1) The devs don't care about fixing this 'feature' of CO/STO/NW's chat system OR PWE is preventing the fixing/adjusting of this 'feature'.
2) Flagging someone as a spammer AND ignoring them both count towards the 24 hour chat ban. It's some total that the system keeps track of behind the scenes. Once you hit that number, POOF! you can't talk.
3) The GM's NEVER do anything about it on either end (the player reporting even if it's false and the person who got muted).
We've had many threads about this over there, too. And the devs/forum mod NEVER drop by to say anything.
Everyone has the Option to Hit The Ignore Button, when it comes to Chat.
Does that, then, justify Tribble games, Chuck Norris jokes, political debates, fan fights, and all the other inane TRIBBLE that effectively renders Zone chat useless unless one starts /ignoring people?
I mean, you do realize you're implicitly justifying that sort of behavior by saying "use the /ignore feature," right?
I don't use /ignore to auto-silence people specifically, but I will admit a grim satisfaction in the fact... After all, they have the option of going to PMs or starting private channels for their little spats and games. If they persist in spamming Zone (and, even better, spitting at people who tell them to knock it off), they get what they deserve as far as I'm concerned.
As far as chat ban griefing goes, yes, it sucks, but keep in mind that 1) it takes several /ignores to silence someone, which means that either it has to be a fairly concerted effort or the target managed to tick off a lot of independent actors, and 2) clearly, neither Cryptic nor PWE are interested in doing what it would take to fix the issue - probably because it would involve hiring more customer service peeps than they want to invest in.
Does that, then, justify Tribble games, Chuck Norris jokes, political debates, fan fights, and all the other inane TRIBBLE that effectively renders Zone chat useless unless one starts /ignoring people?
I mean, you do realize you're implicitly justifying that sort of behavior by saying "use the /ignore feature," right?
Wait a second, you're reporting or ignore people for stuff like that? Where exactly does it state that zone chat is intended solely for things you might deem useful? I hate to break it to you, but all /zone means is that it sends whatever you type in behind it to, imagine that, everyone in the zone. The channel is not named Trade. It's not named LFG. It's not named Help. If it was named any of those things, your little standards there might hold up. And in fact, we do have channels for most of those things.
And yeah, the Gorn game gets a little old sometimes. We've all heard most of the Chuck Norris jokes. That's why we're switching to Bear Grylls. Politics and social trolling, yeah, those are usually included in the ruleset. Fan fights though... Well now... Are you suggesting, that in a game named Star Trek online, there must logically be a rule forbidding the discussion of Star Trek? Cause I'm pretty sure that's what most fan fights around here are about.
So if you've been setting to ignore or reporting as spammers people who do any of these things (except the politics one, as again, general webiquette) you're really part of the problem here.
Seems to me though that if you want a channel dedicated to 'useful' discussion, where all the petitions for free rides (lf help lvling) and general help (how i fish 4 dilitihum?) can go, that's a great idea. If we'll just create a channel named "Help" that all new characters are autojoined to upon creation, which functions gamewide, we can seriously cut back on the overreacted and outright false reports made in /zone chat.
Provide you, like, you know, stay out of there, or get a sense of humor.
Wait a second, you're reporting or ignore people for stuff like that? Where exactly does it state that zone chat is intended solely for things you might deem useful? I hate to break it to you, but all /zone means is that it sends whatever you type in behind it to, imagine that, everyone in the zone.
Exactly. Everyone. But not everyone in the Zone wants to engage in, or even hear, Tribble jokes, inane arguments, etc. The options available to me? Close Zone chat, or /ignore. I do the latter, because occasionally someone will have something useful, relevant, or genuinely funny to say, or a newbie will have a question, and I'd rather not miss it for all the spam.
Casual conversations in Zone I've got no problem with. But when Zone chat scrolls endlessly with nothing but Tribble or Gorn jokes, or is completely dominated by 3 or 4 people arguing religion or politics, I'll lay on the /ignore to filter them out. The auto-silence thing is just icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels the same, given these auto-silence threads... Consider it "democracy in action"! ;p
So if you've been setting to ignore or reporting as spammers people who do any of these things (except the politics one, as again, general webiquette) you're really part of the problem here.
Good one. I'd suggest the problem is with the people who, knowingly or unknowingly, make Zone chat useless for the rest of us. And with those folks who will defend anyone's "right" to fill any channel with noise of any kind without consequences.
Provide you, like, you know, stay out of there, or get a sense of humor.
Like I said, a good joke I can appreciate. Name game spam is obviously just spam for the sake of spam, and gets real old after the first incident or two. I'd rather not see it, but I'd rather not shut out Zone entirely because of it. I've only got one option left, and I will gleefully use it.
If the system is ever adjusted to require 50% +1 of all people across all zones exposed to the person being reported in order to impose a 24 hour communication ban, I will. Untill then, though, it's just five antisocial malcontents dragging everyone down with them.
Mind you, I've never actually been banned myself. I've no personal stake in it, and I do agree that most of this stuff is fairly idiotic, so I rarely get involved. But I do think a system, without appeal, where it isn't immediately clear there's no difference between ignoring and reporting someone and where you, intentionally or not, censor whatever people say that doesn't suit you, is far from democratic. It is a backward system. And I avoid using it as much as possible, with exceptions for actual gold spammers and the occasional militant doomsday prophet.
It's hard to not do damage with it, though. Since not just reports, but also ignores count toward the ban, I rather suspect a lot of the people who can't figure out what they've said wrong in the chat channels, were actually 'reported' because they're oblivious to the fact that they've got their mics set open and that they are blasting static into every STF they go into. If you click mute on someone's voicechat, it automatically adds them to your ignore list. And since ignores count toward the game wide channel gag, and I don't know if manually unignoring them undoes that, I started using the volume slider after I made that connection.
They really need to disconnect the ignore and report functions, cause to be fair, I really shouldn't be able to hold it against you that you don't want to sift through inane nonsense to find whatever it is you're looking for in zone chat. It's Cryptic's fault for not distinguishing between the two 'different' options.
I suppose, maybe, if we start setting Devs to ignore, they might do something about it. (Probably just take out on us, though.)
Untill then, though, it's just five antisocial malcontents dragging everyone down with them.
Do you consider me an antisocial malcontent, then? If so, how is it antisocial to not want to see spam on a channel that I and others could otherwise find useful?
They really need to disconnect the ignore and report functions, cause to be fair, I really shouldn't be able to hold it against you that you don't want to sift through inane nonsense to find whatever it is you're looking for in zone chat. It's Cryptic's fault for not distinguishing between the two 'different' options.
I used to agree. Now I'm fairly ambivalent. I'm not crazy about the potential for abuse, but I can't really shed any tears for the people I accidentally auto-silence by /ignoring...
One thing I've learned on the internet is that things are rarely what they seem. It's come to the point where if I see someone complain about, say, a name change, a chat ban, some other punitive action, or even harrassment from another player, I suspect there's more to the story than what's presented. I try not to pre-judge, but in the few times relevant information has become available, the real story usually doesn't support the complaint. Thus, I take all these auto-silence complaints with a grain of salt.
It'd be nice for silencing to be human-moderated, but that ain't gonna happen. The only other real alternative, i.e. removing silencing from /ignore, will, I suspect, result in one of two things - either people will switch to reportspammer instead on freebie accounts made for the purpose, or we'll have even more spam than what we've got now. It may be invisible to me once I /ignore the spammers, but it won't be invisible to newbies or people just logging in or people who don't clean out their ignore list regularly or whatever.
IMO there is no happy medium. Any solution will have its negative consequences. Since we have the auto-silence system now, the onus is on people who oppose it to consider the negatives of the reasonable alternatives, and show that they're better than what we have now.
Do you consider me an antisocial malcontent, then? If so, how is it antisocial to not want to see spam on a channel that I and others could otherwise find useful?
Not necessarily, but you did use the word gleefully to describe the act of ignoring/reporting people. As I said, I don't mind you not wanting to see that. You're well in your rights. But if knowing what the consequences are for this other person, you won't even reexamine exactly what threshold warrants this kind of response... yeah. When you consider your own interests with total disregard for the rights of and/or consequences to another, I think that's pretty textbook. If you do consider these things and then come to the same conclusion, so be it, I can't fault that. But when you derive pleasure from doing it, well, that moves into sadism, doesn't it? That takes you from what I'd deem overly casual use, near griefer territory.
And yes, evaluating these relatively short-term bans in real time or even within their 24 hour duration would be very expensive, difficult and maybe even impossible. So there is only one other alternative I can think of. Don't evaluate the people who got reported. Evaluate the ones who do the reporting. Specifically, only the ones who submit an unusually large number of reports, compared to the rest of the playerbase. So instead of requiring someone to go over every 5 or 10 reports, now you go over only the instances where someone, on his or her own, reported 50 or 100 people in a week. Then see if their idea of what warrants a report is the same as that of the game managers, and if not, start with a friendly request to cut their fellow players some slack, and then take it from there.
But if knowing what the consequences are for this other person, you won't even reexamine exactly what threshold warrants this kind of response... yeah. When you consider your own interests with total disregard for the rights of and/or consequences to another, I think that's pretty textbook.
Isn't that exactly what the Zone spammers do, though? They seem to have no problem considering their own interests with total disregard for the rights of others. On top of that, as I've said before, if you say "knock it off" in Zone, no matter how politely, I guarantee you're in for a flamefest (if you're acknowledged at all). If I'm antisocial for reacting to them with /ignore, aren't they just as antisocial for, well, starting it? And gleefully continuing with even greater fervor if anyone dare say anything?
There once was a time where I was reluctant to /ignore anyone, even when I didn't know that it added to the auto-silence count. I've seen enough to pretty much obliterate that reluctance. Everyone's tolerance levels are different, of course, and I'm sure that anyone who participates in the spamfest is going to think they're not doing anything wrong. You may think a 24-hour chat ban is excessive, and maybe you're right, but I see it like giving a grown-up kid a "time out" for acting up. As such, I'm kind of glad it's there.
Don't evaluate the people who got reported. Evaluate the ones who do the reporting. Specifically, only the ones who submit an unusually large number of reports, compared to the rest of the playerbase.
As I understand it, that's already being done for /reportspammer. I have no doubt that if they do that for /ignore, people will cut back on using it... but, frankly, I'd sooner see /ignore divorced from auto-silence altogether. It's what I use to filter Zone, whether auto-silence is attached or not, and I think that's its proper function.
The "change" you're asking for was the initial state of the system. The problem it caused was that chat was a constant flood of spam, and no sooner would you ignore one than another would arise. They would spam over and over, rendering zone chat completely useless (yes, I'm sure some wag will now reply saying it's useless anyway; let's accept that some people want it and move on from that premise, if you don't want it this doesn't apply to you). Certainly, you could ignore each spammer as he arose; but you'd still miss everything happening in chat until you did that, another spammer would arise, and most severely, the rotation of old ignores out of your list made it impossible to use it to avoid the people you didn't want to read for personal reasons.
If you ignored somebody because you WANTED to, you were forced to unignore him again in a couple of days as your list filled up with spammers.
The forums had constant complaints, at greater volume than the silencing complaints. I see no reason to believe that removing the current system wouldn't immediately restore that initial state of affairs, including the higher level of forum angst.
Bogus silences are a problem; but there's a better solution to this problem, which affects very few people, than restoring a problem that affected the vast majority of players.
The right solution to misuse of the spam reporting system is to set a strong policy against that abuse and then action accounts that abuse it. This has the benefit of being something that can be done at more leisure than is acceptable for an anti-spam response, which needs to be fairly swift.
for that to work PWE would have to give a TRIBBLE about their player base. things like this are why my account is just sitting there not making any money or PWE. When they start caring and start fixing the problems with this game then i shall come back and maybe even throw some money at them. Until then my lifetime account will just there.
Just when I thought I was getting somewhere with the web support ticket I got a response that it was a duplicate. I had referenced the web ticket which was about the possibly missing items in my in-game ticket which was also about the missing items.
I was asked not to open duplicate tickets.
Sigh. More bureaucracy.
So I logged into the game and the in-game ticket had been updated. The GM stated that he'd done additional research (yay!), reviewed the logs (double yay!) and confirmed that the "items had sold". He promptly removed his offer of free Zen (naturally).
So it seems like in this case I got lucky. I still don't know what would have happened if the items had expired since I did not receive any e-mail from the Exchange. If I wasn't notified of sales, I have my doubts that I would have been notified of expirations -- and the attached items that go with them.
So back to the ticket -- I asked the GM to please forward this on to the appropriate team as it is most likely a bug. Hopefully this will happen. I might send Brandon a tickler to see if he can grease the wheels.
On second thought, I definitely will.
So for now, I haven't lost anything except a few informational e-mails. If any further information is forthcoming from Cryptic I'll of course let you know.
On the thread topic, if anyone reading this is silenced, and while silenced, receives any e-mails from the Exchange, please post it here. At least that will establish my issue as a glitch. If, however, you are sure you were supposed to get an e-mail, and didn't, please post that as well.
Or better yet, if you're silenced, remove your listings just to be sure until official word is given on what exactly happened to me.
The dev team has tested incoming e-mail. But I can't get confirmation that they tested the automatically generated messages from the Exchange. Brandon has been told, "incoming mail is incoming mail". Perhaps that's true.
I for one will remain cautious should I ever be silenced again.
The zone chat is being taken over by 4 or 5 people who start talking about bacon or gorn this or that at the ds9 zone. There purpose is control of the zone chat and exercise total control over whats being said. Anyone who tries to recruit or sell and item will be attacked and silenced. Drozana is likewise a control point where a certain fleet uses fire extinguishers and other annoying things to grief people into leaving. At Drozana I was one of the 1st to grief the griefers and we have won most of Drozana back, but ds9 is impossible to silence those who silence because they do it secretly and i don't know who silenced me. I guess i could silence those who silence but it takes a coordinated effort by 4 to 5 people who will stick to it for 5 or 6 hours a day which is what i see st ds9. My people want to play the game and not control ds9 chat therefore i can't get the needed support for such an adventure. it is a shame though because i would like to recruit maxed out level people at ds9.
So people in ESD are talking about the normal abnormal stuff like TRIBBLE people's Klingon mothers, why a fleet name sounds like swear word, etc., and someone says "Rick Roll."
So I type:
"Never gonna give you up," etc - that famous refrain, and suddenly, I'm flagged as spam.
You see people will do that because cryptic allows to exploit the game .I suggest get a group of friends and start reporting other people for spam till they will receive 200000000000000 tickets about their stupid system then they will have to do something.
I can list at least 5 exploits which f**** with other people's fun and not only they are not removed ,but they are also improved (they tested to see if when you get chat ban you receive items from exchange in mail ...that means they had time for that stupid test but not to remove the exploit).
Also 90% is bugged at the moment ,say thanks that s*** system is still working or they will do a quick maintenance just to fix it :rolleyes:
Probably their next move will be to give people your IP and your location...you never know what s*** they can invent to annoy people.
if this sounds harsh you dont want to know the uncensored version I had in mind.
Report spam doesn't have to auto silence. What does it matter if it ignores the REAL offenders which I'm happy to tag. This is just effing stupid. Right after I got the silence tag, I noticed an old fleetmate I knew from 2yrs ago said something in chat to me, and I couldn't even send a PM to tell him these idiots at ESD decided to shut down my chat ability.
I hadn't even been in chat aside for that Rick Ashley TRIBBLE. I could understand if I was constantly blabbing and posting lyrics, but 3 lines and then nothing isn't spam. Fleet and sales spammers get more warning that I did, and they don't ever seem to get shut down.
UNBLOCK MY CHAT so I can converse with people in the OTHER chats and fleet I'm a member of.
You see people will do that because cryptic allows to exploit the game .I suggest get a group of friends and start reporting other people for spam till they will receive 200000000000000 tickets about their stupid system then they will have to do something.
I can list at least 5 exploits which f**** with other people's fun and not only they are not removed ,but they are also improved (they tested to see if when you get chat ban you receive items from exchange in mail ...that means they had time for that stupid test but not to remove the exploit).
Also 90% is bugged at the moment ,say thanks that s*** system is still working or they will do a quick maintenance just to fix it :rolleyes:
Probably their next move will be to give people your IP and your location...you never know what s*** they can invent to annoy people.
if this sounds harsh you dont want to know the uncensored version I had in mind.
The issue is that it's not something the STO devs can do as the chat ban is handled by the shared chat server.
It is just as big a problem over in CO where it gets at least one thread every week complaining about the chat ban system, we've also uncovered that a standard ignore is counted exactly the same as a Report Spam and that the scoring system for chat bans doesn't depreciate.
Yes the system is messed up, are we likely to see a change, not really.
The issue is that it's not something the STO devs can do as the chat ban is handled by the shared chat server.
It is just as big a problem over in CO where it gets at least one thread every week complaining about the chat ban system, we've also uncovered that a standard ignore is counted exactly the same as a Report Spam and that the scoring system for chat bans doesn't depreciate.
Yes the system is messed up, are we likely to see a change, not really.
No offence but thats BS.The report spam thingy is in the UI.It doesnt matter if its a chat server or not ,you can remove parts from UI and leave the function there.Im pretty sure most people wont start typing lines of commands just to ban you.
No offence but thats BS.The report spam thingy is in the UI.It doesnt matter if its a chat server or not ,you can remove parts from UI and leave the function there.Im pretty sure most people wont start typing lines of commands just to ban you.
Did you just read the first line or the entire post?
Removing the Report Spam button would have zero effect as the Ignore button can trigger a chat ban.
As for your suggestion, we have pointed this out over on CO, they said they'd look into it and nothing happened so it presumably got vetoed by the higher ups.
You could submit a ticket for support to review the temporary chat ban (in theory anyway), but the ban will be long over before the ticket was even looked at.
You could submit a ticket for support to review the temporary chat ban (in theory anyway), but the ban will be long over before the ticket was even looked at.
Yep, considering that PWE/Cryptic staff has the Thanksgiving holiday off and likely won't be back in the office til Monday.
Anyway, this would illustrate the problem inherent in automated banning systems: They don't have the human quality of discretionary judgment. They can only think in two states. Ones and zeroes, off and on, either it is or it isn't. No inbetweens or gray zones.
they dont care, been like this for a long time.. just turn off zone chat and it will never happen again.
[12:35] Vessel Two of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 225232 (271723) Plasma Damage to you with Plasma Lance.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
Here are some nice videos to get a glimpse of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
You were stupid to participate in stupid Zone Chat. Next time just STFU and don't try to be witty because you come across as an idiot.
Even though I had to work today and wasn't able to waste my life in-game, be glad that a mod wasn't on or they'd have been handing out more than just chat muting.
I've been ignored by several people just for talking in Zone Chat. I have yet to be 'muted' for it. And people who know me also know how vocal I am. So yeah if you TRIBBLE off just enough people to get muted, you know you irked the wrong people.
TLDR: STFU with trying to be cute and reciting **** lyrics to a **** song. I'm glad you were muted and wish you were banned instead.
I'd ignore you too if I thought I was about to get Rick Roll'd.
Smooth move.
About as smooth a move as not comprehending my post? Someone else said something about ol' Rick, and I just typed a few lyrics and was done. No one was about to "get" anything.
Here are some nice videos to get a glimpse of what it feels like to be on the receiving end. You were stupid to participate in stupid Zone Chat. Next time just STFU and don't try to be witty because you come across as an idiot.
Even though I had to work today and wasn't able to waste my life in-game, be glad that a mod wasn't on or they'd have been handing out more than just chat muting.
The only winning move is not to play...so turn off zone chat.
I've been ignored by several people just for talking in Zone Chat. I have yet to be 'muted' for it. And people who know me also know how vocal I am. So yeah if you TRIBBLE off just enough people to get muted, you know you irked the wrong people.
Never heard of you. Don't really care about who you are either, nor the pseudo authority you're trying to push.
STFU with trying to be cute and reciting **** lyrics to a **** song. I'm glad you were muted and wish you were banned instead.
Because someone with the attitude you just displayed is TOTALLY worth having as a fellow gamer, lol. Exactly the kind of armchair warrior that's not worth my time.
Have to admit, I pay little attention to Zone Chat and don't dignify most of what is said their with a response (though I do tend to answer genuine queries pertaining to gameplay etc).
Generally though, the terrible 'quality' of the discussion says it all:
Gorn 'jokes' (funny in the late 1960's, and perhaps when STO was new, but not so much now)
'My country is better than your country' arguments
Peculiar sexual fantasies
'Which was the best war'
I always feel it's best to just let the sort of people who spout that sort of nonsense to their own little world(s).
and what has that to do with ban exploits?
Also please show me where it says what you are allowed and not allowed to write in chat.If you dont like somehting doesnt mean is spam and needs to be removed .If you cant support other people go play singleplayer games.
In game chat is pretty much worthless, some moron using the channel as his personal soapbox to go on about politics or global warming or whatever, mainly because it's one of the few places where he can sound off without someone slapping him in the head and telling him to stfu. That or stupid jokes, prepubescent behavior, annoying fleet requests every other line and a long list of things not worth reading.
If you want reliable chat without game flaws and general stupidity, get your friends on a program like Xfire and simply turn zone chat off.
I only use the chat window for NPC, mission and system messages and Xfire for communicating with people I actually want to talk to, zone chat hasn't been missed.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
In game chat is pretty much worthless, some moron using the channel as his personal soapbox to go on about politics or global warming or whatever, mainly because it's one of the few places where he can sound off without someone slapping him in the head and telling him to stfu. That or stupid jokes, prepubescent behavior, annoying fleet requests every other line and a long list of things not worth reading.
If you want reliable chat without game flaws and general stupidity, get your friends on a program like Xfire and simply turn zone chat off.
I only use the chat window for NPC, mission and system messages and Xfire for communicating with people I actually want to talk to, zone chat hasn't been missed.
Zone chat is taking on the greatest issue in the history of mankind, an epidemic like no one has seen since the black death.....The loss of Twinkies
The quick and sensible fix would be to separate "Report Spam" and "Ignore Player". Right now, "Ignore Player" goes towards your spam count. That is utter nonsense, since people will silence you if you do ONE little tiny, trivial thing that they don't like or agree with. You can say you prefer a different syrup then they do on their pancakes and they will put you on "ignore" and then suddenly BAM!: Silenced because you had 2 other jagoffs do it within 24 hours because they preferred a different Captain then you....
Comments
1) The devs don't care about fixing this 'feature' of CO/STO/NW's chat system OR PWE is preventing the fixing/adjusting of this 'feature'.
2) Flagging someone as a spammer AND ignoring them both count towards the 24 hour chat ban. It's some total that the system keeps track of behind the scenes. Once you hit that number, POOF! you can't talk.
3) The GM's NEVER do anything about it on either end (the player reporting even if it's false and the person who got muted).
We've had many threads about this over there, too. And the devs/forum mod NEVER drop by to say anything.
Working as designed. Plain and simple.
Razira's Primus Database Page
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
I mean, you do realize you're implicitly justifying that sort of behavior by saying "use the /ignore feature," right?
I don't use /ignore to auto-silence people specifically, but I will admit a grim satisfaction in the fact... After all, they have the option of going to PMs or starting private channels for their little spats and games. If they persist in spamming Zone (and, even better, spitting at people who tell them to knock it off), they get what they deserve as far as I'm concerned.
As far as chat ban griefing goes, yes, it sucks, but keep in mind that 1) it takes several /ignores to silence someone, which means that either it has to be a fairly concerted effort or the target managed to tick off a lot of independent actors, and 2) clearly, neither Cryptic nor PWE are interested in doing what it would take to fix the issue - probably because it would involve hiring more customer service peeps than they want to invest in.
Wait a second, you're reporting or ignore people for stuff like that? Where exactly does it state that zone chat is intended solely for things you might deem useful? I hate to break it to you, but all /zone means is that it sends whatever you type in behind it to, imagine that, everyone in the zone. The channel is not named Trade. It's not named LFG. It's not named Help. If it was named any of those things, your little standards there might hold up. And in fact, we do have channels for most of those things.
And yeah, the Gorn game gets a little old sometimes. We've all heard most of the Chuck Norris jokes. That's why we're switching to Bear Grylls. Politics and social trolling, yeah, those are usually included in the ruleset. Fan fights though... Well now... Are you suggesting, that in a game named Star Trek online, there must logically be a rule forbidding the discussion of Star Trek? Cause I'm pretty sure that's what most fan fights around here are about.
So if you've been setting to ignore or reporting as spammers people who do any of these things (except the politics one, as again, general webiquette) you're really part of the problem here.
Seems to me though that if you want a channel dedicated to 'useful' discussion, where all the petitions for free rides (lf help lvling) and general help (how i fish 4 dilitihum?) can go, that's a great idea. If we'll just create a channel named "Help" that all new characters are autojoined to upon creation, which functions gamewide, we can seriously cut back on the overreacted and outright false reports made in /zone chat.
Provide you, like, you know, stay out of there, or get a sense of humor.
Casual conversations in Zone I've got no problem with. But when Zone chat scrolls endlessly with nothing but Tribble or Gorn jokes, or is completely dominated by 3 or 4 people arguing religion or politics, I'll lay on the /ignore to filter them out. The auto-silence thing is just icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels the same, given these auto-silence threads... Consider it "democracy in action"! ;p
Good one. I'd suggest the problem is with the people who, knowingly or unknowingly, make Zone chat useless for the rest of us. And with those folks who will defend anyone's "right" to fill any channel with noise of any kind without consequences.
Like I said, a good joke I can appreciate. Name game spam is obviously just spam for the sake of spam, and gets real old after the first incident or two. I'd rather not see it, but I'd rather not shut out Zone entirely because of it. I've only got one option left, and I will gleefully use it.
If the system is ever adjusted to require 50% +1 of all people across all zones exposed to the person being reported in order to impose a 24 hour communication ban, I will. Untill then, though, it's just five antisocial malcontents dragging everyone down with them.
Mind you, I've never actually been banned myself. I've no personal stake in it, and I do agree that most of this stuff is fairly idiotic, so I rarely get involved. But I do think a system, without appeal, where it isn't immediately clear there's no difference between ignoring and reporting someone and where you, intentionally or not, censor whatever people say that doesn't suit you, is far from democratic. It is a backward system. And I avoid using it as much as possible, with exceptions for actual gold spammers and the occasional militant doomsday prophet.
It's hard to not do damage with it, though. Since not just reports, but also ignores count toward the ban, I rather suspect a lot of the people who can't figure out what they've said wrong in the chat channels, were actually 'reported' because they're oblivious to the fact that they've got their mics set open and that they are blasting static into every STF they go into. If you click mute on someone's voicechat, it automatically adds them to your ignore list. And since ignores count toward the game wide channel gag, and I don't know if manually unignoring them undoes that, I started using the volume slider after I made that connection.
They really need to disconnect the ignore and report functions, cause to be fair, I really shouldn't be able to hold it against you that you don't want to sift through inane nonsense to find whatever it is you're looking for in zone chat. It's Cryptic's fault for not distinguishing between the two 'different' options.
I suppose, maybe, if we start setting Devs to ignore, they might do something about it. (Probably just take out on us, though.)
I used to agree. Now I'm fairly ambivalent. I'm not crazy about the potential for abuse, but I can't really shed any tears for the people I accidentally auto-silence by /ignoring...
One thing I've learned on the internet is that things are rarely what they seem. It's come to the point where if I see someone complain about, say, a name change, a chat ban, some other punitive action, or even harrassment from another player, I suspect there's more to the story than what's presented. I try not to pre-judge, but in the few times relevant information has become available, the real story usually doesn't support the complaint. Thus, I take all these auto-silence complaints with a grain of salt.
It'd be nice for silencing to be human-moderated, but that ain't gonna happen. The only other real alternative, i.e. removing silencing from /ignore, will, I suspect, result in one of two things - either people will switch to reportspammer instead on freebie accounts made for the purpose, or we'll have even more spam than what we've got now. It may be invisible to me once I /ignore the spammers, but it won't be invisible to newbies or people just logging in or people who don't clean out their ignore list regularly or whatever.
IMO there is no happy medium. Any solution will have its negative consequences. Since we have the auto-silence system now, the onus is on people who oppose it to consider the negatives of the reasonable alternatives, and show that they're better than what we have now.
Not necessarily, but you did use the word gleefully to describe the act of ignoring/reporting people. As I said, I don't mind you not wanting to see that. You're well in your rights. But if knowing what the consequences are for this other person, you won't even reexamine exactly what threshold warrants this kind of response... yeah. When you consider your own interests with total disregard for the rights of and/or consequences to another, I think that's pretty textbook. If you do consider these things and then come to the same conclusion, so be it, I can't fault that. But when you derive pleasure from doing it, well, that moves into sadism, doesn't it? That takes you from what I'd deem overly casual use, near griefer territory.
And yes, evaluating these relatively short-term bans in real time or even within their 24 hour duration would be very expensive, difficult and maybe even impossible. So there is only one other alternative I can think of. Don't evaluate the people who got reported. Evaluate the ones who do the reporting. Specifically, only the ones who submit an unusually large number of reports, compared to the rest of the playerbase. So instead of requiring someone to go over every 5 or 10 reports, now you go over only the instances where someone, on his or her own, reported 50 or 100 people in a week. Then see if their idea of what warrants a report is the same as that of the game managers, and if not, start with a friendly request to cut their fellow players some slack, and then take it from there.
There once was a time where I was reluctant to /ignore anyone, even when I didn't know that it added to the auto-silence count. I've seen enough to pretty much obliterate that reluctance. Everyone's tolerance levels are different, of course, and I'm sure that anyone who participates in the spamfest is going to think they're not doing anything wrong. You may think a 24-hour chat ban is excessive, and maybe you're right, but I see it like giving a grown-up kid a "time out" for acting up. As such, I'm kind of glad it's there.
As I understand it, that's already being done for /reportspammer. I have no doubt that if they do that for /ignore, people will cut back on using it... but, frankly, I'd sooner see /ignore divorced from auto-silence altogether. It's what I use to filter Zone, whether auto-silence is attached or not, and I think that's its proper function.
for that to work PWE would have to give a TRIBBLE about their player base. things like this are why my account is just sitting there not making any money or PWE. When they start caring and start fixing the problems with this game then i shall come back and maybe even throw some money at them. Until then my lifetime account will just there.
Just when I thought I was getting somewhere with the web support ticket I got a response that it was a duplicate. I had referenced the web ticket which was about the possibly missing items in my in-game ticket which was also about the missing items.
I was asked not to open duplicate tickets.
Sigh. More bureaucracy.
So I logged into the game and the in-game ticket had been updated. The GM stated that he'd done additional research (yay!), reviewed the logs (double yay!) and confirmed that the "items had sold". He promptly removed his offer of free Zen (naturally).
So it seems like in this case I got lucky. I still don't know what would have happened if the items had expired since I did not receive any e-mail from the Exchange. If I wasn't notified of sales, I have my doubts that I would have been notified of expirations -- and the attached items that go with them.
So back to the ticket -- I asked the GM to please forward this on to the appropriate team as it is most likely a bug. Hopefully this will happen. I might send Brandon a tickler to see if he can grease the wheels.
On second thought, I definitely will.
So for now, I haven't lost anything except a few informational e-mails. If any further information is forthcoming from Cryptic I'll of course let you know.
On the thread topic, if anyone reading this is silenced, and while silenced, receives any e-mails from the Exchange, please post it here. At least that will establish my issue as a glitch. If, however, you are sure you were supposed to get an e-mail, and didn't, please post that as well.
Or better yet, if you're silenced, remove your listings just to be sure until official word is given on what exactly happened to me.
The dev team has tested incoming e-mail. But I can't get confirmation that they tested the automatically generated messages from the Exchange. Brandon has been told, "incoming mail is incoming mail". Perhaps that's true.
I for one will remain cautious should I ever be silenced again.
-Forjo
My oldest post (that I can find)
Location: Houston, TX
Former Cryptic User #11424
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Stop the easily abused and unfair auto-silence "feature"!
Why Season 7 is better than you realize
Raise Refining Cap for Gold/Lifetime!
So I type:
"Never gonna give you up," etc - that famous refrain, and suddenly, I'm flagged as spam.
UNBLOCK my chat now, please.
:rolleyes:
I can list at least 5 exploits which f**** with other people's fun and not only they are not removed ,but they are also improved (they tested to see if when you get chat ban you receive items from exchange in mail ...that means they had time for that stupid test but not to remove the exploit).
Also 90% is bugged at the moment ,say thanks that s*** system is still working or they will do a quick maintenance just to fix it :rolleyes:
Probably their next move will be to give people your IP and your location...you never know what s*** they can invent to annoy people.
if this sounds harsh you dont want to know the uncensored version I had in mind.
Report spam doesn't have to auto silence. What does it matter if it ignores the REAL offenders which I'm happy to tag. This is just effing stupid. Right after I got the silence tag, I noticed an old fleetmate I knew from 2yrs ago said something in chat to me, and I couldn't even send a PM to tell him these idiots at ESD decided to shut down my chat ability.
I hadn't even been in chat aside for that Rick Ashley TRIBBLE. I could understand if I was constantly blabbing and posting lyrics, but 3 lines and then nothing isn't spam. Fleet and sales spammers get more warning that I did, and they don't ever seem to get shut down.
UNBLOCK MY CHAT so I can converse with people in the OTHER chats and fleet I'm a member of.
:rolleyes:
The issue is that it's not something the STO devs can do as the chat ban is handled by the shared chat server.
It is just as big a problem over in CO where it gets at least one thread every week complaining about the chat ban system, we've also uncovered that a standard ignore is counted exactly the same as a Report Spam and that the scoring system for chat bans doesn't depreciate.
Yes the system is messed up, are we likely to see a change, not really.
No offence but thats BS.The report spam thingy is in the UI.It doesnt matter if its a chat server or not ,you can remove parts from UI and leave the function there.Im pretty sure most people wont start typing lines of commands just to ban you.
Did you just read the first line or the entire post?
Removing the Report Spam button would have zero effect as the Ignore button can trigger a chat ban.
As for your suggestion, we have pointed this out over on CO, they said they'd look into it and nothing happened so it presumably got vetoed by the higher ups.
Smooth move.
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
Yep, considering that PWE/Cryptic staff has the Thanksgiving holiday off and likely won't be back in the office til Monday.
Anyway, this would illustrate the problem inherent in automated banning systems: They don't have the human quality of discretionary judgment. They can only think in two states. Ones and zeroes, off and on, either it is or it isn't. No inbetweens or gray zones.
ROLL TIDE ROLL
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
You were stupid to participate in stupid Zone Chat. Next time just STFU and don't try to be witty because you come across as an idiot.
Even though I had to work today and wasn't able to waste my life in-game, be glad that a mod wasn't on or they'd have been handing out more than just chat muting.
The only winning move is not to play...so turn off zone chat.
I've been ignored by several people just for talking in Zone Chat. I have yet to be 'muted' for it. And people who know me also know how vocal I am. So yeah if you TRIBBLE off just enough people to get muted, you know you irked the wrong people.
TLDR: STFU with trying to be cute and reciting **** lyrics to a **** song. I'm glad you were muted and wish you were banned instead.
Why Season 7 is better than you realize
Raise Refining Cap for Gold/Lifetime!
Because someone with the attitude you just displayed is TOTALLY worth having as a fellow gamer, lol. Exactly the kind of armchair warrior that's not worth my time.
Sshhhh he is trying to be a wannabe troll :rolleyes:
and what has that to do with ban exploits?
Also please show me where it says what you are allowed and not allowed to write in chat.If you dont like somehting doesnt mean is spam and needs to be removed .If you cant support other people go play singleplayer games.
If you want reliable chat without game flaws and general stupidity, get your friends on a program like Xfire and simply turn zone chat off.
I only use the chat window for NPC, mission and system messages and Xfire for communicating with people I actually want to talk to, zone chat hasn't been missed.
Zone chat is taking on the greatest issue in the history of mankind, an epidemic like no one has seen since the black death.....The loss of Twinkies