EVE General Discussion

How will we know who initiated the "spam" though, should we petition ever pilot trying to open a convo a the time or how's the though proceedure?

/c

So even though it's something players shouldn't do, if I lose a ship because of it I wont be reimbursed?

Do you mind if I just ask you to flesh out the logic behind that a bit? Not saying there isn't logic there, I just don't get it at the moment. Unless you're threatening to ban players outright, what's stopping me from saying to my 256 man fleet "OK anyone who hasn't already got warned about this, send a conversation"? If I say it over TS you wont be able to prove I ever said it, so can't really punish me for suggesting it.

If everyone did that to say, kill a Titan which you know they wont be reimbursed for, a lot of people would think it's worth it.

Separate to the 'popup takes focus' issue, in previous threads some people claimed that the conversation auto-reject might be client-side, meaning a convobomb would still cause a good amount of lag due to the number of requests queued up only to be rejected by the client (to my limited understanding :D)

Was this not true, or is it just not a problem?

what about the case were im in a fleet and actually want to receive legitimate chat convos? is that such a "fringe case" now so i should simply block all incoming chat requests while in a fleet?

We are aware of those claims and they are being investigated.

Edit: Note that causing lag is not an exploit per se. If it was, bringing a large fleet to an engagement would be an exploit. However, purposefully causing lag is not allowed and we do warn and ban for that; conversation spamming is no different in that sense if our investigations into the matter yield confirming results. HOWEVER, the fact that someone did something that is not allowed does not automatically mean that the other party will be reimbursed. Many different considerations factor into a decision like that.

Tl;dr Using an exploit and doing something wrong are not always the same thing.

To be totally honest I have never been convo spammed, so I can't comment on what it used to do compared to what it does do now.

If there was evidence to show it does more then simply annoy pilots, would the GM team reconsider their stance?

I'm only asking because while I appreciate there's a way to block them if they are no more annoying then local chat, if they effect actual gameplay in even some cases I think, in my own personal opinion, telling people to always fly where people can't chat to them is a bit unfair. There's a difference between saying "It's annoying, but you can block it if you wish to trade off not being annoyed for no-one convo-ing you" and "You need to fly with no-one being able to convo you otherwise you MAY lose your ship due to tactics which could result in a player being banned."

I get the difference between you saying "This is an exploit, you lost your ship unfairly, we wont tolerate it and here's your ship back" and "They are breaking the EULA by being an annoying spammer, but you haven't lost your ship unfairly". I think an open mind on changing your stance should new information or examples come to light is important that's all.

Just my thoughts on the matter anyway.

I'm interested to see how you could potentially differentiate a ship loss resulting solely from convo-bombing versus one that was fated to die anyways in the given circumstances.

Honestly, one way to get rid of the issue is to come down hard and reimburse all losses in which request abuse occurred by opposing forces. Creating a disincentive gets rid of the problem.

So essentially while dying when convo spammed doesn't automatically equal reimbursement it doesn't mean that ship reimbursement is totally ruled out, just dependent on circumstances? (Presumably like every other situation)

What exactly is your justification for that? How do you define fair in this context? How do you define "fleet engagement"?

In fact, while we're on the subject, what makes something an exploit vs. "not allowed"?

What exactly is your justification for that?

That is a discussion that would take too long to have here. The matter is incredibly complex and we have had several long discussions on that, both internally in CS, internally with other departments and externally with the CSM. Basically it is more important to remain fair and impartial and treat everyone equally than it is to see that everyone is happy. This is incredibly hard to do where large scale fleet engagements are concerned.

How do you define fair in this context?

Treat everyone equally; this means applying our reimbursement policies as strict as possible for everyone involved.

How do you define "fleet engagement"?

By consensus and on a case by case basis using internal metrics and guidelines. Yes, this is vague and it will stay that way. It is simply impossible to define this externally in a way that would satisfy the majority of our players.

what makes something an exploit vs. "not allowed"?

Linking porn in chat channels is not allowed, but it is not an exploit. Basically, everything that breaches our rules (EULA, ToS, etc) is not allowed, but abusing the system in a way that drastically affects the game can be determined to be an exploit once the process has been verified and can be tracked. In that sense there have even been exploits that were "allowed" simply because it was impossible for a player to know that he was using an exploit.