Sunday, March 7, 2010

Allod's Online: Spammers 4, Yeebos 0

I was planning a post about the crafting system in Allods. It's a bit of a pain since at low levels you can gather or craft items, not both. To make finished products you pretty much have to have two toons, one supplier and one producer. Once you do have both going, one of the best crafting systems I've ever encountered in an MMO opens up (really, it's quite impressive!). However, that is now seemingly another post. Allod's has been well and truly ruined for me by spammers.

Zone chat in Allod's has been surprisingly non sucky since I have been playing. Apart from prime time on the weekends, I've been really surprised by how helpful and friendly the folks in zone chat were. Of course, whenever I log, there is the daily ritual of adding gold spammers to my ignore lists. Therein is the problem.

The process of adding someone to your ignore list in Allod's is clunky. You double click someone's name, that adds their name to your chat window in such a way that you can ctrl+c to grab the name, then you mouse over your social panel and with a few more mouse clicks ctrl+v them into a window, mouse again to add them, and they are ignored. You can save a few mouse clicks by using the "g" button to open the social tab, but all-in-all it's a process of at least several steps. When you get really good at it, you can shut down a new gold spammer by the time they get four or five messages in zone chat. Which is all well and good, apart from one problem . . .

Allod's has the smallest ignore list I've ever encountered in an MMO. My main, at level 13, has maxed out her ignore list. Now when a new spammer pops, I have to delete old spammers from my ignore list manually in order to make room for the new guys. Since I can't ctrl+c names in my ignore list, that means typing out names like "aslkdkljasj" by hand. As you can imagine, that sucks. The gold spammers have also apparently decided to be as annoying as possible. Right before I logged, four started in at once. After getting about half way through the process of removing previous spammers from my list by hand to make room for the new ones, it occurred to me that I could be having a lot more fun doing practically anything else.

At the bare minimum, Allod's needs to implement right click to ignore from chat (standard in LoTRO, WoW, and several other MMOs) and make ignore lists much much bigger (infinite would be nice). As any toon that I start will max out their ignore list by the low teens, and have to jump through idiotic hoops to make use of zone chat from there, I'm backing off of Allod's for the time being. I could simply leave zone chat. But Allod's would essentially become a single player RPG if I did since I am unguilded on all of my toons.

Edit: As you can likely tell I was pretty ticked when I wrote this post. I thought about deleting it, but I've decided to leave it up. After sleeping on it, I'm not sure whether I will keep playing Allod's with zone chat turned off or wait for the developers of the game to come up with a better solution for spammers. I am curious to see the higher level content. However, being utterly unable to use zone chat would diminish the game. Even apart from being able to ask for and give out advice, zone chat is the main way of getting PuGs together for instance runs. I'd basically end up locked out of a lot of content without it.

5 comments:

  1. I was pretty dissapointed when I made it out of the tutorial and the first thing I was greeted with was gold spam in the chat window.

    Right now I have zone and local chat turned off, but it shouldn't have to be that way. It reminds me of the first couple of weeks of Aion's release.

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  2. Right-clicking to report a spammer and having them automagically added to your ignore list seems like it should be default functionality now, just like having a friend/ignore list to being with.

    Have you noticed if the spam drops off once you get out of the initial zones?

    I rarely see gold spam in LotRO or Star Trek, but when I do it's because I'm in Bree or the Starbase at Earth.

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  3. Dear MMO Developers,

    When designing your chat systems, please remember that other people are complete and utter morons.

    Thanks, your loving fans.

    ---

    Well said, Yeebo. I get the feeling that most companies are happy if people can chat at all. Asheron's Call 2 proves what failing that basic test means.

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  4. @Jaydub: yeah, that made a pretty bad impression on me too. When I could add spammers to my ignore list as they appeared, it a wasn't a huge deal...just annoying. Now that I've maxed my ignore list, it's passing annoying.

    @Blue: I am hoping that the spam will drop off once I get to the 22+ zone. If not, and barring some change to the chat system, that ill certainly be the end of Allod's for me.

    @Anjin: I concur. A robust system for ignoring morons and gold spammers is just as essential to a good chat system as being able to send tells or separate channels for party and guild chat. It boggles my mind how many MMOs stumble on that basic step.

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  5. That's an awfully small ignore list allowance. The gold spam annoyed me to no end in STO. I must have about 30 people on ignore by now and would have been really frustrated having to go through such hoops to ignore additional spammers.

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