Look blizzard I solved the gold spam problem.

by Away | 15/04/2007 06:17:14

It took all of 15 minutes to think up and at least for steps 2 and 3 would be extremely easy to implement.

I have a three step process to fixing the gold spam problem forever.

1. License some good spam filtering technology, the kind gmail uses. Implement it. Since you are only filtering one type of advertisement, honing this intelligent filter and making it extremely accurate will be very very easy. Anyone who needs to talk about stuff that just happens to get filtered, can just GROUP UP with the person they need to discuss it with, getting around the /tell filter. Make the filter apply a MORE STRICT RULESET FOR CHARACTERS UNDER LEVEL 10. This should catch almost everything from spammers yet let any legitimate talk of legitimate in-game transactions through fine.

2. Limit the AMOUNT of characters a person under level 10 can send tells too. For example this would allow you to send unlimited tells back and forth between yourself and a friend who just started, but a person under level 10 would not be able to send tells to more than 10 DIFFERENT CHARACTERS in say, an hour.

Wouldn't hurt newbies talking to their friends *AT ALL*. Wouldn't hurt people on trial accounts who want to talk to their paying customer friends. Wouldn't hurt anyone except a gold seller. Anyone with more than 10 friends will be invited to a friend's guild when they join so the limit would NEVER be met unless you were trying to spam.

3. ADD a 1 hour cooldown on character creation. No one honestly needs to make more than one character every hour. This prevents a spammer from getting around rule number 2.

There blizzard, I solved the gold spam problem without hurting any legitimate customers.