Guild Wars 2

We’re all sick of getting whispered by spam bots all day long, so I had this idea. Basically, when someone wants to whisper you, if they are not on your friends list or in your guild, you get a small pop up (somewhere near the bottom of the screen) that states “Allow X to Whisper” to which you can click Yes or Ignore.

In order for this feature to not in itself become annoying, have a cool down period before an ignored person can once again try to whisper you, as well as make the pop up itself be relatively small and non interrupting of any gameplay mechanic.

Thoughts on this, or ideas to expand upon/improve it?

I think this is a fabulous idea. The number one complaint I see in game is with regard to spam bots/gold sellers whispering us. Just yesterday I was spammed 8 times within in 30 second period and simply just logged off after that as a result. This takes away from the joy of gaming and it quit annoying. Having a system in place to either accept or decline a whisper would be a great way to ignore these issues and stop the spamming. AWESOME IDEA!!!

i fail to see how this is more convenient than right-click, block

I like it. And Algreg, it prevents your chat from being clogged with those 6+ lines of whisper spam.

I find this idea awesome as well, hope they add something like this because those gold sellers are getting annoying for good lately -.-

If I’m going to get a popup I may aswell get the message. I don’t want ANYTHING popping up at all.

I should just get the option to turn off whispers to all but friends & guild.

I think it would just drive the gold sellers to spam map chat as they were doing in Divinity’s Reach last night. If they whisper to me, only I get annoyed; if they post in map chat, they annoy a lot of other people.

Allowing everyone to disregard whispers from anyone not on their friends list will just encourage more isolationism. I’ve had whispers from new players asking questions, people I don’t know complimenting the look of my character, someone I didn’t see requesting a rez, and friends who weren’t on my list for whatever reason. If I had the option to ignore all whispers, I may have just assumed all those people were spammers.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Kumion.7580:

Allowing everyone to disregard whispers from anyone not on their friends list will just encourage more isolationism. I’ve had whispers from new players asking questions, people I don’t know complimenting the look of my character, someone I didn’t see requesting a rez, and friends who weren’t on my list for whatever reason. If I had the option to ignore all whispers, I may have just assumed all those people were spammers.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: having an option to filter out all whipsers besides people on your friends list can work here as it does work in another game that I play. If someone wants to talk to you or ask you to add them to your friend list they can still mail you to do so. If you don’t want to filter out all people, that’s fine too, you DON’T have to use the option to do so, but please allow those of us who do want such an option (or similar) to have that option.

It doesn’t have to be a pop up, it could be in the chat and you can simply click yes or no. That is a good point about the map chat, however. Any ideas on that would be lovely. That one will have a much tougher solution.

They have a solution for it. Report and block.

Report so that ANet can ban them. Block so you don’t have to see them in the meantime.

This solution will be too much of an inconvenience/hinder to those who use the whisper system appropriately over the spammers. The spammers will just move to a new chat type, map, say, etc. Non-spammers might not be able to depending on the nature of the communication.

When a critical mass of whispers from an account gets “Reported” that account gets squelched for X hours.

done.

They’ve started moving to map chat now, had it all over my map chat last night.

I actually removed whispering from my main window and created a “whisper only” chat box. Now when/if I hear the whisper tone, I decide if I want to check it out. I’ve deemed whisper’s not important to my gameplay, want to talk to me…do it in guild/map/say or mail me a letter telling me to check whispers.

If I start to get a tone every few secs and I actually can hear them (when my own music is off), I will then report and block if the culprit is a gold seller.

They all spam the same message or variants of that message. Is it really that hard to automatically detetct and ban them from the game? They advertise their gold selling website all day. I think your solution is not a real solution, real solution is implementing an auto-detetct/ban mechanism for gold sellers and their spammer bots. Besides their spams, gold sellers already ruin the game via inflation and unfair rmt.

How about a simple question to prevent bots from messaging us?
What class is this character?
What is the name of this character?
What level is this character?

When the question is answered correctly you can send a whisper, get it wrong and you can try again after an exponentially growing cooldown!

Seera.5916:

They have a solution for it. Report and block.

Report so that ANet can ban them. Block so you don’t have to see them in the meantime.

This solution will be too much of an inconvenience/hinder to those who use the whisper system appropriately over the spammers. The spammers will just move to a new chat type, map, say, etc. Non-spammers might not be able to depending on the nature of the communication.

Simple as this, we don’t need to turn ourselves upside down to try to fix this “problem”.

Annoying? Yes, but only because the game is(was?) on sale.

Report, block, done. For the longest time we didn’t see any of these, when the game goes off sale and all accounts are blocked you won’t see them anymore for a while.

With the way the friends list is set up at the moment, people only have to “follow” you to be classed as a friend (it’s not reciprocal) to see where you are and I don’t think a friends-only whisper option would work because of this.

I find whispers to be annoying in general and no longer have the option enabled in any of my chat tabs. If people want to talk to me, they can use /say or mail me.

Today, I got 8-9 whispers from spam bots. They were still bombarding my chat box although I had reported&blocked all of them. They have so many accounts for spamming. It really started to be annoying after this point… They were sending only 1 messages for a day, but they are constantly spamming now. Please arenanet, find a solution for both their advertisement spams and gold selling. They manipulate in-game market, cause inflation, and allow ppl to buy legendaries in 1 day without effort. Annoying spams are just an extra.

As annoying as whisper spam can be and as severe as I would like to punish them, I like legit players being able to whisper me.

I recently got a very nice message from an opposing player after a round of spvp and we had a nice conversation. I sometimes get compliments on my character and I also sometimes like to whisper people who ask for help.

If you put some kind of captcha on whispers, almost all of that will just stop and the game will be worse off for it.

One thing I would like to see is that if you block someone, their messages disappear from your chat window.

Better yet, there should be a blockedd chat channel – you turn it off of course, but once you block someone, they get added to that channel on your client and their chats basically become invisible – unless you need to see it for some reason.

Simply reporting and blocking is good, but it does not remove the offending text and it’s annoying to have to sit and look at it. Placing people into this invisible blocked channel would really help players and help hinder those who abuse the feature.