Hey there, My suggestion is short and simple, a lot of people have been complaining about macros spamming up trade chat and some have even suggested blocking the ECHO command in macro mod (The one that has you issue a command into chat) all together. So I propose, instead of blocking the ECHO command breaking a bunch of legitimately useful macros (See tinyurl.com/eekmacros for some examples), change the rule for trade messages to being 2 unique messages per 3 minutes to being 2 unique messages per 4 or 5 minutes. This way you still get to advertise with your macros and use the ECHO command and trade chat doesn't get clogged up as much. And in case anyone says 'but advertising should be something you put time into' (@UnitedStates2), I understand where you're coming from, but not everything needs to be a tedious hassle on this server, even if it is a 'hardcore' economy server. Thanks for the consideration.
I think the real problem is the afk machine spam. It doesn't really matter how regular it is, people need to be there rather than just keep posting the same thing over and over again.
I would rather suggest making paid trade ads. Something like $70 per message, or better, $1 per character. Would it be a pain to implement?
then make it 20 cents per character. IIRC there's a max of 140 characters per line. So you would be paying $28 for a completely filled line of chat. It would certainly reduce the spam you see now, without being extremely expensive. Hell, the price can be even lower to 10 cents($14), or 5 cents($7).
I just don't see why money should be brought into this, those small amounts add up, especially if you're not very wealthy.
I agree. My "$1 per character" was just to make a rough idea, this could be tweaked and adjusted over time precisely to the server's needs. Everybody would be able to afford a one-time ad, and macro-ad-ers would have to find a balance between spending money on ads and getting people to their business. On the other side, prohibiting afk ads would be a total pain to enforce, and we would just have one more totally useless rule.
I have nothing against people advertising while AFK, but I really dislike the idea of having to pay for ads...
But let's go back in topic with the suggestion: it would surely not complicate the rules (just a change of a 3 into a 5), but I don't think it would drastically change anything. So, +0,5, meaning that it would be better than nothing, but I still think something more drastic should be done.
The way I see it is that shouts are like paid, highly effective advertising while trade chat is the less effective version of advertising since everyone uses it and it's in a less visible colour. Fair enough, thanks.
Completely reasonable. Every 5 or even 7 minutes is more than reasonable in my mind, especially when there are 10 or more players all running macros and filling the trade channel with their important information.
The big issues I have with having paid trade chat messages is that it discourages people from using the chat (Therefore you have less people selling/buying things), it seems to hurt people more than it would help, and it could potentially be very harmful to the poor, while meaning nothing to the wealthy.
Please, not this. As @RyanBlocks2 said, afk auto-ad-ers would just use /ch tr, while the inability to use /ch qm tr would make life a hell for non-afk auto-ad-ers that want/need to chat meanwhile. It would kill the baby without getting rid of the bathwater.
I witnessed that lol. I do agree with the suggestion. It is hard for users who dont have the macro to get trade messages out, when people are using the macro AFK to send the message
