Just Kill the In-Game E-Mail System Already
By
Agent79,
Posted on: 2009-07-13 09:40 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Annoying as spam is, IMHO it's usually hyperbole-free. The OP, however, not so much.
No. Spammers are now shunted to an easily ignorable area. I had a character who I hadn't logged on in awhile. When she logged in she had 131 emails. They were deleted in 10 seconds.
I will agree with nothing that even has the potential of sending the spammers to the chat system.
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
I don't like the idea of killing it, as there are at least a few players who actually make use of it for its intended purpose(s). How about an opt-out? I never use in-game email, so I'd like to be able to turn it off, if only to not have to bother with deleting the spam to get rid of the distracting red text that accompanies new messages.
Of course, as has been pointed out, that might drive the RMT vermin back into spamming private tells...
"And in this moment, I will not run.
It is my place to stand.
We few shall carry hope
Within our bloodied hands."
I would happily settle for the player having the option to opt-out of the mail system as well. The red text is an eyesore, and I'm tired of having to delete emails every time I jump on. Worse, having the spam hit while I'm playing is even more obnoxious.
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Of course, as has been pointed out, that might drive the RMT vermin back into spamming private tells...
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Haven't they determined that RMT spammers are using free trial accounts? I thought that was the whole reason they took alot of capability away from trial accounts (like private tells).
EvilGeko is right, anything with the potential of driving spammers back into the chat system is NOT a good solution. At least the spammers are currently contained and aren't annoying players via /tells or broadcast channels.
And Dollhouse is onto something here to... if the devs could just change the red text to a less distracting color, then I think the majority would be very pleased with that and the spammers can email us all they want. 
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I never use in-game email, so I'd like to be able to turn it off, if only to not have to bother with deleting the spam to get rid of the distracting red text that accompanies new messages.
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I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds the red text annoying. If they did something about that, I could happily go back to ignoring the email function like I always have 
Either remove the email system entirely, or allow for the option to disable it, or even just add a new button to "Delete All" emails at once rather than having to delete every message individually if you want to clear your email box.
A "Delete All" button should be easy enough.
Although at this point I don't even look at any email anymore, and I just ignore the red email text. It's already dead, at this point the only question is whether the corpse is going to be removed or just left to sit there and rot.
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...and finish the job the spammers have done on it.
Seriously, it has lost all usefulness as a player tool for me .
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Fixed that for you. I find the in-game email useful so I would like it to stay.
I certainly wouldn't mind some additional options, as long as I could choose to set them to work EXACTLY the way it does now.
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I just need a spam filter.
Then I can set everything = spam, and be done with it. ^_^
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...and finish the job the spammers have done on it.
Seriously, it has lost all usefulness as a player tool for me .
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Fixed that for you. I find the in-game email useful so I would like it to stay.
I certainly wouldn't mind some additional options, as long as I could choose to set them to work EXACTLY the way it does now.
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What? Didn't you read the OP? If it's bothering him it must be ruining the game for you. Because... um... he's more patient and tolerant and less prone to start rants on the forums. Especially not a new thread for a topic that has come up once a week since i9.
"Mastermind Pets operate...differently, and aren't as easily fixed. Especially the Bruiser. I want to take him out behind the woodshed and pull an "old yeller" on him at times." - Castle
The email system works great at keeping spammers out of my hair.
Leave it be, TIA.
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or even just add a new button to "Delete All" emails at once rather than having to delete every message individually if you want to clear your email box.
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This.
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
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...and finish the job the spammers have done on it.
Seriously, it has lost all usefulness as a player tool for me .
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Fixed that for you. I find the in-game email useful so I would like it to stay.
I certainly wouldn't mind some additional options, as long as I could choose to set them to work EXACTLY the way it does now.
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What? Didn't you read the OP? If it's bothering him it must be ruining the game for you. Because... um... he's more patient and tolerant and less prone to start rants on the forums. Especially not a new thread for a topic that has come up once a week since i9.
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Pretty much, yeah. I'm glad you agree with me. Welcome to this week's rant, it was my turn to start it- your turn's next week. Fight the power, brah!
I'd be happy with an opt-out too. But my point is mainly this: if a game system is so compromised by those using it for anti-game purposes, then it needs to be drastically altered or eliminated.
We're seeing a lot of other fundamental game-system shake-ups that were always tagged as unfeasible. I'd like to keep this possibility red-flagged for the devs as something that should be addressed as well.
Statesmonkey Sez: Lighten up! It's a game, for Lincoln's sake!
Also: Six years of casual play begins to look an awful lot like one year of hardcore play.
A while back, I might have actually agreed with the OP (Although I would have advocated filters instead of trying to kill the e-mail system). However, I've come to realize that trying to mess around too much with the e-mail system probably would cause way more problems than it would solve, since it would drive spammers to spam tells instead of e-mails. The e-mails are minor annoyances that take all of 5 seconds to get rid of most of the time but RMT tells are extremely disruptive. It wasn't fun when they did that quite regularly and I don't want that to happen again. I'm not sure how they'd react to e-mail filters but I don't know if it's worth risking the possibility of RMT tells again.
I know people are annoyed by the very presence of RMTers and want them removed from the game altogether, but that's just not practical. As long as there's an economy in any MMO, RMTers will be there to try to make a profit. Sure, we can try to squish them, but they're like cockroaches and will always come back. The best we can hope to do is try to minimize their impact and I believe we've done that fairly well right now.
Hey, at least you can look on the bright side. For every RMT account that gets banned, they have to waste some money for replacements since they can't use trial accounts anymore (Unless they have some way to avoid paying. I'm not sure). That money goes to NCsoft and, by extension, the game itself. Sure, it's not a lot but if they keep getting banned, it can add up.
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If they wanted to put the effort in, they could overlay a lot more spam-specific restriction. When I log in and see those 75 messages, most are from "empty". I presume that means the character was deleted, but tell me why I'm manually going through messages from an account that they know for a fact doesn't exist anymore?
If you wanted to get aggressive with it, why not text ban the names of the RMT sites? Spam's not very useful if they can't tell you where to go.
I can brainstorm a half-dozen ways to fight this annoyance. I'm sure others could come up with more. They just don't care enough to try. They're busy creating a new option to let you sort AE missions by the second word in the title.
But no I don't agree with the OP on removing it. People use it and if they're able to, more power to them.
I'd just prefer to have an option to disable it on a per character basis. Some people use the in-game email, and that's fine. I've never used it and the only time I use it is to enlarge my spam filter (which is already at max). I'd disable it on any character I create.
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If they wanted to put the effort in, they could overlay a lot more spam-specific restriction. When I log in and see those 75 messages, most are from "empty". I presume that means the character was deleted, but tell me why I'm manually going through messages from an account that they know for a fact doesn't exist anymore?
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It's bugged, I think; when they revamped chat a while back ( like adding the Ignore as Spammer button ), originally the Empty e-mails wouldn't show up, or would vanish right off. These days, they don't.
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I'm confused by something. If spammers moved away from tells because trial accounts can't send tells now... how are they sending emails? I thought trial accounts couldn't use the email system either.
If they can, then why not just shut off email for trial accounts? Almost no one uses it anyway except the spammers, so no great loss for trial accounts. I'd shut it off on my own full account if I had the option.
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I'm confused by something. If spammers moved away from tells because trial accounts can't send tells now... how are they sending emails? I thought trial accounts couldn't use the email system either.
If they can, then why not just shut off email for trial accounts? Almost no one uses it anyway except the spammers, so no great loss for trial accounts. I'd shut it off on my own full account if I had the option.
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Because they're paying for accounts with stolen credit cards. Money that the credit company takes back so NCSoft doesn't get anything from it either... and the RMTers get temporary use of "paid" accounts.
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...and finish the job the spammers have done on it.
Seriously, it has lost all usefulness as a player tool.
It's only impact on the gaming experience is as a method of intrusion into our gameplay by spammers. When was the last time you got an e-mail that wasn't spam? Heck, I don't think I've gotten more than 2 legitimate player e-mails in the 4 and a half years I've been playing. Spam? Pfft. Uncountable bucketloads.
And you know- when it's affecting *my* gameplay, it's got to be flat-out ruining the gameplay of people who are on playing for more than a couple of hours every 3 days.
Yeah, yeah, "We're working on it" blah blah blah.
Just kill it.
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So let me get this straight.
1.) The E-mail system is a source of spam.
2.) The E-mail spam ruins the game play experience.
3.) The E-mail system is useless.
So Main point: As the E-mail system is a source of spam that ruins the gameplay experience, AND is completely useless, it should be removed.
So I don't understand? If it's completely useless, how does it matter if it is filled with spam?
If it's a feature you never use, how does that spam ruin your experience?
If it's a feature that you use often, and the experience is ruined by spam, why would you want to have the email system yanked out entirely, since that would undoubtedly be worse than having spam in the inbox?
Are you really going to try and argue that the little text that reads "Email" and turns red when you have some is ruining your entire game play experience? Or are you really going to argue having to delete spam mail every so often is ruining the entire gaming experience?
Either way, I want to ask you this, how do you survive on the internets? Do you not get spam e-mail in your non CoX email accounts? And if so don't they ruin your internet experience and shouldn't you have quit the interwebz by now?
Sorry, but the E-mail system should stay. Yes spam is annoying, but oh well, if the E-mail system is really so useless then E-mail spam shouldn't affect you that much.
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I think the easiest solution is to just take the cap of the global ignore system.
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paytoplay_hero wrote:
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A "Delete All" button should be easy enough.
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Or a "Spam All" button. Since it's all spam, all the time, one click would make it even easier to ignore them.
--NT
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If you are one of the poor suckers that tries to use that disfunctional mess known as in-game email, then you can bother with the hassle of hitting the spam button a few hundred times a month, get-E-up, more power too you.
The rest of us that never use in-game email, relish the joy of all the RMT emails sent to the never opened purgatory of an unused system. I never get RMT tells, I never open my emails so I never get RMT emails, it really is a rather beautiful solution to the annoyance of the RMTers.
Yes the little red light on the email button is annoying, but after of few days of never opening emails, you won't even see it anymore. More annoying are the, "you have 78 new emails" tells I get every zoning; but I am practicing not seeing those too.
...and finish the job the spammers have done on it.
Seriously, it has lost all usefulness as a player tool.
It's only impact on the gaming experience is as a method of intrusion into our gameplay by spammers. When was the last time you got an e-mail that wasn't spam? Heck, I don't think I've gotten more than 2 legitimate player e-mails in the 4 and a half years I've been playing. Spam? Pfft. Uncountable bucketloads.
And you know- when it's affecting *my* gameplay, it's got to be flat-out ruining the gameplay of people who are on playing for more than a couple of hours every 3 days.
Yeah, yeah, "We're working on it" blah blah blah.
Just kill it.
Statesmonkey Sez: Lighten up! It's a game, for Lincoln's sake!
Also: Six years of casual play begins to look an awful lot like one year of hardcore play.