I wouldn’t even call NPC corp chats a “social channel.” Even before this was a huge problem, CAS had the only really active corp chat, and were by far the exception rather than the rule. An ISD moderated help channel will always be superior to an NPC corp chat when it comes to actually helping new players. I’ve always thought local to be a better facilitator for spontaneous conversation anyways. Even if most people don’t use it for that, the potential is there and I encourage more people to strike stuff up in local.
I’m usually not for removing features that are just there and aren’t causing any harm, but this is clearly harmful to the new player experience. It looks very much like the the gold spammers from other MMOs.
There could also be legitimate reasons to post a referral link to someone, like in the instance where someone actually gets recruited to the game by their friend. Sure, they could just send the link over Discord or whatever other chat app, but it would be much more convenient to do that over Eve itself… Of course, you then get in to the weeds of how exactly you discern between a spammer and someone doing it legitimately. You can just ban the spammers on an individual basis, but it’ll be like whack-a-mole. They’ll just keep popping up.
I’ve had alts in Pator Tech School recently and when it’s not overrun with referral link spammers, it’s just dead. It’s really not a good first impression. I think there should be more impetus to get new players in to either another player corp, or at least their own corp where NPC corp taxes don’t hamper their income. Treating NPC corps like a “holding area” inbetween being in a player run corp, whether it would be someone else’s or their own, is better in the long run.
Disagree, all the rookie corps were active, (FNA in particular was extremely active) just not the other npc corps you’d get shunted off to after you joined and left a player corp.
No one is claiming links should be banned entirely, just in the rookie corps. Though, personally I do like Aisha’s filter idea best. The filter just need to be set to atomically filter links, and you’ll see people stop doing it immediately.
It’s dead because of the spam. It wouldn’t be if the channels were free of it. I’ve heard some rumblings that ccp is thinking about dropping all the new players into a single rookie corp (probably air) sometime in the future. That would also make rookie chat a bit more lively (perhaps a bit too much.)
All rookies are already dumped into Rookie Chat, which is occasionally moderated (I guess more so in EU and US TZ than in AU TZ). I would ask CCP to make sure there is active moderation at all times, but especially if they’re not taking further measures to fight the spam.
Also, next to “Report ISK spammer” we need another right-click report button for reporting referral link spammers and other rule breakers. Ain’t nobody got time for using F12 or something else with more steps to report these annoyances.
People will just end up ignoring the channels that get spammed.
I reported a guy now running six characters in twelve NPC corps. That’s 72 characters all with the same recruit link posting one after the other every minute or two. ALL DAY.
No human can do this. It is, of course, a bot.
So I took the time to screen shot every one of these characters in ten of the twelve NPC corps and did my best to use small words and simple phrases to point out the obvious in my report.
And…nothing.
What passes for GMs in EVE are either chatbots, lazy work from home people, or complete incompetents.
It’s a shame as every NPC chat is raging at this botter. New players will just say, “■■■■ this, I’m out.” All because CCP can’t hire people to do the job they are expected to do.
Have to follow a strict play book with issues they can handle, what steps to follow to handle and determine the problem, what solutions they can use and how (and what) to communicate to their customers.
“Go compare these different people’s texts on different characters to determine if what they did was humanly/realistically possible or not and if not come to the official conclusion that given it’s several different characters doing the same thing in different chats means it’s a bot”, is not really in any sort of play book. That sort of deeper deterministic isn’t really going to fly for normal base level GM’s who are graded on metrics like “time used per ticket”. Has nothing to do with them being lazy or not.
It’s certainly interesting to pursue but unrealistic to expect GM’s to act on.
I’m stating that you being a Karen about how you describe what happened (in your mind) doesn’t help nor is realistic. The effort you put in is good, wanting the game to improve is good, going against botters is good.
Going “those GM’s are fcking clowns for not being able to deal with this complex issue I presented them with” is not good. Blame CCP, not the people who just work there and do as they’re told.
And @Aisha_Katalen is correct, Customer Support at CCP simply has very limited options what they can do if they get a report. It’s really not like they don’t want to stop the spam, they simply aren’t allowed to restrict customers in any way.
