Black List

I know this is a touchy subject for some, but I think it should be brought up. The devs have eluded to the fact there may be a black list ability where you can put people you don't want to see on a list and they will never load into your game.

I'm hoping this is the case, since:

A) There won't be a strong moderator presence as far as we know.

B) There will be people out there to ruin other peoples games by generally being a internet nice guy.

C) Some people just don't get a long. You shouldn't have to spend time with people you don't want to.

I know there is a FPO and SPO that we could technically go into to avoid these people, but it would be nice to play online and take away some of the abilities of greifers to ruin the game for people.

 

Considering that the technology supports this kind of feature anyway, there's no reason why it shouldn't be in. A good additional feature would be a stat that monitors how many times a certain account has been blacklisted. The more blacklists someone is on, the lower "priority" they have when checking to see who to populate an individual's game with.

Advantages:
-Reduce griefing. If someone is bugging you, blacklist them, and bam, they are no longer a part of your game world ruining your gaming experience.
-Effectively eliminate gold spam. Gold spammers will be blacklisted quickly and often, basically erasing their presence from the game world without any need for moderator intervention.
-Further improve the quality of players met in OPO. If the blacklist stat mentioned above is implemented, then eventually the only people you will meet are quality "rated" people, creating a fantastic overall community. The people who are continually blacklisted will likewise be more likely to be 'grouped' with other blacklisted players.

Disadvantages:
-Potential for abuse in PvP zones. Someone afraid of getting killed may simply blacklist everyone they see in a PvP zone. This can be moderated by only allowing a blacklist to apply changes after reloading an instance.
-Whining from griefers.

I'll definitely be championing this throughout alpha and beta

 

I think the abuse in pvp zones could be contained by making it that you can't do it in said zones...you could do it once you were no longer involved in that...that way even the greifers that are in there will be called on it.

 

Blacklisting promotes things like externally maintained, third-party "community" blacklists that cause effective ostracization of individuals, whether it's deserved or not. I'm reminded of various third-party systems designed to punish leavers in DotA matches, but in reality anyone could add anyone else to the list for any reason, which resulted in repeated kicks from game lobbies.

I mean, I get all the buzz about PK'ing being the hot topic this weekend, but in reality I doubt this will ever be a real issue, that someone is camping or hounding or harassing you and you keep running into them over and over. The only place I can see this happening is in town, and even then it's still probably not going to be a big deal, the matchmaking system is supposed to be really good about helping you see people like you at around your level. I guess it would be good to have something to tell the game servers that you don't actually "like" someone who is a friend-of-a-friend in the game's matchmaking system, but a blacklist is not productive overall.

 

After some discussion in the chat room i think i can consolidate some of my thoughts and some of the thoughts and ideas that really speak to me here as follows:

1- obviously this could be abused... for example a player who has been around a long time and has blacklisted anyone who is a threat will have a huge advantage over everyone else. this goes against the point of this list, especially since it should help the newer players the most, who will be at the greatest disadvantage

2- its a great way to ensure repeated harassment does not occur between any 2 given players...

so how do we consolidate these 2 competing issues? I think we should use the same techniques used in network engineering and information security.

create a round robin short list as follows:

- a player can black list anyone they have contact with. there might be an additional prerequisite, such as one player must flag another or something... whatever. ill leave that up to the devs to decide.

- that player goes on a round robin list for up to some interval of time, lets say 48 hours.

- there is also a whitelist to avoid messing with the game mechanics and abuse. for example if i am in a warring guild or opposing faction, you cannot blacklist me. the whitelist rules might be a little complex but getting a handle on it should be easy after some testing.


you guys think this is a good start? thoughts? ideas?

 

I disagree that it's not productive and it's only partially to do with PK.

There's not going to be fully open PK in the game, there's no worry about new or non-combatant players getting killed while crafting or whatever. However, there are a number of ways to grief, such as spawn-camping (yes, you can camp at an entrance to an instance), camping at crafting resource points, following people around and aggroing mobs to them, or simply being an ass. I'm most worried about the latter.

While you can argue "well that's the risk they take", it's true. But remember this isn't a sharded game. You're never going to be able to block every single person, because the game will just keep adding more. There could be a limit to the number of players on a blacklist, a limit to the number of times you can add to your blacklist in a certain time frame, or only be able to access it in certain areas, like safe areas (towns).

You can also make it so that the blacklist simply doesn't work in PvP zones, or simply reduces priority of players.

Another alternative is not to have a blacklist, per se, but simply a ratings system. If you rate someone "bad" then they are just less likely to appear in your game if not not at all, but if they are the only person in a pvp zone TO add, then you're just stuck with them.

Again, PvP is the only real problem with the proposed blacklist. I'm more worried about NON-pvp situations, myself.

 

@tekkamansoul: whats wrong with spawn camping? thats an essential part of the game.
i want to camp spawns.

 

I can't make an opinion until we know more about things like thieves. Blacklisting is abused way too easily as Urganite said. Can you just blacklist a thief and suddenly there is one less thief to worry about? That's exploiting game mechanics in my opinion. Can you block the big named pvpers who are known for hunting in high value quest areas that require you to be in danger?

The other thing is that people need to remember this is an online game with options to control how many people you see, not necessarily who you see if you have it set to see people other than just your friends. There will be different personalities and playstyles. If you don't want to have those in your game, then keep it set to friends or yourself only. I believe it goes against the spirit of online gaming to be able to pick and choose exactly who you see if you're wanting to be part of the larger community.

 

I'm not sure about that Mystic...in a normal game we could get a mod to deal with issues....this one is different, where the potential for the inmates to run the asylum is way to high due to the fact we may not have a lot of MODs. This is a cheaper alternative to not having things go chaotic.


The question is how will we deal with PVP and theives.


I'm thinking if you are open to those playstyles maybe the Blacklist would be disabled. Those areas would require more moderation then.

 

I don't think that blocking a harassing player is abusing game mechanics; and I disagree that waiting for someone to come into the instance and killing them before they've even finished loading is totally fair. Some people do, and that's fine, those people wouldn't add said players to their blacklist.

Naturally this is speaking without any knowledge of how the mechanics behind pvp actually work, just like everyone else, but again, I'm not worried about PvP. Other situations are where my opinions are coming from.

The number of times I've been in PvP and said "I want this person deleted from my game" have been very very few and far between, though I understand that there are going to be sore losers who are going to try to block everyone that kills them. I think it will work out with the right restrictions because, again, you CANNOT block every single person in the game. It literally isn't possible (at least not without spending months doing so). Someone is always going to take their place, unless the game is completely empty to begin with (not gonna be the case).

This isn't a sharded game. We're not talking a server population of a few thousand. There's already 20,000 people that are going to be in the alpha and beta - no blacklist is ever going to get that big. There will always be other people.

What I'm worried about is tailoring my online experience to what I want, without having to be reduced to blocking EVERYONE that I don't know (FPO). I want to play on OPO and I want to be able to meet new people, but I also want the option, and there's no reason why I shouldn't have the option, of removing people from my game whom I don't want around harassing me. Because in every online game I've played, I've met people like that. Again, the game technology is going to be performing similar operations in the background anyway, I just want a firmer say.

Remember, "everything is exploitable".

 

I see no reason not to allow the blacklist. It would be no more abusive than switching game modes.

 

I agree with PrimeRub. There is no reason to not allow a blacklist. If you have a friends list then a blacklist is easily doable.

This can be no more abused that switching modes which is a confirmed feature, and would most likely take affect in a "safe zone" like the mode toggle. The tech being used already has some sort of relevance engine that will populate your world with people it thinks you will like. A blacklist just ensures your game is tailored in a way that would give you the most enjoyment, which - as I have understood - appears to be a goal of this project.

With the growing intolerance in the forums and in chat between "certain factions", I think a blacklist is a necessity unless Portalarium would prefer people leave the game (or go single player) to avoid the other element. Because of this dynamic sharding system, I imagine it would be difficult to have GMs that can help with griefers and I believe the goal is to provide a system where GMs aren't really necessary. A player controlled blacklist is a good solution because I may enjoy PVP and PKing but that doesn't mean I won't want to avoid jerks that the system may randomly drop in.

I will make sure to bring this up, and push for it, in the developer forums and chats that I will be involved in.

 

Am I missing something? The ability to '/block' or '/ignore' another player is an old feature and basically universal on every large multi-player game. I would be shocked if it was not in this game, as it should be.

Now, is that what people mean when they say a 'blacklist'? Or has someone suggested a communal list of blocked players that could be subscribed to? I don't feel that is necessary. You want to ignore someone, you do it on a case by case basis.

 

I also was thinking about this. The problem could be when some of your friends add someone of you black list in your party... But maybe this ca be solved just with a system text "You cannot do this: Black list not compatible", or something similar. :S

 

@Eriador,

Actually, I would think that if you have a "friend" with a person in their party on your blacklist then your friend would not be brought into the game until they stop playing with that person. The same way if your friend is in Open mode and you are in Friends.

I really look forward to seeing the mechanic/UI for friends which should give us a better idea how this would work, but if you actually have a way to try to manually sync up with friends (force them into your world) the I would imagine some sort of error message would present to both players. Something like:

Player A wants to invite you to your game but is blocking Player Y.
Player B cannot be invited into your game because you are blocking Player Y.

 

im still completely staggering here....lordrex wrote something i agree with. i need a shower or something.

 

I would rather have a way to report players that are griefing. Perhaps a LoL style tribunal if there aren't enough mods. Punishment could be to force them into a lower level of online play for a while. PvP down to PvE, OPO to FPO to SPO, etc. Perhaps this would get them to improve their interactions with other players.

 

I am sure you will be able to report players, but if the matchmaking is automatic you could find yourself being placed in the same world as the "griefer" through the weekend or at least a few hours of game play. I don't think players should have to suffer or that Portalarium would need a huge staff to police.

Just give the power to the players to tailor their experience. They will already have a friends filter so a whitelist isn't much different.

There should also be a list for Arch-Nemesis too, so you can flag people you want to fight against to included as well. This way the people you want to fight against can be the "good" bad guys rather than jerks you want to avoid.

 

@Umbrae, an interesting idea, instead of the usual /friend perhaps also a /enemy that puts the 'foe' on a separate list that provides for other interactions. Maybe NPC's will tell you where in the world they last spoke to another NPC or something similar.

 

Thanks, Phredicon!

I would definitely like input into who I fight against. Sometimes random people being tossed in is ok, but if I am hunting a player down or escaping from them (because I want them to chase me) then it might be good for the player to have control over than without calling them a "friend".

Of course that could just be a setting on the friends list like Type of Friend: Enemy.