Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Waffling Ludicrous

I've been pretty chill about goldspam in Aion lately. The block feature is easy to use, and it only takes about 30 seconds to clear up my chat for my gaming session. That's tolerable, I can live with that. Then, of course, this shows up:

Then, for whatever reason, I just lost it.  I seriously just had a mental flip out.  Why the waffle should I have to remove past gold spammers from my Block List?  Why the waffle does the Block List even have a limit?!?!
I'm fully aware that NCSoft is aware of the situation, and they are actively working towards reducing the amount of gold spam in Aion.
So, in order to maintain my mental sanity (did I mention I'm also very ill, yet I still have to go to class/work, hence I have a
slightly short fuse at the moment?) I've pondered a few small solutions that NCSoft could implement.
They won't fix the issue completely, but they'll sure as waffle make the ride easier:

  1. If a Name Doesn't Have a Vowel, Auto-Boot: Fdhfg, Dgb, Htpg, Dfdfd, etc.  I think its fairly obvious that none of these people are real players, so why even let them play?
  2. 50+ Blocks, World-Wide Auto-Block for 30 minutes: Yes, I'm aware that this could very easily be taken advantage of, but if someone blocks an innocent person, I wouldn't be surprised if they themselves were blocked out of spite.  So hopefully society would have the brains to not abuse this.
  3. **No Limit to the Block List**: Until the goldspam is greatly reduced, its just dumb to have a limit to our Block List.  Give us at minimum, a three times longer list, if not infinite.
  4. Remove Players Who No Longer Exist: If goldspammer X no longer uses character Y, please automatically remove it from my list so I don't have to bother doing it.
These are just a few steps that could really ease the burden on players. While most of us would love to see one ultimate BANHAMMER occur, I think it would be much wiser to destroy this issue in fast-paced incremental stages.  I'm sure everyone would be very thankful.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to eat some chicken noodle soup, take some medicine, and block some more gold spammers. X_x  MEDIC!

5 comments:

  1. Yeah, it's to the point of rediculous now. Please make it stop NC West!

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  2. There should be an account block command. Why do you block someone anyway? To block the person talking on the other end! He can just as easily talk on his first character as he can his second! Of course an infinite block list would be nice, I think what's most important is the ability to auto-report someone's ACCOUNT (not character).. and to auto-remove any characters from block-list that are banned or deleted.

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  3. Remember that Estimation rant of mine? The block list falls into this category...

    The list must be finite in size, because they need to allocate server-side memory for each character's list ahead of time - if they're variable length, then a server-wide blocking fest could harm the server. The list can be of different sizes, but finding a good length is hard. 50 may seem small, but 500 is likely more than necessary, and thus wastes resources.

    The last point would be my approach: a purging of friends/blocks when the characters are deleted. This has been successfully implemented by WoW, so it's doable. It is a pretty high overhead to set up, though, so I can understand the reluctance to do this.Then again, they're getting paid to improve the game environment - seems like a good direction to go!

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  4. There's a limit to the block list... My God that's ridiculous. If you don't block them you can't bloody use chat features because of all of the spam, or seeing your crafting/gathering skillups and such.. If you do.. you have a limit.. My God that's, erm, shit.

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  5. I have just ignored chat lately. It sux, but blocking is only a temp fix once its filled so why even bother.

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