Ah, but for those that haven't invested lots of money in the game, a new one offers the chance to "start over" and get a lead on your friends. If you can't win on your friends terms, maybe its time to win on your (other) terms. I play WoW on a regular basis, when another MMO comes out a slew of players say that they think its great and will move over and start playing it. 2 months later they are back to WoW saying that it sucked in one way or another (usually lack of late game content). If you can make a better game, and advertise it well, you will get all those angry farmville players who dislike the "unfair" advantages other players get.
One system that might make "ethical" sense when allowing the use of real currency to purchase items in game you can get though playing instead, is that the game is "grindware" where you can get many of the features of the game by doing less enjoyable activities to earn the right to sample the content you could purchase.
For example: Lets say I make a game that is a collection of roguelike dungeons. Each one has different features and are short with various levels of difficulty. Now, for free I put the basic dungeons to play free of charge, and I allow you to take out any money you find (plus a bonus for winning). The more interesting dungeons I require an entrance free to enter. This entrance fee would require running the basic dungeons a few times, and while you do get more money if these advanced dungeons, it won't pay for the entrance fee. Spend some time and you can try any of the dungeons you like.
Now, lets say I offer a premium service, for 1$ you get 10 dungeon tickets. Each one gives you a 1 time no entrance fee into dungeon, lowers the entrance cost 10% for all future visits and rewards 5% of the money you have previously spent (less than 10 to discourage waiting on purchase, while making it more inciting to buy the longer you play). You can spend 10 tickets to reduce the cost to 0, which not only gives you the ability to do that dungeon when you want, but gives you a better way to make money to do other dungeons (assuming other even more interesting ones are much more expensive).
Under this system, I'm offering much of the content under a trial basis, which you can purchase. I think this system is more ethical than allowing the player to spend money on consumable items, but not as much as offering unobtainable content with money. One financial downside to this system, is there is a reasonable cap to how much a player can spend.
I haven't used facebook, so I don't know how close apps are to this kind of system.
How do you play World of Warcraft as a single player game?
Simple, you play though to max level, takes about 250 hours depending on how efficient you are. That is a lot more than most RPGs offer, yes it is a lot slower going, but for 15$ per month its a lot of bang for your buck. At the end of that stretch, you might feel like trying some of the competitive or co-op the game has to offer, or you do the game over again with a different character. There are 2 sides with about 2/3 in common for single player content, and 10 classes for different ways to play.
There are various 3rd party research groups that you can sell your exploits too for money. They are legal, moral and assist the targeted companies in getting them fixed (and providing emergency fixes to their clients)...
This doesn't help too much when you find a non-exploitable bug though, or are we only talking about exploitable ones?
Blizzard has stated that any piece of input hardware that emulates another piece of hardware is fine provided that every hardware command sent to the game is backed by a direct (not delayed) human interaction. Such mapping from human interaction to input also needs to be consistent. You may map more than one button to a single action, you may multi-box as much as you like. You may not using "auto fire" sytle buttons, as that causes an input without direct human interaction, or even one that presses a button 5 seconds after you press one on the keyboard. You may not use programmable "combo"s that press a series of keys in sequence by you hitting a single key several times.
There are no currency farming bots in Wow with a trial subscription. The trial accounts in Wow don't let you trade, use the AH, chat in global channels, and only let you accumulate a very small amount of coin. Most bots in Wow are the result of accounts that had their password stolen. The reason this doesn't plague Aion (as you claim) is that it has not reached the player base threshold for farmers to invest the time to create phishing scams to get these passwords. If they did, it would be easy to get a few passwords and have those accounts refer their bots. To make a non-car analogy, it would be like saying that linux/mac is less vulnerable to viruses because it is harder to compromise. In actuality, it is the popularity of Windows that makes these viruses more profitable to make.
I don't know about you, but here on the west coast wearing causal every day is perfectly fine (provided you don't do face to face with your customers, or your working for/with the government/military), you may get a few glares if you are wearing a tie.
I tried the good 'ole Random article. Didn't see anything remotely pornographic for about a dozen articles... finally came up with a book cover featuring the side view of a naked adult male (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Horde). Seems like the vast majority of Wikipedia is not about, or even borderline related to sex (of course you can make anything related to sex if you try hard enough).
(keeping in mind that we're, presumably talking about C# - that is, the language - and not.NET class libraries)
At what point is the language and the libraries separate? You can make a language like c# that has a completely different library, but it won't make portability any much easier. Clearly, System.Type is part of c# since typeof is an operator in c# that results in System.Type (same goes with many of the types in the base System namespace).
From my understanding DllAttribute is treated in a special way by the compiler (as a pinvoke), the term Dll is special to Windows. Lets not even get started with ComVisibleAttribute.
From Java's standpoint, there are 3 languages... J2ME, J2SE and J2EE. However, in the J2SE case (which is what is usually taught); the core library (everything in the standard download) API are designed to be as cross platform as possible. You can find examples of things that may not work out well for a given OS (swing menu bars in mac OS), but nearly all the API methods make sense on most desktop/terminal platforms. A good example of some of the cross platform efforts that Java has is the File class. You will notice that there is a setExecutable() method, which doesn't exist in Windows. There is also a listRoots() method which isn't necessary in Unix since unix OSs only have a single root. The.NET FileAttributes enumeration on the other hand is very Window oriented, which may have unix equivalents, but many of those attributes are not as easily obtained.
Teaching c# is fine as long as you don't use any GUI operations, which is more limiting than Java is.
C# and Java are so close they are almost exactly the same language. C# is basically just a Java accent, and it has actually fixed some of Javas problems.
Yes, c# fixes some of Java's problems, but at the same time introduces its own. There are many features in c# that only apply on whatever current version of Windows is out there right now, making the language less portable. I am not a fan of many of the shortcut features (e.g. overloading the explicit casting operator, bit set like enums), which leads to more of "That's cute, but WFT does is it doing".
Java does have its own problems (e.g. why is generics implemented with smoke and mirrors), and is quite bureaucracy encumbered (version 7 has been around the corner for quite a while now), but it is still my language of choice.
So what if they do? Executing the sudo command is limited to the program you're sudo-ing, not your whole session. A program can't wait in the background and get root when someone types sudo.
Don't underestimate the ability of virus writers to spoof some or all of your UI. I assume a simple way a virus can do this is by replacing your terminal icon on your computer to an evil terminal that works just like a real one, but as soon as you type sudo you are in fact executing its evil butler who will take over your system once it has permission to do so.
I'm pretty sure that a Table PC does not meet the minimum system requirements for WoW, hardware wise. OS wise I assume that Table PCs run Windows CE, which is not a supported operating system for WoW. Now if there is a virtual desktop application for Windows CE, then yes, they could essentially do what this developer did.
On why WoW was choose? I assume it is a combination of: 1. Too high system requirements to play directly on the iPad (Civ 4 would play great with iPad controls, its not avialable for it, but I'm sure its portable). 2. Somewhat playable with iPad controls (you probably ain't going to be able to do raids very well with just a touch screen). 3. Well known.
If Blizzard's policy remains, Linux will simply be an unsupported platform. You can use wine to emulate^H^H^H^H^Hrun it, and even play in rated games online (without risk of getting banned for using an unacceptable OS), but if you break it you keep both pieces.
The iPad doesn't support Flash, but it does support HTML5 , so we can totally Quake II on the iPad... because you know we can... and have lots of money and free time.
I read the article, and I'm still confused. If he is ordered to take down all infringing material, then the solution is simple: purge all torrents, then let the users upload them again. I'm sure if he announced that there was a time planned to do this, someone would back up all the torrents, and then re upload them after the purge.
Oh, stop with the wow is 'EZ' mode. Yes, Blizzard said they want everyone to see all the content. But there is a heroic mode of the current content that is really, really hard. Only about 2% of players have completed regular mode of the content which allows access to the hard stuff. About a week ago, the first guild completed the challenges for the 25 man non-heroic content. The end boss, The Lich king, still remains undefeated on heroic mode. I have yet to see the Lich king on regular mode, even 10 man. So, yes, I guess I am causal, since I'm not in the only guild on my server that has seen and beat him on normal 10 player version (which is much easier than the 25 player version).
Yes, there is a 5% damage/healing/health buff currently in effect for content that may eventually climb to 30%, yes it will eventually make the content much easier. No, many players will still never see the heroic mode.
For those of you that like to pvp instead, the system does 3v3 or 5v5 combat. You can only get the best gear if you are in the top 5%.
The reason they found it necessary is that they've designed WoW more and more around mind-numbing repetitive grinding of intolerably easy dungeons. They need to stop pushing the "kill this same guy once a day for the next week and we'll give you a piece of gear" design and go back to "work a little bit on this long difficult quest chain."
Let's see, doing a random dungeon awards 2 emblems of frost the first time you complete it each day. I'm sorry, but 14 emblems of frost won't buy you anything. All gear you can buy with those costs between 30-95 emblems. You will either need to do this a quite a bit longer, or get these though other means (such as doing the end game content with 9 or 24 of your friends).
The reason they have this once per day reward for doing the same dungeon, is to help keep a social atmosphere in the game (dungeons are set up to be done by 5 players). You don't need to arrange time with your friends or ask around randomly to complete these though; simply enter a queue to do a dungeon, and 4 other players (across a dozen or so servers in your cluster) will be found (with similar gear level) to help you complete it.
"A long but difficult quest chain," takes extra development time (time that could be spent on the next expansion), and without artificial gating ("come back tomorrow to do step 2") will be completable by veterans in a single sitting, while possibly completable by any causal player.
Wow has set up the model of rewarding skill and dedication, having either will get you good gear, while having both will earn you slightly better gear.
Any time I get some demo of a product that loses some or all functionality over time I feel heavily pressured to try and use as many of the features I can within the time limit. I can't really enjoy the demo this way, it is not how I would start playing if I had the full version. Yes, being able to test all the features of the game will let me better evaluate it, but there are other ways to let players test features.
If you (and have permission from Sony) are going to implement this, you should consider limiting the overall play experience rather than trying to handicap the players. A game that ends up only letting you use a dagger if you play it for a long time may be an interesting challenge, and having these limitations may give the player incentive to continue playing the demo without getting the full version.
How I would do this is: As the player plays for longer periods, I would make it more tedious to play. Shop keepers will have their prices inflated over time, requiring the player to 'grind' more money; experience will be slower (but not more difficult) to obtain; bonus stages at the end of a level may only give you 1 attempt at the game, and only if you rack of 5 attempts in the level you just finished; special abilities take longer to charge (as long as this doesn't make the game significantly more difficult). If you really want to be mean, you can steal some of the player's currency they are saving up at random times to really fustrate them. Just don't take away their gear.
I find that many self-taught programmers learn by example. They copy a bit of code here, and modify it to suit their needs. The problem with this is they often do not understand why the code segments work the way they do. For example, I see a lot of Java programmers with the misconception that the 'import' statement is equivalent to C's #include statement (rather than the using statement). They know that if I 'import java.util.*' I can use the classes in the java.util package. Instead what they should say is: I can write the short form of classes in java.util.
For this same reason, I find a lot of beginner programmers confused on instance methods vs static or global methods. As Java does not have global methods, the simpler to understand static methods require an additional keyword to use. Many Java programmers will start out with applets, where the starting point is an instance method, and then try to transition to applications where the main method is static and wonder why they can't call instance methods from their main method.
If you have a lot of notice boards (with the notices behind a window) you can use this printer to recycle old notices and put new ones up. These notices are not touched or punctured and are replaced frequently. If you only have a single notice board your probably better off just getting a flat screen monitor that displays the notices (probably cheaper given the cost).
Considering the number of spam bots you get in WoW... probably not.
Even though WoW has a $20 initial purchase fee (you can't spam trade channels with a trial account), you still get a lot of spammers. This is due to player accounts getting stolen though key loggers. After the account is striped of anything useful, the spammer creates characters on other servers and starts spamming trade channels with them.
Additionally, even with a trial account you can still create a character, run to the town, and start spamming stuff in/say near the auction house where many players reside. Another tactic used is the creation of a lot of trial accounts, and using a game hack tool, spammers will get their characters killed in such a way as to form a corpse message with their dead bodies.
Until Blizzard can figure out a way to prevent this from happening, we will see this keep continuing. Although with the reporting tool, if enough players "report spam" on a player, that account will be temporary muted from standard channels and private tells (unless responding to another player). The report spam does have the draw back of being able to silence someone you don't like if you get enough friends to help you (as there is no penalty for using this feature).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but for those that haven't invested lots of money in the game, a new one offers the chance to "start over" and get a lead on your friends. If you can't win on your friends terms, maybe its time to win on your (other) terms. I play WoW on a regular basis, when another MMO comes out a slew of players say that they think its great and will move over and start playing it. 2 months later they are back to WoW saying that it sucked in one way or another (usually lack of late game content). If you can make a better game, and advertise it well, you will get all those angry farmville players who dislike the "unfair" advantages other players get.
One system that might make "ethical" sense when allowing the use of real currency to purchase items in game you can get though playing instead, is that the game is "grindware" where you can get many of the features of the game by doing less enjoyable activities to earn the right to sample the content you could purchase.
For example:
Lets say I make a game that is a collection of roguelike dungeons. Each one has different features and are short with various levels of difficulty.
Now, for free I put the basic dungeons to play free of charge, and I allow you to take out any money you find (plus a bonus for winning).
The more interesting dungeons I require an entrance free to enter. This entrance fee would require running the basic dungeons a few times, and while you do get more money if these advanced dungeons, it won't pay for the entrance fee. Spend some time and you can try any of the dungeons you like.
Now, lets say I offer a premium service, for 1$ you get 10 dungeon tickets. Each one gives you a 1 time no entrance fee into dungeon, lowers the entrance cost 10% for all future visits and rewards 5% of the money you have previously spent (less than 10 to discourage waiting on purchase, while making it more inciting to buy the longer you play). You can spend 10 tickets to reduce the cost to 0, which not only gives you the ability to do that dungeon when you want, but gives you a better way to make money to do other dungeons (assuming other even more interesting ones are much more expensive).
Under this system, I'm offering much of the content under a trial basis, which you can purchase. I think this system is more ethical than allowing the player to spend money on consumable items, but not as much as offering unobtainable content with money. One financial downside to this system, is there is a reasonable cap to how much a player can spend.
I haven't used facebook, so I don't know how close apps are to this kind of system.
How do you play World of Warcraft as a single player game?
Simple, you play though to max level, takes about 250 hours depending on how efficient you are. That is a lot more than most RPGs offer, yes it is a lot slower going, but for 15$ per month its a lot of bang for your buck. At the end of that stretch, you might feel like trying some of the competitive or co-op the game has to offer, or you do the game over again with a different character. There are 2 sides with about 2/3 in common for single player content, and 10 classes for different ways to play.
There are various 3rd party research groups that you can sell your exploits too for money. They are legal, moral and assist the targeted companies in getting them fixed (and providing emergency fixes to their clients)...
This doesn't help too much when you find a non-exploitable bug though, or are we only talking about exploitable ones?
Getting a cue right from The underhanded C contest
</tinfoilhat>
Blizzard has stated that any piece of input hardware that emulates another piece of hardware is fine provided that every hardware command sent to the game is backed by a direct (not delayed) human interaction. Such mapping from human interaction to input also needs to be consistent. You may map more than one button to a single action, you may multi-box as much as you like. You may not using "auto fire" sytle buttons, as that causes an input without direct human interaction, or even one that presses a button 5 seconds after you press one on the keyboard. You may not use programmable "combo"s that press a series of keys in sequence by you hitting a single key several times.
There are no currency farming bots in Wow with a trial subscription. The trial accounts in Wow don't let you trade, use the AH, chat in global channels, and only let you accumulate a very small amount of coin. Most bots in Wow are the result of accounts that had their password stolen. The reason this doesn't plague Aion (as you claim) is that it has not reached the player base threshold for farmers to invest the time to create phishing scams to get these passwords. If they did, it would be easy to get a few passwords and have those accounts refer their bots. To make a non-car analogy, it would be like saying that linux/mac is less vulnerable to viruses because it is harder to compromise. In actuality, it is the popularity of Windows that makes these viruses more profitable to make.
I don't know about you, but here on the west coast wearing causal every day is perfectly fine (provided you don't do face to face with your customers, or your working for/with the government/military), you may get a few glares if you are wearing a tie.
I tried the good 'ole Random article. Didn't see anything remotely pornographic for about a dozen articles... finally came up with a book cover featuring the side view of a naked adult male (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Horde). Seems like the vast majority of Wikipedia is not about, or even borderline related to sex (of course you can make anything related to sex if you try hard enough).
Can you give some examples?
(keeping in mind that we're, presumably talking about C# - that is, the language - and not .NET class libraries)
At what point is the language and the libraries separate? You can make a language like c# that has a completely different library, but it won't make portability any much easier. Clearly, System.Type is part of c# since typeof is an operator in c# that results in System.Type (same goes with many of the types in the base System namespace).
From my understanding DllAttribute is treated in a special way by the compiler (as a pinvoke), the term Dll is special to Windows. Lets not even get started with ComVisibleAttribute.
From Java's standpoint, there are 3 languages... J2ME, J2SE and J2EE. However, in the J2SE case (which is what is usually taught); the core library (everything in the standard download) API are designed to be as cross platform as possible. You can find examples of things that may not work out well for a given OS (swing menu bars in mac OS), but nearly all the API methods make sense on most desktop/terminal platforms. A good example of some of the cross platform efforts that Java has is the File class. You will notice that there is a setExecutable() method, which doesn't exist in Windows. There is also a listRoots() method which isn't necessary in Unix since unix OSs only have a single root. The .NET FileAttributes enumeration on the other hand is very Window oriented, which may have unix equivalents, but many of those attributes are not as easily obtained.
Teaching c# is fine as long as you don't use any GUI operations, which is more limiting than Java is.
C# and Java are so close they are almost exactly the same language. C# is basically just a Java accent, and it has actually fixed some of Javas problems.
Yes, c# fixes some of Java's problems, but at the same time introduces its own. There are many features in c# that only apply on whatever current version of Windows is out there right now, making the language less portable. I am not a fan of many of the shortcut features (e.g. overloading the explicit casting operator, bit set like enums), which leads to more of "That's cute, but WFT does is it doing".
Java does have its own problems (e.g. why is generics implemented with smoke and mirrors), and is quite bureaucracy encumbered (version 7 has been around the corner for quite a while now), but it is still my language of choice.
P.S. Including VB.NET, but not C#... WTF
If its too good to be true, it probably is.
So what if they do? Executing the sudo command is limited to the program you're sudo-ing, not your whole session. A program can't wait in the background and get root when someone types sudo.
Don't underestimate the ability of virus writers to spoof some or all of your UI. I assume a simple way a virus can do this is by replacing your terminal icon on your computer to an evil terminal that works just like a real one, but as soon as you type sudo you are in fact executing its evil butler who will take over your system once it has permission to do so.
I'm pretty sure that a Table PC does not meet the minimum system requirements for WoW, hardware wise. OS wise I assume that Table PCs run Windows CE, which is not a supported operating system for WoW. Now if there is a virtual desktop application for Windows CE, then yes, they could essentially do what this developer did.
On why WoW was choose? I assume it is a combination of:
1. Too high system requirements to play directly on the iPad (Civ 4 would play great with iPad controls, its not avialable for it, but I'm sure its portable).
2. Somewhat playable with iPad controls (you probably ain't going to be able to do raids very well with just a touch screen).
3. Well known.
If Blizzard's policy remains, Linux will simply be an unsupported platform. You can use wine to emulate^H^H^H^H^Hrun it, and even play in rated games online (without risk of getting banned for using an unacceptable OS), but if you break it you keep both pieces.
Its a fine line. Technically, you can run Quake II on HTML5.
The iPad doesn't support Flash, but it does support HTML5 , so we can totally Quake II on the iPad... because you know we can... and have lots of money and free time.
I read the article, and I'm still confused. If he is ordered to take down all infringing material, then the solution is simple: purge all torrents, then let the users upload them again. I'm sure if he announced that there was a time planned to do this, someone would back up all the torrents, and then re upload them after the purge.
1. Start smoking, paying $$$ for cigs
2. Get cancer
3. Pay $$$ for an operation to remove cancer cells
4. ???
5. Profit ?!?
Oh, stop with the wow is 'EZ' mode. Yes, Blizzard said they want everyone to see all the content. But there is a heroic mode of the current content that is really, really hard. Only about 2% of players have completed regular mode of the content which allows access to the hard stuff. About a week ago, the first guild completed the challenges for the 25 man non-heroic content. The end boss, The Lich king, still remains undefeated on heroic mode. I have yet to see the Lich king on regular mode, even 10 man. So, yes, I guess I am causal, since I'm not in the only guild on my server that has seen and beat him on normal 10 player version (which is much easier than the 25 player version).
Yes, there is a 5% damage/healing/health buff currently in effect for content that may eventually climb to 30%, yes it will eventually make the content much easier. No, many players will still never see the heroic mode.
For those of you that like to pvp instead, the system does 3v3 or 5v5 combat. You can only get the best gear if you are in the top 5%.
The reason they found it necessary is that they've designed WoW more and more around mind-numbing repetitive grinding of intolerably easy dungeons. They need to stop pushing the "kill this same guy once a day for the next week and we'll give you a piece of gear" design and go back to "work a little bit on this long difficult quest chain."
Let's see, doing a random dungeon awards 2 emblems of frost the first time you complete it each day. I'm sorry, but 14 emblems of frost won't buy you anything. All gear you can buy with those costs between 30-95 emblems. You will either need to do this a quite a bit longer, or get these though other means (such as doing the end game content with 9 or 24 of your friends).
The reason they have this once per day reward for doing the same dungeon, is to help keep a social atmosphere in the game (dungeons are set up to be done by 5 players). You don't need to arrange time with your friends or ask around randomly to complete these though; simply enter a queue to do a dungeon, and 4 other players (across a dozen or so servers in your cluster) will be found (with similar gear level) to help you complete it.
"A long but difficult quest chain," takes extra development time (time that could be spent on the next expansion), and without artificial gating ("come back tomorrow to do step 2") will be completable by veterans in a single sitting, while possibly completable by any causal player.
Wow has set up the model of rewarding skill and dedication, having either will get you good gear, while having both will earn you slightly better gear.
Any time I get some demo of a product that loses some or all functionality over time I feel heavily pressured to try and use as many of the features I can within the time limit. I can't really enjoy the demo this way, it is not how I would start playing if I had the full version. Yes, being able to test all the features of the game will let me better evaluate it, but there are other ways to let players test features.
If you (and have permission from Sony) are going to implement this, you should consider limiting the overall play experience rather than trying to handicap the players. A game that ends up only letting you use a dagger if you play it for a long time may be an interesting challenge, and having these limitations may give the player incentive to continue playing the demo without getting the full version.
How I would do this is: As the player plays for longer periods, I would make it more tedious to play. Shop keepers will have their prices inflated over time, requiring the player to 'grind' more money; experience will be slower (but not more difficult) to obtain; bonus stages at the end of a level may only give you 1 attempt at the game, and only if you rack of 5 attempts in the level you just finished; special abilities take longer to charge (as long as this doesn't make the game significantly more difficult). If you really want to be mean, you can steal some of the player's currency they are saving up at random times to really fustrate them. Just don't take away their gear.
I find that many self-taught programmers learn by example. They copy a bit of code here, and modify it to suit their needs. The problem with this is they often do not understand why the code segments work the way they do. For example, I see a lot of Java programmers with the misconception that the 'import' statement is equivalent to C's #include statement (rather than the using statement). They know that if I 'import java.util.*' I can use the classes in the java.util package. Instead what they should say is: I can write the short form of classes in java.util.
For this same reason, I find a lot of beginner programmers confused on instance methods vs static or global methods. As Java does not have global methods, the simpler to understand static methods require an additional keyword to use. Many Java programmers will start out with applets, where the starting point is an instance method, and then try to transition to applications where the main method is static and wonder why they can't call instance methods from their main method.
If you have a lot of notice boards (with the notices behind a window) you can use this printer to recycle old notices and put new ones up. These notices are not touched or punctured and are replaced frequently. If you only have a single notice board your probably better off just getting a flat screen monitor that displays the notices (probably cheaper given the cost).
Considering the number of spam bots you get in WoW... probably not.
Even though WoW has a $20 initial purchase fee (you can't spam trade channels with a trial account), you still get a lot of spammers. This is due to player accounts getting stolen though key loggers. After the account is striped of anything useful, the spammer creates characters on other servers and starts spamming trade channels with them.
Additionally, even with a trial account you can still create a character, run to the town, and start spamming stuff in /say near the auction house where many players reside. Another tactic used is the creation of a lot of trial accounts, and using a game hack tool, spammers will get their characters killed in such a way as to form a corpse message with their dead bodies.
Until Blizzard can figure out a way to prevent this from happening, we will see this keep continuing. Although with the reporting tool, if enough players "report spam" on a player, that account will be temporary muted from standard channels and private tells (unless responding to another player). The report spam does have the draw back of being able to silence someone you don't like if you get enough friends to help you (as there is no penalty for using this feature).