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LabRat

Should bots be able to send messages in local chat?

Should bots be able to send messages in local chat?  

269 members have voted

  1. 1. Should bots be able to talk in local?

    • Yes
      159
    • No
      110
  2. 2. What limits should be set?

    • No limits
      82
    • Limit to greeting players only
      44
    • Limit to commenting on events only
      19
    • Limit to new hour announcements only
      13
    • I voted no
      111


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It is just more bot spam.

On pk server we have 3 bots, and even when there were only 2 I found the messages on #3 annoying. I can only imagine how annoying local chat would be on the main-server...

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I voted Yes, Only Greetings

I think also those greetings should be limited to their guildies only (or close friends of some kind) - the "street of love" in NC would be terrible to go thru otherwise.

Maybe even some limitation should be imposted (as once per hour for the person) and the range should be "close" - not full scale visibility, but something like 5 steps or so.

 

And ofcource there should be some good exception for the rule - as the bot, who shout "Gargoyles" for newbies in WS storage. But not much of exceptions please :)

 

For sure i would do not like comercials (yes, i do not read @3 for this kind of spam there) and events are anounced publicly by server - so no automated echo from bots please.

 

Time can be set in client, and also can be send in PM/GM no need to hear all bots around shout the same "new hour" in 10 variants over each other.

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Wouldn't it be a better idea to ask people to sign up for testing it and run your tests in either PMs or special channel? Bothering everybody around, including people not interested in it at all, doesn't sound like a good idea.

lol... I had written a bunch of other stuff to explain what I had done, but decided it was off topic so removed it from the post.

 

As I mentioned earlier, Trin is on my guild's map, so she won't chatter away to anyone that doesn't want to hear it anyway.

 

Out of interest, the part of the AI that I coded is in use in #gm only so it does not need people to sign up for it. She simply tries to interact with the guildies in #gm in a very simple manner.

 

I do agree with a lot of comments on this page, that any standard repetitive response is spam. I feel that if a greeting was to be said with any high frequency then it should differ each time for some variety, but it should also be limited in how many times it greets you. That would be part of what I would see as an acceptable AI.

 

Again with Trin, she does have some specialised responses for certain guildies for variety, but I didn't go anywhere near enough to be happy with her not appearing autonomous as I never got the time to do much work on that side of her.

 

I feel that bots *can* provide some flavour to the game, but for this to remain interesting and not become spammy (as it is currently) there needs to be certain limits imposed. I think that for greetings there should be a maximum frequency with which a bot can greet you.

 

I also think it would be a good idea that if bots are allowed to greet people, then they should have at least a basic level of variety. How you determine what is a reasonable amount of variety is however an issue.

 

Finally, I feel that on top of all this, bot owners should be proactive and aware of the situation their bot is in. If the bot is in a high traffic area and is saying more than 1 greeting every 5 minutes (on average) then they should probably disable that feature due to being too spammy. Also, if people complain that a bot is spammy they should listen and try to fix the problem. Naturally, both these things are dependant on bot owners discretion and that isn't necessarily reliable.

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One of the most clever uses of public posting from a bot I have witnessed is the one near WS sto that warns of the gargoyles' presence. Nice work and adds to the game. I voted yes.

It's not, i hate that bot. WS used to be my favourite C! storage, before this bot started spamming. It may be nice if you see that once or twice, but if it starts saying it 30 times a hour it will become annoying. Actually that bot was first 'player' i had on my ignore list.

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One of the most clever uses of public posting from a bot I have witnessed is the one near WS sto that warns of the gargoyles' presence. Nice work and adds to the game. I voted yes.

Not that newbies listen anyway. Just saw 2 die to gargs yesterday at raven :whistle:

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:whistle: LOL :devlish:

 

would be interesting to create 2 polls, one for bot owners, one for non bot owners, and then compare the results

 

speaking of newbies, not sure it would be fair to make bots hold any sort of conversation , as I recall when I first went to C2 i spent a good few minutes trying to speak to Shari BOT , and thought she was bloody rude for not answering me

 

if they hold a conversation of any sort, this will make such moments even more embaressing

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voted yes, and for commenting on harvest events only, new harvest hour is fine too though.

 

there are bots everywhere, they taken over the market channel, and now local chat.. you dont wanna walk through NC if they are all able to tell you to buy/trade with them in local :\

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Please, dear Ent, NO!

 

I appreciate when I go to the local grocery that the bots at the store don't all greet me. There are bots occasionally that try to engage me in an unsolicited way - where possible I find the battery compartment and disable the damn things.

 

I suppose since there is a command to disable getting bot spam in channels, as long as that is extended to local spam then we would at least have a way around such annoying drivel.

 

I like talking with other PLAYERS. The fewer interactions with NPCs I have to have, the better.

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if they hold a conversation of any sort, this will make such moments even more embaressing

There are ways to code a bot to handle this situation better. The bot could attempt to identify that someone is talking to them based on common sentence structure (which would be even more complex for a multi-lingual bot). If they establish someone is talking to them, then it could reply that it does not understand as it is a (storage/trade/etc) bot.

 

there are bots everywhere, they taken over the market channel, and now local chat..

Errr?? Bots were talking in local chat long before they started spamming market channel.

 

you dont wanna walk through NC if they are all able to tell you to buy/trade with them in local :\

Bots should *never* handle trade communications in local. There is absolutely no reason.

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Voted Yes, they should talk in local.

And voted no limits since the options don't express my opinion.

 

Automated bot talk should be allowed in several cases:

  • Guard bots should always be able to talk in local to warn intruders, warn you about intruders and greet friends, since they are only on guild maps I don't consider it spam. And I know no guard bot which doesn't talk in local.
    (That's why I think the idea of muting all bots is :whistle: ... kinda weird)
  • Trade bots and community bots should be able to greet in local [if] they are in a house. I think Richery did that when he was in the portland bank.
  • Congratulate to harvesting events if there is some kind of limit (i.e. once every 10 mins per person)
  • Hourly reminders if there are no other bots near or it's the only bot doing it.

Like all automated things it gets boring and annoying after some time so bot owners should always set up several possible greetings, congratulations and reminders so it adds some variety to the game.

 

 

Greeting of friends or even strangers (big NO NO) is quite annoying imo and could get very excessive in some areas if everyone did it.

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Reality check. This is a game. This is not a grocery store, nor your local library. And hey, what happened to "everything in moderation"?!

 

Having said that, I did vote yes. It is cute when a bot welcomes a guildie or close friend. Often I'm in "History" and don't see when someone comes along unless a bot or someone else greets them. Once I know they're there, then I can say hello to them as well. I'm not saying that's a good reason for bots to greet people, I'm just stating what I like about that aspect.

 

In closing, I would say that in order to "moderate" what the bots say, couldn't they just be limited to how many times they are allowed to say it? Is it hard to code that in?

 

(My two cents)

 

 

Lyrendeile

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Voted yes as well.

 

While a bot that hails anyone when the bot sees them can be very boring, most (if not all ?) bots are mostly silent (the "noisiest one" i know is Agneum, and honestly, i like her messages on positive events)

 

I voted "no limits" because what I think is not mentionned. Actually, i think that having a limit to only known people to be hailed when passing by (e.g guild members or friends), and on positive, rare harvest events is fine, while hailing everybody (immagine the local spam generated at the NC sto exit :lipssealed:, fortunately, this is not the case)

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I can only hope #ignore_bots command will start working in local too if bots are allowed to chat. Otherwise people like me will be forced to go through all Players Online bots list and ignore them one by one.

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Seems the second part of the poll is skewed anyway, an awful lot of people voted "no limits" wanting limits, but their idea of what the limits should be wasn't offered. :lipssealed:

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I could not predict everyone's choices beforehand.

 

Since the poll appears to be approximately 20% majority in favour of the bots being able to talk in local, it now comes down to the community to decide on acceptable limits.

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Seems the second part of the poll is skewed anyway, an awful lot of people voted "no limits" wanting limits, but their idea of what the limits should be wasn't offered. :lipssealed:

 

Aislinn is right many people voted for no limits simply because they didnt like the other voting options , so to say Ok its now down to what is an acceptable limit isnt really right.

 

Plus, i still say you should have a bot owner and a non bot owner poll, because there is obviously a conflict of interest, its like allowing chocolate lovers to vote in a poll asking '' is chocolate tasty '' , there only ever going to be one answer

 

*edit* plus if you look at the numbers of the poll , aparently a whole 172 people voted for this, which is nearly the amount of bot owners in the game, so I think you get my point about this poll

Edited by Ateh

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Well, given the nature of the poll, and the limitation of responses being used to auger a notion of support for local chat, let me give another interpretation:

 

If all the people who voted, as of this post:

 

33% of the total population want there to be no limits to posting.

16% of the total population want to have the bots greet people in local

 

Given also that some of the people who voted yes to the first post had nothing to their liking to choose in the 2nd post and perhaps chose randomly or chose the least abhorrent option, I wouldn't say this was particularly overwhelming.

 

Is it simply vanity that makes an autonomous program speaking ones name seem enticing? Or am I missing something?

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@Ateh:

The poll was in the bots section. It got moved. It was not in the bots section to hide it, but because it was concerning bots. It is now in general chat and has been for some time.

 

@Spleenie:

You should know as well as (if not better than) anybody that polls in these forums never get voted on by every player ingame. If you want a larger number of votes how about you post the thread in #message (there is nothing new with that, it has been done many times before) every so often?

 

I have nothing to gain or to lose from this poll - in fact I actually assumed that this poll would go against bots and proactively added code to send PMs rather than local chat in my bots.

 

The whole point of this poll is not to spam local but to see if the community minds messages from bots in response to events (player in range/harvesting event etc).

 

For anyone wanting my opinion here it is in its entirety:

Should bots be able to talk in local? yes

Should bots be limited to a certain number per day? no

Should bots be limited to a certain number per hour? yes

(the 2 above are actually not linked - some hours you can have hundreds of positive events, a good hour should not affect a day's quota)

Should bots be able to try and sell stuff to you in local chat? yes in response to an event (pickaxe breaking), no for the sake of it (hey someplayer fancy buying my sun medallion?)

Do I mind how this poll goes? no

 

I only made the poll because Entropy asked for it to be put to public vote. Please don't pull it apart because the public aren't voting the way you want. Every event has a winner and a loser, this is no different.

 

Feel free to come up with the "yes" options for the poll (up to 10 options on this forum).

Edited by LabRat

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i agree with aislinn. since the vote is really kind of close, what is such a drawback to have bots pm you instead?

 

bot spam sucks and it's annoying as hell.

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Is it simply vanity that makes an autonomous program speaking ones name seem enticing? Or am I missing something?

 

You seem to be missing the fact that quite a few of the people that bothered to vote and reply in this poll actually value a little personal touch in the game. just something harmless, that can easily be ignored by the people that feel annoyed by the exact same thing.

 

I understand, and respect that there are indeed people that see this game as just a thing for themselves to do and they don´t necessarily care for those extra gestures, or a little motivation towards eachother. I also think, there should be some limitations. But calling the people that do appreciate it 'vain'.. no. it's just our way of enjoying the game.

 

A little understanding towards eachother, and some compromising goes a long way :lipssealed:

Edited by dilloesional

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Is it simply vanity that makes an autonomous program speaking ones name seem enticing? Or am I missing something?

 

You seem to be missing the fact that quite a few of the people that bothered to vote and reply in this poll actually value a little personal touch in the game. just something harmless, that can easily be ignored by the people that feel annoyed by the exact same thing.

 

I understand, and respect that there are indeed people that see this game as just a thing for themselves to do and they don´t necessarily care for those extra gestures, or a little motivation towards eachother. I also think, there should be some limitations. But calling the people that do appreciate it 'vain'.. no. it's just our way of enjoying the game.

 

A little understanding towards eachother, and some compromising goes a long way :lipssealed:

How is it even remotely personal? It's a bot. If my washing machine decided it would note my presence every time I entered the laundry and "greeted" me, I would very quickly be searching for the voice unit of the washing machine and dismantling it. I would also resent having to go to the trouble to do that.

 

Like has been said in previous posts, it would be personal if the bot owner spoke to you. It is not personal if his/her bot speaks to you. At any rate, if your idea of a close personal interaction is to have a bot speak to you, why can't it be in PM? Is it not as cosy and personal any more? Or is it that you wish others to see that the bot deigned to speak to you?

 

*Gets the sledgehammer and heads to the laundry*

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I understand, and respect that there are indeed people that see this game as just a thing for themselves to do and they don´t necessarily care for those extra gestures, or a little motivation towards eachother.

I absolutely understand this concept. But isn't the "multiplayer" in MMORPG implying a player, not a bot? Those extra gestures should be coming from other people, not a program. It seems to me that relating to a bot is more "a thing for themselves to do" than relating to other people.

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