Quote Originally Posted by Roda View Post

Real talk, I'm on balmung. The only good thing that's come of the server lockdown is that I've never had any persistent interaction with RMT in this game, so I don't know how aggressive the RMT is vs how aggressive SE is at suppressing it. But I highly disagree with the idea that new players can just be denied QoL features because they're new. To me this is like if until you're level 17, you can acquire and spend gil, but you cannot see how much gil you have because it makes life less convenient for gil farmers.
Turn it off for trial accounts, sure, but my recruit-a-friends paid for this game so they can experience the same game I play and they shouldn't be punished because SE's spam detection sucks.

But, if you insist on restricting low level players because of RMT, at least be consistent. Take away the chat functionalities of anything you don't want to see a bubble for, because they can be abused just as badly, and even more intrusively now, since they actively push away lines from level 18+ players.
I'm on Excalibur, the RMT spam tends to only show up during periods where there is no queue to get in (right now the queue averages about 20 from noon to 11pm), I tend to play between 5pm and 4am. So I do see it, I've even sat there at the marketboard over the course of two hours and counted how many new RMT bots.

Cue


Roughly, a new bot appears, it starts spamming, I hit report RMT, it keeps spamming for about 5 minutes, pops out of existence, and then a new bot arrives a minute later. Repeat about 20 times.

As for how bad spam can get in a mmo... I went through all my mabinogi screenshots and pretty much remembered I took great pains to get screenshots that don't have rmt spam in them, though I did find this one in Mabinogi:



This is standing in the "market" on channel 1 Alexina sometime during November 2009. Also every single one of those shops are bots, so you often saw the rmt spam bots right on top of the rmt shops. Nexon only started to do somethings to curb the spam abuse years later, but this is typically what the market looked like on a day with few bots.

I have screenshots from Wizardry and Archeage beta's/release versions that have similar problems, but it will take a while to locate them, so let's just let me say that this is not the worst.

Bad is when the bots appear and just stay there, worse is when the bots appear and disappear only for another to take it's place, thus rendering the blacklist useless.

FFXIV's report RMT AFAIK at least just creates a ticket for the GM's to look at and hopefully ban the physical accounts, but it's not good enough when the only thing that stops RMT is by preventing new characters from being created in the first place.

Perhaps that's where RMT combat should be addressed. Anyway, staying on topic of the bubbles.

In most cases, the bubbles you see from NPC's are about 1 and a half lines, probably because they are translated from Japanese and Japanese is a little more concise with the amount of space it takes up.

What I'd suggest is maybe 66 characters across (typical type-written letters are this wide, as well as emails) and 3 lines being the maximum.
http://webtypography.net/2.1.2

That would give you 198 characters to fit most text. If we want to consider making that larger, I'd suggest auto-line breaks, so that if someone writes a 500 character post, it displays it one sentence at a time, and bumps the previous line up until there is three, then deletes the top most line before it adds the next line so that only 3 lines are ever displayed.