Merchant Archive

I have a number of things that will immediately trigger an ignore:

1. Spamming more than once per minute.
2. Multiple chat boxes for the spam.
3. Use of any form of phoenetic spelling (more commonly known as l337$p34k).
4. Reputation as being a scammer. Only ever done one for this though.
5. Stupid character name. LEETDOOD is not Star Warsy.
6. Begging in any form. Some of the AFKers don't even advertise services. They're begging for money.
7. Maybe whatever you're saying hits a nerve.

The sad fact of life is that as long as AFK spamming works people will keep doing it. I will admit that I started AFK spamming to holo-grind merchant. It works. I started a lottery vendor in a house with a 1 credit entry fee the premise being you enter once every 15 minutes and offer an item to the vendor for 250,000 credits. At the end of the week I randomly choose en entry to purchase and reject the rest. I have been running the contest3 weeks this Sundayand I am 4044 merchant now already. I am getting about 50 lottery entries a week and I am spamming that plus my Bio-Engineer alts BE pet vendor (new mounts!). Before the AFK spamming the BE vendor took in about 1 million a week in sales. The first week of AFK spamming it took in 6 million. The second week of AFK spamming now and it is looking like it will take in another 6 million. What sucks is that the game really does not provide any other message to advertise and advertisement is necessayr for a successfull business.

Wow! never thought of the lottery method You may be a god in my book if I can get the last 3 boxes by monday.

Set up a spam bot (not me) in theed hawking a lottery for 100k and a crystal. 5 min delay so hopefully I don't get squelched much.

Meistro Meatpuppet.

Guns and Random /waypoint 1980 3820 (outside Keren)

Sometimes it is clearly not the owner of the shop spamming, but some other character shouting about the merchant's shop. While this is a good fix to the "ignore" problem, it makes me wonder.

Is this some guild initiation ritual? Or just a newb that sold his soul for a few credits? Or maybe a second account?

Unfortunately, this is the only form of advertising now (with the possible exception of structure names) that can let a customer know about something he didn't already know he wanted.

I have, also,had a couple bad experiences when something was spammed that I wanted: the waypoint given led to nothing. Now I may have typoed it, but it also struck me as possible disinformation.I have hit empty vendors that had been spammed as well, this actually seems a better way to ruin someone than a bad waypoint-- wait until you catch his vendors empty then start spamming for him. Certainly nobody would do that to himself! Destroying your competitor with the use of a throwaway character seems possible, but a bit excessive and probably not effective.

Oh I don't deny that it works (short term at least), and don't think for a minute that one obscure thread will dissuade people from doing it.

On Chilastra a least though I do know of at least 2 commited merchants (i.e. they want to play as traders as opposed to being dabblers - PA Hall Malls, the whole 9 yards) who got on myignore list through AFK spamming.

It's these sort of people I started the thread for - I suspect there are a few 'real merchants' out there who didn't realise the full implications of this form of advertising.

There are other forms of advertising - principally mail, my main medium isa mailing list to people who ask after my services. I'm a BE so I just have to leave my tag up! Other ways of 'harvesting' likely customers include putting items on the bazaar and noting who buys them (particularly effective when selling resources), searches on tags andchecking other people's vendors (again, as a BE most of my customers are Tailors and Chefs).

Welcome to my ignore list when:

1) You are AFK selling or advertising anything.

2) Multiple chat bubbles.

3) Or my screen is full of nothign but your spam because you feel it necessary to say 100 times in a minute that you need training. Like I did not see the 1st 99 times you said it.

I do not spam at all and my daily sales are quite healthy.

I've pretty much stuck to e-mailing friends and the boards for advertising, but recently I started doing this pantyraffle thing to raise some money for my city. I was having trouble selling them.

one night of afk spamming = 50 rafflepanties sold @ 10k per hotpants = 500k

Plus I received a bunch of e-mails and tells from people throughout the night asking for more information. Once I sent it to them they went and bought rafflepanties as well.

People do it because it works.

That's very true. I run a shop on Rori and got zero customer unless I spent a whole nite spamming at the starport (with multi-chat boxes and pause every 10 secs). If the advertisement sucks, that's no way of getting things sold.

This is particularly true when u first start your shop where no client base is built up and ready to go.

I know I have been added to ignore list and that's fine for me. Similarly, I will add those who "spam" me about the spams to ban list of all my structures and of course my "buff/ heal" list. LOL

My guy barks a 3 sentence statementevery 3 mins (and it isn't a shout).. I didn't believe that to be spamming... But the people thatwrite books and shoot out every 15 secs is a bit extreme..

Message Edited by Wamphyrri on 03-30-2004 09:52 AM