A Question For Eric and Bioware.

You're right, someone might not like working with such a high stress job...

So what do you suggest? Just let it go? Do nothing? Because doing something seems to be what you disagree with.

I suggest player moderators. Only specifically to deal with spam. I don't really feel like we need to regulate in-game chat in general.

Problem is BW can just do the herd animal routine. As long as the majority of game companies aren't bothering to deal with it, or can't effectively, they can consider it not worth any investment.

That player mod for spam idea sounds good.

I don't disagree that something could be done, but I do disagree that its simple, cheap, and effective.

Player moderators is one thing, however, finding those players is difficult. At best you would have a player base "committee" that goes beyond one person opinion. Something kind of like LoL where you have high end players vote on an action based on the chat logs. Which isn't much different than what they have now in house, where it gets reported and delt with eventually. The problem is, the system for dealing with them is slower than what people like, and also is not "permanent". The BEST way to get rid of them is to stop having people purchase their goods.

You mis interpret my disagreement, I am only disagreeing in the methods since any method is not perfect and will not solve the problem. Take your example for instance, short of having someone police the gen chat 24/7 on every server there is no way of having an immediate response to the spam without inconveniencing someone at odd hours. I dont think someone on call would be sufficient to get the response people desire, since it would be up to them to decide if its worth logging in at 3am to squelch a spammer.

If you got a phone message every day @3am to report a spammer, how long before you just put it on ignore and waited until 9am to answer it? IF you got a message every 5 hours 7 days aweek how long before you just stop caring and quit? How much would that person have to be paid? How much is it worth to the company to implement a new system beyond the /ignore already there?

There are such a thing as player mods on forums who don't form a committee to discuss post deletion. What I propose for in-game chat, even if used on someone who isn't spamming, should at worst be a moderate inconvenience, while still achieving the goal of stopping a gold spammer until they make a new account quickly and efficiently.


Bioware chooses player mods.
Player mods get an additional "Ignore for spam" button
This button functions as a 3-day chat ban for specific channels, namely "Trade", "General", "PvP", and "Say/Yell". If used incorrectly, it shouldn't interfere with a person's ability to play the game this way.

The only question is about an appeal's process. Given that gold spammers are more likely to create new accounts than appeal this, I think a simple peer review of appeals and chat logs by fellow player mods on the server should suffice.

Wouldn't it be interesting, then, if someone who amassed hundreds of millions of credits legitimately and wanted to mess with people on the way out of the game sent randoms (or even people he disliked / on his ignore list) mails with 2-5 million credits saying, "Thanks for buying credits from me!"?

Enforcement is problematic. You don't want to hurt innocents. There's no way to prove anyone bought credits, or sold credits.

But they can fix the spam programmatically. Blizzard did it in WoW. The easiest, first step is ban all F2P accounts from all chat channels except guild, party, and operations. A more involved way, and what Blizzard did, is to write an intelligent, learning chat filter. Another option is to automatically chat ban a F2P account if it gets N unique accounts worth of spam reports in a short period of time, say 50-60 in 3 minutes.

don't disagree, problem is it will be a never ending job. People don't want it to be a temporary thing, but a permanent solution. And probably an immediate response. Unless you have a huge selection of players on all servers available at all times, it goes back to what we have now where its reviewed by someone and a ban put in place "eventually"

There is no solution beyond what we currently have /ignore and report. Ignore removes from your chat and report allows the account to be flagged, which was fine during pay to play since opening a new account was expensive. When game is free, it becomes harder.

Sure its a never-ending job, but its not like they'll have to spend all their time doing it.

It'd take them about two clicks to mass-ignore a spammer on behalf of fleet. The spammer will take a while creating a new account and making his way back.

As for "constant" monitoring, well the premise is that people have different playtimes and schedules.

It's immediate as its a single person who happens to be reading chat at the time making the decision(also its biggest downside), it'll take care of peak hours and some off-hours to a large degree, and the cost is negligible.

Now it is by no means a perfect solution, but we don't really need a perfect solution. We just need a way to quickly silence gold spammers on a wide-scale. It isn't important that we catch every single gold-spammer in off-hours.

I have nothing against that. I'm just trying to be realistic and get others to be also. That the solution isn't simple and to temper expectations.

Getting a rapid response a few days a week at peak time might be achievable, but don't expect a rapid response every day, nor at odd hours on any given day, nor for it to be overly "rapid" at that.

Even if you have 1000 players per server, it will be difficult to control all planets, on both factions every day, even if limited to peak time. As long as that is what people want, fine, but most people seem to be wanting a permanent solution, not just a few hours of respite here and there.

I log in, ignore that days spammer, and move on.