I ask you again... for a full ignore

[andveryginger]

There are individuals in this game who show up every night, harassing the Nine Corellian Hells out of others. While I have to admire their dedication to bullying fellow players, it gets old, and legacy ignore doesn't do even half the job it needs to. No, we don't have to group with them in content -- fantastic -- or see their conversation in /gen or /say chat -- also great, but they are still able to continue their harassment by other means: Spamming emotes to feed the scroll; spamming mounts; and spamming other non-targeting abilities. And yes, this is more than a nuisance. This is repeated, targeted behavior that has not been addressed by the numerous support tickets already submitted.

So if customer service is not going to be responsive enough to address it, then the technology in-game should.

Edited March 8, 2023 by andveryginger

[Vendettus]

An option to completely make another player invisible is essential.  How in the world can there be emotes that allow one player to take physical control of another for any reason? And yet there I can be when all of the sudden my character starts aggressively dancing without consent, and this can go on until the harasser gets bored or I log out.  It's nonsense.  How can a public area allow for flags, or giant kriffing mounts that can be weaponized against players?  Give players the ability to completely ignore others, making them completely invisible to them if they desire will improve the quality of the game for everyone and actually make harassment claims disappear overnight since we could just take care of it on our own.

[Nee-Elder]

11 hours ago, andveryginger said:

 but they are still able to continue their harassment by other means:

It's been like this since launch 2011/2012 , so  i'm guessing it must be some type of CODE hurdle inherent within the game-engine itself.

Otherwise, why would BioWare  not have changed it by now?

Makes zero sense imo.

[LD_Little_Dragon]

1 hour ago, Nee-Elder said:

It's been like this since launch 2011/2012 , so  i'm guessing it must be some type of CODE hurdle inherent within the game-engine itself.

Otherwise, why would BioWare  not have changed it by now?

Makes zero sense imo.

Bioware has not changed it because bioware does not care.  They put the items in the game that let others players control your char in the first place.  They do not give a F*** about players who do not like those items.

[andveryginger]

4 hours ago, Nee-Elder said:

It's been like this since launch 2011/2012 , so  i'm guessing it must be some type of CODE hurdle inherent within the game-engine itself.

Otherwise, why would BioWare  not have changed it by now?

Makes zero sense imo.

I agree that there might be coding limitations to what they can do. On one hand, they have shown themselves to be very creative in dealing with the engine when need be, practically having rewritten the thing since the original developers went under shortly after purchase. On the other hand, I realize that they will eventually hit a few walls with what they can do, and this might be one of them. Perhaps the move to 64-bit will help. Perhaps it will not. I have never written or modified code at this level or complexity, so I can't say. 

I will counter one thing: While it was never perfect, it was slightly better with launch, in the 2011 - 2012 era, because the game/support was more fully staffed. I can remember gold spammers being silenced and kicked much quicker. As time and budgets have been cut, this seems to have suffered; the time gold spammers stood on fleet, hawking their services, grew more and more extended. They have, however, made a concerted effort to discourage gold farming, and the flood timers seem to work decently most of the time. That the game isn't quite as popular as it once was also factors into this, of course, creating less demand for their product.

Thus, if the solution cannot be implemented through encoding, then customer support has to fill the gap. And that, unfortunately, has been lacking for many years. Tickets submitted only take snapshots of text; any further investigation requires going into server logs and determining if other actions, such as toy/mount spam, took place. This takes time and manpower -- an investment that needs to be made, to maintain the full playability of this MMO for everyone -- RP, PvP, and PvE players alike... especially since there are always going to be jerks who get their jollies from bullying or harassing other players.

That said, I have played this game -- with a brief gap -- since launch. I have enjoyed the hard work of the art department, the writers, the coders, and the devs; I have also appreciated the work done on these forums, especially with a bit more effort to herd the cats and open communications these days. Have there been mistakes and mis-steps along the way? Undoubtedly. But nowhere else can I immerse myself quite so fully into the galaxy far, far away with the many friends I've made over the years. In short, I just want to enjoy the damned game, but the failure of EA/BWA to find a good solution here ultimately affects that.

TL;DR: If they're going to keep on a "quality of life" kick, then this needs to be addressed, too.

[SteveTheCynic]

1 hour ago, andveryginger said:

On one hand, they have shown themselves to be very creative in dealing with the engine when need be, practically having rewritten the thing since the original developers went under shortly after purchase.

The original developers of *what*, exactly that supposedly went under?

You certainly aren't talking about Simutronics, because they are still in business, nor about Idea Fabrik who bought the HeroEngine from Simutronics and are still around.  See e.g.:

• HeroEngine - Welcome to HeroEngine!
• HeroEngine - Wikipedia
• Simutronics - Wikipedia

[Shayddow]

the gold spammers are still around. I was playing on Leviathan during prime time there (France is 5 hours ahead of where I play from) and the spammers started on fleet. In English. (Leviathan is a French server). And their pitch was in dollars, not Euros. Pretty stupid.

 

[andveryginger]

6 hours ago, SteveTheCynic said:

The original developers of *what*, exactly that supposedly went under?

You certainly aren't talking about Simutronics, because they are still in business, nor about Idea Fabrik who bought the HeroEngine from Simutronics and are still around.  See e.g.:

• HeroEngine - Welcome to HeroEngine!
• HeroEngine - Wikipedia
• Simutronics - Wikipedia

Here, a bit of a history lesson:

https://forums.swtor.com/topic/768204-the-end-of-heroengine/

A quote from the post (emphasis mine): 
 

Quote

 

In any case, BioWare fully licensed the engine and source code, they had long discussions with the HeroEngine developers and made various improvements to the engine over time. In 2007, BioWare was purchased by Electronic Arts but everything continued normally. Around this time, development on Elder Scrolls Online started and they also used HeroEngine to quickly start developing the game, but they later wrote their own engine and no longer use HeroEngine. In 2007-2008, SWTOR was announced but it took a few more years before we knew that they were using HeroEngine.

In 2010, Idea Fabrik purchased HeroEngine from Simutronics and they created HeroCloud, which is the same as HeroEngine except the game is hosted in the cloud, so developers can just start developing without having to run their own servers. There were hundreds of developers using HeroEngine to test out ideas but only very few games that made it to release, The Repopulation is one of the biggest ones after SWTOR. Since SWTOR's release in 2011, BioWare continuously updated the engine on their own (which at BioWare means, outsourcing it to the Russians at Sperasoft), which is why it is very different from the original HeroEngine now.

 

I had a similar conversation with a few of the BWA staffers at the last Cantina event I attended in 2019. Not much had changed -- Simutronics was purchased by IdeaFabrik, and IdeaFabrik is still around, thus so is HeroEngine. But, during the financial issues, there were issues getting support; it was also noted that the engine couldn't always do what they had expected it to. Thus, the EA/BWA team license used for SWTOR has been heavily modified, probably bordering on a new beast. It's also why, sometimes, they get odd bugs popping up, as the code interacts in ways they don't expect (as if programming doesn't do that enough on its own at times).

That said, it still doesn't change the fact that something needs to be done about all the BS spammers.

 

[andveryginger]

3 hours ago, Shayddow said:

the gold spammers are still around. I was playing on Leviathan during prime time there (France is 5 hours ahead of where I play from) and the spammers started on fleet. In English. (Leviathan is a French server). And their pitch was in dollars, not Euros. Pretty stupid.

 

We just don't see as many over on Star Forge these days.... Of course, I say that, and will probably jinx it. 

[RowanThursday]

Essentially what we want is the ability to de-render other players entirely. 

The game can do that- it's clear from various occurrences that instances and things are phased to use the phrase WoW adopted for that sort of thing, rather than geographically separated, so the ability to edit out undesirable meatbags is present. You don't "have to" see everyone on a line of sight to you occupying the same location in game data, there are plenty of conditions whereby you don't, already. 

That isn't to say it wouldn't lead to extra work for the devs, to implement a new criteria of "Is that player muted to the other one", but still, the basic mechanic is there.

I really can't think of a good reason for not implementing this.

If I choose to ignore Darth Jar Jar because he's a griefer, a spammer, or harrassing me knowingly or unknowingly, then it can surely be taken as read that in addition to not seeing his chat, I also don't want to see his speeder, his AOE spam, or any other details- or to be affected by any of his toys- snowball launchers, social emotes, etc etc. Who suffers as a result of this?

Darth Jar Jar? He can still see his epeen speeder on his own screen, he doesn't have any right for it to be seen on mine. He can still interact with all the players he hasn't annoyed. If he's annoying players by accident, then the number he's isolated from will be relatively low. If he's annoying players on purpose, then his losses don't matter. I don't see a downside to ignore also including a complete de-render.

[StrikePrice]

Unfortunately, you will never get this. It will not work for many technical reasons. Things like emotes and actions that have to go to many players in the vicinity are handled at the network layer very differently than things like chat. 

My recommendation is to use your stronghold on the fleet. You can still participate fully in chat, but no other toons can come there that you don't explicitly allow.

[RowanThursday]

Well, it's not really that pressing an issue for me personally, since I avoid the Fleet like it's contaminated with Rakghoul Covid at the best of times anyway, but I do think if you're right that it's impractical, that's very unfortunate. 

My reasons are simply that the undirected chaos of the crowds of players and their associated mayhem (I believe you call it "humanity" (tongue-in-cheek)) honestly makes me feel rather unwell and disorientated very quickly- but if people are being on the receiving end of directed chaos from vermin using the game to intentionally harass others, then that's a more serious issue. 

I don't mind avoiding the Fleet- it's not a "me" sort of place, and realistically, the main player it would be necessary to change, in order to make a busy social hub be a place I'd feel relaxed in is me, so, me not liking Fleet is basically fine- but, if other people who like that sort of thing are being deterred from spending time there and the social advantages (forming groups etc) that come from being there, because of the anti-social behaviour and obnoxiousness of certain deliberate bad actors, that's a far more significant problem that there is a certain duty on Bioware to address.