New Britannia Postal Services

So the idea of a postal service has come up a couple times in other discussions so I thought I'd put it forth as a topic of its own.

This idea is basically an immersive in-game messaging system but should also allow you to ship items to players as well as messages (not to be confused with chat channels). This would be mostly handy for when you need to leave a message to players who are offline or for whom it is inconvenient to meet up.

The postal service would also double as a gold sink.. no one is going to deliver your mail for free after all. A fee will discourage "junk mail".. and there should also be flexible block options that you could configure at the post office or your own mailbox at home.

Mass mailings:
It should be possible to send mail to groups of people.. such as a specific list or all residents of a town.. members of a guild and the like. However, each additional recipient means a higher postage fee. Guilds sending to guild members could perhaps receive a discount?

This would allow for some junk mail such as vendor / crafter ads.

Mail Types:
When sending messages you would select what kind of mail to send. Personal mail, ads, guild mail (if applicable)... and also who from. You can list yourself, your vendor or your shop.. guild members might have some other options.

Blocking / Filter options:
Players should be able to block from senders which might include guilds and also by type of mail. So let's say you don't want to receive ads from just anyone.. but you're in the market for a new blacksmith in a particular area so you set your filter to receive ads from blacksmith shops or something.

Shipping Items:
Shipping an item would cost more and be limited to 1 recipient for obvious reasons but anything that can go into your inventory you should be able to ship.

Restrictions:
You should NOT be able to ship to other characters on the same account. (This is assuming multiple characters on a single account are allowed.. just covering the bases folks).

Postage/shipping fees:
Postage and shipping fees will vary by distance and possibly by destination. If sending to a location in the same town this should be relatively cheap. If sending elsewhere the price goes up depending on how far away the destination town is. If there is a lawless town then anything being sent there will cost more due to increased risk to the couriers.

Caravans:
An over world map encounter.. you might expect to see caravans moving between towns. Perhaps you can help them out or attack and rob them for all sorts of interesting loot and corny love letters. Note that you should not be able to intercept player shipments.. or more accurately you should be able to prevent anyone from receiving shipments/mail if either the sender or receiver is not PvP enabled.

IF both parties are PvP enabled then maybe.. just possibly we could consider allowing mail and shipments be hijacked.. (messages would still be delivered but hijacking the delivery might give someone access to a copy?).

Actual delivery of shipments and messages would generally take place after a short delay and not necessarily by any caravan schedule.. but also should not be instantaneous. Perhaps 1 game day per so many hexes?

Delivery:
If the player owns a home then deliveries will arrive there. If there are multiple homes then perhaps the sender will have to select which town to send to.. if multiple homes are in the same town then perhaps it can be random.

If the receiver does NOT own a home then the sender will select a town to send to.. the letters and items will be held at the local post office it was sent to for the player to pick up.

Am I missing anything?

 

If the postal service is too thinly disguised as a gold sink, people won't use it. I've played a number of games that charge for sending messages, charge for sending good, charge for everything, and in games like that, I don't use the postal service. Instead I'll use the guild forums, or the group storage at a guild owned building. Design your game to make it easier for people to interact. Don't charge them to interact.

 

I believe this concern can be addressed with proper pricing. If it costs you 10g to send a letter to the next town.. then as you say.. people probably won't use it. If it's just 1g though? Who's going to miss 1 little gold piece? As a gold sink it shouldn't be used to draw huge amount of gold from the economy.. but tiny amounts spread out across the community could have a modest cumulative effect. Of course I prefer a multi-coin currency in which case we'd be talking silver or even copper rather than gold or whatever the currency happens to be.

 

Heh, contrary cuss that I am, if it costs me a copper, I'll not use it. If I have free alternatives, why should I?

 

lol Well if we're just talking a simple message that can be delivered by other means that's up to you.. but let me give you some practical applications..

Say you're out hunting down a PK with your buddies and through the course of conversation one of them wants to borrow a book from you on anti-PK strategies. You have to leave soon and don't have it on you and you don't know when you'll both be on at the same time. So when you get a chance later you find the book and ship it off to your friend.

Another scenario perhaps more for myself.. let's say a guild leader wants to be sure a message about an upcoming event is received by the entire guild ASAP.. but not all guild members check the forum on a regular basis.. and believe me the larger the guild the more of those kinds of members there are.. so you do a mailing to your guild members about the event so they'll receive it in-game as well.

Or say you want a leave a message to someone who doesn't have access to your guild forum?

 

Scenario 1. Post the contents of the book on http://oracle.the-kgb.com. If it's important enough for one guildie, it's important enough for everyone.

With respect to scenario 2, most games have guild chat that feature Message of the Day functions. "Hey, dumb guys. Check the following post on the Oracle."

Ventrillo also has the same feature, and everyone uses Vent, even if they don't check the forums.

This is not to say the idea is a bad one. For players less organized, it would probably be a good thing.

 

Bah! Ok then smarty pants. (yes I'm joking)..

Business partners.. 1 harvester.. 1 crafter.. Crafter pays in advance for a shipment of iron.. the harvester goes out and collects but now the crafter is offline. So the iron is shipped. Or you have a favorite weapon smith from whom you commission a new sword that gets finished while you're offline.

Besides.. no one is going to force you to use it. But there are scenarios where it's convenient.

 

I think the first question really is.. Will SotA have mail?

No AH system (yay!)

No global chat channels (im all for this although i think Portalarium should immediately contact the ICQ people and start co-op dollars for the increased business they'll see. Its still better the most other IM's IMO. Although i use Trillian and use them all).

So will there be a mail system? If its been indicated i apologize, missed it.

As far as to the mechanics of said system, im not concerned.. Mail systems exist in almost every online game. Our devs have each used dozens+ at a guess if not created some. Im sure they'll use the best aspects of each...

But while im ok to toss out RP/immersion for many things.. And while sure, i can create my own RP as to how the mail works (bats, pet doxins, pigeons, etc)... This is one area that if we DO have mail id like to see a background for it.

I think a special race of critters would be great. Maybe something that has teleportation, a use for currency, and for whatever reason(s) only act in the world as mail carriers *shrugs*

Maybe there is even just one single being that handles mail (grim reaper, santa claus... The mail carrier)

In LOTRO hobbits tend to be attributed as mail carriers (fitting for that world). In harry potter we had familiars.. In the transporter we had Jason S. Mail is important, that it will get there safely, unviewed, quickly, etc.. Is a lot of important things. So something i hope we have a nice established RP in place for.. Although i can live without it.

 

I think the very suggestion implies the addition of a mail system and while colorful I don't see a need for any special critter or fantasy driven mail delivery. What's wrong with good old fashioned people? They have to communicate in the world do they not?

I don't think the question is whether or not the world would have a mail system.. so much as what is the literacy rate in the world? If we assume that more NPCs can read and write.. then there's going to be mail of some kind. Written letters are pretty much as old.. or older than books and scrolls.

Pets as carriers does bring up an interesting question though.. as trained birds have long since been used to carry short messages. The problem I see with this is that it seems like it would be very limited in message length and something you'd only really do if the receiver was online.. in which case why not just use the chat function?

 

No thank you! The last thing I want is junk mail in SotA.

Add whatever other mail features you wish, as long as the following option exists:

Only accept mail from accounts explicitly on your friends list. [ Y | N ]

(Game / NPC messages will always be delivered)​

Otherwise, it's just a pipeline for gold spam messages, regardless if it costs to send or not. The intent is good, but it will be abused 24 x 7. And if you don't think it will, in both Rift and GW2 (two recent examples) gold spammers used the in-game mail system for exactly this reason, and this was with a fee to send, and with a "report gold spam" button on email.
In one case, I personally reported a particularly bad gold spam mailer for over a month before they stopped. Every day. For a month.
So again, No thank you!

 

Mhmm, a mailbox is something I inquired about a while back (It didn't get a solid answer). I would like to see a way to send offline players items, be it a delivery service or a mailbox at their home you personally leave things in. The devs have seemed eager to find ways to interact with friends that might not be online the same time you are, so I hope this is one of them.

 

I believe I accounted for this with "block / filter options". But now I'm curious.. just what is "gold spam" ??? That terms doesn't make any sense to me. I'm pretty sure it's not someone sending me gold.

My only real concern on this point is what the default settings should be. Mass mailings off from all senders except guilds the character is a member of sounds pretty good to start with. But I think legitimate "local" advertising (ie vendors from the same town as your home) should be acceptable.

And remember.. the idea was a fee PER recipient.. AND extra for distance.. so it should add up if someone is trying to send en mass. it's just finding the right balance.

 

Gold Spam is mail used by nefarious players whose sole purpose in game is to sell gold for real money, regardless if the company permits it or not.
Typically, the MMO company starts out with the naive belief that an in-game messaging system won't be abused. So, it starts out with players sending out several dozen, hundred, or thousands of /tells per second to all players in game, repeated telling them things like:
"$50 for 1 million gold, easy fast delivery, contact mmogold now!"

So, a whole bunch of normal customers get angry, and they put in /tell frequency limits. Then the gold spammers multi-plex the gold spam over several dozen accounts, until...
The developers put in an option that says:
Only accept private messages from your guild and players on your friends list [Y / N].

At that point in the arms race, the gold spammer switches to in-game mail, and sends out again, dozens, hundreds, or thousands of mail messages per minute containing the same message. In some cases, they actually do attach money or an item to ensure the mail gets stored for the maximum amount of time.

Yes, you did mention block/filters, but your description puts the onus on the receiver to block the sender, which is not effective. You'll receive dozens of mails per minute/hour/day from dozens of unique accounts, and your block list will be finite. What do you do when you run out of block slots? That's the same problem with using ignore filters for stopping in-game spam /tells. You only have a finite number of ignore slots.

Best to just start out safe rather than sorry.

 

Interesting.. well my thinking was to block/filter by type of mail sent. It's meant to be tied into "mail type".. you wouldn't be able to send out a mass mail as "personal" for example.. you'd have to categorize it as a specific type of add.. ie vendor sale.. shop specific. political (if we have town politics or something similar) and then you'd simply block all ads or have them blocked by default.

If you were looking for a new favorite blacksmith you'd enable ads from blacksmiths.

Ooooo it just occurred to me you could also use this as a sort of newpaper delivery system. Some groups do enjoy writing news and articles.

Ok expanding the idea.. Subscriptions! hmm.. might not need a mechanic for it but it would basically enable mail from a specific sender or type of sender.

Anyhow.. my point being that a gold spammer would be required to assign a category to their messages in order for them to sent.. making them that much easier to block. You wouldn't need to block by account.

 

Ok, so they'll use whatever category isn't blocked by default, and then one message of each category, and/or of each possible combination of categories. This isn't an an impediment in the slightest.

 

And if there is no category they can use that isn't blocked by default? If it's a concern then all you need to do is say all mass mail is turned off by default. And you're assuming the game's UI will allow a bots to mass send frequently.. there is also the assumption that a single mass mailing will reach everyone..

So with that in mind I guess there is one thing I did forget. Mailing to groups.

To start with.. there should be no 'global' group to mail to and if there was.. there's no way you could spam everyone and keep it up. You wouldn't have any gold left to sell. Send to 1000 players.. pay 1000 gold.. oh wait.. 900 of those players are in other towns.. pay 5000.. every second? That'll add up fast. How would they expect to sell gold if they've gone none left? Anyhow..

Groups would be town residents.. and.. well honestly I can't think of any others. Guild mailings should be mainly guild only. Just groups by town and you could limit that to home owners.

Yeah ok so you say they'll just send to all towns.. but it's going to be a pain.. it's going to incur significant cost to spam it and they shouldn't be able to do it quickly.. I don't envision any scenario where they can simply open up a window.. select groups.. paste a message and then mass click a send button. or paste send - paste send - paste send. XXX *buzzer* XXX

Rather you go to the local post office. Interact with an NPC.. hand them a letter and postage saying "I'd like to send this to <name> in Britanny" .. they confirm it's a valid address and ask you to be sure it's where you want it to go etc. This is not meant to be a chat style interface.

 

All my posts in this thread presume there would be no mailing lists, nor any ability to send to more than one character or player with one mail. Gold spammers use individual accounts, they send individual mails. No assumptions of one->many or any similar mechanisms.

Any interface that's meant to be an impediment will be scripted via a variety of mechanisms or the API calls (if exposed) used directly. Even this:

would be trivially scriptable. As far as cost goes, any cost they put will be a speed bump. Increasing the cost to counter the gold spammers will simply punish the legitimate players, to the point where it won't be used by legit players if it's made "effective".

As far as implementation of a communication feature that is disabled by default... well, I think that speaks for itself.

 

Surely detecting that sort of thing would be trivial.. it all has to go through and be verified by Portalarium's server.. and there's no need to increase the costs.. the cumulative cost of mass mailing would add up quickly at the rates you're talking about.

How about this assumption then.. that the gold spammer will be able to both acquire and maintain enough gold to sell. The economy must first allow for rapid wealth accumulation to be able to sell gold on the level you're describing. First they have to get the gold in enough excess which would be an economy problem.. not a messaging one. If the economy is not abusable at that level then how is this going to become a serious problem? Are they going to do it just for kicks and giggles?

 

As a pure crafter, I have to state my case against this:

1) A mail system in game is just asking to be spammed. Sure, you could make it so that only friends can send mail, but then you'd be constantly adding people who you are trying to conduct business with and then deleting them. I'm torn on the idea of an instant message system in game as that too is easily spamable. I would much rather do business over my old trusty ICQ, in a chatroom that is moderated or in a moderated forum.

2) Sending items... again, no. It takes away from the face to face interaction between players.

3) I've always liked the idea of caravans but only if they are fully player run and not automated. However, the idea of moving wagons has been shot down before so I'm not sure if that's possible. Plus, if banks are universal it makes the need for a caravan much less.

I like the game to be as player based as possible without automated systems. It enhances player interaction and gets people more interested in making new friends (or enemies).

 

Presumably with #2 at least you've already had face to face interaction.

This is one of those things where hey.. you don't have to use it if you don't want to. I don't even think I'd use it much.. Players will play how they like.

As far as basic design goes I don't see a major issue. If you know what the problems are and how they occur then there's a way to deal with it. (ie spam). Not everyone's going to want to use it for whatever reason.. that's fine.. but if other people want to use it and it doesn't impact you negatively at all then why not?

I'd rather not use "some people are going to act like jerks" as a reason not to do something.