Sorry, late to the game in posting anything, but been following in the background. Toxicity is a problem in any game. ...doesn't matter what game it is. What do all games have in common? ....anonymity and no identify verification. If you really want to have an impact on toxicity in the community and differentiate as a company, remove player anonymity and ensure at account sign-up or first login a solid form of identity verification. It still won't fix it, but it would make a significant impact. I doubt any company would risk anonymity as it would turn some paying customers away, but given the type of game we are talking about here that relies on the community building it so significantly, it should be considered. Identify verification, whether done thru social security number, birth certificate, ID card, or driver's license, again won't catch everything, but would be a filter.
Personally, I'm from the US. Toxicity in the states on the internet as a whole, not just gaming is horrible. Removing anonymity would get rid of some serious low life trolls that are truly toxic. People would cry right to privacy, but privacy and anonymity are two separate things.
I would personally be quite happy to see the anonymity removed. Identity verification of this type, especially in the states would be a marketable characteristic to appeal to a broader audience, and play on safety and security online which is becoming not only more visible, but increasingly more important to clients.
A KYC in a game, I had never heard of something like this in a game. If they do something like this, it will be necessary to have solid security to protect data on an offline server. But, to be honest, I would send my information to verify my account, because I have nothing to hide and I act in the game, as if acting in real life, trying to enjoy it and not causing problems to others.
But to be honest, I don't think this will work efficiently.
Forgot to mention that well being banned for like five mine or more depending on offense for clutterign up the chat channel is kind of a catch all. So if some is being toxic or spamming or saying things off topic. Then they get banned. People are more inclined to understand that they are over posting than well you telling them how to behave.
On huge servers with healthy populations well the messages are so many that the average person can barely read them in time before they go scroll out of view. So it is a legitiamate issue not just another way to bann some one for being toxic.
I still haven´t really seen a lot of people to talk about what "toxicity" actually is.
Perception goes both ways. Just becouse you view someone as being toxic does not mean other people do or that your perception of toxicity is actually viewed as toxic by other people.
This is especially true between different cultures and the people who call for "controlling toxicity" are usually the most untollerent people themselves.
I would also raise my eyebrow against someone suggesting to punish people for something which is not against law. Intrepid would have to act as if it is above the law and knows what is best than the nations themselves.
Generally when you start enforcing anti-toxic behavior it only produces more toxic enviroment. Instead fun chatting it becomes the excersise of self-censorship to avoid punishment
There is a old archived thread that is titled the following
How to stop public 'toxic' in game game chat?
So that could be summarized also lots of good ideas there just old post but still valid eight pages worth maybe you already read it thought i mention it just in case.
Option to make your in game and profile private would be cool so people will not be telling you that you have the wrong set up all day long.
Do not know game is going to have a function were you can just look people up any time and look at a toons complete profile. Function to make this private would be cool.
Really personal profile information could be requested when looking for guild, looking for pvp team looking to join raid.
Default in most games is not private if deefault setting was on private for all users then people would have to ask for acess to profile both types. In game were you click on a person see profile and the other were you can see a player stats on some website just by typing their name..actaully could be left out of the game.
Toxic people like to look up people up and troll on them for things they have not done and amount of times killed and and they could even figure out about when you started playing by looking at the dates of some of the achievements like when you hit level ten if there is such an acheivement and if they have like a year or two more of playing time then start calling you a noob.
Well most recently I'm coming over from Atlas, and what the developers there did to curb the rampant toxicity in the game's first few months was to have the game fall flat on it's face. It worked brilliantly. Nearly all of the toxic players have left. So has nearly everyone else, but you can't break a few eggs without making an omelette right?
On the off chance that's not the route you're looking to go with AOC, do everything in your power to make ingame reputation matter. It is the removal of the social consequences we must deal with in real life if we act like a nerfherder in public that lead straight to the asshattery that drives players away from online games just so some numbnuts can stop feeling like his parents didn't love him enough.
Sorry, late to the game in posting anything, but been following in the background. Toxicity is a problem in any game. ...doesn't matter what game it is. What do all games have in common? ....anonymity and no identify verification. If you really want to have an impact on toxicity in the community and differentiate as a company, remove player anonymity and ensure at account sign-up or first login a solid form of identity verification. It still won't fix it, but it would make a significant impact. I doubt any company would risk anonymity as it would turn some paying customers away, but given the type of game we are talking about here that relies on the community building it so significantly, it should be considered. Identify verification, whether done thru social security number, birth certificate, ID card, or driver's license, again won't catch everything, but would be a filter.
Personally, I'm from the US. Toxicity in the states on the internet as a whole, not just gaming is horrible. Removing anonymity would get rid of some serious low life trolls that are truly toxic. People would cry right to privacy, but privacy and anonymity are two separate things.
I would personally be quite happy to see the anonymity removed. Identity verification of this type, especially in the states would be a marketable characteristic to appeal to a broader audience, and play on safety and security online which is becoming not only more visible, but increasingly more important to clients.
Do you know how easy it is to track someone, anyone really, just by knowing theyr names? Just imagine, a game with no-anonymity and someday a player that ddnt like something you said or just by having some valuable itens in-game or they just have a few screws lose goes to your house in the middle of the night? It's not that most games company don't want to do it, but they doing it is for the costumer own safety, thats why you should not give IRL information on internet to anyone, you can deal with a toxic person on the internet by turning off your computer, but can you deal with the consequences of putting your own life and the line or the ones you love on the line? Don't ever forget that.
I still haven´t really seen a lot of people to talk about what "toxicity" actually is.
Perception goes both ways. Just becouse you view someone as being toxic does not mean other people do or that your perception of toxicity is actually viewed as toxic by other people.
This is especially true between different cultures and the people who call for "controlling toxicity" are usually the most untollerent people themselves.
Are you familiar with Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance? He states, “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.“
I would also raise my eyebrow against someone suggesting to punish people for something which is not against law. Intrepid would have to act as if it is above the law and knows what is best than the nations themselves.
Generally when you start enforcing anti-toxic behavior it only produces more toxic enviroment. Instead fun chatting it becomes the excersise of self-censorship to avoid punishment
If parents and teachers had to rely upon permission to administer consequences via rule of law, There’d be a lot more problems out in public than rambunctious kids in restaurants and stores and teens causing chaos in classrooms, and people would grow up with no concept of boundaries. Laws do not and cannot encompass every instance in which discipline and punitive consequences are necessary. Ethics also exist beyond laws, and there are oodles of unethical actions that are entirely legal.
Also - and I request this with good intent - where have you seen evidence that enforcing anti-toxic behavior produces more toxic behavior, and how often? It cannot just be a one-off either, otherwise that’s just confirmation bias. There should be ample evidence beyond only a few anecdotes, within quantifiable population masses.
When it comes down to gaming toxicity, Wildstar come straight into my mind. A wonderfully made game with so much potential and hype when it first release, but was bought to a really sad ending eventually due to the toxicity of the community that destroys the whole population.
You guys are moving along the same path as what carbine studio first started off, their catch phrase was "the devs are listening..." and being very open to every development stages. This is the correct direction for a great community based game.
However just to oversimplify why the toxicity came so heavily to the community that the game lost the whole community within a short period of time. They post so much promises and development plans, new phase new patch new content every single month, but they never fulfilled... so shortly they went silenced about the whole monthly updates and other dev interaction stream & blogs.
TL.DR. be sure to deliver what you promise to the community and never go silence on any issues that the community is concern about.
Having been a moderator for very large gaming communities in the past, I'm surprised by a lot of people saying something similar to:
"If you encounter someone toxic, just mute them" - This is not really an effective approach, because that person will continue to be toxic to those that haven't muted them yet or are encountering them for the first time. I don't care if they are paying a subscription. That doesn't entitle them to be an ass. You can easily put "don't be an ass or bad things will happen!" in the T&C's.
I have no problem at all with an automated (or semi-automated with human verification) system, as long as it is built well. What do I mean by built well? Low false positives, plenty of warnings, not oppressive (especially for first time or rare [for that player] incidents). You could also factor in things like how many people have muted the person for example.
Whatever system is put in place, you should be careful about those gaming the system, like getting everyone in a guild to false report someone to get them banned. What I've seen in the past is things like someone having a bad game and everyone reporting them for something like "Intentional Feeding" when it wasn't.
You've also had systems in the past like League of Legends Tribunal system that had players doing the human verification of toxicity reviews. I think that was OK, but it rewarded players for punishing other players, which is why it wasn't ideal and got cancelled last year.
Not saying you need a team of people developing something constantly to deal with toxicity, but certainly don't feel that a "just mute them" approach will work.
Also, as someone else mentioned, rewarding for good behaviour is a great thing to do to lower the average toxicity in a game. Best to use a carrot when you can and only bring out the stick when you have to. You still need a stick though!
Lastly, if the game every goes F2P, toxicity will increase dramatically.
I'd suggest to find a way to give rewards for being opposite to toxic, like for being nice, helpful etc. Overwatch has quite nice approach, after each match you're able to give a 'badge' to three players of the match. Perhaps something in this direction?
Forbidding people doing things quite often doesn't work well, but growing community that is encouraged to be kind will benefit even outside of AOC
Ah this is an interesting tangent I'm glad you brought up @kethatril , and I'd love to dig into this more too! Could you (or anyone else) provide examples of approaches similar to this that you like? (e.g. mentorship programs, other community engagement programs)
Well Pretty easy to implement in 3v3 and 5v5 brackets. In the 100 and 250 brackets well that is a lot of people
to choose from but could be done while the fight is going on through emojis icons and emotes.
But there are times were people in pvp just play at an incredible skill level and players could honor them after the match even the 250 bracket just hard time going through 250 people. Maybe if thewere color coded by class might be easier to find and if there was a search function that did have to be an exact match.
For dungeouns the game could give you extra gold for not taking damage from dungeoun mechanics.
Plus. In a dungeoun there are only eight people so be pretty easy to put an honor system in place plus it would work fairly well cause it is not unusual for people to do dungeouns with different people.
More problematic with raids cause usually raid with same people all the time.
In WoW there is an option to flag yourself as a person that fills a leader ship role. Well if people in Ashes of creation would have a similar choice toons could rate thier leader ships skills through similar system.
As far as dungeouns go people could be honored for good saves, good strategy, and sometimes toons get in a really good group so they could rate the group as a whole.
Some ideas for honor titles are Beast Mode, Colossal Tanking, Divine Heals , And so on.
Plus players could be given oppurtunity to rate the group as whole which would apply to all group play.
Sometimes I would do dungeouns wiht groups and the team work would just be incredible so this is were that would apply.
Language filters and mute that are both toggle options for a player should imo limit personal experience of toxicity. I do not think it should be a games job to police people for bad words, mean words or spam. Give players the ability to resolve these issues directly and limit GM oversight to more serious offenses and game bug/glitch issues.
Tyrantor
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
Truthfully, in a game that is going to be player managed/driven economies, regions, politics, the only out of game management from the Devs/GMs should be real world racial slurs and doxxing.
Other than that, people shouldn't get moderator for shit talking since that is going to be a core driving part of the game.
Talk too much shit, you're gonna get hit.
Or guild war
or declared Enemy of the State
or some other in game mechanic
As allways on point.
Personally i would put a Chat Filter in the game.
But give people the ability to deactivate it.
I have no problem with toxic behavior from others.
Haters gonna hate.
They talk to mutch bullsh** and my guild is gonna hunt them down.
I'd suggest to find a way to give rewards for being opposite to toxic, like for being nice, helpful etc. Overwatch has quite nice approach, after each match you're able to give a 'badge' to three players of the match. Perhaps something in this direction?
Forbidding people doing things quite often doesn't work well, but growing community that is encouraged to be kind will benefit even outside of AOC
Ah this is an interesting tangent I'm glad you brought up @kethatril , and I'd love to dig into this more too! Could you (or anyone else) provide examples of approaches similar to this that you like? (e.g. mentorship programs, other community engagement programs)
Mentor ship is also a good idea.
The Trainee could get an EXP boost while the Mentor could get some time limited loot / Gathering % boost.
The higher the Trainee rates the Mentor, The Higher the Boost.
To limit abuse the Mentor needs to be Level 50.
The Trainee can rate the Mentor every 10 levels. (At level 10, 20, 30, 40, 50)
Only if the Trainee reached level 50 can the Mentor get the full boost.
That way the Mentor has to keep doing a good job rather then only doing it until they get the positive reputation token.
If the Trainee quits or leaves early the Mentor only gets a portion of the Boost depending on how many levels the Trainee did while under mentor ship and how mutch positive Repuation the trainee rated you.
So if you do such a terrible job as a Mentor that your trainee quits, then you should not get a reward.
Also you can Only mentor the highest level char of an Account.
So people doing alts to farm Positive rep would imposible as they would have to create new accounts with subsciption and level them each to level 50.
Let me give an example.
I have a level 42 Char.
That char can become a trainee to a Mentor.
If i create a new char on the same account then that char can not become a trainee
All that would also help people who join a server later "catch up" with the high level players.
You could even Add Titles Like "Honorable Teacher" or even a Unique Title like "Greatest Mentor of the World" that the Mentor with the highest amount of positive Reputation on the server gets as long as they hold that position.
Could even give someone like that a Unique Flying Mount.
That would definitely get people to Mentor New players and do the best possible job.
Maybe limit the Number of current trainees of a Mentor to a certain number
A different reputation system:
When you do any activity you gather Reputation points in that node. (just like you gather node exp)
They are not for yourself but for other people.
You can use them to build up other peoples reputation.
Sure guilds would abuse this to Rep each other.
You could make it impossible or less effective to give rep to someone in your guild.
Limiting the Number of Reputation points you can give the same person could work.
Or having the System make a difference between rep from current guild members and strangers so people don't just leave the guild to earn rep and rejoin. If they did that then it would count towards rep from guild members. If they left it would again counted as stranger.
If i see someone with 1000 rep points all from members of their own guild but only 2 from strangers then it tells me a lot.
You could use the same system but for negative rep.
If some is toxic then i give them negative rep.
And if my Major sees a guy with 10000 negative rep then he may just declare the guy the enemy of the state, even if that guy didn't Grief.
Hell again you can use Titles like "A Beacon of Smiles" for positive behavior.
Been playing League of Legends and in a game I asked for help and player come over and helped and as a couteousy I said ty or Thank You. Then another player said WoW what a huge difference a non toxic game makes. Started to think about and well in toxic games wins are more like Well we had a toxic game but at least we won. And if we lose then it is like the agony of defeat times like 3. So wins are lot less meaning ful and loses are horrible.
But sometims we get really good groups that are mature and paly together well. One time new player said he was new to a certain champion, and was concerened aboutlosing the game, but one player just said
That is fine. We ended up going to help him whenever we could and ended up winning the game. Just because we worked together.
But there are othe games were people are actually really positive (not just non toxic but positive) and well those games have a huge fun factor loses really do not mean to much cause still had funa nd got a few kills in and wins are that much better by like a factor of like 10.
Toxic people really do take most of the fun out of the game.
I stopped and though tabout and realized that the best games in pvp and pve are with those type of people. Positive minded people.
Said all that to say this.......
Think be great idea for IS to address this issue on a regular basis. Video would be great.
Everyone can have a bad day, but some people just want to make things miserable for anyone.
I've always had the idea that you police toxic players. We do this with criminals today, 3 strikes and they're out and what I mean by out, they are moved to their Akham Server where you isolate these players never to return to another server. Lock their account down so that they cannot create a character on any other server.
What this means is that the players should be fully aware what is at risk for their actions. If they're part of a guild, they're gone. If they actually had friends, they're gone. They still have the ability to play the game in full they just no longer get to pick a server.
If they want to try a different credit card to get around it, that's fine. Now that they know and understand the potential repercussion they may be more apt to play civil.
Toxic players are like minded players, just as casual players. But they together they don't mix. What they do is force players to quit which in turn hurts the bottom line. If you separate them though you'll continue to make everyone happy, err... well casual and toxic just on their own servers.
Also if the game is faction driven, meaning you join one of 3 factions, lockdown cross faction chat. Verbal abuse is the first and easiest thing to police. The toxicity isn't quite as bad when you can't decipher wth the other player is saying.
Some of the best moments I have ever had in PVP games is people shit talking, acting tough and being total douche bags.
Anger, jealousy, spite, revenge are all human emotion that spurs on great gameplay!
Like you have been killed 3 times by this dude and so you will always keep going back for more "Oh I gonna get him this time" moments.
Id take that any day over just someone going "meh i'll just report him and get this shit talker banned"
I'd suggest to find a way to give rewards for being opposite to toxic, like for being nice, helpful etc. Overwatch has quite nice approach, after each match you're able to give a 'badge' to three players of the match. Perhaps something in this direction?
Forbidding people doing things quite often doesn't work well, but growing community that is encouraged to be kind will benefit even outside of AOC
Couldn't agree more. At the same time, there are different programmatic ways to evaluate the level of toxicity of a player based on his real-time chat activity. Depending on the ToS, you could use Tensorflow API or Perspective API and flag user with toxic behavior. I like the idea that everyone starts with a positive score that gets diminished or increased depending on their in-game activity. Negative players could be sanctioned and pay additional taxes to NPC or even get banned when their toxicity level is confirmed by a GM. But philosophically, I prefer to encourage and reward positive players too.
I'm in agreement with most of what has already been said.
1. The game is going to be heavily player driven, and players should be allowed to shit-talk or talk bad about other players...and the punishment be other players teaching them a lesson in manners. I imagine the way the game is intent on providing incentive for cooperation with players/guilds will be a deterrent to poor behavior, but some people are going to be that way anyway. Which is fine.
2. Obviously racial slurs, doxxing etc. should be dealt with personally by Intrepid Team.
3. Option to "block" individuals.
If the parameters for bad behavior are too broad, then I just see the support team being overwhelmed by reports against players who made someone feel bad for a low level insult. Hard to get swift action on truly bad behavior when it is surrounded by tickets for dumb behavior.
Shit talking is a part of equation as long as it doesn't get into real life politics, race, religion or ethnicity, I'm all for it. Sure provide people with a way to mute someone if they don't want to see it but it is a part of drama and in-game politics that makes that part of the game fun and entertaining.
In my limited experience of playing mmorpgs and being a game moderator for some years, I feel like positive reinforcement has always worked better than punishments. Attempting to deliver " swift justice" on a player or group of players can be extremely difficult and creates chasms of trust. A bad example of managing toxicity from my experience would be League of Legends.
I used to live in a household with very poor/unstable internet connection when I first moved in and that would cause me to sometimes disconnect for periods of time during a match. League of legends would simply put increasing time bans on my account for " leaving " the game, even if I had gone back and won the match. It really made me and by extensions the friends I played with leave the game.
On the other hand, Guild Wars 2 has a mentor system that allowed players to create a tag visible on the map for other players to find. The interesting part of this mechanic is that being a "mentor" was/is mostly used to locate something/someone like an objective. Now, how does this help manage toxicity ? Its a tool that gives players a chance to be helpful and in that I found mitigated the usual response of a global chat of "Google it" when someone ask for help.
Lastly, I hope to see the usual "Block/Report" buttons when interacting with players who are being rude.
" What do you mean a book I cannot have?" - Frufire
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NelsonRebelMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Truthfully, in a game that is going to be player managed/driven economies, regions, politics, the only out of game management from the Devs/GMs should be real world racial slurs and doxxing.
Other than that, people shouldn't get moderator for shit talking since that is going to be a core driving part of the game.
Talk too much shit, you're gonna get hit.
Or guild war
or declared Enemy of the State
or some other in game mechanic
Agreed. While I dislike peoples toxicity (not related to racism/sexism/religious intolerance), the reality is we can handle that ingame as players. Kill them, destroy their node, attack their resource caravans, etc..
The only things that need to be moderated @LieutenantToast are things like racial attacks of any kind. Any verabal attack based on skin color is unnacceptable in any way.
They should recieve temporary suspensions or outright bans.
Exploits.
Exploiters really create the worst possible environment in the game. People who intentionally exploit, and repeat it and dont report it deserve un-reserved permanent account and IP bans.
To many games give these types of people a slap on the wrist and they go and exploit unseen parts of the game ruining the integrity of the game, its content, and the experience of the game.
Do not give these people any leeway. For the sake of everyone
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NelsonRebelMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
I still haven´t really seen a lot of people to talk about what "toxicity" actually is.
Perception goes both ways. Just becouse you view someone as being toxic does not mean other people do or that your perception of toxicity is actually viewed as toxic by other people.
This is especially true between different cultures and the people who call for "controlling toxicity" are usually the most untollerent people themselves.
I would also raise my eyebrow against someone suggesting to punish people for something which is not against law. Intrepid would have to act as if it is above the law and knows what is best than the nations themselves.
Generally when you start enforcing anti-toxic behavior it only produces more toxic enviroment. Instead fun chatting it becomes the excersise of self-censorship to avoid punishment
Laws against toxicity arent required when you agree to their terms of service, on their platform, on their game that is entirely optional.
Toxicity is pretty easily defined for being racist against anyone, sexist, or religiously attacking someone.
^^^
I don't care what culture you are from any of the above three have no excuse or any place in society and definitley not in a game where we are trying to tune out all of it. Immediate permanent account bans are what I recommend.
Client side toggleable chat filter, robust block/mute feature. Outside of targeted or recurring harrassment, squabbles over words are best handled by giving players the ability to simply block eachother.
I like the right click IGNORE system the best or if there is actual harassment then REPORT. I would love it if there was a way to ban real world political ideology. I just don't want to read about other players political views when I am gaming. NO REAL LIFE POLITICS in GAMES.
Guild complaint reports and more GM oversight.
Make the lowlife individual feel appreciated and not so much the Twitch.tv group.
Disbandment of guilds that effect the game's commerce and game play.
Comments
Personally, I'm from the US. Toxicity in the states on the internet as a whole, not just gaming is horrible. Removing anonymity would get rid of some serious low life trolls that are truly toxic. People would cry right to privacy, but privacy and anonymity are two separate things.
I would personally be quite happy to see the anonymity removed. Identity verification of this type, especially in the states would be a marketable characteristic to appeal to a broader audience, and play on safety and security online which is becoming not only more visible, but increasingly more important to clients.
But to be honest, I don't think this will work efficiently.
On huge servers with healthy populations well the messages are so many that the average person can barely read them in time before they go scroll out of view. So it is a legitiamate issue not just another way to bann some one for being toxic.
Perception goes both ways. Just becouse you view someone as being toxic does not mean other people do or that your perception of toxicity is actually viewed as toxic by other people.
This is especially true between different cultures and the people who call for "controlling toxicity" are usually the most untollerent people themselves.
I would also raise my eyebrow against someone suggesting to punish people for something which is not against law. Intrepid would have to act as if it is above the law and knows what is best than the nations themselves.
Generally when you start enforcing anti-toxic behavior it only produces more toxic enviroment. Instead fun chatting it becomes the excersise of self-censorship to avoid punishment
How to stop public 'toxic' in game game chat?
So that could be summarized also lots of good ideas there just old post but still valid eight pages worth maybe you already read it thought i mention it just in case.
Do not know game is going to have a function were you can just look people up any time and look at a toons complete profile. Function to make this private would be cool.
Really personal profile information could be requested when looking for guild, looking for pvp team looking to join raid.
Default in most games is not private if deefault setting was on private for all users then people would have to ask for acess to profile both types. In game were you click on a person see profile and the other were you can see a player stats on some website just by typing their name..actaully could be left out of the game.
Toxic people like to look up people up and troll on them for things they have not done and amount of times killed and and they could even figure out about when you started playing by looking at the dates of some of the achievements like when you hit level ten if there is such an acheivement and if they have like a year or two more of playing time then start calling you a noob.
On the off chance that's not the route you're looking to go with AOC, do everything in your power to make ingame reputation matter. It is the removal of the social consequences we must deal with in real life if we act like a nerfherder in public that lead straight to the asshattery that drives players away from online games just so some numbnuts can stop feeling like his parents didn't love him enough.
Do you know how easy it is to track someone, anyone really, just by knowing theyr names? Just imagine, a game with no-anonymity and someday a player that ddnt like something you said or just by having some valuable itens in-game or they just have a few screws lose goes to your house in the middle of the night? It's not that most games company don't want to do it, but they doing it is for the costumer own safety, thats why you should not give IRL information on internet to anyone, you can deal with a toxic person on the internet by turning off your computer, but can you deal with the consequences of putting your own life and the line or the ones you love on the line? Don't ever forget that.
Are you familiar with Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance? He states, “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.“
https://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/should-we-tolerate-the-intolerant
If parents and teachers had to rely upon permission to administer consequences via rule of law, There’d be a lot more problems out in public than rambunctious kids in restaurants and stores and teens causing chaos in classrooms, and people would grow up with no concept of boundaries. Laws do not and cannot encompass every instance in which discipline and punitive consequences are necessary. Ethics also exist beyond laws, and there are oodles of unethical actions that are entirely legal.
Also - and I request this with good intent - where have you seen evidence that enforcing anti-toxic behavior produces more toxic behavior, and how often? It cannot just be a one-off either, otherwise that’s just confirmation bias. There should be ample evidence beyond only a few anecdotes, within quantifiable population masses.
You guys are moving along the same path as what carbine studio first started off, their catch phrase was "the devs are listening..." and being very open to every development stages. This is the correct direction for a great community based game.
However just to oversimplify why the toxicity came so heavily to the community that the game lost the whole community within a short period of time. They post so much promises and development plans, new phase new patch new content every single month, but they never fulfilled... so shortly they went silenced about the whole monthly updates and other dev interaction stream & blogs.
TL.DR. be sure to deliver what you promise to the community and never go silence on any issues that the community is concern about.
Have a great day ahead
"If you encounter someone toxic, just mute them" - This is not really an effective approach, because that person will continue to be toxic to those that haven't muted them yet or are encountering them for the first time. I don't care if they are paying a subscription. That doesn't entitle them to be an ass. You can easily put "don't be an ass or bad things will happen!" in the T&C's.
I have no problem at all with an automated (or semi-automated with human verification) system, as long as it is built well. What do I mean by built well? Low false positives, plenty of warnings, not oppressive (especially for first time or rare [for that player] incidents). You could also factor in things like how many people have muted the person for example.
Whatever system is put in place, you should be careful about those gaming the system, like getting everyone in a guild to false report someone to get them banned. What I've seen in the past is things like someone having a bad game and everyone reporting them for something like "Intentional Feeding" when it wasn't.
You've also had systems in the past like League of Legends Tribunal system that had players doing the human verification of toxicity reviews. I think that was OK, but it rewarded players for punishing other players, which is why it wasn't ideal and got cancelled last year.
Not saying you need a team of people developing something constantly to deal with toxicity, but certainly don't feel that a "just mute them" approach will work.
Also, as someone else mentioned, rewarding for good behaviour is a great thing to do to lower the average toxicity in a game. Best to use a carrot when you can and only bring out the stick when you have to. You still need a stick though!
Lastly, if the game every goes F2P, toxicity will increase dramatically.
Well Pretty easy to implement in 3v3 and 5v5 brackets. In the 100 and 250 brackets well that is a lot of people
to choose from but could be done while the fight is going on through emojis icons and emotes.
But there are times were people in pvp just play at an incredible skill level and players could honor them after the match even the 250 bracket just hard time going through 250 people. Maybe if thewere color coded by class might be easier to find and if there was a search function that did have to be an exact match.
For dungeouns the game could give you extra gold for not taking damage from dungeoun mechanics.
Plus. In a dungeoun there are only eight people so be pretty easy to put an honor system in place plus it would work fairly well cause it is not unusual for people to do dungeouns with different people.
More problematic with raids cause usually raid with same people all the time.
In WoW there is an option to flag yourself as a person that fills a leader ship role. Well if people in Ashes of creation would have a similar choice toons could rate thier leader ships skills through similar system.
As far as dungeouns go people could be honored for good saves, good strategy, and sometimes toons get in a really good group so they could rate the group as a whole.
Some ideas for honor titles are Beast Mode, Colossal Tanking, Divine Heals , And so on.
Plus players could be given oppurtunity to rate the group as whole which would apply to all group play.
Sometimes I would do dungeouns wiht groups and the team work would just be incredible so this is were that would apply.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
*Mods should stricltly enforce Racism
*People will arguue, and Trash talk. That's part of the game.
Toxic games have become the Norm, since at release they only stand to lose a subcription fee at most, this might not deter people very much.
I'm hoping the active Game Masters will monitor this and Intrepid will take a hard line stance, 1 Warning , then Ban (Account Gone)
As allways on point.
Personally i would put a Chat Filter in the game.
But give people the ability to deactivate it.
I have no problem with toxic behavior from others.
Haters gonna hate.
They talk to mutch bullsh** and my guild is gonna hunt them down.
Mentor ship is also a good idea.
The Trainee could get an EXP boost while the Mentor could get some time limited loot / Gathering % boost.
The higher the Trainee rates the Mentor, The Higher the Boost.
To limit abuse the Mentor needs to be Level 50.
The Trainee can rate the Mentor every 10 levels. (At level 10, 20, 30, 40, 50)
Only if the Trainee reached level 50 can the Mentor get the full boost.
That way the Mentor has to keep doing a good job rather then only doing it until they get the positive reputation token.
If the Trainee quits or leaves early the Mentor only gets a portion of the Boost depending on how many levels the Trainee did while under mentor ship and how mutch positive Repuation the trainee rated you.
So if you do such a terrible job as a Mentor that your trainee quits, then you should not get a reward.
Also you can Only mentor the highest level char of an Account.
So people doing alts to farm Positive rep would imposible as they would have to create new accounts with subsciption and level them each to level 50.
Let me give an example.
I have a level 42 Char.
That char can become a trainee to a Mentor.
If i create a new char on the same account then that char can not become a trainee
All that would also help people who join a server later "catch up" with the high level players.
You could even Add Titles Like "Honorable Teacher" or even a Unique Title like "Greatest Mentor of the World" that the Mentor with the highest amount of positive Reputation on the server gets as long as they hold that position.
Could even give someone like that a Unique Flying Mount.
That would definitely get people to Mentor New players and do the best possible job.
Maybe limit the Number of current trainees of a Mentor to a certain number
A different reputation system:
When you do any activity you gather Reputation points in that node. (just like you gather node exp)
They are not for yourself but for other people.
You can use them to build up other peoples reputation.
Sure guilds would abuse this to Rep each other.
You could make it impossible or less effective to give rep to someone in your guild.
Limiting the Number of Reputation points you can give the same person could work.
Or having the System make a difference between rep from current guild members and strangers so people don't just leave the guild to earn rep and rejoin. If they did that then it would count towards rep from guild members. If they left it would again counted as stranger.
If i see someone with 1000 rep points all from members of their own guild but only 2 from strangers then it tells me a lot.
You could use the same system but for negative rep.
If some is toxic then i give them negative rep.
And if my Major sees a guy with 10000 negative rep then he may just declare the guy the enemy of the state, even if that guy didn't Grief.
Hell again you can use Titles like "A Beacon of Smiles" for positive behavior.
There are so many posiblitys.
But sometims we get really good groups that are mature and paly together well. One time new player said he was new to a certain champion, and was concerened aboutlosing the game, but one player just said
That is fine. We ended up going to help him whenever we could and ended up winning the game. Just because we worked together.
But there are othe games were people are actually really positive (not just non toxic but positive) and well those games have a huge fun factor loses really do not mean to much cause still had funa nd got a few kills in and wins are that much better by like a factor of like 10.
Toxic people really do take most of the fun out of the game.
I stopped and though tabout and realized that the best games in pvp and pve are with those type of people. Positive minded people.
Said all that to say this.......
Think be great idea for IS to address this issue on a regular basis. Video would be great.
I've always had the idea that you police toxic players. We do this with criminals today, 3 strikes and they're out and what I mean by out, they are moved to their Akham Server where you isolate these players never to return to another server. Lock their account down so that they cannot create a character on any other server.
What this means is that the players should be fully aware what is at risk for their actions. If they're part of a guild, they're gone. If they actually had friends, they're gone. They still have the ability to play the game in full they just no longer get to pick a server.
If they want to try a different credit card to get around it, that's fine. Now that they know and understand the potential repercussion they may be more apt to play civil.
Toxic players are like minded players, just as casual players. But they together they don't mix. What they do is force players to quit which in turn hurts the bottom line. If you separate them though you'll continue to make everyone happy, err... well casual and toxic just on their own servers.
Also if the game is faction driven, meaning you join one of 3 factions, lockdown cross faction chat. Verbal abuse is the first and easiest thing to police. The toxicity isn't quite as bad when you can't decipher wth the other player is saying.
Anger, jealousy, spite, revenge are all human emotion that spurs on great gameplay!
Like you have been killed 3 times by this dude and so you will always keep going back for more "Oh I gonna get him this time" moments.
Id take that any day over just someone going "meh i'll just report him and get this shit talker banned"
Toxicity should be tolerable within reason.
Hate speech,Doxing,ect should be actionable by admins.
The game to absolutely not model after is FFXIV. You are risking getting banned if you ask a healer to pay attention to the tanks healths.
I also don't care for these player run tribunals like LOL, and Archeage. Just let a GM deal with it.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Couldn't agree more. At the same time, there are different programmatic ways to evaluate the level of toxicity of a player based on his real-time chat activity. Depending on the ToS, you could use Tensorflow API or Perspective API and flag user with toxic behavior. I like the idea that everyone starts with a positive score that gets diminished or increased depending on their in-game activity. Negative players could be sanctioned and pay additional taxes to NPC or even get banned when their toxicity level is confirmed by a GM. But philosophically, I prefer to encourage and reward positive players too.
1. The game is going to be heavily player driven, and players should be allowed to shit-talk or talk bad about other players...and the punishment be other players teaching them a lesson in manners. I imagine the way the game is intent on providing incentive for cooperation with players/guilds will be a deterrent to poor behavior, but some people are going to be that way anyway. Which is fine.
2. Obviously racial slurs, doxxing etc. should be dealt with personally by Intrepid Team.
3. Option to "block" individuals.
If the parameters for bad behavior are too broad, then I just see the support team being overwhelmed by reports against players who made someone feel bad for a low level insult. Hard to get swift action on truly bad behavior when it is surrounded by tickets for dumb behavior.
I used to live in a household with very poor/unstable internet connection when I first moved in and that would cause me to sometimes disconnect for periods of time during a match. League of legends would simply put increasing time bans on my account for " leaving " the game, even if I had gone back and won the match. It really made me and by extensions the friends I played with leave the game.
On the other hand, Guild Wars 2 has a mentor system that allowed players to create a tag visible on the map for other players to find. The interesting part of this mechanic is that being a "mentor" was/is mostly used to locate something/someone like an objective. Now, how does this help manage toxicity ? Its a tool that gives players a chance to be helpful and in that I found mitigated the usual response of a global chat of "Google it" when someone ask for help.
Lastly, I hope to see the usual "Block/Report" buttons when interacting with players who are being rude.
- Frufire
Agreed. While I dislike peoples toxicity (not related to racism/sexism/religious intolerance), the reality is we can handle that ingame as players. Kill them, destroy their node, attack their resource caravans, etc..
The only things that need to be moderated @LieutenantToast are things like racial attacks of any kind. Any verabal attack based on skin color is unnacceptable in any way.
They should recieve temporary suspensions or outright bans.
Exploits.
Exploiters really create the worst possible environment in the game. People who intentionally exploit, and repeat it and dont report it deserve un-reserved permanent account and IP bans.
To many games give these types of people a slap on the wrist and they go and exploit unseen parts of the game ruining the integrity of the game, its content, and the experience of the game.
Do not give these people any leeway. For the sake of everyone
Laws against toxicity arent required when you agree to their terms of service, on their platform, on their game that is entirely optional.
Toxicity is pretty easily defined for being racist against anyone, sexist, or religiously attacking someone.
^^^
I don't care what culture you are from any of the above three have no excuse or any place in society and definitley not in a game where we are trying to tune out all of it. Immediate permanent account bans are what I recommend.
Good manners, helpfulness, generosity, supportiveness, fairness. Be who you want to be but let goodness stand out.
Make the lowlife individual feel appreciated and not so much the Twitch.tv group.
Disbandment of guilds that effect the game's commerce and game play.