Guild Wars 2

Can we please have the player or account name attached to spawned items? So that we can report and block them?

This for example: http://i.imgur.com/T2MIhuC.jpg

Things like Aviator Box, Box o Fun, Merchants – basically any spawnable thing that can be interacted with. People are constantly spawning these kitten things on nodes and at the banks, etc. And yes, I know you can manually mouse click them, but some are smaller and people do this on purpose.

If people drop these things on popular area’s they would suddenly find themselves shut out and reported – if we had a name.

And, on a brighter note, it would also allow people to know who to thank when these things are dropped responsibly at events.

You can bind a key to ‘Next Target’ if it’s bothersome or in an awkward place. To report someone for this, how do you distinguish the difference between one player doing it for laughs, and another player who didn’t realise where they were stood? It’s really not something to report for.

Annoying? Yes. Reportable? I don’t think so.

Well, it can be considered an honest mistake if there’s one item in an inconvenient place. But those who dropped food feasts all over the areas where ley energy needed to be picked up, as seen in previous screenshots on this forum? At some point it becomes clear they are purposefully interfering with the game play of others.

Adding names would add screen clutter, this is true, but I agree it would be nice to have some way to identify the source of the objects. Both to report obvious griefing and to thank the ones helping out by responsible and useful placement.

Merchants hiding under Auric Basin Grand Chests are the most annoying. But even with a name plate on who spawned it, you can’t see it under the chest.

MashMash.1645:

Can we please have the player or account name attached to spawned items? So that we can report and block them?

This for example: http://i.imgur.com/T2MIhuC.jpg

Things like Aviator Box, Box o Fun, Merchants – basically any spawnable thing that can be interacted with. People are constantly spawning these kitten things on nodes and at the banks, etc. And yes, I know you can manually mouse click them, but some are smaller and people do this on purpose.

If people drop these things on popular area’s they would suddenly find themselves shut out and reported – if we had a name.

This creates a convoluted mechanic to solve a low-frequency issue that can be addressed in numerous other ways. In other words, there are simpler approaches to resolve the issue, which boils down to:
Make it hard for people to troll others using spawnable ‘nodes’ or ‘NPCs’

This solution requires that ANet: create an entirely new mechanic that will potentially impact all current and future ‘spawnables’ (which might cause unexpected programming issues) and require more time from players to /report and require more time from ANet to investigate (and decide whether and how to address individual trolls)… and in the end, it doesn’t actually prevent people from being jerks. Plus, it doesn’t prevent this sort of thing from happening accidentally.

Here are a few other approaches:

• Set the priority of ‘spawnables’ to be last, behind all other ‘interactable’ objects/NPCs.
• Alternative version: set the priority to be first for the player dropping the item and last for everyone else.
• Prevent spawning interactables within a certain distance of those already on the map.
• Reserve only special locations for spawning of interactables (I don’t like this one, because it also seems like extra effort for something that might also be annoying).
• Throttle the number of interactables one account can spawn, by time and location.
• Despawn interactables when the player who dropped them leaves the map or moves more than e.g. 2400 units distance.

None of these require any of us to /report other players. All reduce the likelihood that anyone (aside from the ‘spawner’) would be adversely affected by the dropping these objects.

tl;dr let’s address the root issue (spawned ‘nodes’ too close to map ‘nodes’)

Interesting ideas. I’ll weigh in against the despawn on dropper’s absence, though, unless an exception is made for guild boost banners. I don’t think I’ve ever seen those used in a nasty fashion, save perhaps for spawning a pile of them on top of each other, presumably in error. They provide benefits to every player who passes by for 30 minutes and it would be a shame to require the guild person who places them to stand there all that time or have them disappear.

Donari.5237:

Interesting ideas. I’ll weigh in against the despawn on dropper’s absence, though, unless an exception is made for guild boost banners. I don’t think I’ve ever seen those used in a nasty fashion, save perhaps for spawning a pile of them on top of each other, presumably in error. They provide benefits to every player who passes by for 30 minutes and it would be a shame to require the guild person who places them to stand there all that time or have them disappear.

I don’t know that I’d apply any of above to buff banners. I know that people do troll them, but mostly, people just aren’t good about placing them. I don’t think they are as much as a problem as things like Boxes o’ Fun, Bobblehead, and Aviator.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

MashMash.1645:

Can we please have the player or account name attached to spawned items? So that we can report and block them?

This for example: http://i.imgur.com/T2MIhuC.jpg

Things like Aviator Box, Box o Fun, Merchants – basically any spawnable thing that can be interacted with. People are constantly spawning these kitten things on nodes and at the banks, etc. And yes, I know you can manually mouse click them, but some are smaller and people do this on purpose.

If people drop these things on popular area’s they would suddenly find themselves shut out and reported – if we had a name.

This creates a convoluted mechanic to solve a low-frequency issue that can be addressed in numerous other ways. In other words, there are simpler approaches to resolve the issue, which boils down to:
Make it hard for people to troll others using spawnable ‘nodes’ or ‘NPCs’

This solution requires that ANet: create an entirely new mechanic that will potentially impact all current and future ‘spawnables’ (which might cause unexpected programming issues) and require more time from players to /report and require more time from ANet to investigate (and decide whether and how to address individual trolls)… and in the end, it doesn’t actually prevent people from being jerks. Plus, it doesn’t prevent this sort of thing from happening accidentally.

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Here are a few other approaches:

• Set the priority of ‘spawnables’ to be last, behind all other ‘interactable’ objects/NPCs.
• Alternative version: set the priority to be first for the player dropping the item and last for everyone else.
• Prevent spawning interactables within a certain distance of those already on the map.
• Reserve only special locations for spawning of interactables (I don’t like this one, because it also seems like extra effort for something that might also be annoying).
• Throttle the number of interactables one account can spawn, by time and location.
• Despawn interactables when the player who dropped them leaves the map or moves more than e.g. 2400 units distance.

None of these require any of us to /report other players. All reduce the likelihood that anyone (aside from the ‘spawner’) would be adversely affected by the dropping these objects.

tl;dr let’s address the root issue (spawned ‘nodes’ too close to map ‘nodes’)

The simplest solution would be to have an “embargo” zone of sorts. Perhaps a 600 unit radius around server “owned” interactables and static npcs. This would mean harvest nodes, npcs, chests, and my personal hate-inducing favorite, world boss portals (lookin at you kittens at TT).

Some people just use these things next to the bank because they are cancerous to inventory space and not really fun anymore (same old stuff gets old). I may or may not be guilty of this.

Cecilia.5179:

Some people just use these things next to the bank because they are cancerous to inventory space and not really fun anymore (same old stuff gets old). I may or may not be guilty of this.

The ones at banks or vendors are easy to excuse as accidental spawns. They’re the vast minority when it comes to spawned items in bad locations.

The majority of inconveniently spawned items players are not accidentally spawned close to a bank, but rather spawned in the middle of an event, at exactly the time and place when many players want to pick something up or interact with something. I agree that reporting would not solve the problem sufficiently. What needs to be done is:

• Make it impossible to spawn stuff in a certain radius around interactables. This includes eventstuff, stationary vendors, but also other spawnable items.
• Restrict every player to one or two spawnable items at a time. This prevents a single player from occupying all space using the rule above.
• Despawn any spawnables in a certain radius around event interactables as soon as the event starts and spawns it’s interactables.

Aidan Savage.2078:

The simplest solution would be to have an “embargo” zone of sorts. Perhaps a 600 unit radius around server “owned” interactables and static npcs. This would mean harvest nodes, npcs, chests, and my personal hate-inducing favorite, world boss portals (lookin at you kittens at TT).

That’s what I think, as well. I’m not sure how doable it would be, but I think something like that would be best. The other day I was grabbing the go-to Ascalon vista for the daily vista viewer, and someone was standing there dropping multiple food trays and guild feast items on top of it. It was easy enough for me to find the vista interact thingy (or I could have just gone to a different, just as easy vista). But it’s still annoying that trolls can just drop item after item on top of another interactable.

This is happening every day now: http://imgur.com/s8C9tZl