You can't control what people say and do within the game mechanics. It's like trying to enforce players not interfering with player-run events. The game-mechanics determine the laws of the game. If you want to make changes to the way people play the game, change the game mechanics. This will become more obvious once we get a larger player-base. There will always be people who will push it as far as the game mechanics will allow, verbal attacks included.

My point is that asking everyone to be nice isn't going to do anything at all with a large player-base. Nothing. Nada. Period. It's arguable as to whether or not it does anything now with our very small player-base. If you want to make changes to the way people play the game, change the game.

Obviously, threats and stuff that violate the EULA and Rules of Conduct need to be dealt with by the devs as they are now. These things will always happen no matter what changes are made to the game. As it stands, these events will get more and more frequent as the game gets bigger and the devs won't be able to handle it with their current staff. The solution is to make changes to the game mechanics that will make these events less frequent so it's manageable. Changes to the in-game communication system seems to be the most obvious solution.

Ok, that was classic blacknet.

I agree with the OP though, in that flaming characters is fine as long as the people behind the characters aren't treated that way. It's immature and it hurts the game for everyone involved.

Strat, as I see it, everyone is using code as a crutch for not managing the community.

No matter what game mechanics you put in or what awesome code you spool up to do stuff, nothing beats a human there, handling the situation.

I could suggest many "normal" things that would help, but I doubt they could be done. Such as:

- Make sure a Guide is around 75% of the time (might mean getting more)
- Hiring a part time community manager to handle the community and it's crap
- A better reporting system from ingame and the forums that goes to one of the Devs who gets the unenviable position of "Part Time Community Manager". make it official so people know who to run to, instead of running from one dev to another until they get the response they like or can deal with most.

That's just a few of my suggestions.

Neglect the community, and it will run wild.

I agree with you that more guides will help, moldyman. However, global chat is still a problem I think. It doesn't even really get used right now for anything productive, except by noobs.

How about making only 1 global channel and restricting its use to noobs and certain approved players? IRC could still have a presence there so there will always be someone around to answer questions. The trolls wouldn't have motivation to make trial accounts and spam the channel because the audience would be too small.

Also, we could restrict global chat (both sending and receiving) to in-station, like an intra-station bar chat. This would mean it would get very little use but would still be there if needed.

How about something as simple as making the default channel 11 instead of 100. There are tons of things the devs could change. Not only would some of these ideas help control trolling/harassing, they would also make the game more immersive. Kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

Yes, I always thought the idea of having "universe" chat channel kind of unrealistic. People would move around more if system and sector chat limited the shouting around a bit by having to be closeby.

I would hope that General Chat will go away completely once there are enough players to sustain a sector. I'd love to jump through a wormhole and say "Hey, anyone in Latos?" and get some answers. Gives you a neat local feel, and would make people feel like they actually went somewhere. Group and guild should stay universal, nation should work only within the nation (and then only for actual members of the nation) system chat to the system you're in, Sector Chat as it is, and general can die.

Right now there aren't enough players to sustain that type of system, but hopefully there will be eventually.

I agree. Didn't the devs said they are expecting to advertise and receive a large influx of players this summer? With this trolling/harassing topic surfacing again right before the time they said they plan on bringing in a larger player-base, it seems to be the perfect time to implement a new chat system.

Doing away with global chat would also make the game much more mysterious and exciting like tumble was saying. Traveling would be like exploring. You could interact with players you never had a chance to meet before. It would be more immersive and realistic. People would actually play the game instead of sitting in-station (or in IRC) and chattting.

The only roleplaying I do is /roll. That and my sweet sig.

{image deleted}- Sarahanne.

/roll eyes

I love that sig!

I'm definitely going to agree with Strat and Tumbly. Ch 100 as we know and love, should go away.

In ship, I thinks there should be:

- Sector broadcast
- Group broadcast
- Direct Ship-to-Ship Comm
- A very closely monitored Help Channel.

Maybe a couple special access channels, some recieve only channels (like 201 & 202 "should" be), and an "Event" channel or two.

I would go one step further and do away with Ch 11 (who uses it, anyway).

Global Chat channels should, however, be fully available in station.

Oh, yeah... Ion storms should knock out comms.

worth noting to those who want to see MORE people online. Don't drive them off with spam on 100 and go along with the general population when they ask you not to do things else people will leave and you will have a smaller population of people.

Next time someone throws a temper tantrum then lets just direct them to either daycare or a nursing home.

Here's the problem with removing 100 right now: we do not have enough users to sustain any kind of community with only system and sector chat.

We already get comments from a lot of newbies "Other than the chat, I never knew anyone else was online" etc etc. The universe is too big, admittedly, but I can't do anything about that now. The universe-wide chat is the only thing that ties it together to any extent, for the moment. It'd be fine for you guys, the vets, since most of you have buddy lists and stuff, and know what's going on. But for the fresh newbie, they'd basically assume the universe was completely dead.

I do advocate changing to mostly system/sector chat (with maybe a highly-rate-limited universe-wide chat) once we have more players. But it's a chicken/egg problem, we can't really do that until we HAVE more players, and if we do it too early, we risk not GETTING more players. As a note, we actually did the above chat scenario not long after launch in 2004, and ended up having to back down to the current situation, since it was too quiet.

Improving guide availability and whatnot is something we can do, and are working on. Michael is actually developing some cool administrative web stuff right now, which will eventually be adapted to our guide system as well (in game guide requesting and issue reporting that opens an automated "ticket" on our admin site and notifies a guild list if it doesn't find anyone online, and so on). Plus we're also looking at more guides.

The universe is too big, admittedly, but I can't do anything about that now.

Actually, and not in any way saying this would allow for elimination of 100's annoying Space-Quake existence, you can.

Seal the GR/Deneb wormhole.

I know the border war is a great place to test new content and all that. But the problem isn't so much that there aren't enough users for the space, as it is that those we have are pulled in two opposite directions to two places that are very far away to engage others.

Instead of having two opposite points of contact for players venturing out into VO, force them to flow in one direction: out of nation space and towards Gray. This would also concentrate trading/piracy opportunities, eliminating the chance for traders to pass between Serco and Itani space without passing through Gray.

Are there backstory problems with this idea? Sure. Would it be good to still have the border skirmish content, since we really lack content now? Of course--just put it all in one place for now.

Well, that's an interesting idea. But I don't think it would do much to address the actual problem for newbies. Regardless of how people move around, the sheer scale of the current universe allows them to be very spread out. It would increase traffic at grayspace choke points, but a lot of newbies never even make it that far. If we had something like.. 8 systems of 32 sectors apiece, you would frequently run into other people.

Anyway, since deneb is moving more in the "war-zone" direction, it might be possible to reduce traffic that isn't on a war-related mission. Limiting transit without actually removing the wormhole, military checkpoints and all that (ranging from something like Berlin during the cold war, to a front-line during a hot war).

This is all straying a bit from the whole "let's be nicer on 100" generic topic. I'm not going to be shrinking the universe in general, we're well onto our course of trying to populate it with more Stuff. So, I'll be trying to move forward with that, and see what we can do. Along with the Guide stuff, and so on.

Still off topic, but, when the border patrol mission was first introduced, the only bad part was getting there. I suggested a WH from latos to Deneb/GR (I called it the BP highway I think). I don't know how hard it is to instal a new wormhole, but it would definitely make getting to the big hotspots easier.

Thanks, Inc.

So, i miss checking the forums for one day, 24 hours and look what ya'll have done! Is the the king thread of off topic treads or what!! Amazing! Good thing I didn't read it all, I'm sure my shear delight would be dashed. Oh well.

It's not off topic. We're just...uh...delving into why these kind of problems occur.

Zamzx, that's simple. One word to answer that one, immaturity. The only solution would be more adult supervision.