As of late, gold sellers (business that do real money trading for game currencies, in-world items etc) are starting to become a nagging problem in W:AR, as they have been in other MMOs.

The game is barely out and already the spam has already started.  ‘Tells’ (private chat messages sent directly to players) and junk mail sent via W:AR’s internal mail system have increased to annoying levels.

Gold sellers like to claim that they don’t interfere with the game’s enjoyment but you’d be very hard pressed to find any player who agrees.  Spam Tells distract the player’s attention and cause otherwise important information to scroll off the chat display prematurely and users have to spend time deleting junk mail from the in-game mail system.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning has an API (application programming interface) that allows users to add on additional functionality to the game.  One such add-on that I’ve installed recently is SpamMeNot.

It’s no exaggeration to state that SpamMeNot is a Godsend.  It intercepts spam Tells, prevents them from displaying, and automatically reports the spammer using the in-world reporting system; and it does so automatically and seamlessly.

I got a chance to see the add-on in action last night during a session:

SpamMeNot successfully intercepts a spam 'tell' msg.

It worked so seamlessly that I hadn’t even realized I had received gold seller spam until I received an unobtrusive chat message by W:AR support thanking me for issuing the report and that they’ll investigate it.

SpamMeNot also does ‘fuzzy matching’ so it can handle attempts by gold sellers to obfuscate URLs by substituting or adding characters.

You can download SpamMeNot from here. The only thing it requires is the LibSlash library, which is available here.

You do not need the Curse.com add-on client as you can install these add-ons manually by copying them from the archives with full pathnames to the Interface\Addons\ directory located in the game’s root directory.

SpamMeNot’s auto-reporting coupled with Mythic’s highly aggressive stance against gold sellers will certainly make things much harder for gold sellers.

Yeah, silly Engrish name but cool trailer!

I played Armored Core on the PS1 years ago and I liked it. I tried the Armored Core 4 demo on the Xbox 360 and found it a little too difficult.

What one reviewer said was dead on. The designers need to find a balance between laughably easy and excruciatingly hard.

I’ve seen some game play trailers on YouTube and while the combat looks fun and very fast-paced, I might have to keep looking for a decent mecha combat game to get into.

The game’s a little over a week old and already gold spammer parasites are starting to spam players via chat and using the in-game mail system.

Thankfully, Mythic is taking a hard and pro-active approach to the problem.  Within the first few days, they’ve banned 400+ accounts.   I heard yesterday that number has now grown to over 2000 (EDIT: Current count as of the 27th is 4051!) and the count will probably continue to rise.

Mark Jacobs, co-founder of Mythic had some pretty strong words to say about gold spammers on his blog.

Yesterday, I received four or five gold spam Tells during my session and I got my first in-world junk mail message the other day.  That may not seem so bad, but I can only see it getting worse as time goes on.

I’m happy that Mythic has a department who’s sole responsibility is hunting down and banning gold spammers.  By nipping this crap in the bud,  W:AR will be a whole lot more enjoyable for current and future players.

I suppose I was being too harsh on Order players on the Bretonna server.  It’s just that it can be frustrating when you try to play like a good teammate should, but no one else on your side appears to have the desire or the wisdom to do as well.

Resounding defeat after resounding defeat because Order can’t operate as a team becomes frustrating because teamwork is such an integral part of the W:AR game design.

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100th Kill in RvR

I reached an historic moment in Warhammer: Age of Reckoning last night.  The picture above shows the body of my 100th player kill in realm vs realm combat.  The image above depicts the unfortunate victim that was dispatched by Torryn, my Witch Hunter character.

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