My friend, who never played any MMO in his life, decided to give EVE a try couple weeks ago. He liked the character creation, enjoyed AIR intro part, started a tutorial and quit in middle of it.
Now why would that be?
In 3 hours of playtime, he got:
6 eve mails asking to click a refferal link
10+ times refferal links spammed in a NPC corp chat
3+ times refferal links being spammed in local chat
2 private convos asking him to click on a refferal link
one floating container asking to contat some person for 1M free SP
and his EVE career ended before it even began, thanks to the naggers.
Sure, one could say to âbe a manâ, tell them to scram off and keep blocking.
Sure, thatâs an effective way to get rid of the problem, but refferal spammers are like hydras - you block one, two new spammers take his place.
But there is only so much one could take.
If CCP is trying to improve new player experience, by adding various catchup mechanics and tutorials, why is refferal spam still allowed?
I think probably because for most players it just isnât a factor. It disproportionally effects new players who donât have their own corp chat and who hang out in starter systems where the emails are targeted. Iâm sure it is obnoxious, but really it wouldnât have been an issue in like 2 days.
CCP trusted its GMs to do the job they were hired for. It was a huge error in judgment. I doubt these guys ever log in to the game they are supposed to be policing.
I have characters in NPC corps and itâs a wall of spam all day, every day. Massive spambotting as well.
All it would take is for a GM to log into one NPC corp a day for 15 minutes to clear out all the spammers with a chat muffle for a period of time. But they wonât. They told me as much when I foolishly spent two weeks gathering dozens of screenshots, hours of chatlogs, and a whole lot of mails demonstrating the 23 hour spamming and spambotting to place in a report to them. Instead of showing some interest in keeping the company that employs them staying in business, they hit me with a copy/paste and locked the ticket.
So CCP goes through the trouble of coming up with a program to retain new players with a massive SP incentive ( a good thing) and the the GMs let them be driven away from the game by the spam for that same program (a bad thing).
Itâs a problem for the first month as you get spammed by mails from rookie help, and you canât leave it. We have new players who complain that even though they close this chat it auto-reconnects every time a connection to the chat server is lost and the spam starts again
Most spam on character age so after a few days all the recruitment and referral spam just drops. Spamming via Rookie doesnât happen too often at all, yes itâs extremely annoying but as Wes said, after a few days it becomes a non-issue unless you stay in npc corp (perhaps the best advertisement to get a real corp asap).
All this because CCP cant admit a mistake that they made trying to code the Buddy program. I know a guy with free game time until 2030 and has made billions for spamming a link to existing players and hasnt brought one single new person to game.
Very simple, all those people who made use of his link and subbed because of it are players who stuck around (longer) and paid ccp money. Itâs really not complicated because referrals work, end of story.
Previously when newbies found out about the referral system they had to create a new account which either made them contemplate restarting at all or forever âfeel the lossâ of not having that 1 mil sp, exacerbated by the 10 hour character deletion timer. Then CCP âsolvedâ it by having GMs apply it to accounts retroactively but that costs alot of GM time and is prone to issues with people squabbling about rewards for using a referral.
What we have now just makes the most sense referral wise. The best solution is to have chat/mail window toggles to allow or block URL links, contracts and hypernodes. Weâve also been reporting spam offenders (corp invite, referral, chat channel invites) which seems to have helped because itâs much less of an issue than it used to be. Like that hypernode/trade channel spam we had a while ago, that got stopped fairly quickly.
They are actually new players so getting that 1 mil SP boost is massive, being able to instantly âlevel upâ just works especially at the beginning where everyone tells newbies to train boring skills.
Being able to advance makes people commit and stick around (for longer), basic human nature.
If he canât cope with spam then heâd never cope with being in a corp, as 90% of what is posted in corp chat is effectively spam to most usersâŚand there is always that guy who just rattles on for hours in corp chat about nothing much in particular. That is Eve. Get used to it.
People can cope with spam, but its a hassle when its the same person on numerous alts posting the exact same thing in every channel, over and over and over. CCP should add a filter that autohides any post which includes a link to a contract, a url, or a hypernet.
Personally I would love to just gank one of those system to system referral spammersâŚeven if at a loss, as they are often just in a shuttle. It would just be kinda satisfying.
Not to mention most of these people tend to use recycled alpha characters to get through being blocked by simply biomassing a disposable character every now and then and creating a new one then repeat the process endlessly.
While many players outside newbie systems wonât get or see these messages, even I get mailed multiple referral links whenever I spend some time in rookie help answering questions.
While some spam is part of the game - scams and hypernet advertisements are all within the spirit of the game of earning ISK and aimed at any age of player - referral links are not. Referral links are meant for outside the game universe and are targeted at (and scaring away) new players only.
Quick question. Is it appropriate to use the âReport ISK Spammerâ function for referal spamming?
Iâm sure youâll all agree that itâs getting a little congested out there with the number of spam comments but, as a very specific warning pops up when you use the above function (something about action being taken against your account for inappropriate use), I wanted to make sure I wasnât going to get into trouble for using it.
No, report isk spammer is for reporting RMT âgold sellersâ. If you misuse the system for reporting referral spammers then not only will it not solve anything, you will mess up the whole reporting stuff as they waste time on checking characters that have nothing to do with RMT.
This wouldnât be an issue at all, if players were given better spam filters. All of those walls of text you see are cut, copy, paste of the same manifesto. If one was allowed to select a single line from it, then use that string to block the entire post, 99.9% of them would never be seen. The last line of their rhetoric, tells you how to block the spammer, but there are far too many to be blocked. I doubt we will see any movement or action on this from CCP, as they are running this promotion, to gain profit from sales.
