Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Obviously you don't want people to feel like an addiction to it, or that they're owed it.
As a lot of people have said, I think most problems can be handled by the community if we are given the tools to do so: Blacklists, chat muting, bounty systems, guild wars, etc. But there still needs to be a strong reporting system, in case players find a way to grief/harass each other that isn't covered by existing systems.
In other words, let the community moderate itself, but make sure to keep watching/listening, because eventually there will be one of three serious problems that can't be handled by the community alone:
1) Individual jerks find a way to work around the existing systems (like stalking people despite being blacklisted, harassing people without being detected by the usual chat systems, griefing people without gaining corruption somehow, etc.)
Issues like that shouldn't require a ton of GM intervention. Just listen to the community and improve the existing tools that the community uses to police/protect itself. Of course, there will be some obvious and extreme offenders that should just be permabanned, but for the most part I think the community should (and needs to) be empowered to deal with individual doodoo-heads naturally. Mostly just because it would be super expensive and/or ineffective for Intrepid to handle every case of toxicity with typical moderators, bans, and appeals.
2) Large groups or sub-communities wage war on each other through less-than-honorable means. By which I mean, I expect we'll see some troll guilds who don't just start physical wars in-game and PK people, but they also take to harassing and griefing people in and out of game on a large scale. Raiding Discord servers, doxxing, sending dozens of alts to troll specific targets, etc.
Because of the large-scale nature of these attacks, they are inherently more dangerous and harder to deal with, especially for individually-targetted victims who don't have a guild to back them up. I think it's possible for the community to deal these problems without GM intervention, but it's a lot less likely than the first case. So Intrepid's GMs should look for and investigate these toxic groups like a hawk. As soon as they cross the line to out-of-game harassment or if the community seems unable or unwilling to stick up for the victims, then GMs should step in. Because these cases are rarer and larger-scale it should be easy to detect and handle them personally (i.e. not relying on automatic systems).
3) I doubt this will happen, so I'm really only mentioning it as a thought experiment: The entire AoC community could drift towards toxicity. I hate to bring buzzwords into this, but basically I'm talking about systemic racism/misogyny. Or just a general selfish and unsympathetic attitude that pervades the community.
It's 100% Intrepid's job to try and steer the community away from that, and to encourage empathy at the least, and compassion/cooperation at the best. Of course, most of this just comes down to core game-design and how the game encourages/rewards player interaction (and what kind of interaction is encouraged).
If worst comes to worst (see League of Legends' community), Intrepid really only has the option of mass ban waves for automatically detectable stuff, like slurs in chat and trolls with a long history of player reports. But I doubt it will ever come to that. I could write an essay on the sociology of toxic communities, but I think it's pretty obvious that an MMO with a sub-fee that's marketed towards (somewhat) more mature audiences shouldn't be very toxic in the first place. I expect the majority of AoC players will be mature adults (with some teens and young adults who hopefully know what they're getting into) who are here to play a largely cooperative and player-driven game, so I'd be shocked if there was a lack of respect between them.
(Speaking of essays and League of Legends, I heard that their Player Behavior team wrote a few legit scholarly articles about the problem, although it hasn't helped them a ton in wrangling their own community. I blame the short/disconnect and PvP nature of the game, combined with the free-to-play model, and younger audiences. Toxicity was bound to run rampant in such a game.)
Consider using World of Warship's Karma.
In a nutshell - standard right click reporting -> One of two things happen
1. Reported for various "good behaviors" ie. Worthy Opponents, Team Players, Politeness, Charity, Thank you
2. Reported for "bad behaviors" ie. Language, Harassment, Poor Cooperation, Jerk
Instant gratification for players who are just mad and need to vent, and who think the other player is a good chap and desrves to be recognized
But there is one thing that seperates this from every other system -> actual feedback!
3. These are recorded and counted....and Player can see their own "Karma" points
I'm a teacher irl and I can tell you feedback is extremely underrated. Letting the players see that their karma is -28pts and they'll stop/change or at least reflect on the source...likewise players who see their happy green 148pts (and this is especially true for the MMORPG player's brain) they will cultivate it and be gentlemen in chat to fish for more meaningless karma...but gentlemen in chat nonetheless!
It's up to you devs how you want to implement and balance this ie. intervention and descipline at -300, meaningless gold stars at 50 or 5000, 30 day "memory" of karma so no one feels beyond redemption..etc
Toxicity is a general atmosphere of a game and it's different from that one rogue player being Grade A manure d-bags who needs to be banned. That's a different issue from toxicity that I'm sure many people know how to deal with already - but does nothing to help with general positivty/toxicity levels.
This easy and simple system addresses Toxicity by simultaneously reducing the bad and encouraging the good.. The easy +/- karma reporting with the viewable counter will foster a general atmosphere of positivity and reduce toxicity while still allowing players a meaningful way to voice discontent. Most players will be happier knowing they are able to make someone's counter go down than by writing a 5 minute rage letter reporting someone and then it just gets tallied and ignored until X players do the same....but players will also be happier and more likely to repeat postive behavior such as helping someone lost or about the be killed, if they can get a little point recognizing and thanking them.
Oh - and it's yet another player driven system. We all know how much you love that
tl;dr
Reporting should be easy and include 'good things' not just the bad.
Players should recieve feedback through a counter (either net or specific items) of what people have right-click-reported them for.
Emphasize reporting for good behaviors - the goal is to grow the community in a positive direction, not find and assassinate the Grade A d-bags
On a more personal suggestion: "Ignore for a Day" option please. I don't like to blacklist because it's too permanent for temporary emotional chat squabbles. but I also don't want to have to go an unblacklist people either
Just that little acknowledgement is letting me know that my voice was heard and that the reporting system actually works.
In games that have such a reporting system, I find myself to be a whole lot less toxic.
So as long as there is a BLOCK button & a REPORT button (checked by the GMs or Devs) - I find it fixes most things; I mean, cant be bothered if you cant see what they are saying.
haha, that's funny.
However, reducing toxicity should go beyond fiding and arresting the A-Holes. That's easy. A good indicator of the "toxic" level of a game is how general chat responds to someone in need.
"I'm lost, how do I get to Origgimar??" or "This is only my 2nd arena match, what do I do?
Do players ignore him? Make fun of? Help? PM Help? Groan? Give a Troll response? Meet up with them and help?
That's positivity and toxicity, anything addressing indvidual d-bag players and not the general ATMOSPHERE of a game is not focused on the right task.
Maybe players can flag other players for different things like being nice, helpful, etc. Each player can only give a one flag to a player with the option to change/remove it. There could be a leader board that shows players who have received the most of each flag. Every year these flags are summed up on each server and rewards are given out to the players with the most, like an angelic aura. You only keep the reward a year and have to re-earn it the next year. I'm sure some people will game the system but I'd hope that good feeling you get when you see someone flag you as nice or helpful will remind some be nicer.
That's why I said it's up to the devs to balance and they can do that. It's very easy to stop guildies from abusing the system by not alowing it the reporting, making it count less etc, or by limiting the #per day. Anti-cheat and anti-Hacker software already tracks the number of times player X does action Y to player Z and looks for trends, also very easy to see if Nagash has complimented NagashAlt 57 times in 4 days,.
it makes a HUGE difference.
so, some old player who has many friends does something, for example :
1: changing loot options and taking them
2: blocks a passage
3: attacks people in the same side when no one is around to steal their things
4: is using alts or bots or friends to gain something/anything that is not done through intended methods.
5: denies some people from a raid or certain things just because he/she doesn't like them because they tried to calm things when he/she was insulting someone else, and now he/she hates them or doesn't like them.
6: just keeps spamming or shit-talking even if it is not a racial thing but it is uncalled for and annoying very much.
now people who are for example new players are vs the old player with many friends
the winner is obviously the older gamer who has many friends no matter what he/she did or does no one is going to believe the less famous people.
ok then what are these poor nobodies have to do to get justice?
clearly, the community is not on their side and it is understandable.
the ONLY thing they CAN do is to report this to gms and ask them to step in and just do something! not big but just anything.
some people say this is carebear you just dont talk shit, dont ask for trouble and get a guild... get friends and most of all "world is not a safe place it is hell"
these are all correct but we are not there now, are we?
we CAN do something about it so why not?
i think a pyramid structural support team would be good, some reports go there first filtered by ai maybe, then higher in the chain if needed to be solved.
also take into account, some people are very weak in pvp and they get killed for their haul and they are FURIOUS and they snap and insult something now they are kos ... (i know it rarely happens but just imagine)
so not ALWAYS being camped and killed continuously is their fault.
sometimes it just has to be forgotten.
each new people brings more new people. but the older ones already brought in whatever they could.
so IF you enjoy the game try to keep it alive on your part.
Overt racism against fantasy races is deemed OK in a manner that overt sexism, mysogyny and homophobia is not.
True. A statement of "Hang all Tulnar from the nearest tree!" will not get you banned. But a statement of "Hang all <insert RL race> from the nearest tree!" will.
There will always be toxic people.
However in my opinion toxicity occurs more when a player does not feel connected with another player or players and it occurs less when a player feels that it belongs in a group of players.
I found that games in which the majority of time you spend it in Group Finders either for a battle ground or an instanced dungeon are 100% toxic or silent.
When playing a game in these rules you dont get to know the 3 random people that you got randomly teamed up for a dungeon. So obviously they dont need to be polite to you and you to them. Leading to toxic experiences. Same for BG PvP with a team that your only objective is the victoty of that round.
If the players in those random group finders are not skilled they receive a lot toxicity from the rest. This is not a team. It's a random assembly of people unknown to each other.
I found that I never came across toxic people when I was playing with familiar people. These were a group of 7-9 friends playing together all the time or a guild of 100 or so.
We knew one another and respected each other. We knew things about our friends and their ingame characters. We basically helped develop each other and get stronger and smarter.
In an open world mmorpg a player has to be part of a larger group such as a guild in order to experience all the features of the game.
The player feels proud of the guild and they work to promote their interests and fame all the time.
It's not the same with winning a BG battle or farming an instanced dungeon with some random people.
The more players feel like they belong in a small community the less likely they are to be isoleted, rude and act in a stupid way to make a bad name for themselves and be toxic.
Replace the open world mmorpg with instanced content and what do you have?
A group finder filled with people that want to complete the objective and /leavegroup and you better know that if they dont get to complete it there will be some bullshit accusations and toxicity thrown at each other
exactly, ive seen it in action for more than a year continuously by many many many players who were always becoming hero of the nation
the funny thing is I can see this happening
Allowing players to award "badges" or commendations at the end of a match doesn't really do too much in my experience. I have played League of Legends for many years which uses a similar system and it doesn't really work as intended. Players usually give badges out to the teammate who "carried" the match, rather than the teammate who had the best attitude. I've gotten commendations from my teammates for carrying them despite me not saying a single word. Sure I wasn't toxic but I certainly didn't earn a commendation in my eyes.
Mentorship programs can work but you have to be very very careful with how you implement them. My suggestion would be to look to the twitch streamers and youtubers. These people have a great deal of influence over the community, both good and bad. Unfortunately, more often than not it's the toxic streamers that get the most views, simply because they draw a lot of attention. You can counter this by promoting well behaved streamers and content creators on the in-game launcher or website.
This would give streamers an incentive to be well behaved and set a good example for the rest of the community. You could, for example, have a "streamer of the week" and promote them on the in-game launcher, possibly providing a feed to the stream.
Here's the thing
1: This is shady as fuck when a party leader does this; but that person will get a reputation for doing it and won't last long. - Doesn't need GM interaction
2: Is permitted - Doesn't need GM interaction
3: Is permitted and is dealt with by the corruption system - Doesn't need GM interaction
4: Alts are fine. Bots are against the TOS and aren't really toxic behavior so yes requires GM interaction but not really relevant
5: Social games so this is allowed. Is the GM going to come and FORCE me to let someone in my raid group? I think not - Doesn't need GM interaction
6: Sure this is a problem. Solution is the block button - Doesn't need GM interaction
Being subscription based keeps a lot of the trolls out.
*This will apply to the MMO but not the discord, why people are going crazy there.
**+ Apoc being Free to Play will lead to having a lot more toxic players -
Your Free to Play player base is more likely to complain about a lot of things this will include stuff that doesn't even affect them, which will result in you having people that arn't even your core player base trying to influence the MMO that they aren't even (planing on) playing.
Having the game world and lore is set up in such a way that it does not pit one part of the player base against the other (think Horde and Alliance in WoW).
Constantly rewarding and Incentivizing positive player behavior, interactions and teamwork despite how different everyone is creates a "we might be different, but we gain more by working together than we would fighting each other" atmosphere, which promotes social interaction in a positive way.
A Mentoring system that rewards actually helping people and not just making new alternative characters to farm rewards.
Although the town looks pretty grim, there are some bright spots. Next week is the Founder's Day picnic and parade, to honor the brave pioneer who founded Toxicity, Moses Toxi. His family coat of arms is the city's crest, depicting a frog giving you the finger while he drinks a My Dew Game Fuel.
I hope to entice you all to give Toxicity a stop on your next road trip to FlavorTown.
In regards to some positive reinforcement I think making a mentor-ship program with exclusive and good looking cosmetics for those who help new players would be an easy motivation to get people helping others. Also make multiple tiers of cosmetic rewards to encourage people to repeat good behavior.
This is exactly why I warned against mentorship programs. If a player wants to help another they will do it in good faith without needing to be rewarded for it. But the moment you add in rewards like exclusive cosmetics, players use the mentorship program purely for those rewards and you get a ton of people who don't actually want to help others acting as mentors.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/8l12sn/discussionwhy_is_there_such_a_big_hate_against/
This is the result.....
I think it's fine if people commend their party members for being skilled at their role, as long as they weren't being toxic. That's just reflective general community values; most people like it when their dungeon runs (and other content) goes smoothly because everyone knows what they're doing. "If you want people to like you, just do your job well and don't be a dick," isn't a terrible message to send. I'm often that guy who just wants to do a couple quick dungeons runs and get some loot without having to say much, so I don't have a problem with silent parties that just give their commendations to the healer who didn't let anyone drop low or the tank who pulled/controlled mobs well.
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Regarding Mentorship programs, I agree that they're hard to set up right. It's difficult or maybe impossible to incentivize people to act like mentors if they didn't want to teach newbies in the first place.
I imagine that for Ashes, the best system is to just let people be generous with their resources (which sounds like it will be the case anyways), so that newbies can, for instance, cede their loot to their mentor if they successfully learn and complete a dungeon/activity. Or guilds can sponsor 'learning' or 'academy' runs, where they pay their mentors to teach new recruits.
Setting up addition, artificial rewards for mentorship is likely to just lead to abuse, though. It's too hard to vet mentors, and ensure they are actually teaching people. I fully expect that veterans will try to find a way to game the system and get the rewards, even if the supposed "pupils" are actually all veterans as well.
Also have the corruption system a meaningful deterrent for farming a player over and over. If you have to be killed before the corruption goes away maybe have each death only drop corruption by 1 tier or a certain % or have it so death by a guild member or someone in the friend group does not count (this doesn't stop someone from unfriending and refriending, but they have to at least go that extra step). Because if I can just farm people for resources and just go get my buddy to kill me and give me back my items it doesn't exactly curtail my bad behavior.
Don't allow easy server transfers so people can't just server hop after getting a bad reputation and don't allow name changes for the same reason.
As far as most things in the game I feel it will take care of itself. With no fast travel people will get reputations and if their reputation gets bad they will have to leave at least to a major node network further away and start over. If it gets bad enough they'll have to reroll on a different server because the community will find out and has a long memory.