Arming yourself in the battle against LotRO gold spam

by Shawn Schuster Nov 25th 2008 at 9:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, Lord of the Rings Online, Expansions, Game mechanics, MMO industry, Legal, Academic, Education

Following the release of their first paid expansion, Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria developer Turbine has released a reminder of their policy concerning gold-selling and real money transactions (RMT). The reminder post was written by Senior Game Master "Nod" on the official forums, and it contains their no-nonsense code of conduct when it comes to dealing with gold selling.

The rules themselves are fairly typical of an MMO's anti-RMT stance, yet this post also gives players information on how they can deal with gold sellers, spammers, farmers and gold-selling websites themselves. For example, to report a gold spammer, "right-click their spam in your chat window, click on Chat, then click Report as Gold Spammer. This will automatically block the spammer and report the spam to In-Game Support." If you've found yourself getting annoyed by the onslaught of gold spammers that plagues games as they increase in popularity (like LotRO), this information should help you in your battle.

Tags: code-of-conduct, gold-farmers, gold-farming, gold-spammer, lord-of-the-rings-online, lotro, rmt, turbine

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jess said on 9:17AM 11-25-2008

Thankfully, while Turbine does indeed deal harshly with gold spammers/sellers like most companies, the real place where they/lotro stands out is not letting anyone with a trial account PM or mail anyone. This forces gold spammers to buy real accounts, which promptly get banned, forcing gold spammers to pay through the nose to "advertise" in LOTRO. Yes they can still spam a channel, but it's rare and since Turbine put in the the PM/Mail restrictions, I think I've had one PM and one mail advertisement for gold in about 6 months.

LOTRO's anti-gold seller tactics are by far the most superior I've ever seen. Completely blowing away AoC's and especially Mythic/WAR's (supposed) tough stance on the issue. Uh oh, I just criticized WAR...*sets up sandbags and razorwire in preparation for the inevitable onslaught of Abriael's WAR fanboy cannons.*

eggmanjr said on 1:38PM 11-26-2008

No flame but I do have to say WAR is doing something right for the time being in the area of spam blocking.

Used to get a ton of spam for the first six weeks or so but about 3 weeks ago it just stopped. Its funny you could tell when they were starting to run filters as the spammers would shorten their spam and misspell words but seemed like WAR adjusted to that pretty quickly.

Maybe a reflection of the fact that there is no real reason to buy gold in WAR or maybe they implemented some decent filtering finally, something I constantly sent them feedback on. It was frustrating to report a spammer just to seem him still spamming many hours later.

Whatever they are doing now though seems to work quite well to block spam

HexDSL said on 10:03AM 11-25-2008

to be honest i don't think i have ever seen gold spam on the EU servers :)

jadesansible said on 2:07PM 11-25-2008

You would be hard pressed to find a spammer spamming for gold for long in LOTRO. As soon as they announce themselves on chat they get spammed immediately. I would say much of LOTRO barely tolerate gold spammers and the instant ban capabilities help with keeping those spammers under wraps.

DeathMutant said on 4:22PM 11-25-2008

Gone are the days when a character named "Buylotrogold" (seriously!) can stand near a new character spawn-in point and repeatedly (via a macro) shout a pitch advertising their services and web site. Yeah, 5 seconds into the game and the first command I look for is /ignore, lol.

To be fair, this was during open beta were *everyone* was in on an effectively free account. After the game went live I do not remember many gold-spammers. There were some, of course, but not as obnoxiously flagrant as the one I described.