PLAYER OWNED TOWNS AND HOUSES

Seems to me that this game will have more than 10 bad apples.

 

Yes, but 10 is a good place to start testing from. But yeah, I've got more than 10 on my forum ignore list...

 

Thanks for replying to the thread. I think it is (or will be) appreciated by all POT leaders. The system makes sense in principle and is what Ravicus and I discussed in this thread.

10 sounds a bit low. It is probably enough for day-to-day management and it would give Port time to investigate these matters. Obviously if such players break T&Cs and are removed from the game then they should be removed from the town ban list too. Where there could be a problem is for large player events: there is an obvious grief tactic of flooding a town with more than 10 people and being safe in the knowledge that some will be unbannable.

My suggestion to improve this mechanism would be to keep the 10 player permanent ban list but to introduce a temporary (1 day) ban list which can accommodate up to 50 people. The latter is to stop events being flooded with griefers, but accept that after an event is over the griefers might not care to bother coming to town (a permanent ban is heavy handed and more suitable for repeat offenders).

The notion of ownership in a digital context is fluid. As a point of interest, information cannot be owned in any legal sense within the UK (it isn't true of all countries, Germany is different, and I have to admit I don't know how it is in the US). Obviously you have paid for the insertion of a town into the game to be named and (somewhat) customised according to your whims but the word "ownership" is perhaps too strong.

If a person comes into your town and behaves as an idiot, what is it they can really do? They can't steal anything from you. They can't deface / modify anything. So the worst they can do is insult people and disrupt events by getting into people's ways. A ban from multi-player instances would prevent that player from doing all of those bad actions. In single player or offline modes they can do anything to "attack" your town or events. Moreover, it would be "impossible" for you to know they are even there.

 

Instead of limiting the amount to 10 they should just add a timer. You have 10 ban uses and they are renewed either when you remove the player from the ban list of when some time passes (1 day? 7 days?)

 

Two different things and two different mechanics/features.
Eviction removes a deed claim on the POT lot and places the stuff in the closest bank.
Ban removes the ability to enter the scene in multiplayer mode.

The simplest example is if someone goes AWOL for longer than agreed, then you might want to evict them so someone else can claim the spot, but you wouldn't want to ban them since they might come back.

The other example would be a temporary warning to cool things down where you might want to ban them from the multiplayer scene but really want them to come back once they have cooled off.

 

I feel the same way as Weins if a person does something severe enough to get a ban then they should be banned from the town in all game modes not just multiplayer.

However I understand that a multiplayer only ban is probably being implemented due to technical reasons although I would expect people to at least be heavily restricted in what they can do in other modes if banned, for example absolutely no access to chat while in town (if that’s even possible in other modes??) and ONLY access to the bank NPC and LOT, no other NPC.

10 ban slots is a good start but I feel it will need to be much much higher at launch because there will be situations that will require several people to be banned at once whether they are from the same guild or friends.

 

Additionally, the larger the town, the more players live there, the more services it offers, the higher the chance for a guild or organization to exist there, etc, and thus the higher the chance for attracting trolls. Perhaps the number of ban slots should scale with POT size, from 10 for a Holdfast to some larger number for a Metropolis (I'd suggest ~60-100).

 

A multiplayer-only ban makes sense. And it's a damn elegant and performance conscious solution.

Why you would ban someone? To not have him/her around your property. But if you will never see him/her there because he's in SPO, what difference it makes from a total ban? Not that he can affect your MPO scene anyway...

If he's in MPO, you two cannot interact in your property. If he's in SPO, you two cannot interact anyway.

"If a tree falls in a forest..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest

 

The only thing I can think of that you might want to ban someone from a scene and not have them able to re-enter in SPO, is if you are trying to prevent them from accessing something like public vendors (or even more petty, prevent them from seeing something on a property, like a maze or construct). If we ever get the ability to tell our vendors not to sell to people that we have blocked, that first is no longer a problem, but being petty always is.