As a notorious pirate, I've started getting a ton of "Ping" messages from various pissant trader/anti-pirate types who have sand in their vaginas about the loss of the Active Player List. These douchebags have decided that scripts, which spam messages to all players they're worried about being online and let the aforementioned asswipe know if the messageee is logged on, are the appropriate response.

That is fucking retarded.

However, there's currently no way to address that abuse. I can ignore all of these fucktarded cousin raping morons, but they're still able to get a yes/no on my online status via the use of /msg.

I suggest that any msg sent to a player who has the sender on their ignore list return a "[X player] is not online" message, same as if they were in fact not logged in.

hahaha.

how about in addition, some kind of stealth mode is added where all people (save buddies) sending messages to you get told that you aren't online.

I agree with Lecter's suggestion. It should also be extended to group invites and anything else that could provide feedback indicating whether a character is online or not. Of course, this can be defeated by periodically making fresh new characters that have not been /ignored for the sole purpose of determining if someone is online, but it's better than nothing. Eliminating feedback across the board, even for people who have not ignored you, would be too problematic, so this is a decent compromise.

that people will defeat the mechanism by making new characters is why i suggested what i suggested. why do you think being able to go into stealth mode would be problematic?

I am in agreement with Maalik. As long as the original messages still go through (assuming they're from an un-ignored person), I don't see a big problem with it. If Lecter wants to talk to someone not whitelisted, and they message him, he'll still get the message and be able to reply. Some discussion might be useful on whether someone immediately gets whitelisted in that case (not desirable, most likely), or whether they are put on some kind of temporary whitelist, or what. But the base idea seems admirable to me.

I have a better suggestion, because I don't think I should have to /ignore someone just so they can't exploit a script to see if I'm online (you losers are really writing lua plugins to generate your own active player lists?! REALLY?!)

How about all feed back messages are removed across the board. If you PM me and I'm not online, it should be the same as if you PM me and I simply don't respond.

you losers are really writing lua plugins to generate your own active player lists?! REALLY?!

C'mon Tumble, you're not really surprised are you? This sounds like something you might do :) It's not even an offside move. Broken, sure, but I don't think many people here are innocent of exploiting broken game mechanics.

I do agree though that it should be fixed. Although getting your collective panties in a twist seems a bit melodramatic. Tumble's suggestion as per online/offline messages being removed across the board I think works best. Most likely the easiest implementation as well.

Long term, I'm putting my vote behind seriously neutering scripting all together. I've seen people do things that make this seem like a day at the park. Things that were followed up with a "YOU DID NOT SEE ME DO THAT" comment.

And Lecter, you have officially lost any right to give anybody shit about their English skills ;)

Nah, I'm still OK here Gav: don't make the mistake of confusing "ignoring" with "/ignore-ing." At worst, I'm guilty of omitting a stylistic hyphen.

Like I said before, I think removing feedback altogether is going too far. Many of us occasionally talk to people who we don't want to be buddies with. We'll be having conversations with ourselves if someone suddenly logs off or loses their connection. There would also be no one way tell if we just made a spelling error in the name and we were PM'ing someone who didn't exist. If people really start regularly spamming ping messages or whatever from new 0-level characters, it can be reported to the devs and they can deal with the accountholder. If they implement Lecter's initial basic /ignore suggestion, I don't think it'll be a big problem anymore.

We'll be having conversations with ourselves if someone suddenly logs off or loses their connection.

I don't see why this is a problem. Someone logs off or loses connection, you'll figure it out pretty quickly. If you think that might be the case, and they haven't just gotten sick of talking to you, leave them a note (or whatever they're called, I don't think I've ever used them).

The main issue with the OP's suggestion is that it requires the culprit to be ignored in order to restrict their ability to know whether you are online or not. How the hell am I, as a pirate, supposed to know what traders are online, and who exactly I should be ignoring?

i support removing any feedback messages. vo is not big enough to allow people to know who is and who is not online.

on a side note wow you guys are so pathetic for making a script to /msg people it's a fucking game oh boo hoo you got shot at.

remove all feedback and make it so that if you try to /msg a non existent character (as would happen in a typo) it tells you. That solves the hell out of the problem.

Maybe only give you feedback if you are messeging someboudy in your buddylist or guild, because you can see that anyway.

remove all feedback and make it so that if you try to /msg a non existent character (as would happen in a typo) it tells you. That solves the hell out of the problem.

Maybe only give you feedback if you are messeging someboudy in your buddylist or guild, because you can see that anyway.

Done and done. Moveover, if someone isn't online, just send the msg to them when they get online next.

Perhaps there should be separate commands for ignoring public chat and PMs/group-invites (guild invites?). I honestly liked the APL and want it back, but I don't see spamming people as a good alternative.

remove all feedback and make it so that if you try to /msg a non existent character (as would happen in a typo) it tells you. That solves the hell out of the problem.

I thought of that. The only problem is all the spoof characters that are slight misspellings of real characters' names. There are also non-spoof characters that may be simply close in spelling to the person you are trying to contact, so it would still be fairly easy to contact the wrong person.

Removing feedback altogether was my first thought as well, but after thinking about it I just think we'll discover that it will be more annoying than it's worth. Maybe I'm wrong, but I foresee it causing more grief than it prevents. I still think the original /ignore suggestion is the best compromise.

Ultimately, VO is not a giant chat room, nor is it supposed to be. If you want to have a conversation with someone and be 100% sure they won't accidentally get disconnected without you noticing, use IRC.

There should absolutely not be any feedback messages of any sort which allow a player to determine the online status of another

Feedback for mispellings can be accomplished without feedback for online

In the balance between those who want to keep the giant chat room aspect and those who want to capitalize on the removal of the APL and be stealthy about one's presence, adding a mode that one can activate that eliminates all feedback generated by chat and group commands (&c.) seems quite reasonable. If I don't want people to know if I'm online then the cited concerns about other people not knowing if they spelled my name correctly or if I was mysteriously disconnected seem completely insignificant. Moreover, preemptively ignoring people is impractical and detrimental to one's gameplay.

Why are VPR against this?

probably cause they are the ones with the scripts

I'm not the decision-maker on this, but, as a user of the chat system, I prefer Maalik's solution; does anyone have a strong objection to it?