Please hide blacklisted player's character

[Risvertasashi]

On topic. Would it be nice for blacklisted players to be removed from your gameplay entirely? Sure. You blacklisted them because you didn't want to deal with them. Of course it would. But it's not realistic.

It could be done. It could even be done well. It's possible.

But the programming implications... Nope. It's just not going to happen.

Well, here's the thing. Blacklist does block party invites, party finder, trade windows, and so on. IMO it's done pretty well. Someone goes on that list, they are, effectively, removed from your gameplay.

But MMOs are also a social, shared world. If merely seeing a person you (hypothetical 'you') don't like is too much to handle... then once more, I don't think this is the right genre for such a person.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Alright. I am going to comment on something annoying me. I brought this up as a possible solution to people griefing other players with emote spam or simply hovering around when they've already been blacklisted for prior issues. Essentially, they are just trying to be irritating. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "growing a ticker skin" or millennials, but merely not wanting to have another player purposely act like an asshole. Why the subject even drifted to that nonsense is beyond me.

[Alipoprocks]

I blist rude players and mostly during the cycle after endgame goes to df and I'm farming pieces of gear I still need. So I often will remain in a party with a person on my blist because I can no longer read the rudeness. I was just imagining how fun it would be if they were invisible too during the raid, lol. And would their name still appear in the party list?

[Waeksyn]

Rather than hiding them, how about the ability to change the avatar of anyone in your blacklist to whatever you want! While the jerk may still be visible, having them appear as a ground squirrel (rat) might make you feel better!

[Breezelyn]

Just gonna put my two sense here. There's only so much one person can do with reporting to the GM's. Blacklisting SHOULD remove someone from your client side view. If other games can do it, I don't see how much coding it can take to make someone just "disappear" off your screen. Even Mabinogi (A freakin old MMO) makes someone completely vanish from your screen, once your BL them. It shouldn't be that hard to expand on the block feature.

[Vandril]

If other games can do it, I don't see how much coding it can take to make someone just "disappear" off your screen. Even Mabinogi (A freakin old MMO) makes someone completely vanish from your screen, once your BL them. It shouldn't be that hard to expand on the block feature.

It's not the coding itself, but the implications of the code. It's the largely unnecessarily wasted resources spent handling the conditional decisions and on-the-spot alteration of client-side character graphics that are the biggest hurdle to overcome. The client would need to check to see if every single character it happens to load is on your blacklist or not every time it is time to load character graphics assets and any time your blacklist is updated. By itself, it's a small process. But it's little things like this that add up and cause problems with program efficiency.

That's the gist of it. It's up to Square to determine whether or not they see the resources worth using on something like this. Given that limited resources are one of the things Square generally uses as a reason to not implement a feature, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

I brought this up as a possible solution to people griefing other players with emote spam or simply hovering around when they've already been blacklisted for prior issues. Essentially, they are just trying to be irritating. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "growing a ticker skin" or millennials, but merely not wanting to have another player purposely act like an asshole. Why the subject even drifted to that nonsense is beyond me.

If you grow irritated by simply seeing someone from your blacklist continue to obviously try and irritate you despite only being able to see their character and nothing more, then it has very much to do with how thin your skin is. Why do you let their antics bother you when it's as slight as seeing their character go through the motions? I mean, that kind of thing is precisely what having thin skin means.

(Note: I mean "you" in a general sense, not you in particular.)

I agree that the "millennials" mention was completely off the mark, though. As that particular topic always is.

[Catwho]

I fully support this. We had the ability to turn someone completely invisible back in a virtual world coded in 1995 (I know, I was a GM there with the ability to zap it.)

You CAN end up in an party with someone on your black list, however. I rolled into a World of Darkness with a dude who was on my blacklist because we both came in from Duty Finder. I was DPS, he was healing. That was kind of awkward. I couldn't see anything he said in party chat and he couldn't see anything I said in party chat (I think.) The exception would have to be made for when you're in a duty with someone on your black list, then they are still visible.

But open world? Yeah. Ghost their butts on my client. I don't even want to see them.

[Callinon]

I fully support this. We had the ability to turn someone completely invisible back in a virtual world coded in 1995 (I know, I was a GM there with the ability to zap it.)

You CAN end up in an party with someone on your black list, however. I rolled into a World of Darkness with a dude who was on my blacklist because we both came in from Duty Finder. I was DPS, he was healing. That was kind of awkward. I couldn't see anything he said in party chat and he couldn't see anything I said in party chat (I think.) The exception would have to be made for when you're in a duty with someone on your black list, then they are still visible.

But open world? Yeah. Ghost their butts on my client. I don't even want to see them.

It CAN be done. It's possible to write code that does this. But it would be hugely taxing on the client to do it.

Vandril put it pretty much exactly right. Every time your client loads any character model (pc or npc) it'd have to scan your entire blacklist, potentially 200 names to see if it's about to load someone who's blacklisted. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

So Idyllshire for example.. let's say you have 150 PCs and the 20 or so NPCs in that zone. That means that the client has to scan your 200-name blacklist 170 times. That's 34000 checks it's doing just because you zoned in to Idyllshire. God help you in a zone with wandering mobs. Let's say both you and Mr. Blacklist like to do Alex Savage... so now we're talking about Drav Hinterlands. Couple hundred players crowded around the entrance, plus 50ish mobs in your loading radius wandering in and out.

It'd be a ridiculous use of cpu time doing this. And what do you do about effects? Animations are tied to the character model, but the person could still spam you with spells and not only would there be nothing you could do about it, you wouldn't even be able to see where they were coming from. So what's next then? Blacklisted people can't cast spells on you? Yeah there's no way for THAT to go horribly wrong in some FATE or Hunt later on down the road.

If someone is harassing you and blacklisting them doesn't make the problem go away, that's what the GMs are for.

[Roegadyn_Bear]

I had someone that was bothering me, and just generally made me uncomfortable. They had a harassing attitude, but once I blist them obviously i no longer had to deal with any messages, or emotes. Now this person doesn't actually follow me around or anything like that. But they do similar things that i do, like farming DoL red scrips, and doing alex. So I always see their character standing around. It still makes me feel uncomfortable. You could argue its on me, sense they don't go out of there way to stand on top of me, or anything like that. But it still makes me feel uneasy seeing them. So I would support this.

I did find a way to kinda make them disappear, and that's to remove the name plates from the UI. But unfortunately they have a distinct look. So I can still spot them. So for me being able to make them disappear off my game would be a boon. I wish I never met the person I wouldn't be worried about them. But because I endured their harassment, and it made me feel this way, now anytime I see them I get anxiety. It's only this one person.

The fact that his/her mere digital presence affects you so profoundly says way more about you than you realize.

With all due respect, you'll need to get over it and grow thicker skin or you'll need to seek help because I can only imagine just how crippled you'd be outside of a medium that doesn't give you nearly as much options to protect yourself from people who affect you so negatively by merely existing in the same space.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

Instead of making him invisible it should change him or her into a plate of food or glass of water.