Every day since i started playing diablo 4 i am getting daily friend requests from usernames that are just advertisments for gold trading websites. Is there some way to stop these friend requests from coming in? The last one i got had their user name set to "
They had the website link right before sell dr4 but this forum wont let me post this with that link there.
Report and move on unfortunate its a never endin battle that hopefull they will disapear or fall into lava thanks for that vrak. Also its realy bad idea to give them free advertising by posting it on the forums. For every 1 account they remove another dozen are used. Untill the player base stops looking for the easy way out these lava bait spawn will prey on the player base.
Hi Fralla! You’ve posted on the WoW forums. You may receive a better answer in the Diablo IV forums:
That is probably for the best, since we don’t want to help them advertise. 
Our teams are aware of the current method of advertising and seeing what they can do to help curb it, but in the meantime, I’d agree with Darthwraith. Report those that you can.
Yup, noticed an uptick in lvl 1 toons trying to find different ways to advertise.
There’s one on my own realm that spams aberrus boosting, and I’ve seen the level 1 toon phase out within seconds after it posts it in general zone chat. They’ve finally learned to avoid trade chat I guess.
how about maybe not allowing goldtrader or any variation as usernames, and maybe just ban website links in usernames too. seems like an easy fix to me. i have blocked 17 users between GoldTrade, GoldTrade1 and GoldTrade10 since diablo 4 launched.
They tried something similar in wow and it was beaten in 5 min it boils down to the player base looking for the easy way to the top untill the players stop looking for the easy way to the top there will always be cockroaches that take advantage of the stupid.
Most gold traders don’t use “goldtrader” as part of their name, so blocking it would only catch a small number of them. For the longest time, the names have either been “normal” names from compromised accounts or names that look like someone banged their hand on the keyboard.
Otherwise, you would need to post your suggestions either in General Discussion or use the in-game option on the Support menu. The Devs who make/apply those sort of filters don’t take suggestions from the Customer Support forum and the SFAs here, like Vrakthris, are not liaisons with them.
I genuinely would like to know what is preventing some sort of defense against spam that goes beyond player reporting. I’ve been reporting for years and still see the same stuff posted daily. I’m lost as to why there isn’t some sort of background program in game that tracks and flags certain wording immediately upon being spoken in any form of chat. Like if any sentence contains “for only $9.99 at myphatloots dot co m,” the game should probably shadow ban it from most global chats (so its never actually seen by another living player). Something similar to what many streamers use to moderate chats.
Furthermore, why not put some sort of chat restrictions tied to the age/quality of an account? Like if a character/account that has only existed for a day with no activity suddenly is spamming real money sales ads, there should again be a built in program that preemptively blocks or shadow bans those texts while a real person reviews those. The spammer can spam all day but have no effectiveness while Blizzard takes its time studying them. To prevent a spammer from just making accounts rot for a while to get around “new”, I would also establish hidden value metrics where an account must achieve a certain amount of effort and value that a normal human would attain, a level at which it would not be remotely possible for a spammer to replicate at a profitable rate. Like if my account has been doing keys or arena effectively for several expansions, the program probably doesn’t need to auto blacklist if I say “$9.99” one time in a sentence.
Suggestions aren’t gathered from the Customer Support forum.
Blizzard tried filtering chat before. It was bypassed five (5) minutes after the servers went live.
Because that’s a lot of effort on Blizz’s end to force spammers to make mild changes on theirs.
The spammer then immediately adds a space, or replaces the o in com with a zero, or spells out the price. Lot of effort on Blizz’s side, a few minutes at most on spammers’.
The spammer then primarily uses existing characters on compromised accounts.
And how many legit accounts get caught up in this? How many people purposefully troll Blizzard for this? How does this significantly change matters with regard to spammers using compromised accounts?
I’m not saying your heart’s not in the right place, but this is a war that’s been going on decades. Spammers have a vested interest in exploiting any system Blizz puts into place, and Blizz has tried many fixes commonly suggested. If a suggested solution takes orders of magnitude longer to implement than it does for spammers to circumvent, it’s just not worth the time and money. There’s a reason report spam is still suggested, since it’s worked the best.
They do have these in place, and the spammers have already found ways around them. It is why most accounts that spam are stolen and not just new. Also Blizzard doesn’t study spammers, they do that with bots. The whole reason for the squelch system that kicks in if a certain amount of reports are received in a short time frame is so that spammers can be dealt with faster. The problem is that they have thousands of accounts and when one gets taken care of they just move on to the next one.
I understand that this is not an easy process, but I also have a hard time believing that there is not some way to more intelligently track bad words/phrases than what we have now. Entire business empires with values larger than nations’ economies are being defeated by impoverished gold farmers? I’ll take a cost effectiveness argument, but I won’t pretend this is the best that can be done.
If I could olive branch an alternative route, perhaps Blizzard should put it even more on the players to fight back. Expand the baseline ability to ignore and ban people and all forms of text they don’t like. From my own use of third party addons, I have actually managed to curb a large amount of spam from trade, and awful people from my life. It is by no means perfect, but it has been my own way of improving things, and it is something I believe should be baseline. Why not give me the ability to ban all calendar invites from non friend/guild members? Why not give me more tools to filter my group searches? How about a button to ignore all incomplete work orders? Don’t like a word? Let me blacklist it! If the player and their reports are the only supposed effective means of combating a problem like spam, then why not give them more tools to fight?!
As for whoever above said this is a customer support channel, I requested to know what is preventing a better means of combating spam beyond player reporting. I don’t expect an answer from anyone with authority, but I am still going to ask out of curiosity.
Let me stop you right there – the gold farmers may not get much themselves, what with being prisoners or human trafficking victims, but the businesses behind them are international crime syndicates laundering money. This is a billion dollar industry, not some fly by night thing.
The nuance here that I feel like is missed is that there needs to be a more intelligent design with regards to identifying an account’s nature. I understand that they can use stolen accounts to mask their deeds, but there should be easy markers to tell right away when an account behaves erratically. Like if I haven’t played in 5 years, and suddenly log on and spam, the system should have already had me preemptively marked as a higher risk account because of the fact that I have been inactive for so long. What happens if that account instead plays normally for half a year? Less risk assigned over time. Or if my account of 20 years behaves normally and then suddenly the next day spams? The system should intelligently think “probably stolen, lets freeze and ask the 20 year customer to be sure.” I imagine this comes down to simply cost effectiveness, not ability to do so.
I’m also lost on how many possible stolen “legit” accounts are in play. People here keep throwing out all these stolen accounts, but how many exist? How many real unclaimed accounts are out there for these people to use? There has to be a finite number, and if supposedly we all are reporting their bad deeds daily, there has to be some theoretical point where no players are left in World of Warcraft because all their accounts are stolen, or the bad guys have run dry on things to steal. Maybe someone will say the gold cartels have a department of botting real accounts into existence, but then I go back to intelligent systems that properly identify real accounts.
Putting aside the idea of big gold, I’m curious if social media platforms only function properly because of user censorship. Basically, because users police and moderate their own pockets of the internet so much, we deceptively think these companies’ algorithms are really well designed, when in fact its just a lot of people with nothing better to do but upvote things. Otherwise, I don’t know how to explain why youtube top comments aren’t filled with ads, but Blizzard cannot stop spam? If it really is just users behaving like rabid watchdogs, then my point about expanding the players’ tools to fight back makes even more sense.
Who is capable of actually stopping spam? You say it like if one spam item gets blocked the spammer gives up. It’s an ever-evolving process.
And when your account is the one that is restricted because the “intelligent design” decided your play-style is sus, what then?
Based on what? What specifically is behaving erratically? Can you specifically identify activity that is ONLY done by spammers?
Why would a dormant account be marked as a higher-risk account? An active account is just as likely to be compromised.
Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousand. The game is almost 20 years old. There have been millions of players. The stolen accounts don’t have to be dormant accounts.
That would only happen if there weren’t new players entering the game. As long as more players join, the number available is going to increase.
What constitutes a “real” account?
What are you referring to when you say “spam”? One definition of spam is about advertising. Another is unsolicited communication. You whispering another player that you like their transmog could be reported as spam. So you would be OK with having your account locked because you randomly whispered another player?
“Intelligent systems” aren’t intelligent. They don’t know when they’ve been fed bad information. They will act on that bad information.
Because unfortunately, people can type one phrase up fifty types of ways and they would still find their way to get around it.
What I will offer - that I know works in the game chat (but I don’t think they’ve yet come up with a version to sift out unwanted mail), is an add-on that does that kind of thing. Granted, I took the time and added a bunch of phrasing in there that it didn’t initially pick up on, but it does help clean up my chat from things I’d rather not see. And before anyone comes for me that “we shouldn’t need an add-on for this!!!”, it exists. You’re welcome to use it or not. And there are more than just these two specific ones that can restrict by character level, f2p accounts, guild adverts and such, I just didn’t want to spam up the page by linking every single one of them.
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/bad-boy
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/badboy_ccleaner
I fully agree on this as I have been using those addons for years and, if you keep them updated, they work wonderfully.