The Curious Case of SWTOR's Gold Sellers

In the comments of one of my recent posts, a commenter went a little off topic and brought up the subject of gold sellers. (I suppose that, strictly speaking, we should refer to them as "credit sellers" in this case, considering that gold isn't used as a currency in game, but gold seller is just such a well-established term... I'm sure everyone knows what we're talking about.) This is actually a subject that I've been meaning to talk about for ages, so this is as good an opportunity as any.

I always thought that the most interesting thing about gold sellers in SWTOR was that, at launch, they were practically non-existent. People didn't really talk about this much back then, I suppose because we were busy enough talking about which parts of the game we liked and which ones we didn't - why worry about the absence of minor nuisances we knew from other MMOs? Maybe we also thought that the technology had simply become advanced enough that gold sellers had finally been defeated for good. All I know is that it took several weeks (maybe even months, I'm not entirely sure) until I saw my first advert to buy credits. It wasn't in chat either, but someone had managed to sneak an in-game mail through the filters and was encouraging me to buy credits for real money that way. It was a memorable moment precisely because it made me realise that actually, until then, I hadn't even seen a single gold seller advertising anywhere. That was two years ago now.

It didn't really strike me just how remarkable that was until I followed the news surrounding the launches of ESO and Wildstar this year, both of which were apparently absolutely inundated with gold seller spam and hacking/botting issues (caused by gold sellers needing wares to sell). So clearly the technology isn't there yet, generally speaking. Bioware just happened to have some secret anti-gold seller sauce. Too bad they got little credit for it.

What's really sad though is that said secret sauce has started to fail in recent months. I don't look at general chat often enough to be able to say whether any gold sellers manage to spam it, and I'm certainly not being accosted in whispers or in-game mails... however, at pretty much any time of day, there's a character standing near the GTN who advertises a gold-selling website in both /say and /yell.

I've blanked out the URL in this screenshot, but most people have probably seen the site advertised at some point or another. It's quite annoying, and the sad thing is that Bioware doesn't seem to be very responsive when it comes to reports. I can right-click "report spam" all I want - the next day the exact same character is still standing there doing his thing. And by the time they finally remove him, the gold selling company has already run the next alt to the fleet. It's not like I expect an instant response (I work in customer service myself, I know how it is), but you'd think that silencing these guys would be a very straightforward task that doesn't require much investigation before you can at least mute the character to shut down his shenanigans. I suppose it doesn't help that the game doesn't use the placebo you commonly see in other MMOs, where reporting someone for spam automatically adds them to your ignore list as well, so even if customer service is slow to react, at least you don't have to see any more of the same spam.

I wonder if the inventor of the anti-gold selling spam secret sauce no longer works at Bioware?