No.

The initial reason for the limit was because the behavior of stakers was downright terrible and they're still displaying that same behavior. If anything the arena should be closed.

Assuming that will make them behave any less retarded. Ban them, mute them, that's what rule breakers deserve. Why limit what people can do in-game because of a few rotten cunts? Toxicity isn't exclusive to duel arena. With your logic PKing should had been removed back in scape.

I personally never liked the gambling aspect of the game. People get addicted and frustrated, that's also the cause for all this toxicity. It's not healthy for the players nor the game.

Clearly the 1M limit hasn't worked due to the number of middleman scams, unfortunately the stakers haven't figured out that we don't actually want them staking, atleast I don't. I wouldn't mind removing the limit, but other changes should be applied.

I'll just throw some random thoughts and ideas about the problems etc.

First it's the accessibility: compared to Scape a majority of players are affiliated to the arena, which wasn't the case previously. The sad part is that even new members are dragged there with the delusion of getting fast cash.
The easiest solution for this is a total level requirement. This also limits the throwaway staking accounts in game, since most of them don't bother levelling at all. Atleast this way they would actually have to contribute to the game at some point. Membership requirement could also be a thing.
This will be really controversial though, since these people don't care about skilling or levelling. We could potentially lose players, I'm not sure if Thomy is willing to take the risk.

Cash only stakes: this is actually something I really like. It has made the job much easier for staff members (I won't get into detail on this one, but reverting would be plainly stupid). Also it has given us stable prices. They might be low, but atleast they're stable.
If it was to be removed, yes there's a possibility that some of the items skyrocket, but we don't really have such collector-like stakers right now. Let's say it does happen though, it wouldn't take long until that person is cleaned and the items are dumped again. We've been there, huge price crashes, really unstable and fluctuating prices. The gamble isn't worth it.
Also you're forgetting the fact about how overflowed we are with items, cash is not the problem. We need item sinks for that, not some potential stakers who might be interested in buying in bulk if the limit is removed.

If cash overflow gets problematic, we just apply a temporary staking tax. Since most of the cash is moving around that it would be the most effective sink. Considering how popular the place is, it doesn't even have to be a high tax. But as I said, since item overflow is far worse than cash overflow, we have to deal with the items, not the cash.

As far as the toxicity is concerned, harsher and more effective punishments will do. Also restrictions (total level, membership) will reduce the number of accounts people can stake with, so it will improve. Temporary staking restrictions (+mute/ban) could also be a thing.

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TLDR: remove 1M limit, don't enable item stakes, item sinks (to improve economy), add temporary staking tax if cash is overflowing, harsher punishments for toxicity.

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In my opinion the optimal yet risky solution would be a complete removal of arena (even non-stake duelling). Focus will shift to pking. Scams would take place at first, but hopefully stakers have enough wit to stop.
Risk would come from stakers quitting entirely.

I personally never liked the gambling aspect of the game. People get addicted and frustrated, that's also the cause for all this toxicity. It's not healthy for the players nor the game.

Clearly the 1M limit hasn't worked due to the number of middleman scams, unfortunately the stakers haven't figured out that we don't actually want them staking, atleast I don't. I wouldn't mind removing the limit, but other changes should be applied.

I'll just throw some random thoughts and ideas about the problems etc.

First it's the accessibility: compared to Scape a majority of players are affiliated to the arena, which wasn't the case previously. The sad part is that even new members are dragged there with the delusion of getting fast cash.
The easiest solution for this is a total level requirement. This also limits the throwaway staking accounts in game, since most of them don't bother levelling at all. Atleast this way they would actually have to contribute to the game at some point. Membership requirement could also be a thing.
This will be really controversial though, since these people don't care about skilling or levelling. We could potentially lose players, I'm not sure if Thomy is willing to take the risk.

Cash only stakes: this is actually something I really like. It has made the job much easier for staff members (I won't get into detail on this one, but reverting would be plainly stupid). Also it has given us stable prices. They might be low, but atleast they're stable.
If it was to be removed, yes there's a possibility that some of the items skyrocket, but we don't really have such collector-like stakers right now. Let's say it does happen though, it wouldn't take long until that person is cleaned and the items are dumped again. We've been there, huge price crashes, really unstable and fluctuating prices. The gamble isn't worth it.
Also you're forgetting the fact about how overflowed we are with items, cash is not the problem. We need item sinks for that, not some potential stakers who might be interested in buying in bulk if the limit is removed.

If cash overflow gets problematic, we just apply a temporary staking tax. Since most of the cash is moving around that it would be the most effective sink. Considering how popular the place is, it doesn't even have to be a high tax. But as I said, since item overflow is far worse than cash overflow, we have to deal with the items, not the cash.

As far as the toxicity is concerned, harsher and more effective punishments will do. Also restrictions (total level, membership) will reduce the number of accounts people can stake with, so it will improve. Temporary staking restrictions (+mute/ban) could also be a thing.

---

TLDR: remove 1M limit, don't enable item stakes, item sinks (to improve economy), add temporary staking tax if cash is overflowing, harsher punishments for toxicity.

---

In my opinion the optimal yet risky solution would be a complete removal of arena (even non-stake duelling). Focus will shift to pking. Scams would take place at first, but hopefully stakers have enough wit to stop.
Risk would come from stakers quitting entirely.

You're wanting people to join other private servers and runescape, aren't you? Staking doesn't ADD any cash into the game, therefore it shouldnt be sunk through staking either.

In my opinion the optimal yet risky solution would be a complete removal of arena (even non-stake duelling). Focus will shift to pking.

then the case of duel arena will apply to player killing, and willderness will become the new "duel arena"
stakers will always find a way to lose their cash.

I personally never liked the gambling aspect of the game. People get addicted and frustrated, that's also the cause for all this toxicity. It's not healthy for the players nor the game.

Clearly the 1M limit hasn't worked due to the number of middleman scams, unfortunately the stakers haven't figured out that we don't actually want them staking, atleast I don't. I wouldn't mind removing the limit, but other changes should be applied.

I'll just throw some random thoughts and ideas about the problems etc.

First it's the accessibility: compared to Scape a majority of players are affiliated to the arena, which wasn't the case previously. The sad part is that even new members are dragged there with the delusion of getting fast cash.
The easiest solution for this is a total level requirement. This also limits the throwaway staking accounts in game, since most of them don't bother levelling at all. Atleast this way they would actually have to contribute to the game at some point. Membership requirement could also be a thing.
This will be really controversial though, since these people don't care about skilling or levelling. We could potentially lose players, I'm not sure if Thomy is willing to take the risk.

Cash only stakes: this is actually something I really like. It has made the job much easier for staff members (I won't get into detail on this one, but reverting would be plainly stupid). Also it has given us stable prices. They might be low, but atleast they're stable.
If it was to be removed, yes there's a possibility that some of the items skyrocket, but we don't really have such collector-like stakers right now. Let's say it does happen though, it wouldn't take long until that person is cleaned and the items are dumped again. We've been there, huge price crashes, really unstable and fluctuating prices. The gamble isn't worth it.
Also you're forgetting the fact about how overflowed we are with items, cash is not the problem. We need item sinks for that, not some potential stakers who might be interested in buying in bulk if the limit is removed.

If cash overflow gets problematic, we just apply a temporary staking tax. Since most of the cash is moving around that it would be the most effective sink. Considering how popular the place is, it doesn't even have to be a high tax. But as I said, since item overflow is far worse than cash overflow, we have to deal with the items, not the cash.

As far as the toxicity is concerned, harsher and more effective punishments will do. Also restrictions (total level, membership) will reduce the number of accounts people can stake with, so it will improve. Temporary staking restrictions (+mute/ban) could also be a thing.

---

TLDR: remove 1M limit, don't enable item stakes, item sinks (to improve economy), add temporary staking tax if cash is overflowing, harsher punishments for toxicity.

---

In my opinion the optimal yet risky solution would be a complete removal of arena (even non-stake duelling). Focus will shift to pking. Scams would take place at first, but hopefully stakers have enough wit to stop.
Risk would come from stakers quitting entirely.

I agree on making it a member place only, in addition to a total level requirement, it will limit the amount of accounts a staker can use there after he gets punishment ( each account will worth him hours of playing and at least 10mil ) so they'll think twice before doing it again.

I don't know how item sink in duel arena will work, however I do agree at some point items must leave the game not only adding new items to it however idk if duel arena is the place for it.

Quote from: Magecrune on May 18, 2017, 08:17:13 pm

In my opinion the optimal yet risky solution would be a complete removal of arena (even non-stake duelling). Focus will shift to pking.

then the case of duel arena will apply to player killing, and willderness will become the new "duel arena"
stakers will always find a way to lose their cash.

This. RS gambling went as far as using third-party dice programs along with middlemen. Do you guys seriously want that over a safe 50/50 chance environment?

Since staking is really demanded in this server and limiting it to 1m per fight made people think of other ways to stake as going to wild, middleman and trade after a stake which all leads to a scam.

Well, I have an idea to add new an item called 'Staking ticket' similar to Member ticket which has a limit time to use it, those tickets could be sold in EC shop.

This ticket may cost 150 EC for 10 days of staking.

Moreover, this idea could be enhanced so I'd like to see your opinion in this.

Removed.

Removed.

and that's a live example of why it has been done this way,
seems like someone is leaving the party a bit early tonight.

In my opinion, I don't think it should be limited. They will and have found ways to avoid the limit. (eg. Middlemen)

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As for the toxic players, introduce perm mutes for those who are constantly getting punished for offensive language and being toxic. Make sure you let them know the path they are heading down and what the final result will be. Make it EXTREMELY clear that we don't want this kind of behavior in Emps-world. If they don't want to follow the rules they can play muted or quit.
- Maybe let them appeal it after a set amount of time?

I'm not implying that the staff team go crazy muting left, right and center. Just let the player go down that track and decide on his own how he wants to play. Either nicely or without communication at all.

Most of the toxicity of this game emerges when two or more people are interacting, and then one side gets somehow (e.g. lose items/cash, staking AND pvp) frustrated or a negative emotion. When he doesn't know how to / isn't able to control his emotions, the player starts to flame.

I don't really think we can directly change the way how people deal with their emotions or how do they express/abreact it. Instead we should make the punishments more severe, so that they will LEARN that flaming (breaking rules) will have fatal punishments. Currently player will get max. 3 day mute for using offensive language. Some of these players don't really mind about the mute punishment, they can wait it to wore off, then they would later on flame again. Time is a "thing" that everyone of us have. For someone time might be precious, for someone it's not.

I propose we should change the punishments. At the 4th rule-break, there will be a perm-mute, that can be bought off with e.g. 10m worth of items/coins. At the 5th rule-break, the perm-mute bought off price would be 50m, and will rise accordingly. I think this might somehow teach them that using offensive language is not a good behaviour. Giving perm-ban isn't going to solve any problems, it's just gonna result in players leaving this game.

Yesterday I got into a case with two "known" flamers, and solving that was quite a mess since these guys gets fired up rather easily. Eventually when the issue got solved, they calmed down, and we were chatting to each others as if they were really chill guys.

Learning how to behave is a thing that will be taught to everyone of us since we were born. If you behave badly in school, you will get punished, and you don't want to get punished again, so kids will learn to behave that way. However, this is Emps, it's internet. On the net you don't really have to care that much about your behaviour, since no one will come to knock your door for your bad internet behaviour. So focusing on the punishments is the key, at least in my opinion.

About the staking/item prices, I don't really have any opinion about this, doesn't really matter to me. Though what I know is that changing the limitions of duel arena back to back is definitely NOT good for economy. There are no perfect solutions for this, every solution has its pros and cons. Choose the alternative option that is the least bad.

Most of the toxicity of this game emerges when two or more people are interacting, and then one side gets somehow (e.g. lose items/cash, staking AND pvp) frustrated or a negative emotion. When he doesn't know how to / isn't able to control his emotions, the player starts to flame.

I don't really think we can directly change the way how people deal with their emotions or how do they express/abreact it. Instead we should make the punishments more severe, so that they will LEARN that flaming (breaking rules) will have fatal punishments. Currently player will get max. 3 day mute for using offensive language. Some of these players don't really mind about the mute punishment, they can wait it to wore off, then they would later on flame again. Time is a "thing" that everyone of us have. For someone time might be precious, for someone it's not.

I propose we should change the punishments. At the 4th rule-break, there will be a perm-mute, that can be bought off with e.g. 10m worth of items/coins. At the 5th rule-break, the perm-mute bought off price would be 50m, and will rise accordingly. I think this might somehow teach them that using offensive language is not a good behaviour. Giving perm-ban isn't going to solve any problems, it's just gonna result in players leaving this game.

Yesterday I got into a case with two "known" flamers, and solving that was quite a mess since these guys gets fired up rather easily. Eventually when the issue got solved, they calmed down, and we were chatting to each others as if they were really chill guys.

Learning how to behave is a thing that will be taught to everyone of us since we were born. If you behave badly in school, you will get punished, and you don't want to get punished again, so kids will learn to behave that way. However, this is Emps, it's internet. On the net you don't really have to care that much about your behaviour, since no one will come to knock your door for your bad internet behaviour. So focusing on the punishments is the key, at least in my opinion.

About the staking/item prices, I don't really have any opinion about this, doesn't really matter to me. Though what I know is that changing the limitions of duel arena back to back is definitely NOT good for economy. There are no perfect solutions for this, every solution has its pros and cons. Choose the alternative option that is the least bad.

Some cases dont even care if they get muted or banned, from the moment that they get unbanned/unmuted they'll do it again. From what I've learned so far is that more severe punishments won't solve anything, maybe in the beginning people will be scared from them and behave but after a while they'll get used to it and we will be back where we started. Even if you give an IP-ban people still find a way around it so I'd like to see you try banning every player who is flaming every once in a while. A more efficient way of solving things would be closing the duel arena for good. This would attract more players to wilderness and parts of the game that they may not even have tried before because they were stuck in the stake-loop. If they want to risk a certain amount of gold they can do it at wildy at own risk.

Quote from: Division66 on May 19, 2017, 08:00:38 am

Most of the toxicity of this game emerges when two or more people are interacting, and then one side gets somehow (e.g. lose items/cash, staking AND pvp) frustrated or a negative emotion. When he doesn't know how to / isn't able to control his emotions, the player starts to flame.

I don't really think we can directly change the way how people deal with their emotions or how do they express/abreact it. Instead we should make the punishments more severe, so that they will LEARN that flaming (breaking rules) will have fatal punishments. Currently player will get max. 3 day mute for using offensive language. Some of these players don't really mind about the mute punishment, they can wait it to wore off, then they would later on flame again. Time is a "thing" that everyone of us have. For someone time might be precious, for someone it's not.

I propose we should change the punishments. At the 4th rule-break, there will be a perm-mute, that can be bought off with e.g. 10m worth of items/coins. At the 5th rule-break, the perm-mute bought off price would be 50m, and will rise accordingly. I think this might somehow teach them that using offensive language is not a good behaviour. Giving perm-ban isn't going to solve any problems, it's just gonna result in players leaving this game.

Yesterday I got into a case with two "known" flamers, and solving that was quite a mess since these guys gets fired up rather easily. Eventually when the issue got solved, they calmed down, and we were chatting to each others as if they were really chill guys.

Learning how to behave is a thing that will be taught to everyone of us since we were born. If you behave badly in school, you will get punished, and you don't want to get punished again, so kids will learn to behave that way. However, this is Emps, it's internet. On the net you don't really have to care that much about your behaviour, since no one will come to knock your door for your bad internet behaviour. So focusing on the punishments is the key, at least in my opinion.

About the staking/item prices, I don't really have any opinion about this, doesn't really matter to me. Though what I know is that changing the limitions of duel arena back to back is definitely NOT good for economy. There are no perfect solutions for this, every solution has its pros and cons. Choose the alternative option that is the least bad.

Some cases dont even care if they get muted or banned, from the moment that they get unbanned/unmuted they'll do it again. From what I've learned so far is that more severe punishments won't solve anything, maybe in the beginning people will be scared from them and behave but after a while they'll get used to it and we will be back where we started. Even if you give an IP-ban people still find a way around it so I'd like to see you try banning every player who is flaming every once in a while. A more efficient way of solving things would be closing the duel arena for good. This would attract more players to wilderness and parts of the game that they may not even have tried before because they were stuck in the stake-loop. If they want to risk a certain amount of gold they can do it at wildy at own risk.

I agree with this, eventho punishments might be a temp way to solve this kind of things, however since I was a staff member who dealt a lot with duel arena cases during my time as a staff member, I've done around 3, 30 days mute and few 14 days mute to people who were muted by me / other staff members for like 10 times +
and we even banned some of them for 1 - 7 days if we went to a point where these people couldn't control their mouth.



If its about keeping the rules standing, I suggest closing duel arena for good
If its about not risking losing ' Stakers ' as they're huge part of the game, keeping a cash staking instead of both items + cash is important to not crash everything the server worked for .

Some cases dont even care if they get muted or banned, from the moment that they get unbanned/unmuted they'll do it again. From what I've learned so far is that more severe punishments won't solve anything, maybe in the beginning people will be scared from them and behave but after a while they'll get used to it and we will be back where we started. Even if you give an IP-ban people still find a way around it so I'd like to see you try banning every player who is flaming every once in a while. A more efficient way of solving things would be closing the duel arena for good. This would attract more players to wilderness and parts of the game that they may not even have tried before because they were stuck in the stake-loop. If they want to risk a certain amount of gold they can do it at wildy at own risk.

To solve the problem, we have to know what are the beginning factors that are causing it. I think the consequence caused by staking and the flaming-behaviour are two different problems, though they are also related to each other. Since the staking had been limited, a lot of those stakers came to wildy to PK. Pking community is not any better than staking community, as you can sometimes see at Emps-cc, some guys are just flaming or pissing others of due to dieing/winning in the fight.

Also, I do think that SEVERE punishments do help people at learning what you SHOULD do and what you SHOULDN'T do. Paying 500m for an offensive language rule break is not severe? I think that will be enough to teach some people to change their behaviour.

If its about keeping the rules standing, I suggest closing duel arena for good
If its about not risking losing ' Stakers ' as they're huge part of the game, keeping a cash staking instead of both items + cash is important to not crash everything the server worked for .

This could also work. We'd move 'staking' into the wilderness where actually some skill would be involved in fighting each other. This was also partly the concept of the duel arena change... which didn't work out either.

Imho reverting the duel arena back to what it used to be and just acting much stricter on offensive language (uuid mutes, clan chat bans, etc.) would do fine.