Tells & Freedom: How Frees could use it without RMT hell

Simple. There is another MMO where they had Tribbles with a group of players that made a game of singling out someone and petitioning him or her until they got them silenced. As I recall the offending group called it chat channel PvP. The group had enough members in their fleets that they could hit the required number of petitions necessary to auto-silence people.

It quickly got so bad that GM's had to step in and start banning people in the offending group.

Ouch.

See, this is why we can't have nice things.

Yeah. the group in question was from yet another space MMO that prides itself on open world sandbox PvP, and they were all members of the same faction in that other game.

EVEntually most of them either got themselves banned or tired of the game they were harassing and went back to their original game.

I would agree to this ... but it should be where they don't know their chat's can't be seen. All they know is no one is responding. There should be no "you have been marked as a spammer by 20 people and can't post this chat for a full 24hrs." Give the annoying people a punishment for harassing others.

They will just make another account..... Period ... They need more to just IP bann the RTM spammers when they are reported if that's possible... If they are all in the area "area" it should prevent a bunch for the time being..

I'm... slightly confused, why are people talking about this as a hypothetical change, rather than a feature which we already have?

Because this game has never made a big deal about it. Until Freedom launched trial account chat channel restrictions were effective enough to pretty much muzzle RMTers.

Actually, whenever something is proposed for anything pretty much it should be asked "how can this be abused?" then "Can we counter/fix that?" and then you weigh it against what you want to do and if the problems it could cause are worth the problems it fixes or features added.

For example... War is horrible. War is waged by living things. To do away with war one could easily kill all living humans... This is not something that any living thing would agree with so not a viable solution.

Turning back to the proposed solution... letting any section of a populace silence/ban a person... Seems like a good idea because if that many people dislike that other person they have to be a legitimate problem...common sense says so... but it dismisses why that person is unliked or who dislikes them. Someone who follows the rules and reports legitimate troublemakers will be hated by those troublemakers and the original person acts right the more those who they report will react and ban together to get rid of them.

basically there is a 2000 person culture with several sub-cultures... as well *** sub-cultures of them where the sub-sub-cultures not getting along and wanting to get rid of another.

This isn't about sub-cultures trying to silence each other, as in my proposal VIP's and premiums can't be silenced, and free players can't silence other free players. It's about people being plain unwelcoming of new players en-masse, which is a disgusting possibility i didn't think of.

Making a new account cannot be done by a bot, as far as i know.

1. IP addresses get faked by legitimate internet providers for valid security reasons.

2. So screw the legitimate customers in the banned IP area? Yeah that won't drive away customers by the thousands.

Groups = Sub-cultures... VIP, Premium, and Free Users are all groups.

And stating your definition of groups is important to this discussion because?...

No, no, no.

The last thing free players need is to be singled out as such like that. It may be well-meaning, but all it would accomplish would be letting VIP/Premium players weed out all the "noobs" they don't want to invite to their team based on short-sighted assumptions. A free account already has to depend on non-free players in order to team with anyone; that would only be compounded by giving those other players a means to go down a list saying, "no, no, no, no -- oh, there's a VIP! -- no, no, no...."

You're not going to turn free players into paying players by encouraging the the already-paying players to exclude and ostracize them.

I respectfully disagree. While some players will undoubtedly make the worst assumptions many more of us will use that as a tool to spot people that can't respond to us in most chat channels and as a flag to know who may be unfamiliar with game mechanics and require help learning how things work.

The great players far outnumber the jerks and most of the isolationists pretty much moved themselves to Exalted where they can't offend Freems and Prems.

Isn't that what the big "Help Me!" tag they (voluntarily, mind you) have hanging over their heads is for?

I don't honestly think it would be about "jerks" making "the worst assumptions" so much as people simply not wanting to deal with the extra work that comes with inviting a free player. Which is not to say it's much work at all, but how often do you drive somewhere you could have walked? How often do you use the microwave instead of a regular oven? How often do you call your next-door neighbor on the phone instead of knocking on his door, or search for the TV remote instead of getting up to change the channel? Present people with two options, identical in all ways except that one is more convenient than the other, and they're generally going to pick the more convenient of the two. Not out of malice or even laziness, but just because... why wouldn't they?

I mean, if you did a search and saw two tankers in the same zone as you, both the same level and both looking for missions, but one was clearly marked as being unable to respond to tells or use most chat channels while the other obviously could, who would you invite to fill the eighth and final slot on your team? Being perfectly willing to help a new player who happens to end up on your team and being willing to invite someone who needs that help when you could invite someone who doesn't, are worlds apart for most players, in my experience.