So today (actually right now at the time of writing) there are three unnamed users spamming shouts and in global, and many of the players online have complained about them. Since they are spamming shouts and skirting around the spam rules in global, under current guidelines, they cannot be punished. My suggestion, therefore is to allow staff to warn users when they are annoying other users through shout and global to a lesser extent. I would say this falls under the general trolling rules, as these three users are indeed trolling, but usually only server admins/andrew punish for trolling. Hoping to generate some discussion here. I would have filed a complaint for trolling had I taken screenshots for future reference. edit: I am a former troll so I know what it is like skirting the rules. It's easy to do and be obnoxious while doing it, too.
@oxwood2 I shall spend my money on shouts as much as i want to. It removes money from the economy and helps. If you have a problem with my shout spam please install macro mod and get the macro that blocks shouts. -1
I don't think any person that just wants to enjoy their time on ECC cares if money is leaving the economy - these actions ruin the experiences of playing our server for many. In my opinion this falls under using loopholes to evade the rules, which is illegal. Actions must be taken in order to solve these issues that ruin the server, both shout spam and trolling in general. This solution would absolutely be beneficial to our server and would make our chat more enjoyable and welcoming to all users, instead of irritating and repulsive. +1 Money should never be an excuse to break rules or be excused from the punishments that occur after breaking a rule, more commonly known as corruption. If it were, the world wouldn't be a pleasant place, and ECC should not be any different.
It's not as much about shouts as it is about the trolling. Shout spam is merely one component of trolling
"removes money from the economy"... at what cost, though? At the cost of alienating a significant portion of the playerbase? At the cost of dissauding new players from joining the server? Because I honestly think that whatever gains from being annoying with shout spam are far, far outpaced by the negative effects it has on chat, when it comes to annoying other users and fueling toxicity. There's this myth around that whatever takes money out of the economy must be good because it stabilizes the economy. However what we keep forgetting is that when it comes to the economy, how its designed is our choice! There are many many other ways to take money out else than shout spam. So the question is not whether shout spam takes money out of the economy, but rather whether or not shout spam is an optimal money dump to choose from. And when considering the fact that it annoys players and scares off new ones, I'd say it certainly isn't. Not to mention, the proposition that we need more money taken out of the economt is highly dubious itself. A bit more inflation couldn't hurt, espicially considering the fact that it will help facilitate player-to-player trading which is a good thing and what makes ECC the economy server it is. It's also worth noting that oxwood's thread wasn't specifically directed at shout spam, but just listed it as one of the many forms of trolling that need to be cracked down on. But I'm just specifically throwing out my arguments regarding shout spam before any other players bring up that logic regarding shout spam again.
The level of trolling on the server has significantly gone down but so have the number of players. While I agree that trolling has to stop, I believe we are already making significant progress right now. Forcing staff to moderate shouts is yet ANOTHER thing they have to look after, and ANOTHER place that people could be potentially mispunished. I don't think shouts really have to be moderated, since the purpose of them is to get a point across. Of course they can get a little bit spammy sometimes, but the nature of shouts is that people pay to be able to be a little bit spammier than normal. Making staff moderate more things could potentially create a harsh environment that causes more players to leave. Tldr: The staff are doing a great job reducing trolling now, there's not much that needs to change.
There are already people leaving because of excessive amounts of trolling at times. As well, I honestly don't think trolling has gone down at all in the last year, rather its stayed the same or increased. Shouts might cost $1000, but they shouldn't be a method to bypass a rule. I spent more on Patron than I'll ever spend on shouts; the rules should be the same for both and both should be treated the same, as well as all chat, yet people that use shouts get, to some extent, leniency?
ehhh no one really gets leniency in a shout, if it bothers you it probably bothers a mod and they will handle it.
No the spam was awful today. I have not seen worse shout spam since Revan and her friends were staff and would spam.
I love adding actual numbers to expressions like "sometimes", so let's look at the data @Pivillean has gathered in the past 359 days. Total shouts since August 3, 2016: 6214 = 6 214 000$ ≈ 17 309.19 $/day Shouts where the same character is used at least five times in a row: 3049 = 3 049 000$ ≈ 8 493.04 $/day Shouts where the same character is used at least ten times in a row: 373 = 373 000 = 1 039.00 $/day I decided against searching for pattern repetition (e.g. words) or sending multiple equal messages in a row because I don't have that much time right now. So... I have seen the "It removes money from the economy" argument many, many times. Therefore I want to put this into perspective. Our former ServerAdmin Dewsy92 once made a post about /sell returns and lotto tax in late 2014. The numbers he mentions show that lottery and /sell both work - or at least used to work(?) - in the 7 digit range. When talking about "shouts remove money from the economy" we actually mean "All shouts combined remove as much money every day as the lotto tax does in 28.8 minutes". Honestly, the economic effects of /shout are - at least in my opinion - negligible compared to the large money sinks. EDIT for accuracy: I love current data. I had no idea how well the 7 digit data from 2014 still fits, so I did a quick evaluation for July. I grabbed all lottery purchase messages, then removed all purchases by andrew. The total number of lottery tickets purchased in July 2017 is 112205, which means that 16 830 750$ have been removed via lottery tax. Therefore, 601 098.21$ have been removed every single day. This isn't as much as Dewsy originally mentioned, but the relevance of shouts went from 2% to 3.3% - which is still not that much.
Why not just increase shouts to 5k each? It seems win-win - people who want less shouts still likely get it - people who say that if they spend money they can say what they want still can
Just because there were more shouts and more spam than normal that day, doesn't mean we should scrap or change a system that is working on the whole
Because what if people want to use shouts to legitimately attract attention and don't want to go broke?
tough? there's no drawbacks to them being 5k... like, sure, it might price some people out... but 5k isn't a huge difference and won't matter for people only shouting like, once. even if the change were enough that people just stopped buying shouts altogether, it honestly wouldn't hurt the economy's bottom line.
Great! Let's let the assholes of ECC ruin everything for those who use the same things properly! How about a shout cooldown? But instead of like, a shout per timeperiod, give people, for example a total of 5 shouts for 5 minutes. Whether they choose to use all at once or one a minute, keep it the same total, kind of like trade ads.
yes, well, "ban annoying people" does not make good policy. this addresses the issue at hand and frankly trolling is not a huge issue. staff can already hand out punishments as they deem fit for trolling. because frankly if someone wants to spam a ton of shouts @ 5k per then I'm game for that
