Gold Spammers

[Thurban]

There is at this very moment a gold spammer called Elstanlen spamming world chat on Laurelin server. I have done what i normally do and reported and ignored, thing is he seems immune to the ignore feature. Can someone help?

[Airamire]

Yep, there have been multiple people doing this lately, and we have not been able to put them on ignore list either manually or as a result of reporting them. It makes world chat extremely unpleasant. Would be interesting to hear from SSG about this as the gold spamming started when they reset the passwords of old accounts.

[Braer]

Yep, there have been multiple people doing this lately, and we have not been able to put them on ignore list either manually or as a result of reporting them. It makes world chat extremely unpleasant. Would be interesting to hear from SSG about this as the gold spamming started when they reset the passwords of old accounts.

Just he one guy doing it the most likely though.

They prodded a Hornet's nest. They should have dealt with it a decade ago. It's always "nothing to see here" and how they can spin it. EG7's call for more communication has them only think to increase the spin. We have those indulged in their respective bubbles in mind of years of development ahead but management in mind of imminent collapse and Daybreak pulling the plug, as is their way. If it is in the minds of some to continue long into the future we can only hope they could release themselves of their three monkeys and have their "betters" steer a less self-destructive course.

[Cordovan]

We are continuing to investigate these reports, and we do appreciate the frustration you are experiencing. We have an idea of what is happening, but posting it here would be unwise. We are working on it.

[Braer]

Unwise.

Very understated compared to the hype that surrounds content releases.

If you are really honing in on the reporting anomaly, great but it's still a red herring like MoLs quest order red herring that didn't make the dot update, just something to distract from dealing with/facing the bigger issue.

I hope you are following the recent Accounts Support Forum thread detailing the return of a "hacked" account used for gold/item farming: the time to resolve, the state it was returned in and the promise of no compensation for any damage done. They should be glad the farmers didn't think it worth stripping their chars and Ark was seen as a better prospect for sales.

Please buy in some smarts to get ahead of this not rely on the same attitudes that got you here!

[maartena]

Unwise.

Very understated compared to the hype that surrounds content releases!

Police does not publicly announce their plans to raid the drug dealer's home either. The Gold Spammers read the forums too, and whatever SSG is planning to deal with the situation is something that should NEVER be made public, otherwise the Gold Spammers will find a way around it. That it why that is unwise....

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Police does not publicly announce their plans to raid the drug dealer's home either. The Gold Spammers read the forums too, and whatever SSG is planning to deal with the situation is something that should NEVER be made public, otherwise the Gold Spammers will find a way around it. That it why that is unwise....

The knowledge has been public for years,.... the exploit is openly discussed on publicly available discords. Its not that much of a secret.

Too bad SSG has zero community presence on discord outside of a few mega discords with heavy handed moderation and zero real discussion. If they had joined even one out of about a dozen public raiding / pvp discords, they would have know about this a long time ago.

[TheProvenence]

The knowledge has been public for years,.... the exploit is openly discussed on publicly available discords. Its not that much of a secret.

Too bad SSG has zero community presence on discord outside of a few mega discords with heavy handed moderation and zero real discussion. If they had joined even one out of about a dozen public raiding / pvp discords, they would have know about this a long time ago.

How blinded you are ,do you really believe that exploit is the only exploit, SSG does not live under the rock ,there are evidently more than one way and im sure they are aware of discords, but yea you certainly tech expert how to deal these people these intruders and hackers are constantly finding new ways, its never ending battle.

its way more complicated and trickier and does it even occured these people talk one one thing in public have other things discused in private to misslead them too

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

How blinded you are ,do you really believe that exploit is the only exploit, SSG does not live under the rock

They do though. There's bugs and exploits that have been reported for years, yet all the tickets filed against them are closed without resolution or comment.


Another example: The main source of goldfarmer gold is like, the most poorly kept secret in the game, literally everyone knows, except SSG. its hilarious. Its been reported to death and yet it remains, much like a lot of other things.

The spammers on the other hand, are usually plugged in to the community and end up just using what others have found or reported for their own benefit. Their edge is partially (but not entirely) community knowledge driven.

I would get into the details, but of course that's against CoC here. if SSG wants to know all the problems and loopholes, just plug in to the raiding/pvp community and listen. Millions of hours of QA testing and tinkering from people who try everything in the game are available for free just by reading the discussions.

[Harvain]

They do though. There's bugs and exploits that have been reported for years, yet all the tickets filed against them are closed without resolution or comment.


Another example: The main source of goldfarmer gold is like, the most poorly kept secret in the game, literally everyone knows, except SSG. its hilarious. Its been reported to death and yet it remains, much like a lot of other things.

The spammers on the other hand, are usually plugged in to the community and end up just using what others have found or reported for their own benefit. Their edge is partially (but not entirely) community knowledge driven.

I would get into the details, but of course that's against CoC here. if SSG wants to know all the problems and loopholes, just plug in to the raiding/pvp community and listen. Millions of hours of QA testing and tinkering from people who try everything in the game are available for free just by reading the discussions.

Well, a bigger issue is SSG not fully making it clear their stance on Gold Selling, there are plenty of people who comment on such based on usually this line of dialogue: "$20 for 10,000 Gold? It should be a lot more Gold then that!"

This is just another area what SSG needs to step up their communication with the overall community. Tbh, I think a daily or multiple times of a day message(s) need to be put into the Game Announcements while in-game. Say 1 time every 6 hours for 4 messages in a day from Daily Reset to Daily Reset.

Granted this is just an example for said message: "Gold Selling is NOT allowed in LOTRO. Gold Spammers only want your account info! DO NOT USE LINKS!" would be short, sweet and to the point. As long as the overall community is in the dark overall about Gold Spammers this problem will continue, there will be people who continue to use & lose their accounts and the problem will never go away.

Obviously plenty of other exploits, bugs, etc in the game but thats a whole other issue where as just putting info out there is a fairly simple fix.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Granted this is just an example for said message: "Gold Selling is NOT allowed in LOTRO. Gold Spammers only want your account info! DO NOT USE LINKS!" would be short, sweet and to the point. As long as the overall community is in the dark overall about Gold Spammers this problem will continue, there will be people who continue to use & lose their accounts and the problem will never go away

They literally already do this, world chat messages about not following links spam global broadcast all the time.

The problem? SSG is completely absent from Discord, where most communication happens for anyone who isn't an ultra-casual roleplayer (ultra casual roleplayers have no need for gold or gear anyway). The sellers have an uncontested monopoly on discord communication due to SSG's absence, and they usually don't spam said discords to stay within the good graces of moderators/owners who don't mind so long as they are not disruptive or hurt members of their community...

concurrently they harvest information about player preferences / marketing / etc from the communities they are plugged into to refine their messaging and prices, and obtain new methods from said communities as they are discovered, with no worry about SSG finding out, since SSG isn't there.


The result is an insanely inflated economy on the more populated servers, further increasing demand for their services. People report exploits, SSG ignores tickets and closes, player apathy sets in, the cycle continues.

[OghranNasty]

Unwise.

Very understated compared to the hype that surrounds content releases.

If you are really honing in on the reporting anomaly, great but it's still a red herring like MoLs quest order red herring that didn't make the dot update, just something to distract from dealing with/facing the bigger issue.

This is exactly the kind of language that makes SSG so reluctant to talk about the future in vaguely concrete terms.
A plan that that didn't work out as planned isn't a red herring, a lie or a broken promise. It is just a plan that hit a snag. Your language is counterproductive.

[Harvain]

They literally already do this, world chat messages about not following links spam global broadcast all the time.

The problem? SSG is completely absent from Discord, where most communication happens for anyone who isn't an ultra-casual roleplayer (ultra casual roleplayers have no need for gold or gear anyway). The sellers have an uncontested monopoly on discord communication due to SSG's absence, and they usually don't spam said discords to stay within the good graces of moderators/owners who don't mind so long as they are not disruptive or hurt members of their community...

concurrently they harvest information about player preferences / marketing / etc from the communities they are plugged into to refine their messaging and prices, and obtain new methods from said communities as they are discovered, with no worry about SSG finding out, since SSG isn't there.

The result is an insanely inflated economy on the more populated servers, further increasing demand for their services. People report exploits, SSG ignores tickets and closes, player apathy sets in, the cycle continues.

Well SSG doesn't post info about such on a daily basis about Gold Spammers. I'm talking daily messages. The people posting about don't use the gold spammer links on the regular are players.

For Gold, it is what it is. Overall this game hasn't offered anything within itself to make people at a certain point "spend their gold" and SSG won't be adding in any way to remove a lot of the built up gold or try and force the various server ingame economies to change. You don't even need to use exploits, etc to gain lots of gold quickly. I was helping a kinmate with warg pens runs for just over an hour and earned just under 50 Gold from doing such from Level 126 to Level 130 runs of said instance. There also is the VIP items now, so if you constantly are using them even the daily/weekly costs to repair are now gone for X amount of players.

Discord is a whole other issue or set of issues but tbh Discord is a newer entity overall. LOTRO was already around for 8+ years by the time Discord even really started being used and out even longer before Discord became a fixture in modern times for various things mostly around gaming. LOTRO has had server economic issues for years before Discord truly got relevant mostly due to Gold at a certain point of playing in the game once you start accumulating enough and then unless you need something from Trade or the Auction Hall is worthless.

Yes, SSG is behind in the times for things like Discord which is just another area where they need to improve on but Gold itself has for a long time and always will be an issue for LOTRO until the day it's no longer running.

[Starbuck1771]

We are continuing to investigate these reports, and we do appreciate the frustration you are experiencing. We have an idea of what is happening, but posting it here would be unwise. We are working on it.

Maybe it's time we go back to the old days when we had GM's monitoring chat reports 24/7 Rob. Or we could go old school SOE before they became DBG and have select trustworthy members of the community police the servers like they did with Star Wars Galaxies.

[Harvain]

Maybe it's time we go back to the old days when we had GM's monitoring chat reports 24/7 Rob. Or we could go old school SOE before they became DBG and have select trustworthy members of the community police the servers like they did with Star Wars Galaxies.

Tbh, more GMs and more GM activity especially for weekends would be better overall for everything with LOTRO not only for dealing with Gold Spammers.

[TheProvenence]

They literally already do this, world chat messages about not following links spam global broadcast all the time.

The problem? SSG is completely absent from Discord, where most communication happens for anyone who isn't an ultra-casual roleplayer (ultra casual roleplayers have no need for gold or gear anyway). The sellers have an uncontested monopoly on discord communication due to SSG's absence, and they usually don't spam said discords to stay within the good graces of moderators/owners who don't mind so long as they are not disruptive or hurt members of their community...

concurrently they harvest information about player preferences / marketing / etc from the communities they are plugged into to refine their messaging and prices, and obtain new methods from said communities as they are discovered, with no worry about SSG finding out, since SSG isn't there.


The result is an insanely inflated economy on the more populated servers, further increasing demand for their services. People report exploits, SSG ignores tickets and closes, player apathy sets in, the cycle continues.

so so sad , i think i get it in the end, you are upset few things were done about pvp over years from SSG maybe and now you decided to pop here and magically accuse SSG they have no clue etc, they live under rock , dont check discord etc and they dont how to deal with gold spammers you act you know it inside and out.

you are so wrong hiting on someone like that and some players do not love others when they stand with them, why are you even here i only hear negativity from you nothing else im done here .

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

accuse SSG they have no clue etc, they live under rock , dont check discord etc and they dont how to deal with gold spammers...

I'm hardly the only one saying this, I'm just trying to be constructive and lay out the how and why

For Gold, it is what it is. Overall this game hasn't offered anything within itself to make people at a certain point "spend their gold" and SSG won't be adding in any way to remove a lot of the built up gold

agreed, this is a major compounding issue, but its not biggest the source of the bloated economy right now....

[Harvain]

agreed, this is a major compounding issue, but its not biggest the source of the bloated economy right now....

Gold is overall just a vicious cycle. At this point it will only continue to be what it is even if you cut off the biggest sources of getting it.

Unless SSG plans on doing something drastic Post-Gundabad to force the Gold and Server Economies into basically being reset there is just too much Gold out in the wild that cutting off various sources wouldn't solve for a long time.

They do need to keep sorting various issues but LOTRO's Server Economies are beyond saving or being rational for pricing.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Gold is overall just a vicious cycle. At this point it will only continue to be what it is even if you cut off the biggest sources of getting it.

Unless SSG plans on doing something drastic Post-Gundabad to force the Gold and Server Economies into basically being reset there is just too much Gold out in the wild that cutting off various sources wouldn't solve for a long time.

They do need to keep sorting various issues but LOTRO's Server Economies are beyond saving or being rational for pricing.

The solution is twofold:


1) Eliminate the source of absurd gold sums
2) Remove gold from circulation

Part 1 is simple: patch the farm. Everyone knows what I'm talking about here.

Part 2: for a limited time, offer high end gear (raid-tier, just barely below the best quality) for absurd sums of gold from a vendor.... like really outrageous prices. The gold is effectively deleted from the economy

Cut the supply and remove from circulation without hurting the casual player with overly expensive upkeep and repair costs. Gold sellers won't be able to get new supplies of gold and their existing stores will quickly run out as they will be forced to sell at a price that isn't absurd, since the value of gold is tied to the value of gear and gear is obtainable via instance completion. Their prices will be tied to the price of how much it costs to get the gear via instance completion, which will always be lower than the effort of grinding out that much gold without the farm.

foolpoof way to eliminate goldselling and return the game to a time before selling was massively endemic.

[Harvain]

The solution is twofold:


1) Eliminate the source of absurd gold sums
2) Remove gold from circulation

Part 1 is simple: patch the farm. Everyone knows what I'm talking about here.

Part 2: for a limited time, offer high end gear (raid-tier, just barely below the best quality) for absurd sums of gold from a vendor.... like really outrageous prices. The gold is effectively deleted from the economy

Cut the supply and remove from circulation without hurting the casual player with overly expensive upkeep and repair costs. Gold sellers won't be able to get new supplies of gold and their existing stores will quickly run out as they will be forced to sell at a price that isn't absurd, since the value of gold is tied to the value of gear and gear is obtainable via instance completion. Their prices will be tied to the price of how much it costs to get the gear via instance completion, which will always be lower than the effort of grinding out that much gold without the farm.

foolpoof way to eliminate goldselling and return the game to a time before selling was massively endemic.

Thats not fool proof though, unless SSG does something to FORCE the Gold out of player's hands to make it a reset nothing would happen. Plus you aren't removing Gold fully you just in your example removing the more "absurd" gold sources. If its purely optional for what you suggested, who in their right mind would use their Gold in that scenario instead of saving it for when things settle down? You'd just then see the economy flooded with Gold again from X amount of players who held onto it and we'd be right back to the same issue again of crazy prices.

For a brand new player to LOTRO, MMORPGs, etc etc, Money means a LOT to them. Sure with some research, figuring out how best to get money that isnt absurd, etc will make it easier but the average player doesn't do such. So it would be very hard to judge how newer players or players who just for various reasons never have much money would deal with this scenario.

There really is no fool proof way to deal with this. SSG would have to honestly do a patch that puts all items on the Auction Hall back to the player's mail that is selling items and remove Gold, Silver, Copper from the game on all characters (something they'd have to plan for all the accounts on closed worlds servers), adjust all the values for amounts of money that you can get from Quests, Kills, Trash Items, Other items to sell, etc as well as all items currently in the wild in peoples' inventories/etc. Then bring the game back to live where no one on any server has Gold and everything has been adjusted.

This would be the only true way to reset things and bring the server economies into a state of no longer "absurd" prices for a time. Although even in this scenario, Supply & Demand for items would still exist with Supply still being Extremely Low and Demand still being Extremely High, eventually you would return to an a "crazy priced" economy down the road with whatever Gold amounts would be reached say in 1 year after this "reset" was done with max level content being the most active part of the economy compared to the rest of the game's items and where the largest amount of money would be yet again.

But that above is beyond SSG to an extent and they've expressed from the new producer that at least how they are looking at it for the moment they wont be forcing the economies into being more reasonable from the sense of ways to get Gold out of player hands and forcing prices lower.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Thats not fool proof though, unless SSG does something to FORCE the Gold out of player's hands to make it a reset nothing would happen. Plus you aren't removing Gold fully you just in your example removing the more "absurd" gold sources. If its purely optional for what you suggested, who in their right mind would use their Gold in that scenario instead of saving it for when things settle down? You'd just then see the economy flooded with Gold again from X amount of players who held onto it and we'd be right back to the same issue again of crazy prices.

Gear is essentially a consumable... you buy it, use it, then it gets replaced once the next set comes out, etc. Players will absolutely pay gold to get it, as evidenced by the fact that people are paying hundreds of real world dollars to third-party deed-sellers for the ability to barter pieces of gear, not even the gear itself.

if you are a mid-level player without the ability or social circle to run a 12 man top tier raid to obtain anything close to said gear, you will have to pay.... one way or another. By paying a vendor in an absurd amount of gold (50k gold lets say) that gold is gone forever from the economy and you will be up an item.


I suppose the barter could be a permanent to avoid people holding for later times though.. the gold price needs to be sufficiently high so as to eventually be not worth anyone's time, once the gold is flushed out of the economy.

[Harvain]

Gear is essentially a consumable... you buy it, use it, then it gets replaced once the next set comes out, etc. Players will absolutely pay gold to get it, as evidenced by the fact that people are paying hundreds of real world dollars to third-party deed-sellers for the ability to barter pieces of gear, not even the gear itself.

if you are a mid-level player without the ability or social circle to run a 12 man top tier raid to obtain anything close to said gear, you will have to pay.... one way or another. By paying a vendor in an absurd amount of gold (50k gold lets say) that gold is gone forever from the economy and you will be up an item.


I suppose the barter could be a permanent to avoid people holding for later times though.. the gold price needs to be sufficiently high so as to eventually be not worth anyone's time, once the gold is flushed out of the economy.

Yeah, I'm not saying your wrong it's just there is no true and lasting way to solve things. Plus overall those who have insane amounts of Gold are a minority for all the accounts that exist.

For people paying to basically get the deeds and stuff, its outside of LOTRO. Not saying it's not wrong to an extent but if a person say gives $100.00 USD for a Remmo T2/T3, AD T2/T3 and FoKD T1/T2/T3 future vendor they could be doing such over steam chat, using paypal with no way to know such occurred to get said player those deeds.

Granted money doesn't always happen for these kinda scenarios with people running stuff where they basically carry someone just to get a deed or deeds, although usually in a friend/kinship/overall group community way.

There are a lot of issues where SSG can do things to improve the overall LOTRO experience which hopefully with things trending more positively overall of late even with various bumps in the road that they'll continue to grow and improve in their practices to make their games better.

[Braer]

Was it "Wise" to pander to sycophants who plead for cheats and game bypasses that undermine the fundamentals of MMORPS; gaming endeavours achieved with friends?

Was it "Wise" to promote the game to the more inept of gamers with streamer/moderator choices that sees off the more accomplished and promotes dismal store alternatives?

Was it "Wise" to show complete indifference to so many aspects of the game?

Was it "Wise" to skulk away from a sociopath and leave others to their predation? Yeah on a very personal level.

Was is "Wise" to not acknowledge or deal with the hacked accounts dataset currently supplying this spammer.

Was it "Wise" to continue these appalling choices?

Maybe these choices are the only reason we have a game, I guess this must be what SSG believes. Doesn't it shame you to have those you have fooled always coming to your defence?

[Nehniriel]

Part 1 is simple: patch the farm. Everyone knows what I'm talking about here.

I just want to say: No, not everyone know what you are talking. I don't and with my little time to play I can say that I don't have gold (sure since launch I have 1k Gold between all my characters but that's so little when I look at the HV). So you can PM me if you want (and if not exploit), perhaps I will use it (or not).

And in my opinion you forget a third option:
3) Just stop selling things at outrageous price. If the prices are lower, then gold is less needed then gold spamming will be less interesting. And for people with lot of gold they just can't have more, no big deal.
It can also have a very hard gold cap of, why not?, 2kgold (server wide) to help it.

[Once_of_Bree]

Part 1 is simple: patch the farm. Everyone knows what I'm talking about here.
.

Everyone you play with know it but I haven't a clue. I've played since launch but I just play the game differently than you, with different people and hang out in different web areas to you.

To be clear I'm not that fussed in knowing either, gold has been irrelevant for ages, in fact not sure there's a single in game currency that's relevant. VXP is the only reward I'm currently interested in; gold, shards, embers, motes, crafting resources no longer hold any interest to me. I'm not saying I have lots of any of them compared to others, but enough for me. (e.g. 10k gold, 100 shards, etc)