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IP Blocks and LOTRO?
gloine36
Member UncommonPosts: 28
I noticed in another post something about IP blocks for LOTRO. I've been a long time MMO player and I personally hate the goldspam and other bastards that are constantly farming in order to make and sell gold.
I would like some more info on this. I for one am extremely pleased that I havent' seen one goldselling spam message yet in LOTRO. For that matter I prefer the chat in LOTRO a million times more than the useless garbage chat I had to deal with in WoW.
Tks
Comments
What do you mean? Whos IP do you want to block? Not that it would matter, the only IP your client is talking to is the server.
If you do get a gold spam, right click the name, and report...done. It files a report, and adds them to your ingore in two clicks.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
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How are you?" -Me
I think you meant my earlier reply to another post here. Sometime near the game launch at least Codemasters blocked China and other parts of Asia from euro servers and there has been some indication Turbine has done something pretty similar in USA. Whatever system they use, it's completely transparent to players outside the goldfarming countries and doesn't need anything from players.
At least codemasters servers make the claim that goldspammers cannot be stopped void. They can be stopped if both players and companies are proactive against it.
Playing: AC2
Played: UO, DaoC, Horizons, Ryzom, WAR, LotRO, Eve, VG...
Makes me wonder if Blizzard was forced not to block them by the Commie Chinese government like they are about other things.
Personally it's so bad in WoW that a trip to the city is like walking into an advertisement.
Whoa, wait a minute. That's not proof of anything at all.!
There is no absolute proof that Turbine is doing this and that it's even successful. And no, don't say that you don't get spam therefore it works. That's specious reasoning at best.
It is my understanding that you can block IP's but that people can circumvent this using a false IP.
so anyone who is smart and knowledgeable enough should be able to work around this.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Only way you can circumvent IP ban is by using a special proxy or tunneling setup which isn't 100% effective. And once users have managed to report a proxy using spamdrone, that proxy is effectively dead soon afterwards.
IP addresses visible to entire internet need to be unique, and they are routed by their netblocks, so you cannot just slap any IP to your machine and make it work. Best analogy is telephone network and old fashined telephone numbers - Your IP contains basically a route to your machine from top down, first country number, then state, city... And your nuber has to be legit in order to communication between endpoints to succeed.
People are running very efficient spamkillers on email-servers just blocking networks assigned to Asia.
Playing: AC2
Played: UO, DaoC, Horizons, Ryzom, WAR, LotRO, Eve, VG...
Yep IP Blocks are in place.
Whole of Asia is blocked since LOTRO is not supporting the whole region.
Also a reason why the game isn't having the tremendous amount of subs like some other games.
But EU people can join US region with a US account and vice versa.
And my girlfriend went to Australia for a few weeks and she can login and play with me on EU server with a decent latency of 300ish (but it feels much smoother in game than it sounds - I get around 40-80ms)
I've been playing on and off since 2007 and had no gold spam advert in private tells or mail. Which I approve
Even if they do have IP blocks (and where is the info on that?) I doubt they will work. If players can mimic another IP then they can easily bypass it.
Just doing a search for LOTRO gold sites I found plenty. Some seemed based in the west but several were seemed more like eastern outfits.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Check the forums it's in there
a lot of good people are complaining since they moved to Asia and can't play anymore.
And you may doubt it will work and I agree there's sites selling LOTRO gold but I haven't seen any advertisement yet so...we're all happy with this.
Due the nature of TCP/IP you need a valid, routable IP assigned to your country/ISP - otherwise your machine cannot be reached. Over the IP trunk networks, routing data to main blocks is hardcoded and funny tricks like sourcerouting are discarded. Only way to circumvent this is using a custom proxy in region not covered by IP blocking and once a proxy IP is known it's easy to block too.
There are the gold selling sites still, but they are in LotRO deprived from their main marketing channel, i.e. ingame mails and tells. Which is something that very few if any other games have made any effort on stopping. What Turbine has done though, shows that you can stop goldspam ingame if you are intent on it and if the game population reacts to spam by reporting instead of accepting.
This isn't even in any relation to game popularity, in Vanguard I get several spams per day and even if population there is decent, it is far smaller than the LotRO one.
Playing: AC2
Played: UO, DaoC, Horizons, Ryzom, WAR, LotRO, Eve, VG...
I played WoW on the Arathor server and I didn't notice any large Asian community there. They generally have their own servers to play on. I have no problem with this.
The problem I had in WoW and EQII was the damn spam. It's a constant barrage of gold selling spam all day long. On top of that is the complete and utter lack of Blizzard and SOE's desire to stop that and the farm bots. My wife and son play EQII still and encounter the farm bots daily. I used to run into them all the time. Complaint after complaint, constant reports and nothing would ever be done. Yet they would always say, "We hate this and are working on it."
I noticed their definition of working on it was more like, "We're aware of it."
I think that's just one more reason why I'm playing LOTRO now. I'm sure that if Turbine wanted to cave in to the demands of the ChiComs they could market there and provide Chinese servers that can't route to the US ones. That wouldn't be hard to do.
Ok, then I will defer to players who have more of a technical knowledge in this area. I follow the forums and have yet to see anything about IP bans but will look more thoroughly.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Ok, then I will defer to players who have more of a technical knowledge in this area. I follow the forums and have yet to see anything about IP bans but will look more thoroughly.
I'm not sure on official word but I know some people who have to use some kind of laggy proxy to even login...But it's not working very well for them
Yeah I have no gold spam when playing lotro. Never thought about it, but now that people talk about it I thought: "Damn is true, I never have gold spam", so awesome work for turbine and codemasters. I feel sorry for the ones not being able to play when they moved to china, but you need to draw the line at one point, and this one works fairly well.
ok, well, I did searching on the Turbine forums as I'm not one to just accept something that doesn't seem to make sense.
And as of March 3rd, Victorie, Turbine customer support indicates that one can play LOTRO in china, they just need the U.S. version installed to do it.
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=252340&highlight=china
So this is why I am reticent to believe it when people start saying that their are IP Blocks in place.
Mar 03 2009, 11:28 PM
Victorie
Turbine Customer Support Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 308
Re: Playing in China?
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You can certainly play LOTRO on the US servers in China. Just be sure the computer you are using to log in has the US version installed. The username and password will be the same ones you always use.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I dont know about Turbine in the US but codemasters had to implement some draconian meassures against gold farmers in the EU because they got scammed by the gold farmers and because of that was fined by the big credit card companies.
That is also why you have to use pay pal today to even start an account in the EU, you cant use a normal credit card.
The scam was that the chinese companies used their customers credit cards to start accounts, they then used these accounts to spam their in-game adds and then they called the credit card companies and complained they got cheated by Codemasters and they got the money back on the credit card. When a company get too many of these complaints they get fined or even blocked.
So in the end to protect themselves against these attacks codemasters had to block off all of asia and move to pay pal for payment. In the beginning it caused an uproar because a lot of legimate customers got blocked too. For example they also blocked all of Australia by mistake.
"You are the hero our legends have foretold will save our tribe, therefore please go kill 10 pigs."
I don't know what's in place. All I know is I haven't seen any gold spam in a very long time in LOTRO. I honestly don't care why or how they got it to work but I am super happy about it.
In America I have bad teeth. If I lived in England my teeth would be perfect.
I travel a lot and for some time I live in Asia including China, during my LOTRo days. No problems playing most of the games from China, including LOTRo. In some of the games, even solo games, you have to set the region of your windows setting to US in order to play. I do not remember having to do that in order to play LOTRo. But as I said, I travel, so my notebook might be set to US region even when I fly around. I cannot remember.
Blocking IPs from China might or might not work against gold sellers. If you still believe that gold sellers only live in China, you are in the stone age. Quite a number of these companies have been busted and some are found in US. It is true that they hire cheap labor to do the farming job, and hence Asia is a good place to hire. It is also true that more and more gold farmers are earning their gold from hacking accounts. sometimes, thy hack accounts, stealing the passwords and wait for an order before loggin onto the hacked account and mailing out the gold immediately. Farming, holding a lot of cash and waiting for an order is dangerous, as it is easy to track down such "bank accounts" and banning them, right after a few sales.
In my early days in LOTRo, I do see gold spams. I remember seeing them even during beta. The game population in LOTRo has dropped tremendously so maybe the gold sellers do not bother spam. After all, there is no universal trade channel to spam. For the sake of this reply, I did check a few gold sales web, and to my dismay, almost every named game is listed. LOTRo is definitely on the list.
Actually, the server I play at is even more populated now than it was at the launch. LotRO might not have millions of subs, but it definitely is one of the most played games out there. And in any case, it is definitely more populated than many games which do have constant goldspam.
Main point in all of this is that if company wants to stop gold spamming ingame, it is doable - Despite of several claims that you cannot stop goldspamming in games. There are the sites selling gold for any game, but the main annoyance, ingame spam isn't there.
Turbine/Codemasters seem to have the spine to act , even if they lose some subs. There are other companies claiming they are against the goldspamming, but in practise doing nothing to it - maybe because the spammers make the subsription numbers look so much better...
Playing: AC2
Played: UO, DaoC, Horizons, Ryzom, WAR, LotRO, Eve, VG...
Makes me wonder just how many subs LOTRO has?
I know Wow claims 11 Million but I get the feeling that number is skewed by the Asian community and the way they count subs over there.
And of course out of 11 million subs how many are gold spammers at any given moment? Logged into Wow to say goodbye to my guild on my final day and got hit with 3 in the first 15 minutes of standing in SW.
Orthedos, if you think the population in LOTRO has dropped tremendously maybe you should try loggin in sometime or something because this game has been steadily growing as everywhere I go in game there are always tons of people around. So much sometimes I find it rather annoying how many people are in some areas.
In America I have bad teeth. If I lived in England my teeth would be perfect.
Yeah the population is far above the levels it was at a year ago. The Moria expansion seems to have been very successful in both drawing old players back and attracting new players and then also keeping them in the game.
"You are the hero our legends have foretold will save our tribe, therefore please go kill 10 pigs."
Also considering the all too well-documented exploits and cheats in Moria (that will hopefully come to a swift end with Book 7) with all of that in mind, one might have expected there to be gold farmers/spammers flooding to Moria, farming tons of easy money in instances, "bugging the bosses" etc etc then spamming and advertising their "services" all over the place, and yet it occurs to me that I've not had a single tell or mail or anything spam/gold-selling related for over a year now.
So clearly something was done; was it around book 12 maybe when the rampant gold-spamming all of a sudden simply stopped dead in it's track, anyhow whatever those "preventive measures" from Turbine/Codemasters, whatever they were they worked, and they still do, and the gameplay experience is so much better from it
Well, I do know that trial accounts do not allow the participant to pm people. That could very well be why gold spammers don't spam people as now they have to pay for each account should they want to do this. I imagine that will cut into the profit margins.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo