Pumping Irony

In its first weeks of public life, Warhammer has already become badly deluged with gold spammers sending tells every few seconds. Gold sellers and their spam are prevalent in nearly every MMO with an economy and gear. WoW was bad but Blizzard dealt with it to a point, and a few Lua addons helped as well. Mythic is promoting someone’s Lua addon, SpamMeNot, to deal with the situation but obviously this early in WAR’s life, it’s a bit limited in functionality. WAR’s current ignore list is so small (10 I think?) that the problem is exacerbated when SpamMeNot becomes unable to perform that part of its duty.

Early in LOTRO’s life, players were also bombarded by tells from gold spammers. The only way to avoid them was to set yourself anonymous, which is also the only way around it in WAR. That is truly a shame, because while it hides you from the spam-bots, it also hides you from the real players who may be interested in knowing if there’s anyone in their zone to group with. Turbine added a spam filtering system to LOTRO’s chat servers a long time ago, and I honestly cannot remember the last time a spam tell got through. Sure, if I go to Bree-town I may occasionally find a spam-bot spamming the public channels. Turbine also made it very quick and easy for players to report the spammers.

Instead of annoying us with announcement frames that pop up in everyone’s face when a spammer is banned, and relying on someone else’s Lua code, Mythic had better be dealing with this internally and come up with a real solution.

Are gold spam tells in and of themselves game-breaking? No. In fact, between WAR’s wonky chat system and not alerting you when you get a tell, I usually have no clue anyone sent a tell unless I happen to see it. I normally only see tells if I’m paying attention to and participating in guild chat, because there’s little to no conversation on any other chat channel in the game so far to bother looking at the chat window. But the gold spam tells are one more small issue in a huge list of small issues that when combined, can indeed be game-breaking. Zubon already canceled his account, the spam being the straw that broke his camel’s back.

If I may, I’ll go out on a limb here and state that all the non-technical issues with WAR seem to stem from Mythic’s “avoid other MMO’s” philosophy during development. It’s as if they just made Dark Age of Camelot 2 set in the Warhammer universe without having a single clue what features, UI capabilities, etc. we’ve grown accustomed to and expect from all the other games since DAOC.

All the problems can be fixed, yes. All the problems will be fixed, and likely in very short order. That’s not the issue here. That Mythic could — and should — have been aware of all this before-hand is the issue, and it’s disappointing to see an otherwise polished, high-budget AAA title launch with the handful of  primitive ass-backward features (the chat system and the tiny ignore list being two minor examples) that stick out like sore thumbs.

As I said earlier the only way in WAR to truly avoid spam tells is to set yourself anonymous. Some even set both anonymous and hidden. The in-game community is already borderline anti-social. It’s by far the quietest game I’ve ever played with respect to the amount of players chatting anywhere. Now on top of that, we’re all anonymous and hidden, so no one even knows anyone else is there unless we physically see them.

In LOTRO, there’s been no reason whatsoever to set yourself anonymous for at least a year since Turbine added their spam filtering systems. On my server at least, an interesting side-effect to anonymity has reared its head: many players are refusing to group with anonymous players who “don’t exist” because they don’t show up in /who lists or the social panel. I find I’m slowly becoming one of that group as well. If I see a group being advertised in LFF or GLFF (a global user channel) I may be interested in, if the /who result comes up blank because that player is anonymous there is a very good chance I won’t bother following up with a /tell to find out who they are, etc. I’m playing an MMO to interact with the other players not to have everyone lurking about hidden from each other.

It’s difficult to tell if WAR will suffer a similar fate, especially with the surface-level of anti-social behavior that has run rampant since launch day, but the longer players feel they must be anonymous the more difficult it will be to convince them — as well as new players who will also go anonymous and hidden due to word of mouth — that it won’t be necessary if or when the problem is solved.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 2:08 pm and is filed under LOTRO, MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.