So it seems there's this ongoing battle between two groups of people: 1) Those who want peace and quiet from the economy, unless they're actively engaging in it. 2) Those who want to be able to quickly and easily talk in chat about economic matters without having to worry if their messages are sent to the other party and without having to keep switching channels all the time. Unfortunately, the current system of chat channels is very poor at meeting the needs of these two groups of people because: 1) Most new players do not use the chat channels or understand them. 2) Most players even if they're not new, asking who sells an item, don't use economy channel. In fact, there doesn't even seem to be a rule that they should. 3) Despite there being a rule to advertise your shop or residence in economy chat only, it seems most people still don't. The staff are slowly spreading awareness however, it's still a slow change. 4) There's an overhead in flipping back and forth between channels, and it's very easy to forget to do so. 5) Advertising other shops which aren't yours is often done in the town chat channel. It could be your alternate account or close friend. But certainly someone who wants peace and quiet from the economy is not getting it this way. For a good example, consider the common example of a player asking in normal town chat 'who sells ____'. Now, naturally, if you own a shop which sells ____, you want to help them out. So you have two choices: (1) You can type /ch e, then "Item at ####", then /ch t. As well as taking substantially longer, and being prone to additional typos, there's a chance they could have /ch hide e and wont even get your response trying to help them. (2) You can simply type "Item at ####" and be done with it. It seems to me that the simplest solution is: (1) Regulate all economy, including 'who sells ___', 'who buys ___', 'auction at ___', 'who has a lot of ____', 'check out my shop at ____', 'who wants a job helping me ____', 'what has a job for me', etc... These are all messages which people who don't want economy messages (/ch hide e users) probably don't want to read. Anything involving rupees or advertising a residence should be on the economy channel. (2) Expand the filter to include substantially more keywords, such as anything mentioning a res number, anything mentioning selling, buying, jobs, shops, malls, rupees, etc... (3) Add a way to disable the above filter for power users, and a way to report easily problems with the filter so it can be improved over time to be even more intelligent. Also, if someone sets a channel right before typing a message, the filter is disabled one time. Interested to hear the opinions of others on this matter.
Most of these problems could easily be solved by spreading awareness. Sure, the channel system could use some work, but it isn't the most important thing to fix.
These would be pretty advanced features. It'd be interesting to see how they'd work out. As for how the chat channel operates now, at least how I've seen it in the past, there is little to no regard towards econ chat. Usually, someone asks a question in town chat, asking if anyone an item for sale, or whatever question. Then some guy says, "Hey, use econ chat" message gets repeated by the asker, then some seller announces where to buy in town chat, it's just chaos. Obviously, there are lots of different scenarios. Few of them are positive. I think automatic filters would be an awesome PS setting. Definitely a toggle-type setting, so if an older player gets frustrated with it, he/she can disable the auto filter. Just my opinion. Might have contradicted the suggestion in my first paragraph, but I love this idea
There is another solution: Aikar magic. Aikar has already put it in place that some messages automagically get put into the E chat and that can help out a lot (IMO). Unfortunately, yes; I tried.. this doesn't include your suggestion: So maybe Aikar could use 'sell' to his magic? I dunno, just an idea. I was gonna buy, then a newer player showed up... I love that community stuff. This is real people helping people for you. PS: that pic is another fine example as to why I love playing on EMC.
When the economy chat came in place I remember being told down and being sad Hey use economy chat but honestly its the EXACT same as town chat except for a little E instead of a T in front of the message. I believe that the economy chat should be reconsidered and should be taken out of EMC because honestly we don't need it.
Part of the reason for Economy chat was to give players the opportunity to ignore the "WHO WANTS A CARROT 4 A HUNRED ROOPEES!!!!11!!" and auction advertisements. As ignored as economy chat is, it still has its uses.
I want. valid 15 30min. after posting time: /tell me in game and you got it. the perfect excuse to play a little longer
I just wish some players would carry on their private conversations in private tells and not in Town Chat. My favorite is when someone is repeatedly responding in town chat to someone who is messaging them privately.
From my point of view, there is no reason for the Economy chat since it gets broadcasted to town chat anyway, that is just adding complications and extra un needed work. Empire Minecraft is based around Economy, that is what EMC is, economy.
That is incorrect. EMC is not based around "Economy", Economy is just 1 of our features which isn't even the main one I am developing. For people who do EVERYTHING, economy will eventually be like a 20% thing. We are not removing Economy chat. As said, its purpose is to give opportunity to ignore Economy messages. We can add more filters to force E chat if a RELIABLE pattern is found. We have to be careful with them, as we don't want false positives forcing messages into E that are not Economy messages. It is easy to report improvements: send me a PM But please dont spam me with "this is a message I saw didn't get forced", and send me occurrences that are repeated OFTEN. A message here and there slipping through is going to happen. Nothing is perfect. But if you have a consistent pattern slipping through, we can add it.
For anyone who doesn't know you can just use the @ symbol and the channel you want to say it in. So for example when someone says does anyone sell blah blah I respond " @e check out /v 6655 dark blue floor" that way I don't have to swap channels using /ch This helps if you are like me and have an issue with all channels and messages and things going
Most of the keywords I mentioned are pretty reliable. There will always be false positives though. The idea is that the filter could improve over time based on an easy report feature. This feature would collect all the reports and organize them into a nice list so you can fix them all in one go. You're thinking of the filter as 'forcing' a user to use a certain channel, but that really shouldn't be the purpose. Instead, it should be thought of as a convenience feature to make chatting easier. For this reason, the user should always be able to override or disable it. No automated system can reasonably detect all cases perfectly, but an automated system can reasonably reach 90% of economy messages with <1% false positives. Having a feature which is forced on users is an easy way to arouse resentment, even if most of the time it does the right thing. A key part of success in getting adoption is to have users feel like they are a part of the change, and encouraging them to improve the filter can help give them a feeling of ownership over the process. Here are some regular expressions to start with. These should all be not case sensitive. w+h*o*( is)? (s[a-z]+l[a-z]+|buy)(s+|ing) [a-z \?]+ "who sells mushrooms" "who is selling cobblestone" wh?ere? c(an|o?u?l?d) (i|we)? (find|buy|ge?t) [a-z \?]+ "where can I buy a horse?" "were could I buy gold" ((who|i|doe?)s? )?([aeny]{2,4}(one|1)? )?(ha(ve|s) a)? (shop|mall)s? ?((that|which)? (s[el]{1,3}l|buy)(s|ing|) [a-z \?]+)? "who has a shop which buys nether warts" "does anyone have a shop which sells stone?" "is anyone selling gold ingots" "any malls that buy promos?" "ne shop buy sponge" .+ (at|go to|@|,|try) ?([0-9]{3,5}( or)?)+ "gold ingots at 911" "for nether wart try 2211 or 11011" "casino at 6611" "new shop at 8811" All advertisements for residences are supposed to be economy. .*(does|where|need|want).* (a job).+ "does anyone have a job for me" "where can I get a job?" "i need a job" "who needs a job?" "who wants a job clearing dirt in my res" .*[0-9]+r.* "emeralds for 47r" "you owe me 100r" "I have 0r" .*rup[es]{1,4}.* "How many rupees?" "Who has the most rupess?" "Earn 100 rups for helping me dig." .*auction.* "beacon auction at 19500 in 5 minutes" A couple additional things I thought of: 1) For the first time that a chat is changed to economy channel, or if there hasn't been a change for, perhaps, more than 48 hours, display a link to the wiki with an introduction to chat channels. I've seen some users ask why there's an E beside their name. Channel systems can be quite complicated for new players to understand easily. 2) Messages with the channel changed should perhaps have a link beside them (ie [Not Economy?]) which is displayed only for the sender and automatically reposts in town chat and submits a report. I'm not sure how links work in the client, but I've seen them done with other things like usernames (so you can automatically start a private chat by clicking usernames) and that would be the most ideal way to do it.
