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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I agree, and of course cheating/hacking that may happen... obviously GM involvement would be needed to fix such things.
the negativity and harassment... would also be something the game should address too, too much of it, not an enjoyable game to play. I understand some bashing and thrashing of big stick owning etc.... but when it goes too far, I believe the game should be doing something.
1) The ability to spawn camp people
2) High level players killing low level players
3) Obstruction of leveling from PvP. I think having the base quests in non-PvP zones with level cap zones being completely open PvP and having below level cap non-PvP, with some areas of the map having PvP through a certain level range being open to PvP so for example a level 20 and 25 could openly PvP each other or level 50 and 55 could PvP each other in these areas. These areas would comprise of high reward quests, high quantity mobs for grinding, and world bosses for people who already have a capped character or friend helping them that want to speed up the leveling process.
4) A poor looting system. Having a robust looting system is key to a party system that will exist in any MMORPGs featuring high quality loot. For example, if your party has 4 people of different classes, have the ability for the party leader to set class-based looting so if a sword drops, your party member that uses swords will get priority for the loot. Couple this with the option to auction it off within the party, give it up entirely to a dice roll mechanic, or choosing which member in the party receives it. Then of course the standard free for all, round robin, auction off all items above x grade, and etc are needed too to give more options to parties for a fair looting process.
5) Proper PvP matchmaking. Having mmr for ranked and unranked are important with a legitimate rank tier system like League of Legends or any other competitive game. This lessens the chance of lopsided matches that are not fun for either side. Hide it for unranked to ensure unranked remains stress free, but still has adequate matches. As a person who plays a lot of ranked competitive games, I'd say 90% of toxicity stems from poor matchmaking. Skill levels of certain players will be too low or too high for a match and just 1-2 in a match will completely throw off the balance and ruin the gameplay for all. Which leads to flaming and frustration.
Trying to approach toxicity from a muting/suspending/banning players is just looking to promote more toxicity. You encourage people to find ways to get around chat to annoy people. It's like classic bullying logic. Take away the bully's words and they amp it up to physical bullying instead. Focus on getting rid of reasons for people to be toxic instead of applying the bandaid.
1) The ability to mute/ignore a specific player. This can resolve most instances of toxicity, as once you stop responding most trolls move on.
2) Robust Reporting system. Something that can give you the opportunity to report exactly what is happening, and if you can capture game/chat/damage logs along with the report even better. Given that this will be a PvP game, there will likely be a lot of 'useless' reporting of those that feel they were at a disadvantage or are being harassed because they keep going back to a place where a PvPer is roaming for kills.
Given the power of Anonymity on the internet though, there are likely to be those that abuse the PvP system to harass lower level players or to repeatedly attack one player for whatever reason no matter where they are. Corruption gives some punishment for this action, if a combatant attacks a non combatant, or corrupted attacks a non combatant. But remembering back to the days of watching players mob train onto some poor leveling party, over and over and over again, I know that players find ingenious ways to hurt each other if they feel so inclined. While in the long run a community may, and I stress may, be able to weed out some bad eggs, short term bursts of truly bad behavior may merit intervention by moderators/GMs, and if there is no way to properly report it, then you are just asking for trouble.
My Opinions:
Karma
I both like and dislike some of the Karma system stuff that has been tossed around. In my opinion, these systems can elicit good behavior of some that would otherwise ride the line, but they are unlikely to push a truly toxic or troll player to be better. If "Incentives" of any kind are given for being "good" then people will do just enough to get the incentive and then go back to their previous behavior. See the Early League of Legends honor system for proof of this.
If any incentive is to be given for good behavior it should only last so long as good behavior continues, and should have no direct game impact. For instance if player exceeds X value of positive Karma they get a minor title prefix/suffix. As soon as they fall below that Karma level they lose that title. Each account should only be able to give positive or negative Karma to another account once, not per toon. This is to avoid abuse of making multiple alts just to boost or degrade an individual player.
There should be no Negative Karma levels or counter. If there are Negative Karma levels that may just be someone's driving goal of reaching Y amount of Negative Karma so they can screen shot it and post it somewhere. If anything, back end tracking could allow moderators to see those that are most "toxic" (negative Karma) and determine if an intervention is necessary. While there could also be a case for some sort of community driven intervention or judgement system, it is my opinion that anything left to mob rule/justice often ends poorly.
Mentor Programs
In general if someone wants to help new people, they are going to just do it. Whether it is by giving advice, or lending a hand on low end content. Making a system to easily do this or list yourself as a mentor would be nice. But once you incentivize people to be a mentor, many will do it just to get the incentives, and may not be a helpful mentor in the process.
Granted, the downside to an unincentivized program is definitely a lower number of mentors to help, but in my opinion that is better than having a system choked full of "mentors" that are really just carrying someone through content to get a reward without teaching or advising a player in any way.
Now, a Mentor Program perhaps coupled with the Karma system, where the Mentee can upvote/positive Karma the Mentor for a good job, and once the Mentor reaches a certain level they receive a small non game altering reward that only lasts so long as they maintain that level. Maintenance may require weekly/monthly re upping of their Mentor status. Any sort of regular involvement will weed out those that just want the one off reward, as that will mean regular investment in the system. Still there will be some that do it just to maintain the unique reward.
People are dumb. They need like one of those goofy sexual harassment seminars which outline problem behaviors.
If you give them an examples of what isn't reportable when and what is and isn't then you get more accuracy and less noise, even though it takes more responsibility to help define what you want to expect from your community.
I think even just being able to create bounties yourself where you reward whoever takes em out could be good aswell
They could add a 'Goodwill' feature, where you can unlock cosmetics etc for playing with goodwill. you could increase your goodwill by being a good citizen or have some way for people to thank you if you help them and it could increase your goodwill.
That might sound odd for people coming from WoW as an example, but because of it, the game has an extra layer of depth through other players. If you are a filthy rich trader in eve, you can bet your ass you're going to have problems with pirates. If you decide to be pirate, you can bet your ass other players and game mechanics will be that same pain, so it's not going to be a walk in the park for either playstyle, because both sides keep eachothers in check.. This is the kind of player interaction II hope AoC will implement properly. UNLIMITED player interaction is the key why eve is still alive, despite being one of the oldest mmo's out there.
What I'm trying to say, and what has already been said many times, keep in-game stuff in game, limit players and their actions as little as possible and only on extreme cases like doxxing should any action be taken.
The thing is, even in EvE there are measures in place to protect players from others.
Yeah i remember those times too. Such a cool thing to see a name running by and go woah, i heard that guy got x rare weapon
However I do agree with many of my fellow players above that if someone is racist sexist or giving death threats or doxxing there should be a easy way to report them and have a REAL HUMAN gm check the logs before any action is taken. I personally have been banned by false reporting and believe me when you spenned hours a day and alot of money on a game and the devs just ban hammer you without checking the entire context of what was said or what happened its pretty sad.
I disagree, this is a very important question. While we aren't children that need our hands held, A large portion of our community as gamer's loves nothing better than to give someone a hard time. Whether that means repeated player killing, hindering quest progress, or just being a troll in general, alot of us can be jerks. And that takes a special importance in MMO's, which are heavily influenced by both community sentiment, and active player numbers. If i play Overwatch or LoL, I get a bad group, or someone trolling, i deal with them once for a small period of time. There are often systems in place to let me never play with them again. There's a much higher chance for repeated, extended annoyance in MMO's.
It's definitely a balance act that can't get pushed too far either way. Personally, I think the best solution is to add as many in game, community led counters to it as possible, which i've seen in the plans for things like the corruption system, bounties, and enemies of the state. Let there be actual consequences for being a jerk. People will be the bandits, no problem, but you have to incentivize some one to be the police, or guards. The only place the devs need to actually step in and drop the hammer (or sandal) is when there's situations of racial slurs, or other ToS violations against fellow players.
I definitely agree with you on the balance act I do truly hope they make the bounty hunting thing huge that would help players who couldn't pvp like some of us get their pay back and revenge and encourage those of us who love Pvp and giving people a hard time with more memez and glory.
As far other games are concerned see some games that do not have the option to report a player for beingg toxic just cheating and botting so there need to be an option to report toons for being toxic.
In other games that have automatic bans for foul language and bans for cluttering chat channel. I found the community to be a lot more mature and not so many people acting like young children.
As for as the mount is concerned yes it would cost you one mount but after six months of behaving to basically get a free mount then the tone and atmoshere would be set for a very positive environment. Of course some people could possible just go back to trolling after six months but think most people would stay respectful and polite. Plus if a person gets toxic after getting the free mount well their mount could disapear. Plus after six months of good behavior people would more inclined to report people that are in fact toxic.
But really there are all kinds of things you could do like reward a 5 percent more gold loot for being polite and having 5 percent penalty if you you troll to much. Plus you could use things like corruption and debuffs for short periods of time to punish people if they are too toxic depends on how far you want to go.
You could also have a Troll Patroll people in the cummunity that report and punish people on the spot for being trolls. Sure you could find unbiased and mature people to do this for you. So if a person is way out of line maybe lightning could be called from the sky to kill overly toxic toons.
For those that posted about freedom of speech just want to point out that speech is regulated everywere. You could walk into a bar start mouthing off and you get kicked out. So freedom of speech does not mean freedom to be toxic and be a troll.
Toxicity is heavily subjetive, usually vaguely defined.
For example:
The definition of racism is entirely different throughout the english speaking countries and others and while the same sentence can be legaly punished in english countries it is not against the law in others.
The same goes for LGBT+ community, in some countries accepted, in some it is viewed as mental illnnes, in others it is criminilized or even outright punished by death.
Things that I would like to see ingame:
- mute/block button
- mature filter
- no karma/commend system - Not giving it to someone can be viewed as reporting somebody and in my opinion produces toxic enviroment
- report function that is more than just 2 button clicks. Preferably with an option for a lengthy message you have to leave to describe the issue. This would be to avoid trigger-happy people false reporting somebody since taking 2 or 30 seconds is quite a big difference.
There is a lot of suggestion that boil down to harden up and use ingame mechanics to resolve conflict. The suggestion then follows that few mechanics are needed beyond covering the bigger no's like racism, doxxing and RL threats.
I personally can relate to that approach. From my comfortable position of age, sex, mental well being I personally will do just fine in that type of environment.
I have however been peripherally aware of cases where that hasn't been good enough. I want a game where my girlfriend can join me and not have to deal with sexual harassment.
I have seen people go on power trips to just try and make somebody's experience terrible.
I personally would like to see AOC be an inclusive space. I think it is good business from a keeping numbers in game and making it easy for new players to join later down the road.
Trying to strike the balance is going to be a real challenge. Best of luck. I hope we as a community have been able to help.
I have no data to support this, but I believe the tribunal was one of the greatest, if not the greatest report systems ever created.
What is the Tribunal?
The Tribunal was a community accessible feature where you could vote on wether a person was toxic or not. Plain and simple.
People got reported in game and those reports would show up to be evaluate in the tribunal.
You did not see the names of the people involved, but you saw the whole gamechat and could decide based on that wether a report was justified or not.
You didn't decide alone on wether something was toxic or not, I don't remember if they ever said how many people needed to vote on a case, but it should have been at least a 100. I can say that much because there was a statistic you could access to see how your votes aligned with the given judgment. I remember some odd cases where I suspected it was a missclick of something 99.5% voted this way and only .5% the other.
I believe this hands on, transparent system was the peek of LoLs most friendly time ever. You could argue that it was just right before it got really popular or several other factors, but in my opinion you could watch the decline of the community the moment the tribunal was closed and replaced by automated hidden monitoring.
I have had not a single instance in the 100s of cases I saw in the Tribunal where I couldn't agree, even if I voted the other way, that it is justified. Meanwhile now, I have experienced and seen reports that just baffled me. Reported games where not a single word was written and stuff like that, was deemed "toxic" to the point of warnings and temporary bans.
(LoL itself is just a shitshow now to be fair, got permabanned? Just create a new account with the same email you just got banned with. I mean.. wow..)
Anyway point is, I think something like that is the best option out of all those that I have experienced over the years. You could combine that with rewards for participating and what not.
Do your Ashes twist on it and it might be all you ever need for the game.
Edit. P.s.: Imo I don't t hink that an mmo even needs something more than a report system. MMOs as a genre is probably the one I have seen the least bad behaviour in. Tera might be an exeption to that and I might just have been lucky, but usually the few times I actually needed something to stop someone, a block was enough and if I felt really annoyed a report followed. Wether that ever lead to something was never a concern of mine. I had my blocked list and knew who I would avoid in the future. Also an argument for the tribunal, it really showed me constantly how tiny the % of people are that are actually toxic, but it only needs one in ten to really screw with your game.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Please have a reporting system for harassment to actual staff. Just because you put someone on ignore doesn't mean the harassment stops. You leave an area in the hopes they leave you alone and then they follow you around. If you try to kill mobs, they steal your kills. If you try and harvest or gather resources, they train mobs on you and kill you repeatedly. You're taking damage to your gear and they aren't even using PVP to kill you. With no quick travel in the game, it is harder to leave and go elsewhere.
Taverns as gathering places to form groups sounds good. Please allow the Tavern owner the ability to ban folks from entering. If everyone puts a troll on ignore, I don't want to have to see them running around making a nuisance of themselves for hours because everyone refuses to group with them.
In my years playing MMO's, I've found the more effort you have to put into forming a group the better your results. MMO's that queue and auto-form groups seems to lead to less polite behavior in a group. What do they care about your opinion of them because you're elsewhere on the server and they aren't likely to get grouped with you again. Or, after queuing for 30 minutes, you finally get a group and then an hour into the dungeon you want to go afk for the bathroom. You come back to find they've kicked you because you left for a few minutes.
Hopefully with taverns, folks with similar playing styles will be able to congregate. I like to read what NPCs say when doing a quest, but not everyone shares that. Other folks get irritated at you if you stop to harvest while completing a quest because they are task oriented. Having folks talk when forming and agreeing on things of this type ahead of time makes for a more enjoyable game.
Perception.
Define toxicity. I bet you ask a hundred people you'll get a hundred answers.
During WOTLK I started a new toon. I rarely play melee classes so I rolled a rogue to try it out. Level 30ish I was running down the road to turn in some quests (on a pvp server) and boom I died. As I was laying there a max level alliance rogue can into view. My computer was not good enough to play max graphics at the time.
I laughed and ran back. A lot of heavy RP people would view this as toxic behavior PVP people would call this part of the game.
It is all perception.
I agree with most here racism and stuff should be rewarded with a ban sandal and handled by a live person not a computer.
There are those times when someone gets hacked and goes on a tirade on chat so this needs its own solution by a real person.
But again it all comes down to perception.
In a real life scenario, no (in the UK at least). In a real court of law, in order for someone to be accused of harassment there are 2 things that need to happen:
1. The harassment needs to be continuous, meaning it happens regularly or at the very least more than once.
2. The harassment needs to be reasonable to the average person. This is more important. If you call someone a "squiggle bottom" and they take offence to that when an average person wouldn't, then their being offended wouldn't be considered reasonable.
The difficulty about harassment in any context is it depends a lot on what society deems to be acceptable. There are plenty of words that have been used as insults in the past, but are now just gibberish. Similarly, there are terms that used to be socially acceptable in the past that are now considered very insulting.
One very simple but very effective thing to ask players to do is to refer players to websites or forums when they ask questions. Even if you do not know anything about websites or forums. A toon could always say somethting like
Try ro find a person that is decent that plays your class and ask them what websites or strategy guides to check out.
Now as far as answering questions well in my opinion it would be much better for toons to learn to do their own research instead of spoon feeding them everything. But if they have time they could answer questions.
But the whole point of this post is just to find a way for the community to be a little helpful instead of some of the usuall comments like Learn to Play or calling people Noobs. I mean any one can refer other people to forums or websites.
As far as forums there should be a place for toons to make strategy guides just to shorten the post would like to refer you to a website called mobafire that is for league of legends.
By the way if you were to add a dps meter then people would be less likely to fight about who did what and have a much better experience.
There could be an achievements pets or some small cosmetic item associated with good behavior too.
If somone is being a D-Bag in general chat, the A.I could alert a GM to review it, and the GM can decide. Flag 'em or Ban 'em
How is that any better than a simple report function?
Delving a bit into Game Theory. Toxicity requires some effort. Someone feels dissatisfied in some way, and acts out in a way that while entertaining (in the hedonic sense) isn’t really productively impressive. How do you redirect that energy in a way that is beneficial?
Research has shown that people tend to be more likely to invest their energy into helpful behaviors (eudaimonics) when they can experience awareness of the impact. It’s not really about prizes and merit as much as feeling involved and like what they do makes a difference, which if you think about it is the entire game concept behind Ashes of Creation. I would focus a lot more on encouraging a helpful environment than on discouraging dysfunction, but some “stick” is always necessary.
As far as any consequences for toxic behavior, as a parent, what I learned tends to stick and make the most sense are “natural” ones, that relate to what was said and done. You lose trust, respect and connection to others.
Just a idea: We can sort of be like Lyft drivers, except we are driving around our characters, and those characters can have a player-driven social rep meter that others can access if they wish, before inviting someone to a party. Over time it gets even more accurate as more inputs are added. There can even be a reward for taking the time to give someone a quick rating (it should not include any other metrics than sociability, teamwork, and other social interaction-related evaluation). This would serve no other purpose than as info for other players.