Age of Conan - Interview @ TTH

A refreshingly different interview is up at Ten Ton Hammer. They interview Brian Lee, Customer Service Manager at Funcom, about naming policy, behavior policy, Game masters and customer service. Here's something on the measures Funcom is preparing in order to prevent in-game gold advertisement:

Martuk: In some of the more current MMOG’s developers have learned that secondary gold selling sites will make use of in-game communication to spam the players with their sites. In many cases they use free trials to post a virtually limitless amount of spam rendering chat channels useless. Can you tell us if you have measures ready to combat chat channel spam when Age of Conan goes live to prevent similar problems with the player communication system being abused and rendered useless?

Brian Lee: The simple answer is “yes, we will have measures to combat the channel spam.” Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in other MMO’s and in our own Anarchy Online, the simple answer will become more and more complex as the game moves out of its infancy and matures. Once spammers learn a system, they change their methods. We are currently working on implementing a system that is easily adaptable to whatever approach they may take and that will have a minimal impact on the regular player base.