Of spambots and non-players in MMOs

[MadMike]

The spambots for gold-farming sites are even worse.

We've had quite a few of those show up on here and on CS. A lot of them had the word "gold" in their name, which made them easy to spot and kill before they even had a chance to post.

We actually considered banning the word "gold" from user names at one point, until we looked and found that there were more legitimate members than spammers.

[ZedOmega]

They're even easier to find on Shaiya. They'll always have a naming template that follows three steps, from the looks of them:

1. Choose a spot on the keyboard where your finger will push three or four keys at once.
2. Push those keys three times, all at the same time.
3. Finish registering the character.

Whenever I'm in the Auction House (the game's cross-faction trading area), it only takes about three or four seconds of waiting to see someone with a name like 'hjyuhjyuhyuj' talking about how we could get 10 billion gold for $20 from a site called thepowerlevel.com. (Which is weird, because it gave me a 404 error when my curiosity got the better of me...) Eventually I learned to just shut normal chat off, leaving Trade and Area running.

That $20? I could just throw that into Aeria Points, spin their wheel until I can't afford to anymore, and throw my winnings onto the auction block for possibly more than the 10 billion gold...