Filters

[Marswipp]

Just wondering if there is anything going to be in place to fight botting, hacking, vulgar expletives (i.e. f- and s-bomb), URL spamming, and non-name character names (Specifically ones that are totally gibberish).

My idea for the URL spammers: One or two one-week user ban(s) for the first (and maybe second) offense, and deletion of the offending character(s). After that, permanent user ban and character deletion. Reason: URL spammers are usually botted. Besides, users of gold sellers should be unworthy of this community's standards. The filter would monitor for all variations of advertising certain websites. This filter will ignore whitespace. What would appear in-game as "w w w. l a y o g o l d .c o m" the filter sees a real URL, it will also be coded to recognize other variants such as mixed-case, and letter substitution (e.g. double letter, number, leet). If any URLs get past the filter, only a small server-side update is needed. The filter could easily be made client-side.

The reason the URL filter idea is extremely strict: URL spamming ruins immersion.

[orth]

These sorts of issues will definitely be considered. What I can tell you is the communications backend is IRC. So when you're connected to the world, you're also a part of various IRC channels. This provides us with the ability to have GMs and Administrators in the IRC channels without even being in game. Additionally there will be ways for the moderators to perform actions from the IRC servers directly into the game. So something like /mute Marswipp 10 would be a command available to them.

[Pen N Popper]

Will this mean that players can interact with the game world through mediums other than the graphical game client itself? For example, can a merchant "park" his visual avatar in a tavern and then interact with others via IRC? If so, how rich is the IRC interface in terms of querying surroundings and getting textual descriptions?

[orth]

Originally Posted by Pen N Popper

Will this mean that players can interact with the game world through mediums other than the graphical game client itself?

No. Such an effort is not in the picture. It certainly has been brought up, along with web interfacing of functionality but it will not be part of an initial release. I would personally love a hybrid MUD to run parallel with the graphics world, even if it was just minimal functionality, I think that would be fantastic... But alas, some things are just not in the picture for our very small programming team.

[lonnarin]

I know this is a longshot, but since the communications side of things are IRC-based, then would there be room to run peer-to-peer tansfers of minor things in game between players? One in particular I was thinking of would be if somebody wanted to use voicechat to talk or have their custom portrait auto-update to and from the server and other players. A bard who sings a song and then you have the option to click on him and listen, that sort of thing.

Of course this might just be a pipe-dream until bandwidth costs and standards go through another drop in pricing, and could open the service up to malicious hacking, so I understand if we don't go that route for at another decade. But, if GM Clients had access to being able to stream say, custom music or a dramatic monologue into a quest much like the way people stream MP3s in chatrooms, it could set a precident that no other MMORPG has even come close to tackling. As badnwidth becomes quicker and more cost-efficient, I could see future MMORPGS down the line utilizing this approach.

[miltonyorkcastle]

interesting idea, Lon... and I always like the idea of being "first"

[darkstorme]

Very neat ideas, Lonn - though, as you say, the limiting constraint will probably be bandwidth. While such features would be neat, I can't imagine they'd take precedence over speed of response in-game.

The only other issue I can see as being a problem would be the issue of copyright violation. By allowing unvetted streaming media to be inserted into the game, you leave yourself in a legally tricky situation. If it were open to everyone, then I suspect the legal precedent set by Youtube would apply - if you stream copyrighted material, you have to stop doing it. But that would allow people to spam "music requests", use up server bandwidth, or give them another avenue for offensive content that isn't so easily screened as text. If, however, only GMs were permitted to use this service, even one GM using a copyrighted recording during a quest might leave Layonara open to a suit based on copyright infringement. I can't be certain about the intricacies of such a case though - can one of our real-life lawyers in the community give us an idea?

Regardless, as I said, Lonn, it sounds like a neat idea, and I'd love to see it implemented... after the various hurdles are circumvented.