if someone in chat is being a pain, just use /ignore and stop replying to them.

If you feed them, they will come.

If you dont feed them, and they come anyway, but you cant hear them, does it matter?

Heh. Spell, you can't expect everyone to ignore account. Despite, do you want new players who log in, want to try out the game, and then the first thing they see when they enter chat is a litany of profanity?

Of course, vote mute is not going to solve the problem though. Because if someone wanted to essentially spam the channel, they can just create a trial and spam it to kingdom come.

At then end of the day, you simply need guides' more active involvement to solve this kind of problem. But, nothing wrong with lowering the player mute vote requirement, it does help the blood pressure of some people to *feel* that they have some power over gen^H^H^H abusive players :D.

/just sayin' :).

my point is that most of these people are looking for a response. people actively responding to them drives them to push farther.

If no-one responds to them AT ALL, they will become bored very quickly. either that or they will quickly become SO obnoxious that they blatantly violate one of the ROC and then a formal complaint can be sent to guildsoftware (including logs so the devs can compare the timestamps on the server).

One of the biggest things i see in 100 is a steady escalation where by the end both parties are clearly out of bounds, then when guides do intervene both people get sat on. then we get whining about the guides picking on the "innocent" who were just responding to "the big mean troll"

I'm against lowering vote/mute at all. In fact, it's probably allready too low for when larger groups of people play the game.

Spell, I understand your point. But I think the line that "they will quickly become SO obnoxious....blatantly violate of the ROC....." have way being passed :). Sure, you can send the log and the devs *may* ban him, but what is stopping a determined troll from logging in with a trial and spam, as I mentioned above?

Also, do not underestimate trolls. The "myth" that trolls will get bored is more wishful thinking than anything else : I can drag out a few examples =P. Repeatedly asking people to ignore it might work in an ideal world, but in reality, trolls flourish because people respond to them (and gets more pissed when you ask them to ignore trolls). So people have to find a more proactive solution.

Finally, in tangent to the above, I repeat : if the first impressions of a genuine new trial user are profanity laced tirades, what do you think would be the results? Not all new users know "/ignore", or would even bother to learn the commands. So ignoring trolls might work for you, and for long time players, but is really a defensive solution.

/just sayin'

they never get bored because people take what they say WAY too personaly, and.. dun-dun-duhhhhhhhhhh respond to them.

Your point about new players IS valid however, which is one reason I think it was a bad idea to make the default channel 100.

Of course with the low playerbase I also understand why that was done.

AS to the fact that its allready pased the point of violating the ROC:

then send a report.. It takes just a few minutes, (on both ends), And if the devs get multiple reports about the same person they will look into it. Also you'd be surprised what information the devs can probably get from thier server logs. I'd be willing to bet that IP's and hostnames are readily availible to them for blocking if someone wants to use trial accounts.

I wonder if restricting trial accounts to a certain number of channels would also work.. make trial accounts only able to access channel 1 and remove the default to 100 once we have a few more players. then anyone being a real nuisance on 100 has paid his/her 9.99 and has a monetary incentive to behave when told to.

I'm wandering a bit, but i really really dont think lowering the /vote mute requirement is a good solution, its allready too open for abuse IMO.

Edit: one last point, if you have someone who's being truly abusive and there are no guides online... go find one, theres usually a few hanging out on the IRC channel. I've hopped on and gotten assistance on a few occasions when people were way over the line, usually they are happy to hop ingame for a few minutes and deal with it.

I don't get the point with new players. They can recognize trolls and have heard bad things before logging in. This happens all the times on IRC or in any forum. What everybody expects is the chat or posts being adequately and firmly moderated.
Moderation cannot be done by the people themselves as a whole. It's like asking people to do the police themselves in the street and you know where it leads.

there are players who will not even remain for a few minutes if the first thing they see is a string of profanity/obnoxiousness. If they dont stick around because someone is being an ***AHEM*** then they never get hooked on VO.

I log in daily, but mostly at night. In the past I used to have to intervene often, but these days I rarely have to speak to anyone about their behavior. Perhaps the more labile types have burned themselves out and have gone to bed by that hour. At any rate, I'm still "actively" involved and I do see other guides (RelayeR and Obsidian, most notably) in there taking care of business.

The devs can indeed see IP addresses and other info. If they take the time to look, they could certainly match players to alternate trial accounts. They can also block IPs, hosts, etc. Remember that some of the devs worked for ISPs. They know their stuff when it comes to the 'net.

I used the "/leave 100" command. Improved my game in ways you cant even imagine :)

I'm gonna be perfectly honest with you, Whistler:

I see a certain few of the guides actually egging the trolls on or actively not acknowledging that there is a problem more often than I see them doing anything about it.

Furthermore, the trolls don't actually log off and go to bed. They just start "behaving" when a guide is online, and then continue harassing other players when that guide has logged off.

terjekv: While yes, it could be used to find alts, at this point, that is precisely the problem with the current /ignore function. With the extremely lacking /vote mute functions and the almost unwillingness of the guides to actually get anything DONE about the problem, the fact that a person can go and create a new character to get around the manual /ignore command completely gets rid of the point. If I want to ignore a troll, I should have every right to ignore his/her entire account if he/she persists in exploiting that hole in the /ignore command to get around my constant typing of /ignore "character name". And there are other, far more efficient ways of detecting alt characters than just ignoring an entire account and seeing who people complain about that you can't hear.

genka: You can bet that if any of us in this discussion were guides, the first and possibly last action we would commit using the commands would be to mute and/or ban your sorry ass. Regardless of whether the devs or other guides would agree with us on that, I'm quite sure that most of the community would applaud the action.

/me applauds Celkan

I have so many characters on my ignore list now that I have to scroll to see them all in the console... and more than ahlf of them are one player!

Now, admittedly, there are times when being able to ignore one character of a player and not another can come in handy (i.e., different RP situations involving multiple characters), so it would be nice to have a command which distinguishes between the two. (/ignore "character" & /ignore_player "character")

I do believe that it makes sense to require a majority of 50% or more of online players to mute an account, and they SHOULD be limited to paid accounts (more specifically, 50% of Paid Account Votes / Paid Accounts Online) for the reasons stated (if someone without a paid account tries to mute someone, they're prompted to use /ignore instead because they (as a trail account) do not have /mute privelages)

I think we should leave the constant mute cap at 30, merely because if we have fewer players than 60 on at any time, you only need half of them anyway, which ammounts to less than that (if there are 60 or more players online, they should have no trouble coming up with the 30 votes to mute someone)

Once someone is muted, all votes should be negated, and they should be forced to serve their sentence to the full length of time required from the time of muting, unless overriden by a dev.

mute and ignore_player should work in bars, but a character-specific ignore should not (RP feature)

And as Celkan said, these things need to not only be done soon, but together... having some of the exploits around while others are fixed doesn't really get us anywhere, and really does nothing to amend the situation.

and you all know who I speak of when I voice my wonder that certian players are still in the VO community at all.

EDIT: Another idea...
Trial accounts should have something in place to prevent issues with troll-generated first impressions... how about anyone with more than 5-10 mute votes on their account is automatically placed on a trial-account users's ignore list?

I'm all for defaulting to a different channel - namely channel 11's nation chat when starting a new account. There is significantly less trolling on those channels, since they're not seen or broadcasted by everyone.

Celkan, everything aside, I totally understand your desire to be able to get *players* not characters ignored. that being said, if a *player* is using alts in a fashion only to get around ignores or to be heard under a new and funny name I'd label it as disruptive to the game itself. doing so repeatadly, over time, should be dealt with by something apart from the other players. adding /ignoreaccount when the game offers free trail accounts that are trivially exploitable only moves the problem over to another stage. the next thing we'll need is /ignoreip and /ignoresubnet.

like Arash said, leaving 100 helps you to enjoy the game. he's not the first one to say so. this is the heart of the problem. you can ignore trolls, but ignoring people who consistantly spew crap about you or people you care about isn't for everyone. what we all *feel* as crap is also different, but the myth (as Softy2 said) that they'll go away, well, yeah, it happens. but not nearly as often as not. besides, I understand the argument of why the *bleep* someone paying for a service be the one to keep working to make the service usable, when almost everyone agrees that the problem is at the other end. yeah, slippery slopes, yeah, principals, yeah, yeah. doesn't change anything about how things are seen, taken or dealt with.

on the upside, I think crafting will help with this, since *any* gamerelated topic is better than 95% of what we have in 100. just hearing "want to sell refire-enhanced AAPs, 580kgs, 10 units" ingame would be a godsend right about now. as it is, there is nothing much to talk about in the game, apart from "I pwned u" and "you fs***** n***** co*****". also, with new missions and all, we might get to hear things like "looking for group"-requests. yay! the time will come when we have a game-related topic going in 100. you'll see! =)

Re: "genka: You can bet that if any of us in this discussion were guides, the first and possibly last action we would commit using the commands would be to mute and/or ban your sorry ass. Regardless of whether the devs or other guides would agree with us on that, I'm quite sure that most of the community would applaud the action."

Is VO chat reserved to the 'omg i pwned j00, gf, i'm at 70%' proclamations and fanfic style self-satisfactory speech without anybody having the right to question egos in return?

Sun Tzu Says :
Is VO chat reserved to the 'omg i pwned j00, gf, i'm at 70%' proclamations and fanfic style self-satisfactory speech without anybody having the right to question egos in return?

Nah. VO chat is for everything, including cheeky side sniping of frazzled hair :).

/guilty.

....Genka isn't really a troll. he makes sarcastic commets about people, but then so do you, Celkan :)

'sides Genka is funny, and he'd stop if you say please I'd bet. it'd be others more like who? me? I'd be blocking....

You're amazingly naive Zamzx...

zamzx zik » I'm sarcastic well within the bounds of decency, Zam.
...Genka, however, is not.

tumblemonster » I'd agree with your statement, however, "naïve" isn't the word I'd use in this situation. "Uninformed" or "not privy to all the facts" is more along the lines of what I'd use seeing as (as far as I know, anyway) Zam hasn't been playing enough recently to see how verbally abusive genka is getting.

Kuuuuuuch-puh.

Ahhhh! DIE DIE DIE!!!

/me PBARs Princess Vader's bus

[Pwned By ADV Rail]

PBAR?

Genka, STFU you attention whore.