This is such a conflicting topic for me as somone who does sales but never advertised for them and as someone who uses a LFG filter for spam / ads because of how absolutely awful they are to see.
As much as I’d like to say “lets find a way to separate them” I know that it’s not really good for the game in the long run.
Personally I’d like to just see them removed from LFG groups and in game chat channels only at the least, even though I understand its quite an inconvenience.
I almost feel like it’s impossible to just say no lfg and expect it to be followed. All my LFG is for the majority of my morning and afternoon is adverts.
He is of the belief that by letting people know of the add-on, we are being dismissive of the issue. Which, at least for me, is not the case at all.
I believe it is a way to make Blizzard see there is an issue, if everyone is using a workaround to deal with the problem that Blizzard has said they will fix and have not.
They are supposed to be against the rules. Yet nothing is done about them. They made a blue post years ago on this.
I don’t have that many to click. I have an addon that blocks a lot of them and the ones that it doesn’t, I flag. It isn’t perfect I know and yes they should enforce their rules but right now that is the only way to deal with it.
Yes, it is.
Asking Blizz to hand out punishment for something that isn’t against TOS that you don’t like is just dumb.
It appears that the only thing reporting does is to temporarily remove it from your view during that character’s current play session. So it’s almost as though the reporting system exists only to increase the time played of reporters.
No one is banned or suspended. The ads you report today, which have links to outside websites that do RMT for lots of sketchy services, will still be there indefinitely, continuing to be posted by the same toon you reported.
The fact that these ads actually stay in the group finder for days on end suggests that people are using bots to keep them up 24/7.
To say that they should do absolutely nothing because “for sure those are stolen accounts, or they’ll start new accounts and boost hundreds of characters to be able to post those ads again” is dumb because they aren’t doing anything at all. At least if they promptly banned those accounts and they had to start new ones and boost to get them to 50 so they can post those ads, that would be profitable.
They aren’t doing anything. They don’t have a team working on it, as we have seen implied. They have chosen to keep those ads in the group finder by their failure to take any action whatever.
Addons which enable the violators to continue to violate without being reported by addon users are not the solution.
no, but it’s the only one available to us
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/lfgspamfilter
the LFG UI is awful, period. but WTS makes it worse.
you’d think, but blizzard hasn’t done it yet.
WTS ads in the LFG system are, in fact, against the rules.
Blizz has explicitly stated several times that carry ads aren’t allowed in LFD. The only space it’s actually allowed in is trade. Handing out punishments would only be enforcing that policy.
This. They made the rule, they can enforce it. If no one gets banned for it; then it’ll just keep happening. Even if people do get banned for it, the paid services will just use comprised accounts and bots to advertise anyway.
IP band, regional restrictions, etc. is the only way they could combat this, and I don’t think they have the willpower for that.
As much as I would enjoy them out of the default menu, giving an ads tab is blizzard supporting selling of runs. They need to do better at punishment for these accounts misusing their game.
There is one other way, and that’s to add a carry finder tab where the character providing the service must be the character posting the ad because the tool handles the whole transaction, and then making it so posting an ad anywhere else is an automatic ban. They could even build it such that the characters offering service have to be capped and geared well enough to actually provide service to post an ad, so stolen accounts won’t work reliably.
Why would you expect this to solve the problem. If there is a huge population in the LFD tab and nobody but boosters go to the Boost tab, don’t you think advertisers will try to hit as many “eyeballs” as possible by posting in both tabs?
Blizz needs to crack down on these guys… the OP solution isn’t really helpful in practice.
Because if there’s a dedicated space for carry ads, they can make it an automatic ban to post ads anywhere else plus most players looking for carries will be looking in carry finder, greatly reducing the benefit of advertising in LFD.
World quest tracker addon hides most if not all of the adds.
Why don’t they do this NOW? They’ve already said advertising cash boosts/carries is against TOS, but they don’t do anything about it. What makes you think they will implement an automatic ban based on keywords? (not hard to implement, but clearly there’s a reason they’re afraid to do that–false positives and no customer service to deal with those banned but are innocent is one reason I can think of).
But it is against policy.