Templar, in my case) channels now too...  That means they're leveling up to 9 and completing the ascension quest, doesn't it?  That takes like 3.5 to 4 hours to do, if you're familiar with it.  I suspect they're spamming the whole time, and just add in that channel once they reach it - so NCsoft is not dealing with them very quickly... :(

[Venkman]

Y'all know they added right-click>/Block in the last patch right? No more needing to type in the name in the Block tab.

But even before right-click>block, I don't get the frustration. I mean, jeezus, we've all been in how many MMOs since the farmers started spamming at Britain Bank before it? This is what the block/ignore channel is for. And better still, you can add memos to the Blocks. Every one of the 40 people I've blocked so far is marked "Gold Spammer", assuming eventually I'll need to block someone for being racist/troll/asshat and mark as such. I see maybe one new spammer every 30 minutes.

This is not gleeful support of Aion. It's just MMO-play best practices. If you can't ignore the spammers here, this is probably your last game with public chat channels

[Segoris]

While it won't help with the channel spam, it will almost completely stop the tell, in game type /anon. I haven't had a single message since I"ve done that.

[Xanthippe]

Its so bad on my server that most of the channels are completely unusable. A different gold message every 15-30 seconds thats a paragraph long. Also, the inability to change the opaqueness of the chat box is destroying my eyes.

You can't change the opaqueness, but you can change channel colors - that might save your eyes.

[Koyasha]

The interesting thing I started seeing two nights ago is that they're getting into the class specific (Templar, in my case) channels now too...  That means they're leveling up to 9 and completing the ascension quest, doesn't it?  That takes like 3.5 to 4 hours to do, if you're familiar with it.  I suspect they're spamming the whole time, and just add in that channel once they reach it - so NCsoft is not dealing with them very quickly... :(

Class channels are available before you ascend.  You get the channels for both of the classes your base class can change to, presumably so you can talk to people of those classes and learn about your choices.

[Chimpy]

The interesting thing I started seeing two nights ago is that they're getting into the class specific (Templar, in my case) channels now too...  That means they're leveling up to 9 and completing the ascension quest, doesn't it?  That takes like 3.5 to 4 hours to do, if you're familiar with it.  I suspect they're spamming the whole time, and just add in that channel once they reach it - so NCsoft is not dealing with them very quickly... :(

I saw a level 23 character with one of those f'd up names in Theobomos tonight. It was either a gold farmer levelling up a toon to, you know, farm gold. Or it was someone who just did a faceroll to get a character started.

[Modern Angel]

Y'all know they added right-click>/Block in the last patch right? No more needing to type in the name in the Block tab.

But even before right-click>block, I don't get the frustration. I mean, jeezus, we've all been in how many MMOs since the farmers started spamming at Britain Bank before it? This is what the block/ignore channel is for. And better still, you can add memos to the Blocks. Every one of the 40 people I've blocked so far is marked "Gold Spammer", assuming eventually I'll need to block someone for being racist/troll/asshat and mark as such. I see maybe one new spammer every 30 minutes.

This is not gleeful support of Aion. It's just MMO-play best practices. If you can't ignore the spammers here, this is probably your last game with public chat channels

I think the problem is that there is NO gold spam in WoW anymore which is the frame of reference for most people. It's all well and good to say that this is just something that happens in all MMOs but the level of spam in Aion is simply not there in the big gold standard and has been pretty aggressively stomped out in smaller games, too.

[Venkman]

Well, yea, there's always the contingent of those selectively forgetting the past. But given that WoW hit it's huge ass numbers years ago, that gold spamming was newer than that, and Aion is populated by a large contingent of ex-WoWers (or dabblers), there's a high probability that the people bitching about gold spam experienced the same thing in WoW.

And probably bitched about it there too for the very many months for Blizzard to ban-in-broadstrokes and develop whatever tools they use to weed it out

Again, this isn't to idolize Aion. I'll probably be done with it before the CE offer expires on the 22nd (which I'm tracking on the off chance I'm almost 30, still interested, and want those 1mil kinah wings ). It's more a reaction against the norm.

[gryeyes]

To reiterate the level of spam in this game is far beyond average, calling it out is has nothing to do with inexperience. Really doesn't impact my gameplay beyond mild annoyance but to say that its par for the course is wrong.