I have a mac.com address, and I checked my junk mail folder... On top of which it shouldn't filter mail from addresses in my address book.

And I understand that it is the weekend... but they are running a 24/7 business. They need to have someone available every day to handle basic customer service issues like this... sorry, nature of the business.

However, the point of my original post was to attempt to create a system whereby they COULD leave this kind of thing to the players. Some people don't seem to want the features that'd make that possible... which leaves more work for the devs. Without player visible votes there MUST be guide/dev review... zero accountability will NOT work.

Its rare that the devs dont respond to emails promptley i think it happend once to me and that was during the christmas holiday crap.

as for lebers suggestion about per ip problem is when i restart my dsl modem i get a different ip adress plus it's probably possible to play vo over a proxie using some kind of remote x windows (not sure how youde work that but it shoudl be possible) also if you have a laptop that can run vo, depending on your area you could log in through multipil wireless networks.

I used to hold the vo community in higher regard but recentley it has fallen due to this kind of bullshit ideally the vote mute command wouldent even be needed. hell i havent been muted once in the nearley 2 years ive been playing. I don't think anybody other than me has even voted to mute me.

I said it before and i will repeat it.
A guide ingame would help more then any /vote mute procedure.
Guides have other means to deal with annoying chars then just muting them.
I know there are not many guides active and that they dont get paid for their work but imho there is a number of existing players who are online a lot and would fit and accept given role if they are asked.

unpaid accounts are no longer allowed to vote for a mute.

I would like to see the following change:
A vote only counts for as long as the voter is online. If a voter logs off, his vote is suspended until he logs back on.
This solves the problem of how many characters or accounts a voter has, because only one character per player will be logged in at a time.
A player's vote should be recorded on a per character bases. So not all a player's characters have to vote the same way, or even vote at all. A player logging in his Serco character may have to mute someone that the same player's Itani character doesn't have a problem with.

This is only one change, and we may need other changes. But this one change would help solve a lot of issues of people submitting more than their fair share of votes. It also keeps the mute relevant to the characters that voted for it. If every one that voted for the mute logs off, does the mute really need to still be in effect?

I agree totally with Bojansplash on the Guide thing; if more were available a lot of problems would be averted/contained. RL and other stuff, unfortunately, keeps them away from the game and the IRC channel most of the time.

As for /vote mute, when someone is being simply obnoxious, I use /ignore, but when someone is being explicitly offensive and/or insulting, particularly towards someone else, I also /vote mute. /vote mute is, after all, supposed to be the way for the community to police itself and send a clearly message some bullshit will not be allowed on chat.

Unfortunately, I've seen it abused too much already (the only time I've been muted in two years is when tumble used multiple trial accounts to mute me and others, including the IRC bot; that's when the Devs stripped the ability from trial accounts), so perhaps it's best that it goes away, and force everyone to use /ignore. Let the offending loon "talk himself hoarse" if he wants to, no one is unwillingly listening to him. In the place of /vote mute, let's add a /report command:

/report "target" "reason"

The report gets sent directly to both Devs and Guides (saying who's sending the report, too), and enough reports about the same person should cause them to look into the matter; this way, reports out of revenge, spite, or maliciousness do no harm (since they would be unsupported by similar reports), but multiple reports about the same behavior can be looked into, and, if substantiated, acted upon. This way there's no abuse possible ingame, there's the accountability Bidi wants (and since the player base doesn't have access to this accountability, the issues Aramarth rises don't crop up) and, hopefully, those who're out causing trouble in the channels will be dealt with by real authority. Also, optional, the target could be told by the system "attention: your behavior has been reported to Guild", though I'd balk at this if only because you could spam someone's chat by reporting him a lot of times.

Good thoughts J.. that could definitely work.

Amen to that.

I agree with Bidi that the muting function is mostly a tool for revenge at this point. And while it (the guide system) was understandably a kludge, one wonders if the world should burn around us before we build a new building >_>;

I think that instead of condemning the revenge-based voting system of today, we need to do the logical thing and embrace it and expand to include /vote kill, /vote bankrupt, /vote transport and /vote ban.

Regarding being informed that you're being vote muted, perhaps if the vote to mute remains for say, 30 minutes after you've logged off. So you can't just log off, reset the vote, and log on to remain being an annoyance. If the vote were persistent for a short period of time, it would prevent that sort of abuse.

Of course, during that period of being logged off, no new votes can be added.

This way, the vote mute can serve as a warning while not necessarily becoming a de facto mute (abuse on the voter's side). And having vote persistence after logging, prevents abuse (abuse on the candidate's side).

On further thought...

The /ignore command is really the only command needed. You can remove mute as far as I am concerned. The mute command does not offer anything positive that the ignore command doesn't already solve.

The devs are up to their eyeballs in adding enhancements to the game, and I don't really want them distracted by trivial issues.

Well, yeah /ignore works.

As long as a guide could have some kind of universal setting where they could set an /ignore flag for everyone against a certain character, effectively muting them.

But, then there would need to be 24/7 guides, something that's not feasible right now.

(Imagine Ad spam bots, porn bots, etc. getting into VO. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already...)

Hey, just a couple of points. Chillum, I didn't get your email until after it was relevant anyway (you would have been auto-unmuted) so I didn't respond or worry about it. Your suggestions are good though. I like the idea of voting "against" and even getting realtime data on votes coming in against you (albeit anonymously).. the latter might cause an offender to change their behaviour before actually being muted.

Anyway, in other news, vote muting is once per *account*, not per *character*. It always has been, and if there's some unforseen exploit that allows people to vote multiple times on different characters.. that's a bug that should be fixed.

There's also supposed to be existing code requiring that no more than a minority percentage of votes can come from users who have characters in the same guild. But, that may not be currently implemented. If it isn't.. it's been on the to-do list for a long time.

We do make an effort to respond quickly to people's problems, but we are a company of four, and we do not offer 24/7 support. That's part of the tradeoff of a VO vs a WoW. On the one hand you actually hear from me personally, on the other hand you may not hear from me as quickly as you'd like.

Yes, we have logs of *everything*. The logs are only available to devs, and we know what we would want to do with them to make them available to the guides.. automatically cut them down to regions only specific to the time around a reported "incident", the specific users involved and so on. But no one has written that yet. It's basically the process of showing people being nasty and unpleasant, while minimizing otherwise invading the privacy of the userbase.

Lastly, I agree with others.. /ignore is really the best solution to these kinds of problems. But, not everyone felt that way, hence our implementing the muting system in the first place. It could definitely use improvement, and I welcome further feedback and suggestions on that.

FYI, there are existing plans for adding the voting system to the PDA, and a "v" icon (similar to the "m" icon for missions) that scrolls out if someone is brought up for a vote. Plus it'll be more complex to initiate a vote, and there'll be more information on why the vote has been started, etc. People who falsely start votes could have their voting privileges suspended. Anyway, we've been focusing our attention elsewhere of late, so this hasn't had much development.

No usage of "v", that's my turbo bind key =P

Oh wait, nevermind.

[Inc., this is "Dr. Lecter"... don't take me that seriously ;)]

"v" should just be the default, it would use whatever you had bound. I hope "m" already works that way.. it's supposed to.

it does!

Thanks, Incarnate. I assumed as much as far as the lack of response, however I would still have appreciated some response. I understand that there are only 4 of you... but there are many people who could (and WANT to) do a good job as guides/channel moderators. (Even myself, believe it or not.) Perhaps there could be an email address that gets routed to them?

Also, I'd like to say that I hadn't intended to complain here about your lack of response. In fact I hadn't intended to complain about anything, and just make my suggestions... certain posts made that difficult.

As far as your post here... sounds good. Hopefully these things can be implemented soon... or perhaps /vote mute should just be pulled until then.