Time to make some universal chat channels level required to use

The spam has gotten ridiculous, seems like on a daily basis I am putting 20+ names on ignore but it doesnt help because the spammers just make level 1 alts and spam, delete them after a while and rinse and repeat with new level 1s with generated names. Scammers also using level 1 alts to broadcast/set up bazar mules. They know their mains are pretty much ignored so they make level 1 alts and then broadcast to send tells to their mains from the level 1 mules to get around ignores. There was a very annoying person very well known on Oakwynd that would just log in and start CHatgpting universal channels for hours and he would just cycle through dozens of level 1 alts a day when he felt enough people had put him on ignore.

I would like to see a level 20 requirement to type in all universal channels except for new players and guild related which would be open from level 1. You could still see all channels from level 1 and send tells to anyone you want, but no typing or broadcasting until level 20.

Getting level 20 is fast now, takes maybe a day or 2 and would not impact the people leveling from 1 as new player channel would still be open to use and find groups.

I think with a higher level requirement to start typing in universal channels it may cut down on the # of trolling and bad behaviors going on.

How many of the people you are wanting to target would just use automation tools to level up to 20 and keep up with the spamming? And if they can't send messages won't they just send tells to people they see using the chat?

I mean, his suggestion isn't perfect but the inconvenience of getting to 20 would stop some of them for sure. And sending messages to people in tells is less people affected than... everyone.

The suggestion isn't a perfect solution, but what is. Unless they get on top of banning/suspending these guys, which they don't appear interested in doing, anything would help tbh.

A typical Waring response of making perfect be the enemy of good while also offering zero alternative solutions.

I doubt this will solve your issue and with all the problems with chat to begin with, it would not help to add more restrictions.

Live servers have a F2P restriction that keeps them out of General and even kicks them out of New Player chat at level 22 so they have to auto join it then.

Silver is half dog half cat. They are free but can chat in General.

FV has a General that is always full and no second General Channel spawns so everyone is dumped into "Planes" and "Newplayer". Players over there actually make "join General" hot keys they click over and over trying to get into it.

BB or is it AB? constantly has issues with their chat not working at all.

It would be easier for a player to close the general chat window and start private chats with passwords to get around the spammers.

But don't be like the one guy whose guild made a private chat and then complained there was a spammer in it - well they invited him in and would not kick him out - so there ya go.

We need regular expression filtering of chat much like text parsing programs do for looking at logs. I know IRC is old as hell but it gives server operators and channel owners many tools for spammers. Certain server sources had the ability to set channels or even globally across all channels to regex kick ban people with certain phrases said in the channel. We could use the same filtering to just hide the chats client side. Or give moderators and owners of channels the ability to set regex filtering to kick/ban people.

I know this because I ran an IRC network for many years.

When the spammers can easily bypass it by using their own PL groups to get the spammer to level 20 or just switch to sending tells it doesn't seem like this change would actually fix anything. All I see something like that doing is preventing lower level players from joining chat and forcing players to level up their bazaar toons to level 20 (or what ever the level is) so they can chat in channels when they want to advertise something.

What does that solve when the spammers can easily level a toon or just switch to tells instead of spamming general? It would also prevent new players from chatting and bazaar toons to be leveled so they could also chat.

What good is an idea to solve a problem when it will do almost nothing to solve it or actually make it worse by changing the spam from a chat channel to tells?

One way to have the best of both worlds would be to leverage the "Report as Spam" feature of the chat window. The more times chat from the account is marked as spam, the higher the level the person needs to be before they can join General. New accounts can join as level 1's, but if their chat gets marked as Spam enough times, then they are locked out until they reach a certain level. If their chat keeps getting marked as spam, their lockout level goes up to 20, 40, 80, 100, ... Spammers would eventually get their accounts locked out completely and they'd have to create a new account. Sure, some KR spammers can spin up endless additional accounts, but this would be a burden on them having to level up characters and would reduce spam. Normal people wouldn't be affected by this and could chat at level 1.

Blizzard had the same problem of carry spam taking over every channel in WoW so they added an official new channel for them to spam in and mute people who spam it in the wrong channels.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/new-services-advertisement-policy/1307494

So what's you're idea to stop the spam or at least mitigate it? Because clearly DPG won't just ban the account. This is your problem in literally every thread. You love to play contrarian and constantly critique things, but when it comes to making solutions or being asked for an alternative you immediately disappear or say "it's not my job to." Well, it's not your job to play official forum thread criticizer or dev lobbyist as well, but you spend a lot of time doing it.

Again, I point out that what is being asked for on TLP will clash with Live. F2P cannot ever join General but can still spam /ooc etc.

There were a few "spam bugs" in the past where accounts were erroneously marked as spam and not allowed to even send tells.

In fact back in 2019 they had to loosen the spam filters as part of the fix.

This might be of interest also:

In EverQuest our system doesn’t mark you as spam because a player reported you. It marks you as spam because you’re doing things that our spam algorithm believes are spam.

Note that even if you are being targeted by other players, they aren’t the reason you’re being flagged as spam. Player reports affect the spam algorithm and go to our team to evaluate spam accounts (generally for plat selling, and other website spam).

I don't see them putting much effort into this "evaluation"

People are not and should not be required to provide an idea about something in order to point out flaws with a suggestion. If this was an easy idea to fix it would already be solved and just setting a required level to send messages in chat doesn't do anything to solve the problem.

All this idea would do is increase the amount of spam tells that people get because the spammer are no longer able to send chat messages.

How common are spam tells? I'm not sure that's really much of a problem. I've never gotten a single one, but I've seen lots and lots of spam in chat.

Another thing to remember is there is a command on the test server that buffs a character to level 25. Unless that is disabled or the ability of test to connect to live test servers is disabled the spammers can just move there and continue.

Yes they should because that's how engaging conversation happens. Pointing things out is easy and lazy which defines your entire forum persona. You provide nothing constructive...ever. You're a living embodiment of forum rule breaking

And I've literally never received a spam tell. What kind of nonsensical baseless arguments are you making up?

Direct tells aren't real common, but I've received a few over the years. I'll leave my toons in the lobby overnight for buffs, and when I check in the morning, there might be a tell from some rando. It's typically someone recruiting for a guild, either on Drinal or another server...sometimes it's random people trying to sell something.

Doesn't happen that often, but it has happened.

Giving players a way to block cross-server chat is a missing feature that's long overdue. They don't have to completely disable cross-server chat (although I would be okay with that). Give us a way to turn off cross server chat if we don't want it to show up in our chat feeds. This is really an independent issue different than the OP. Whether or not they do anything about level-locking General chat, they should still create a way for players to totally ignore all cross-server chat. That way I wouldn't have to have my ignore list on every character populated with every cross-server spammers alt. For instance, this is one spammer:

SOE.EQ.Bristle.Collesette
SOE.EQ.Erollisi.Collesette
SOE.EQ.Vox.Collesette
SOE.EQ.Xegony.Collesette
SOE.EQ.Zek.Collesets
SOE.EQ.Zek.Collesette
SOE.EQ.Zek.Collesettethree
SOE.EQ.bertox.collesette
SOE.EQ.bristle.collesette
SOE.EQ.cazic.collesette
SOE.EQ.luclin.collesette
SOE.EQ.vox.collesett
SOE.EQ.vox.collesette
SOE.EQ.xegony.collesette
SOE.EQ.zek.colleseti

I have to keep adding his cross server alts to all my character's ignore lists. Give me a way to totally block cross-server chat and I only have to do it once and never see that kind of spam again.

I view this in another way. Spammers do this not because they aren't successful, but because they are.

They provide a service. Filling a need. I simply leave General chat if spammers get too wild. Easy fix. Akin to turning off the television, radio, or leaving a streaming service because advertisements get too frequent.

Just because I'm annoyed by it doesn't give me the right to squelch the service for others.

Restricting public channels has proven very effective in some previous MMORPG's, but the reason it succeeded so well was because they have GM's banning spammers in game AND gave players the ability to right-click and "report as spam" in in-game chat.

As far as I am aware, Darkpaw Games does not normally have active GM's "working" on any server for any reason other than to resolve customer support tickets. So your suggestion would do very little to prevent spam, only delay individual characters for a short while -- which may not even have a noticeable impact on the spam at all.

I wish I could suggest something better than a better in-game chat system/tools/modifications, but I fail to think of any at the moment. Maybe later

EverQuest could easily add a channel for LFG spam, for spamming services, etc., and we know this because we already have an auction channel for auction spam. The question is, will they add a channel for players to spam "services?"

Hmm, this made me think for a minute. I have actually received both power leveling and plat sale whispers before on TLP servers. So, I agree that we definitely do not want more /tell spam! If DG won't step up their game to combat spam, then it falls on us players to use the tools available to us for a better solution.

But the question in my mind is, what is that solution? Not everyone uses discord or voice chat, so that leaves in-game chat. And players are restricted from joining more than 10 chat channels at any given time, and there's not enough room as it is to join all the available channels one might want to be active in. Will DG raise the limit on chat channels that we can join from 10 to, say, 15?

I don't see anything outside in-game chat being a reasonable tool for players to resolve this issue on their own effectively. It is my opinion that our chat system overall needs to be improve, with the ability to right-click a player name and choose to ignore them (whether this is used in tandem with a player report system in chat or not, such as "report-as-spam" that auto-ignores the player).