[jaywalker]

Ty for the explanation Neil, but gonna have to disagree with your conclusions.

Originally Posted by Neil Stockton

It's obvious to me The ability to remove yourself benefits anyone who has been on the receiving end of unwanted PMs. It's much better to remove yourself from their FL than having to ignore them. Not only is it a time-waster, but you always have to read the first message they send you.

Indeed, I've been very active in -game for four years. I don't need telling about unwanted PMs

Not everyone is going to have this problem, but someone like me who's a new player adviser or pilot or trader may end up getting so many PMs that it interferes with effective game play.

Absolutely. I am the world;s worst multtitasker, so very often i go out to hunt or mine but wind up spending 3 hours answering PMs instead...

But the way I see it is: it is up to me whether I answer those PMs right now, or even open them immediately. Those few people who don't understand that you might be afk or tied up, and get pissed if you don';t repond immefiately...well they will get pissed about something else before long because they are just too self-centred, so no point worrying about it.

The ones that eat into my game-play are the ones that i really want to answer, not the nuicance ones. Removing myself from people's FL would not solve the problem.

Conversely, if I could remove a lot of people from my FL without removing myself from theirs, that would help a lot, because it would then be possible to tell if the people that i really want to talk to are online, As it is, they are crowded out by business contacts and by noobs who asked my advice once or twice, anything up to 4 years ago. I daren't remove any of those people cos its too hard to tell them apart, but it's really hard to pick my friends and socmates out from the crowd.

Privacy is another issue with some avatars. Higher level or "famous" players need to be able to use the FL, confident that they will be able to remove stalkers.

True, but I would prefer to ask the famous players if that advantage really outweighs the disadvantage that they will not be able to keep tabs on stalkers and impersonators. I think not for reasons that I'll explain below

I don't see that it benefits scammers any more than other players (since you can always still send a support case for scammers, even if they're not on your FL). Scammers will like to remove people from their friend list, but I don't think it makes the actual scamming any easier.

I guess you've never yet reported a scammer? MA insist in being given the full ava name of the scammer ...or any other abuser, come to that. Yet, with recent FL changes,m they might have finally eradicated every conceivable way of finding out the full ava name! This is particularly important in the instance of impersonation scams. Without seeing the full ava name , you can't even tell if an ava called "Summer" , for instance really is an impersonator, or the famous fashion designer, Summer. (somebody did get away with impersonating her quite recently)

Also,one finds that many people who've actually been scammed prefer to keep the scammer on FL, so they can tell whether that person is on-line. There are many reasons why this can be helpful, beryond the obvious attempt to tack down the scammer and get their goods returned.eg there is a scam that involves making teams. Having encounterered one such, I kept a look -out for him on FL after that. This told me the interesting info that he only got banned for 1 month, and enabled me to accurately guess where a sudden rash of team invitations were coming from, and not only refuse them, but also warn others to do the same.

Also, once you've identified a scammer , you can put "scammer" next their name on your FL, so there;'s no chance that you make a mistake and accuse some poor sod with a similar name! (Very easily done. Someone mistook me for a scammer recently, but kept calling me Jupiter! So there's two damaged reps for the price of one! if anyone takes him seriously. At least, if he had me on FL, the real Jupiter would be spared his rantings!)

So all-in-all, I would not be sure that the small gain in privacy for someone like ND outweighs the problem of the big gain in privacy for his impersonators, and the loss of any means to prove that it wasn't really him when they try to scam people in his name. I strongly suspect that it doesn't, but would have to actually ask him that question.

jay