A suggestion on how to deal with Credit Sellers and other "chat-violations"

[EsbenF]

There is a function built in to Anarchy Online that "mutes you" temporarily if you send messages too rapidly. This is probably based on monitoring how quickly messages are sent from the client, or maybe recieved at the server (though I doubt the latter).

How about expanding on that function a bit, so it actually checks the contents of the messages, and "flags" the ones that are suspected to be about credit selling (or other "illegal" activities)?

It wouldn't be a huge annoyance for everyone else (all us non-credit-sellers) if it was done in a somewhat polite manner. If you made it client-based, you could even make it a feature you can turn on and off in the options! That way if you're scared you'll be missing out, you can just turn the filter off.
An example:
You just wrote a message that got flagged. Apart from seeing the message appear in the channel you get a message like the one you get when you're "suspected of spamming";
"Your message has been flagged as suspected of violating the terms of service. Players with the chat filter turned on will not be able to see it."

I'm not saying that would eliminate the problem, but you could probably catch a very large portion of the credit seller messages. Rather than spending your time banning all these accounts, why not just take their voice away?

Of course you would need to allocate a few hours of man-power to maintain the fuction every now and then (when the credit sellers find ways of circumventing it), but it shouldn't break the bank on neither man-hours nor server resources.

[Dooma]

I support whatever is needed to get rid of this pest. I play on DNW and we don't have this problem at all, but i play some other games which have severe issues with this... But nobody, it seems, is able to extinct these spammers.

Maybe make is possible to flag someone by vote, like if 50 people vote someone he will be blocked for a day from ooc, tell, shopping channels.

But there is also one thing i would never support:
Its the (sadly nowadays too much used) wordfilter in onlinegames.
I am an adult and ich want to talk to other adults the way i want. (without offending anybody of course)
But everyone who have experienced these filter know how ... these are.
And it gets even worse as words are now not only blocked but replaced with other "non adult" words, but without any context, leaving my just wrote sentence with a totally different meaning. That is kinda ridiculous, but sadly not funny at all...

[EsbenF]

I support whatever is needed to get rid of this pest. I play on DNW and we don't have this problem at all, but i play some other games which have severe issues with this... But nobody, it seems, is able to extinct these spammers.

Maybe make is possible to flag someone by vote, like if 50 people vote someone he will be blocked for a day from ooc, tell, shopping channels.

But there is also one thing i would never support:
Its the (sadly nowadays too much used) wordfilter in onlinegames.
I am an adult and ich want to talk to other adults the way i want. (without offending anybody of course)
But everyone who have experienced these filter know how ... these are.
And it gets even worse as words are now not only blocked but replaced with other "non adult" words, but without any context, leaving my just wrote sentence with a totally different meaning. That is kinda ridiculous, but sadly not funny at all...

Wouldn't you be happy enough that you could just turn the filter off in that case?
I mean, if you want to speak about credit selling sites or other terms-of-service-violating things, you would still be free to do so, only the people who have opted to not hear about it just wouldn't hear it anymore. Your message would still be sent out to the chat.

I will however add... if this suggestion somehow gets "perverted" into a swear-word filter or something along those lines: I respectfully withdraw my suggestion. I would rather live with the credit seller spam, than not be able to swear my (excuse me) "derier" off when I die due to lag or incompetent teammembers

Regarding your suggestion, 50 votes to eliminate 1 spammer. I can't say I approve. There are 2 major vulnerabilities the way I see it:
1: This opens up a whole new venue for kids who like to harrass people. Let's say someone gets mad at you, he can then start attempting to collect enough votes to get you "banned" from publicly speaking for a whole day. If he gets his entire org to vote, he might even succeed!
Even if you could petition to have it removed or something to that effect, it might take hours if you're unlucky.
2: The number of votes required would be very hard to determine. If you for instance run through Borealis from the whompas to the grid terminal once every second hour for 24 hours... On 2 of those runs you would probably meet a maximum of 10 other players. On another 2 of them you would be so laggy due to overpopulation that you couldn't realistically count the people you meet while running past
How do you determine the required number of votes? If there are only 20 people in total in the city at the time, or if there are over 200?

The second problem gives rise to another question; How long will it take to get a player "chat-banned"? How fast will the votes actually come in?
If it takes as long or longer than it does now for GMs to ban them, I think the whole idea is a moot point. We would just be left with the same situation. I think the spammers have proven that they can create new accounts quite quickly

[blackwitch2004]

this will never work.
credit sellers always keep finding ways to go around it by using weird characters like ! @ #$% or something. credit sellers might seem dumb but they are really not.
to keep improving the chat checker will be a lot of work. as long as froob accounts exsist there will be spam live with it .

the good old /ignore will do .

[EsbenF]

this will never work.
credit sellers always keep finding ways to go around it by using weird characters like ! @ #$% or something. credit sellers might seem dumb but they are really not.
to keep improving the chat checker will be a lot of work. as long as froob accounts exsist there will be spam live with it .

the good old /ignore will do .

I tend to disagree. I think it might work quite well. Especially since it is some very specific things it is targeting. That makes it very hard eventually for the credit sellers to come up with "unflagable" alternatives without sounding like complete gibberish.

Using special characters is quite easy to counter, since usually there is a pattern to how they replace the letters. Like "leetspeak", where certain letters are replaced by certain numbers.
I know the people behind the credit seller sites are not stupid, far from it in most cases. And eventually they would find new ways to circumvent the filter, that is also given. But at this point Funcom would have the upper hand, since they would just have to make a fix for "the latest hole" they find, and then the credit sellers would have to sit down and think of a new one.

And really... I've been doing the /ignore dance for the last two days to no end. Building a new neutral character, I've been running around in Borealis and Newland a lot. Every time I have seen credit sellers spamming, I have ignored them. It has not ever lasted for more than 1 hour, before I saw a new name going at it. At this point /ignore is not a viable option I'm afraid.

[Jenshiye]

Example: Internet e-mails and their spam filters.

[EsbenF]

Example: Internet e-mails and their spam filters.

Except there is a TON of content internet spam filters have to sort out. In this case it would be a very limited number of things the filter was aimed at. Making it a lot easier to make an effective one.

[Dooma]

Wouldn't you be happy enough that you could just turn the filter off in that case?
I mean, if you want to speak about credit selling sites or other terms-of-service-violating things, you would still be free to do so, only the people who have opted to not hear about it just wouldn't hear it anymore. Your message would still be sent out to the chat.

Thats not what i mean. I mean those "on-the-fly-cencoring" techniques. Has really nothing to do with spambots, in fact these seem to work anoyingly good, instead of china-farm-spam-protection.

Regarding your suggestion, 50 votes to eliminate 1 spammer. I can't say I approve. There are 2 major vulnerabilities the way I see it:
1: This opens up a whole new venue for kids who like to harrass people. Let's say someone gets mad at you, he can then start attempting to collect enough votes to get you "banned" from publicly speaking for a whole day. If he gets his entire org to vote, he might even succeed!

That is right, but this is not kiddie wow right? Most players in AO are even 21+ so i doubt this would happen often.

2: The number of votes required would be very hard to determine.

The number should be always the same, if you want more security vs kiddies set it to 250 or 300. If the community really works together and everyone reading a spam flags a complain it will work. As these complaints will not be removed, they will get kicked sooner or later.

The second problem gives rise to another question; How long will it take to get a player "chat-banned"? How fast will the votes actually come in?
If it takes as long or longer than it does now for GMs to ban them, I think the whole idea is a moot point.

No GM, will be needed at all, when the number of complaints needed is hit the corresponding player will be banned from chats like 0.3sec after.

[EsbenF]

Thats not what i mean. I mean those "on-the-fly-cencoring" techniques. Has really nothing to do with spambots, in fact these seem to work anoyingly good, instead of china-farm-spam-protection.

I'm not a fan of censoring in any way to be honest. That is why I think it is essential that they leave the option available to us to turn the filter off! Otherwise they would be censoring, and that is not at all my intention with this post.

That is right, but this is not kiddie wow right? Most players in AO are even 21+ so i doubt this would happen often.

Sure the average player of AO is probably at least 3-4 years older than that of a WoW player (that is just my guess, since I have never played WoW I wouldn't know). But you can't honestly sit there and tell me that abusive players don't exist in Anarchy Online. Sadly poor behaviour is in no way exclusive to "kiddies". I've seen 30-40 year old men engaging in flamewars, or train aggro mobs on top of noobs, just because they felt insulted in some way.

The number should be always the same, if you want more security vs kiddies set it to 250 or 300. If the community really works together and everyone reading a spam flags a complain it will work. As these complaints will not be removed, they will get kicked sooner or later.

Having the same number all the time would not really work. If the total number of players online in a certain city is lower than the number required to successfully mute someone, are we just supposed to put up with it then? A system that only works sometimes is just not good enough.

No GM, will be needed at all, when the number of complaints needed is hit the corresponding player will be banned from chats like 0.3sec after.

That is not what I meant. I realize that the ban could happen instantly AFTER the votes are all in. But how long will it take for all those people to actually vote? That is not something you can say beforehand. Maybe half the people online are AFK getting coffe or making dinner. Will they even bother voting when they get back?


Honestly I think my suggestion is a lot simpler and requires only ONE thing of the player - a decision. Decide if you want credit sellers to spam you or not.
I wouldn't welcome a "solution" that meant me actively having to enter all sorts of commands every time I saw a spammer. That's, once again, just not good enough.

[Chrys]

FC should just delete the OT/Clan/Neutral Shopping 1-50 channel and let players move to 50-100 or 100+.

Heck there's nothing stopping players from moving to these and switching 1-50 off already - just someone should get this started and everyone follow suit.

[EsbenF]

FC should just delete the OT/Clan/Neutral Shopping 1-50 channel and let players move to 50-100 or 100+.

Heck there's nothing stopping players from moving to these and switching 1-50 off already - just someone should get this started and everyone follow suit.

I can see why you would say that - I understand where is's coming from. And I will even concede you that it will probably end up becoming the solution for this problem, for people like myself who can't stand the constant spam.

However, like I said in my earlier post, it is not good enough!

We are paying Funcom for playing their game, Anarchy Online, on their servers. That's a pretty simple customer/service provider relationship. You can compare it to you and your friends renting a go-cart track, or a soccer field, to play a game on on.
If the people who were not currently driving on the go-cart track (ie. waiting to drive), were constantly harrassed by random people who just walked in off the street, wouldn't you expect the people responsible for the track to deal with that?

Or if the soccer field had random people walking in, littering the playing field with garbage and verbally abusing the players of both teams, you wouldn't ask the players to throw them out and tidy up. No. That responsibility befalls the company responsible for the grounds. After all, that is part of the reason you pay for it in the first place - to make sure everything is as it should be.

In our case that company is Funcom. If they cannot provide us with a "clean" playing field, I don't see any reason why we should keep paying for the service.
It is because of things like this I am willing to pay for playing the game. Because I expect that my money goes towards maintaining the game, and the environment in which we play - making for a better and much more durable gaming experience.

Lately we have recieved a lot of great new content, and I know they are working on the new graphics engine. But if issues like these are just left to be, people will start to feel dissatisfied with the game itself, and the effort put into looking after us players, rather than "looking after the game".

I would rather discuss the solution itself, than the motivation behind the solution. It should really not be a question of "why they should do it" as much as "why they aren't doing it already".