Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: barker droid concern
1. The owners will no longer have to be there to spam you.. they'll just leave the droid on hold ground in front of a starport and go on playing the game.. that means each would-be spammer will be there during their normal play times, not just during their /afk in bed/at work times.. 100% spam time, from each person that does that.
2. Droids, unlike players, cannot be put on /ignore. I fully expect within 1 - 2 weeks of Publish 8, to not be able to load into Theed or Coronet anymore due to spam lag crashing the machine.
Solution: PLEASE give us an option in ctrl-O that says "do not show droid barking".
Never once have I seen someone's advertisement spam and gone rushing to their shop.. if I want weapons, I'll look on the planet map for vendors and visit them..
Vilkata wrote:
Like most people (I think), I'm annoyed to no end by spammers hanging around cantinas and starports spam shouting pop-up adds (advertisements). My /ignore list is so long that it nearly runs off my screen and it's 95% spammers.. These barker droids cause two big concerns by me.
1. The owners will no longer have to be there to spam you.. they'll just leave the droid on hold ground in front of a starport and go on playing the game.. that means each would-be spammer will be there during their normal play times, not just during their /afk in bed/at work times.. 100% spam time, from each person that does that.
From what I hear the owner of the barker droid must be on the same serverboundary as the barker droid. So the option to drop it off outside a spaceport and head someplace else to do combat or something will disable the droid. But I too am worried. I heard it is on a 30 second interwall, so even if the owner of the barker droid is close the place will be spam city rather fast.
I would much rather have the barker droids work like this: Set a few waypoints, let the droid walk this path and anyone can click on it and get a radial menu where they can 'hear' the Add barking. This should be a /tell message to get rid of spam
2. Droids, unlike players, cannot be put on /ignore. I fully expect within 1 - 2 weeks of Publish 8, to not be able to load into Theed or Coronet anymore due to spam lag crashing the machine.
I fear this to. I dont visit spaceports or towns all that often but this is a huge problem and I hope that they change the way barker modules will work. Maybe we can put the owner of the barking droid on ignore and that will include the barking droid.
Solution: PLEASE give us an option in ctrl-O that says "do not show droid barking".
Never once have I seen someone's advertisement spam and gone rushing to their shop.. if I want weapons, I'll look on the planet map for vendors and visit them..
By all accounts, your first point has been taken care of flower. It appears that the droid owner must be on the same server cluster as the droid, so they can't just drop off their spambot in Corolag and head of Krayt hunting, they'll have to be in Corolag too.
One could of course be an awfully sneaky DE and assume that everyone who buys a spambot is a rampant spammer and automatically add them to your /ignore list, but you didn't hear that from me 
Kisses
Cass
R0ZM4N wrote:
By all accounts, your first point has been taken care of flower. It appears that the droid owner must be on the same server cluster as the droid, so they can't just drop off their spambot in Corolag and head of Krayt hunting, they'll have to be in Corolag too.
One could of course be an awfully sneaky DE and assume that everyone who buys a spambot is a rampant spammer and automatically add them to your /ignore list, but you didn't hear that from me
Kisses
Cass
Wont that hamper any future sales to that person
You must be in server boundaries for them to work.
Time between adv is set by dev, currently at 30 seconds I think.
From my experience, I can say Theed lag is not related to spam at all.
Even when the city is empty, it lag like hell.
Same with other NPC cities even the one that are always almost empty like Keren.
Lag in NPC cities is IMHO due to building that are specific to the city, so not optimized.
Never had such kind of lag in player cities, even big ones.
Yes, spam is annoying, but why would you spent half an hour near the spaceport? Only people that stay there for a long time, are the spammers.
I don't like spam(who does?) but I don't really fear those droids.
Gavvot wrote:
You must be at least novice merchant to use them.
You must be in server boundaries for them to work.
Time between adv is set by dev, currently at 30 seconds I think.
From my experience, I can say Theed lag is not related to spam at all.
Even when the city is empty, it lag like hell.
Same with other NPC cities even the one that are always almost empty like Keren.
Lag in NPC cities is IMHO due to building that are specific to the city, so not optimized.
Never had such kind of lag in player cities, even big ones.
Yes, spam is annoying, but why would you spent half an hour near the spaceport? Only people that stay there for a long time, are the spammers.
I don't like spam(who does?) but I don't really fear those droids.
Could be you are right about the lag issue. I am just a player of games and dont bother to try and understand the mechanics behind it. What I dislike about the spam is that as soon as you enter a spam area you are bombarded with spam and it makes your chatwindow scroll like crazy. During such time you miss all the important chat either from guild or tells.
I dont hang around in spam areas, but sometimes you pass through them on your way.
Kaldeth wrote:Could be you are right about the lag issue. I am just a player of games and dont bother to try and understand the mechanics behind it. What I dislike about the spam is that as soon as you enter a spam area you are bombarded with spam and it makes your chatwindow scroll like crazy. During such time you miss all the important chat either from guild or tells.
I dont hang around in spam areas, but sometimes you pass through them on your way.
I don't like that either, thzat's why I reconfigured my chat tabs.
1 with group + guild + tells
1 with local + above.
1 with combat, xp, all the system spam (be a musician, you'll now what system spam mean).
Default conf of the chat tab isn't very nice.
I kinda agree the best option would be to have a specific channel for business, like all the other MMORPG does, but immertion isn't great in that way, and with the bazaar and vendor, I prefer not to have a specific channel for that, and use a tab where local isn't, so I don't have look for hours in the window to find interesting messages..
From the perspective of the people who will buy the droid barkers if you make it trivial to ignore them then they won't be much use. So that should be balanced with the desire to avoid the spam. They are currently limited to 128 characters which isn't much room so over all anyone using one will be spamming less than they are now.
I hope they increase the interval a bit to 45-60 seconds instead of 30 which will help the spam a bit as well.
I doubt that the lag in Coronet is caused by the spammers the lag there was horrible even before there was dozens of spammers there. Mostly I think it is trying to render and track all the toons that are present in the city that is causing the lag issues.
If the devs were really clever, they could make the barking interval be a function of the message size. Perhaps, a minimum of 30-45 seconds and approaching 60-90 seconds as the length of the message approaches the maximum.
Gavvot wrote:
Yes, spam is annoying, but why would you spent half an hour near the spaceport? Only people that stay there for a long time, are the spammers.
I don't like spam(who does?) but I don't really fear those droids.
While I might not spend half an hour at a starport, I often do spend that much time at a medical center or cantina. Can you imagine being an entertainer having to listen to the same spam, every 30 seconds, per bot, all day long and be unable to /ignore it?
They don't have to park them at starports, that's not a restriction.. Same load bubble? Spammers will then put it on hold in the cantina and go afk themselves in front of the starport spamming..
The lag also is created by toons, that includes pets.. If they have to be near their droids, that'll just double the amount of toons to be drawn, thus increasing lag.
"No, Sir, I don't like it." - Mr. Horse, Ren & Stimpy
i hate spammers already and ignore list is daily growing when i have to wait silly 10 mins on shuttles at starport :/
the devs decided NOT to reduce the starport 10 mins wait, so i see no point for spam droids to work under 2 mins intervals. 2 mins would be more then enough to catch the advertising more then once while waiting average on a shuttle.
anyways ppl shoul djust use merchant skill register on planetary map for advertise.
the ppl who sell just 1 thing sure need to use spams and thats fine. but to hear day in day out same person at starport spamming every 30 secs same crap and then also in all CAPs theat drives me nuts. i dont even see sometimes if someone wants something from me when they dont use /tell
30 secs spamming intervals are not a good idea imo. pls increase it to 2 mins
ask a Dev 1) Interval between barking changed to be a variable. Range would be 1 to 5 minutes (using seconds to define it).
I think this is better than 30 seconds and still will catch most people who pass through.
2) Keep the barked message as short as it is now but allow 3-5 conversation options so a player who's interested could converse with the droid and ask more details about products, locations, etc. (Each conversation option would allow a couple pages of text. (A neat option would be to allow the droid to email the info to the person upon request)
This will keep the barked messages short so the merchant can grab someones attention, then allow them to get more information if they're interested. To prevent semi-permanent droids at specific spots, limit the call time while barking is enabled to around 2 hours(experimental)
3) Allow the droid to stay called and barking even if you leave the server area it's in.
This is the biggest issue for me. I view the purpose of this function is to provide me the convenience of letting a droid advertise for me without me having to hover over it. I don't really see myself using it if I'm concerned that if I go more than a couple hundred meters it'll stop working. My play time is pretty limited and I have a lot of things to do when I am online. I don't have time to hang out at the starport or whatever and watch my droid bark.
Here's how I imagine myself using this: I'm traveling to meet with friends, place harvs, returning to my shop to craft...etc and I'm passing through the city. I stop off at one port, place the droid and start him barking. Then I go about my business confident that the droid is giving potential customers the info they desire for a couple hours.