What's Wrong With WOW - Trade Chat

Opinion from Matt - Thursday, 20 May 2010 @ 6:37pm

There was a time in the dim and distant past where Trade Chat was used for actual trade. People were quite fussy about that, and an off-trade comment could get you quickly pointed towards "general" where such things belong. Then an interesting decision was made to link trade chat between the major cities, so people selling an item in one town could find a buyer in another.

It seems reasonable, but the side effect of that was that trade chat became a universal chat area, in fact a more general chat than... well... general chat. Trade Chat became the place to talk and troll, and no one really minded.

But increasingly people began to use Trade Chat as a replacement LFG channel. Things have gotten now to the point where trade chat is almost completely useless for either chat OR trade, and is now nothing but a quickly scrolling selection of ICC Looking For Group calls.

Often they're repeatedly spammed, frequently "out of date". The number of them I've seen that say "Need all" and then later in the same message "Healers only." is quite startling.

Worst of all, these calls aren't single line or single message. They're multi-line macros, often with ascii borders. They apparently weren't shitting me enough with just words that they need to put a retarded fucking box around them to make it entirely clear.

The length of these spam messages is so long that they often go completely out of the space allotted for chat (in my case) and leave you with something along the lines of "NO SCRUBS ALLOWED. JUST KNOW YOUR ROLE". Which pretty much puts me out of contention twice in as many pseudo-sentences, regardless of where they're going.

This spamming of trade chat with "LFG ICC 10 5.1 GS MIN, BRYN RSV" and other arcane gibberish is annoying as all hell, and part of me wants to stop it. There's an option in WoW to right click on a person's name and "Report as spam". But I can't really tell if that's supposed to be for reporting people who post shit or (as I would assume) specifically for reporting people who who send goldfarm type spam.

It's tempting to just "Report as spam" them anyway, even if it does the get them banned as gold farmers. Making some examples of people might be a start, and keep people on their toes. Then trade chat can slowly return to what it's supposed to be for. Trade.

And for fuckwits to amuse themselves typing the word "anal" and then linking spells for a "funny" joke.

How do we fix it?
We can't. People will be people and that's just the way it is. Actually, that's bullshit. This one is Blizzard's fault, through and through. This one can be fixed, and it wouldn't even be hard to do. People ARE going be asshats given any opportunity, so it's up to developers to make damn sure that asshattery is minimised and controlled.

The first thing that needs to be on there is basic flood control. This isn't difficult. It shouldn't be difficult and it's an epic and stupid fail that something like this isn't in place already, and that there's no plans to put any such thing in place. A simple system that blocked posts from being made within a few seconds of each other would stop the spam macro megaposts.

Smarter and more advanced programming could make a longer and longer post block depending how often people try to spam, to prevent people simply posting repeated macro comments every couple of seconds.

The second thing that needs to be done is some sort of Spam warning, some clarity to the "Report as Spam" to distinguish between a "Warn fuckwits spamming trade as an LFG" and "Ban gold farmer" functionality. Both of these would serve to allow better control and enforcement of the trade chat and other communication methods.

As a final requirement - fix the problem. People are spamming trade chat because there isn't a particularly good system for finding raiders. If you had a working system in place people wouldn't NEED to spam trade to fill a group. Trade chat spam for heroics vanished when the random dungeon finder and improved dungeon LFG came in. And if there IS a Looking For Raid interface (and I think there actually is) people need to be forced or encouraged to use it. It needs to work BETTER than trade chat spam.