
Originally Posted by
Dadric
It is not substantially more difficult and time-consuming than I suggest, and I would assert that there are likely other methods than the one I mentioned that are even more efficient. There are dozens of other online games that have managed to figure it out. If the complaints had been that Evony staff had not been doing enough to find these people, what you're claiming might hold up, but that's not what's at issue. The violators being discussed here have already been found and exposed in such a way there there can be no legitimate question that they are indeed using multiple accounts. All that's left for a staffer on the other end to do is run a few quick checks and take disciplinary action.
Invoking "priorities" is no excuse either. First of all, it's not necessary for the task of rule enforcement to be assigned to developers. It's absurd to act as if account suspension - or the minimal investigating that would accompany it - requires the skills or access of a developer. If it does, then someone did something seriously, seriously wrong at the most basic level of game design, but I have a hard time believing that's the case. And regardless, to answer your question; Yeah, I absolutely want the enforcement of equity-ensuring rules to be a priority. If I'm going to contribute money to a game, there's no question that I want to know that it's a "priority" that players aren't allowed to gain an advantage by ignoring rules. But even still, the larger point is that enforcement of this particular rule isn't an issue of "priorities" on any level.
At no point is anything that simple. Screen-shots can be doctored and chat sessions altered to fit what the accuser wants. In order to prevent the system from being abused such that innocent players get banned, each accusation MUST be investigated using the actual game logs to verify the claims and proof. To do otherwise is to give players the opportunity and ability to get innocent players banned and suspended simply because they don't like them or because they can.
Investigations take time and resources away from doing something else, and no one here, me included, have any idea how many people even deal with these issues.

Originally Posted by
neko_lord
This is because apparently nobody fully tests these changes to the filter. As it stands right now, you cannot ask "isn't it" because there's that naughty word being formed across the space. There could be all kinds of other combinations that form that naughty word, that it (there's an example) makes things very frustrating. Then there was the anti-Santa incident that got all kinds of words simply because they had that 2-letter combination in them. Then there was the time when even the name of the game was filtered, so any shared URLs to scouting reports or even to these very forums showed up as ****. There may have been another time when numbers were filtered, thus all the numbers in the URLs got filtered.
As someone who has also done programming, all of the errors are likely due to misunderstandings involving Regular Expressions. For example, not understanding how [\w] works... It does take a little bit of practice with regular expressions to get it to do exactly what you want it to do. Bottom line though is the changes need to go through more rigorous test cases / scripts, as clearly there have been some major side-effects which then have to be backed out at the next server reset.
Look, as I've said in other threads, I used to do what you do. I understand, perhaps more than most here, how frustrating it is. However defending a clear failure to run code changes through Quality Control / Quality Assurance by telling customers that they are being too demanding is not a good PR move.
You don't know how word filters work. They look at the text stream and look for those letter combinations mindlessly. They are not intelligent, they are simple, stupid, automatic. They incorporate the usage of spaces in them because that is one common way of bypassing the filter, and while this might break chat, they put those variations in the word list anyway to catch the instances of someone trying to bypass the word filter.
Last edited by Ashanta; 11-24-2009 at 10:50 PM.
But....the eternal ray of sunshine REALLY wanted to see you, so I helped brighten your day by removing the city from around you! ^.^
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