–Quick Edit-- Customer Service told me to post to this Discussion and not in any other forum type.
So I brought this up with Support, waited 6 days before hearing back and was pretty much told to ask the community for their stand. That if it got enough support then something could be done in development.
Recently in Classic and The Burning Crusade Classic, there’s been a horrible influx in spam in-game mail from Real Money Traders. Some so much as even sending a copper so you can’t just delete the mail right off the bat. I’ve tried reporting them and you can’t right-click to block them, some you can’t even type or copy-paste because their complexly symbolized names. There’s a report function, but it’s clearly not doing anything to stop these people from making a new alt and sending more unsolicited RMT mail.
My idea was that there needs to be some kind of improvement for blocking mail from a alt/account in general. Reporting as mentioned before does nothing. I reported the same person three days in a row and they still sent mail, and again, because the funky characters in their name, I couldn’t just type to block them.
When you report the mail from the RMT, it disappears until you log back in. It doesn’t let you report then delete the mail. Or auto-delete when you report it. Honestly, I think just a block player/entire account function suits me perfectly to avoid their alts. Or at least a block option from the mail itself. This RMT is getting ridiculous, and honestly, makes me not want to log in because that’s all I expect. A few times I’ve been tempted to tell these people {Inappropriate Language Removed}" but don’t want to get in trouble by the automatic system for “association” by responding to them.
What are your thoughts on this? Sorry mine are everywhere here. What do you think we can do to improve action against RMT?
My opinion. Adjust the forum posting in to the Customer Service. I know I will catch it and so will you, but…
In game whispers you can stop I think.
The mail is not stopable.
Customer Service specifically told me to post here, trust me I tried lol yeah I don’t get whispers from RMT almost at all anymore. However, they’re just adamant as heck about sending mail and that’s what Custome Service said they’d like to improve but they want the community to discuss it to get opinions and if it gets popular enough they’d look into it. I think they just pretty much told me that to close the ticket.
More likely they want you to post somewhere you’ll get at least some sympathy. It’s not like anyone on here is going to go on about how RMT mailing is part of the authentic TBC experience and should be continued. I also doubt there’s anything Blizzard can do about bot mail once the account is active, unless they make it impossible/difficult for players from regions outside NA to send mail to NA players.
Sometimes I wonder what bothers people to this point. I mean I get those, I just automatically delete them, don’t even read them and if it’s a free copper, hey I’m rich.
Doesn’t take but about 0.5 of a second of my time, and don’t even think about it.
LOL. I feel the same way, but you can’t delete it while it’s there, and much like you aren’t suppose to respond to junk mail, I don’t return it because that confirms to them that I got it.
I wonder how they get our names to begin with? I guess they check the chat channel for who’s on and just use that?
Dang, being a GM sounds cool. You can just tell people to go complain to the forums and link them to wowhead and not actually have to do anything that’s a sweet job.
I am here to add my voice. This is obnoxious to the extreme. I am tired of getting the emails, sometimes 4 at a time from 4 different people. I always report them. It does absolutely nothing!
Blizzard your PR right now is in the crapp house, you need to do something to these accounts that are clearly violating the TOS.
This subject needs more attention. Please tell all your friends who hate the mail spam to post here and complain. This is what they told OP to do, so come on guys and gals, flood this thread with all the glorious complaints that makes this forum entertaining.
Because they’re most likely running support for all Activision games at once. Blizzard loves to pinch pennies when it comes to the entry level employees.
It has to be one of the WORST spam filter mechanisms I have ever seen. If I select an E-mail in any other service I have ever used and report it as SPAM, I never see that E-mail again. If I report an RMT mail in-game, not only does it not block the user from sending me more spam, but I get the mail right back in my box again the next day.
I wrote a post about how Square Enix actually polices their game environments and takes actual actions over these incidents here: Imagine this
However at this point I feel that Activision/Blizzard are only really paying “lip service” to their ToS with respects to real money trading on their servers. Their only response in Retail was to create the WoW token so they could get some profits themselves from the RMT crowd and those who are willing to use those services. You can see that Activision/Blizzard’s attitude towards RMT is aligned with the trading services as their reasoning for offering paid boosts are almost word-for-word the same as what the leveling services offer when they advertise. The only problem I believe that the company actually has with RMT is that they don’t get any profit from it if it is done other than via the WoW token.
It wasn’t always this way, to be sure. When I first started playing World of Warcraft many, many moons ago people had to try to hide their RMT transactions for fear of being investigated and banned. And how much better would the community today be if Activision/Blizzard took a page from Square Enix and actually cared more about the quality of their game and the people playing it rather than kowtow to the lowest common denominator in the name of trying to maximize player numbers and profits?
As for any solution to the RMT mail, mine is to put the sender’s name into my Global Ignore List and Spam Filter add-on. I always use the report function as well, but as I know the mail will just come back to me again, I find it better to just implement my own filter. It only takes a few clicks, but it shows that I actually care more about my game environment than the company does. And as long as that is the case, I highly doubt they will expend any energy or thought towards creating a better report and spam blocking function. There simply isn’t any profit in it for them.
There are gaming companies out there that still care about their MMORPG environments and the quality of the people who play them (see my above link), but Activision/Blizzard stopped being one of those long ago. Unless you can find a way for them to profit from an idea, I highly doubt it would ever be seriously considered by their management for implementation in the game.
It is unfortunate, as they have made some really great games in the past.