Blackspot

The Blackspot
The blackspot is a form of minor user policing on the oceans. In the event that another player simply becomes too disruptive to the enjoyment of the game for you or others, a blackspot can be used. Once issued to a pirate, they cannot communicate with anybody for 5 minutes. However, if another blackspot is issued within a short period of time, the time they cannot communicate for soon becomes 20 minutes. On further blackspots, that time soon becomes a full hour. In the event of more issues of the blackspot, it remains at a full hour.

Issuing the blackspot cannot be done by anyone, however. A blackspot can only be dealt by an officer (or above) in a reasonably well established crew (not in terms of fame, but simply membership numbers. The crew must also have existed for around one month before any member of that crew can issue a blackspot. The function takes around 5 minutes to "recharge" before it can be used by that pirate again. This is to largely stop abuse of the feature, as otherwise pirates with a grudge against another could simply issue the function constantly, effectively griefing them.

The function is used by giving the command /blackspot, then following it with the name of the intended recipient, so it'd become /blackspot [NAME]. When the blackspot is issued, a log of the event is also sent to the Oceanmasters. This is so that they can get a report of any poor behaviour that they may need to act on, but also to ensure that the function is not abused by those that can issue it.

Similar to the blackspot is the complain function, which is a more official method of reporting bad behaviour to the Ringers.