The Elder Scrolls Online developer Zenimax Online Studios has taken the unusual step of requesting that players ignore the game's community code of conduct in an attempt to battle a fresh bout of black market gold spammers.

Zenimax has issued an exception to its site policies and asked forum members to publicly name and shame accounts responsible.

"We request that anyone who has received a private message they believe to be from a gold spammer to post the sender's username as a comment in this thread," Zenimax wrote.

"Please note that our Community Code of Conduct does prohibit naming and shaming. However, in an effort to expedite the process of identifying and banning the spammers' accounts, we are making an exception for this situation. We will investigate each alleged spammer account individually to avoid false reports."

The gold farmers' latest tactic is to try and shift their wares by using private messages on the game's official forum. All private messaging has now been disabled while Zenimax combats the problem.

Zenimax has been fighting the black market trade of in-game gold since the game's launch - a plight highlighted in a statement to players from the studio's boss.

Spammers are offering 100,000 in-game gold for $17 (about £10).

In other bad news, The Elder Scrolls Online has failed to roll-out a major patch to the game despite several hours of server downtime and maintenance.

European servers were taken offline for scheduled maintenance yesterday morning, during which time the version 1.0.6 patch was due to applied.

But after extended downtime the server was brought back online without the changes applied. The game's North American server maintenance and patch roll-out was then cancelled too.

Zenimax blamed the problems on an "unforeseen issue".

"The maintenance is complete, and the European megaserver is now back online and available. However, due to an unforeseen issue during the maintenance, patch 1.0.6 was not deployed.

"We are currently investigating the issue encountered that prevented us from rolling out patch 1.06. The previously announced maintenance scheduled for on the North American megaserver is cancelled and will not happen for today, Tuesday the 29th of April 29th."

Eurogamer has verified that the game is still running the previous version, v1.0.5.972475.