Bots and gold spammers, meet ban hammer

Quizzical

Barunson hasn't officially announced it, but they obviously did something during Wednesday night's maintenance.  More than two days later, gold spam is pretty much gone.  Bots are gone from the high level areas, but a lot have shown up in low level areas.

It doesn't look like the gold sellers have given up.  It does, however, look like Barunson found a way to track down and ban all of the existing bots and all of the gold sellers' infrastructure during the maintenance.  Now the farming bots had to restart from scratch with low level bots that will work their way up.

We'll see how effective Barunson is at banning them going forward.  Even if they systematically let bots level to 20 or 30 or 40 before banning them and any other accounts that they feed loot to, that would be a serious blow to the gold sellers.

One other peculiar thing about buying asper in this game is that you can do it yourself for cheaper than what you can buy from the gold spammers, at least if you're max level.  Spending $2 for a scroll of exploration from the item mall, then leaving your astel to farm while AFK overnight will get you more asper than the same $2 will get you from the gold spammers at the advertised rates.  Going the scroll of exploration route is also completely legal.

Quizzical

There are still a lot of bots around, but whatever Barunson did to block the gold spammers has been pretty effective.  After not seeing any at all for a week, one came back today.  He got one message off before vanishing.  The same gold selling site was back with another bot a few minutes later that managed to send two messages before disappearing.  After quickly going through four such characters (and likely accounts), the gold spammer seems to have given up.

Albatroes

I'm not really understanding the point of this thread especially since there's no concrete numbers as to how many are being banned etc. At best this is akin to someone in another game saying "my server doesn't have bots/gold spam" while others still see it (for example with FFXIV, people on Balmung not seeing bots/gilseller spam while people on Goblin are flooded).

Quizzical

Albatroes said:

I'm not really understanding the point of this thread especially since there's no concrete numbers as to how many are being banned etc. At best this is akin to someone in another game saying "my server doesn't have bots/gold spam" while others still see it (for example with FFXIV, people on Balmung not seeing bots/gilseller spam while people on Goblin are flooded).

For a while after launch, there were constant gold spammers.  There were six different gold selling sites that would each have a bot spamming most of the time.  It was customary that upon logging in, you'd have to immediately block four or so gold spammers to clean up the chat.

Nine and a fraction days ago, they had a maintenance during the night.  Since that maintenance, the chat has mostly been free of gold spammers.  Occasionally you see one get one or two gold spam messages away, then vanish.  I'm not sure what they did during the maintenance, but it worked.  And if it were something that could readily be abused to silence real players, Mistake (who trolls chat a lot) would surely be gone by now.

Also following that same maintenance, the bots who had been constantly farming in high level areas vanished.  Since then, we've had a lot more bots in lower level areas.  Most of the time, you don't see any bots, but when you run into them, you hit a ton of them in one spot.  Those bots are believed to be how the gold sellers farm the gold they sell, so the gold sellers sure haven't given up.  But the gold spam is virtually gone.  Whatever they did, it has worked for the last nine and a fraction days.  I'd be shocked if whatever they implemented during the maintenance was only done on one server and not another.