Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
Blacklists are generally client side, not server side, which is why they're limited in what they accomplish.
Blizzard friendlist blacklists are server sided, but very restricted because of that. Often even too restricted. But even that already helps massively because even with just a list of 75, by the time you reached the 75th, you probably can already remove it because its outdated. Sure, some players are a bit excessive and would need more of that (streamers usualy), but for most players such small list works fine.

Its not even that heavy in resources to make. Lets say each player id is still translated to a 64bit integer (8 bytes - which is actualy a lot as it can contain the entire human population millions of times). This would translate to 128 entries per kB. With a 1000 entries per blocklist (24 entries are removed to store overhead data). You would need 8kB per house.

Lets say we add a state to the players so they can be marked as blacklisted, whitelisted, owner, whatever etc. And we store that in an integer with it (some bits of that integer can be used as a boolean), we can add another 8 bytes. Which would be excessive here. but its easy to calculate with.

We are then still talking about megabytes of data for the entire blocklist for all servers here. And for this even keeping 1GB of space is something that even a basic cheap webserver with mysql could easily handle. Its such low value that it can be managed within RAM on a single basic webserver if that was needed.

The limit is usualy the cost for devs to make it. A yearly cost of $500 to prevent harassment for just storing, hosting and backing up the data is realy not a lot. And when the server has its features shared, is doable. Its only its initial creation that realy adds a lot of costs. Technology wise this is such low amount of data and simple enough data that there is no trouble here. And with it, it saves a LOT of work for the support department of handling support tickets for harrasment, as players can now resolve most cases themselve. That most likely is going to generate profit instead of costing resources.