DewiMorgan wrote: »So it's seeming obvious now that this is going to become an arms race: every rule added to the official release will be immediately downloaded and subverted by the spammers.
A crowdsourced list of UIDs to ignore might be a decent plan, but this requires a few things:
- a way to reload the list of ignores on the fly. It might be enough to do this on zone load, so that reloadui wouldn't become a distraction?
- a way to communicate our ignores to a central server (can you auto-message people using LUA? Or is this another "communicate with external program" problem?)
- a way to whitelist ignorers. At some point, under this system, the gold-spammers will get the bright idea to install the app themselves, and to start ignoring people at random in order to taint the blocklist. At that point, the central server needs to switch over to serving ignores from trusted sources only.
For the moment I'm stuck on finding ways for Lua to communicate (read/write) to external programs. Having a small window down in one corner of the client that changes color seems a decent way for Lua to communicate outward to a program monitoring that corner of the client screen, but sending messages *to* Lua from outside feels like a hard problem. Streaming keystrokes or mouseclicks to it would interfere with the user playing the game.
I respectfully disagree. As it is a multi-player game which hopes and strives to cultivate a community for both social enjoyment and team play (groups and guilds); it is arguably critical to the success of the social component that communication channels are not universally ignored or flooded, as that would go towards making an unwelcoming environment for new players and reducing the willingness of players to engage in the social components.
I respectfully disagree. As it is a multi-player game which hopes and strives to cultivate a community for both social enjoyment and team play (groups and guilds); it is arguably critical to the success of the social component that communication channels are not universally ignored or flooded, as that would go towards making an unwelcoming environment for new players and reducing the willingness of players to engage in the social components.
As an avid player of runescape for many many years and knowing how persistent gold farmers are let me tell you that the only thing the reports will end up being used for is a heat/time map on the locations and times on when they are most active.
The only way to destroy the gold farming/selling business is to kill it at it's source. It is not something any player or group of players can do. It's up to Zenimax to employ strategies to combat them. Reporting them doesn't solve anything. Infact the only thing we CAN do is not buy the gold and ignore them.
If everyone who played ESO had this auto-blocker mod it would be great, it would shoot down their advertising capabilities. I would love to see Zenimax create an official in-game option for a auto-goldfarmer/spam blocker that we could turn on/off ourselves.