LFG flooded with ads. What's goin on?

Community General Discussion
1

Any listing that has WTS, Selling, Free Carry, Bundle, Want to Sell, Boost, and especially any URL to one of these sites should be an auto ban or temp suspension. I’m trying to find a key right now and there are 50+ ads up. I report them all and a few minutes later, another 10-20 are back.

Can Blizzard at least restrict the ads pointing players to these scammy sites? Like I just opened up the LFR section and of the first 6 listings, 5 are ads. Nearly half the total listings are just ads. What gives?

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People are really big on buying their way through the game, that’s what gives. Supply and demand, and the demand must be massive lol.

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I don’t think the demand is that high or that said, any higher than it ever has been. Setting up bots to advertise is simple enough, it’s just baffling that these common words aren’t filtered immediately.

The reporting function should also auto ignore that person. If I report them, I should be seeing them again a minute later.

Man I wish they would focus on some of the little things instead of worrying so much about the next thing.

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Your ignore list would be full (yes, there is a limit) after one sweep of reporting the ads.

This is all just evidence that they don’t really give us the tools we need to curate our game experience and are unwilling to do the simple and basic things that would limit ads heavily.

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People are lazy and will always take the easy way out. So, these will always exist. It’s an unwinnable fight.

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I think Blizzard should rework the group interface where people can list their groups for what they need, but keep the bots out from advertising all their “we’ll steal your account” websites.

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Id love to have a mouse over report as ads macro for these LFG posts.

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Oh, I know. haha

I have a separate addon to handle those. The ignore limit should be removed. Absurd we can’t ignore as many players as we want.

Ban them. There are plenty of ways to prevent advertising. Even simple filters or suspsensions if a player or account gets flagged so many times.

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yea it def seems much worse lately and blizz does exactly nothing to improve the situation

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It’s all listed by level 1 toons. Restrict listing in raids and M+ to level 80s. Majority of ads gone overnight.

It’s a problem that’s probably impossible to solve but one they aren’t even trying to limit at all apparently.

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Yea people always say oh it won’t work 100% of the time durr

Ok so what, it would help by a nonzero amount

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Yeah people go with the “it’s impossible to completely solve so why bother trying anything?” argument. Which just falls flat.

Theft is impossible to completely solve but that doesn’t mean we don’t have rules and guardrails that effectively limit it.

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As you said, if you want to advertise some content, you should be the appropriate level. A level 1 advertising in the M+ filter makes no sense. Limit it to level 80 accounts and if those players want to take bans for advertising, most of the ads will get cleaned up quick.

Regardless, just filtering any add with a URL or some keywords is a stupid easy task to implement. They just don’t care, unfortunately.

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Money is what happened

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15

Imagine one guy whose job was to watch lfg and clean out everything against TOS. If only blizz had the budget.

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Why would they do that?

Step 1: Sell gold through tokens in game store
Step 2: players spend gold to WTS boosts
Step 3: repeat

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Pay some guy in India who’s sole job is to monitor LFG and ban WTS accounts.

How much could that possibly cost?

Actually, I looked it up.

The daily wage for an unskilled worker in India is $9.14.

Three 8 hour shifts, $27.42/day. Plus taxes and whatever else India tacks on to employment wages.

Can Blizzard afford that to clean up LFG?

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Currently 35 “WTS” listings in lfg dungeons and 16 for raids. There’s even a few in the delves and custom sectons.

:man_facepalming:

Between this and needing to run third party addons so chat is useable… come on Blizz. Get rid of this garbage.

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I think the only full way to completely remove the listing is by changing the layout to remove the one source that they can do. The text boxes. But then some people would probably get upset by that because it means they can’t create custom group titles in the Group Finder.

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I think there are lots of other ways to prevent it.

  • Only max level characters can advertise.
  • For M+, only groups that HAVE keys can post. So either the group leader or someone else should have a key.
  • Restrict ALL urls. Even ignoring the ads aside, people could post malicious links. Crazy it’s allowed when we can’t even post a link on the forums.
  • Restrict the use of ANY words that might be selling. Like I said above, just remove all those common key words, like WTS.

3 of those 4 would stop 90% of the ads.

2 Likes