To the best of my knowledge, currently it takes 20 for a /vote mute to pass and take effect. This seems a little excessive to me, considering the current size of the playerbase.

An active guild could mute anyone they wanted if the number was reduced. Ignore is probably a better option.

There's something wrong with the newbs... they've been making Nahin and I agree recently. I demand this issue be fixed.

+1 to OP. 10 seems fine.

I disagree with both Nahim/RR now... this is not the best approach. Indeed, I never saw someone being voted mute, not even peytroll re-playing looooooong cat...

So, my vote goes to reduce required votes to 10, then address any abuses directly, once reported by muted users, if that ever happens.

I prefer solutions that are less likely to be abused in the first place, and therefor less likely to waste the devs time. So 20 is fine. In my experience it's rare that somebody worthy of actually being muted sticks around long enough for it to matter. Usually it's just some idiot with a name like "Super Dick Man" who babbles for five minutes then gets bored and leaves. Either that or he actually did get muted (the game doesn't exactly inform us when we succeed). Either way it's fine the way it is now.

Here's a better solution. Get more of your friends and their friends to play.

Alloh - You must have not been around when Peytros was muted for weeks at a time...

with that said, -1 to this. if someone "deserves" to be muted by the community, the community will unite, as they always have... i think ...

It used to be more.

No they raised it becuase of us muting Peytroll for long periods.... Leave it alone - 20 is just fine

/ignore works for most anyways

/logoff werks too : )

Ask them why they disallowed trial accounts to vote ;)

No, please no. All we need is more dev powers for players.
Why not just add /devkill?
lol

I was just reading an article that mentioned that Bungie has added "auto-muting" to Halo. Apparently when enough players individually mute a player, the game mutes that player for everyone. I like this instead of voting because it encourages players to individually mute - thereby reducing the overall drama even before a system mute is imposed.

That's a pretty cool thought. Although the devil would be in the details of how many, how long before it warns, how long before it mutes, and how long the default mute will last, when it becomes "permanent" and so on. But worth playing with. Better than voting, anyway.

+1 to Whistler's auto-mute idea.

+1 to automute. Considering the regular player size I vote ~10 individual mutes till auto mute
post pizza edit:
-1 to me, +1 to pizza's suggestion

No. It should be at least 25. Yes, it should be even harder to auto-mute than it is to vote-mute.

Something to keep in mind: Just because somebody uses /ignore on a player doesn't mean he wants that player to be muted. For example, somebody might just be discussing a topic you don't want to hear about (maybe a movie or book you don't want to have spoiled) but isn't mute-worthy. Or maybe you're in a grumpy impatient mood, and realize that you should just /ignore those newbies for today so that you don't take your anger out on them unfairly. I have to do that sometimes.

Also, there is the question of whether it should only count accounts that are online at the time, or any with an active sub. And should it differentiate between recent applications of /ignore and old ones?

Oh, and the "muting" should be done by just adding them to the ignore lists, so that people who don't want to ignore somebody can un-ignore them. And the game should tell you when it auto-ignores somebody so that you are aware and don't think they just abandoned your discussion.

Here's another idea: Have the auto-ignoring be client-side, with an option to change the number it needs. So thin skinned polite freaks can set theirs to 5 or 10, and people like me can set ours to 30.

Interesting pizza

How about the local mute last until the ignores drop below the threshold?

I tend to favor a percentage based system so that it auto adjusts to the current playerbase
-( percentage of ignorers could be added by the main server to each post....)

Yeah, I was thinking about percentages too. To be scalable, it should probably also be based on channel population, not the overall online playerbase. A fixed percentage based on the online playerbase wouldn't scale from 40 players online up to 400 players online, but I doubt that all 400 of those people would be chattering on the same channel.

Might also be good to add a little hysteresis to reduce the odds of somebody being frequently muted and unmuted as people enter and leave the channel when the level is borderline. That might be more confusing than helpful though, dunno. Alternately, instead of having instant unmutes, it would only update it periodically, like every half hour.

See? Now you are over thinking it. Never over think in VO.