Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
A face with social/economic repercusions is the way to go.
Other than that I'd rather have no management of toxicity at all. If people want to be jerks they should be able to. WoW solved toxicity by removing player interaction from the game entirely. Important thing to avoid.
U.S. East
I also think having a merit system, or something to give props to a player, would be nice. I could be wrong, but I remember something like this in FFXIV, after players finished a instanced dungeon they could choose whether or not to give other players Reputation points(some kind of good karma) that would reward you with cosmetic items after you gotten to a certain threshold(100 Rep points = Unlocking a cool looking hat, 2000 Rep points = Unlocking a Unique Title).
I definitely think something like this would be neat to have, and promote more positive play from people, especially if they're being rewarded for being good sports. How this would be implemented in a Open world sandbox game like this; I'll leave that to the devs.
It was hands down System of a Down's best album.
Ounce negativity gois out of control it is harder to deal with. This way you could avoid banning people and keep them as fellow gamers.
This would include kill stealing by waiting for a player to weaken the mob, then killing the player before he slays the mob and stealing it's kill for the loot.
I agree on that one - a mute function is important, thats basically it.
You can be loyal nice and calm.
Or you can be a toxic person get a bad reputation etc...
Please nothing like WoW....
The only true stance for a company to have in an MMO.
Oh no, not you people...
Again, it's a good idea in theory but what's stopping a few friends and I from "boosting" each other?
In general I wouldn't attempt to incentivize being a tattle-tail, that's an easy way to increase toxicity. Just leave it at ignore/block filters and move on. Anything else and people will not be happy. (i.e, banning people for expressing their distaste for someones performance during a raid, no matter how "toxic".)
"GG" has no meaning.
Leave the world to be as it is, there will be elitist and there will be normies and casuals. They'll figure it out. It's supposed to be another world, jerks exist everywhere.
Before we can figure how we can reduce forms toxicity, we must figure out where it stems from. I will give what I found to be true through my 15+ years of being in the MMORPG genre and just a gamer in general. I will purposely exclude anonymity and human nature, since those are the most obvious reasons.
Causes for toxicity:
Reason: People hate losing the ability to speak their mind. Plus, censoring is an endless endeavor because players will find a million different ways to say what they want until it reaches a point where you're basically playing club penguin.
Reason: Lack of Accountability
-This encompasses players that go to third-party websites to purchase botting clients to skip the game, buying in-game currency/valued items with real money, and/or bug abusing like duping. All of these devalue the work the legitimate players did and creates resentment towards the developers for lack of preventive measure and repercussions.
-In all games where there is PvP, being forced to play with random players presents an issue of loss of control and feeling helpless. The is especially prevalent in MOBA games. In LoL, one of the most notorious games for its toxicity, has players put into a team with 4 other people. We don't know the other player's favorite champion pool, win-rate, specific elo, playstyle, etc. This can be frustrating when you enter a game and have no idea how the other person plays. If they do not fit your playstyle, there is nothing you can do about it because leaving can get you banned.
-This goes with the previous point, but I will expand further. If the game stops being fun momentarily in a match, a player should not be punished for leaving. Staying in the match despite not being cool-headed only exponentially raises toxicity levels. Also, players should not be punished for leaving when something important comes up outside the game.
1.Weight Limit
2.Vigor, Energy, or Resin System
3.Overcomplicated/Unintuitive User Interface
4.Spawn Camping
5.Trade Restrictions
6.Too much RNG
7.Not enough bag space
8.Server lag
9.Crashing
10.Unskippable cutscenes
11.Escort quests
12.Plants that die too quickly
After reading through the list, you will notice that most of the causes are from poor choices from the development side. So far, I have been told that this game will avoid some of these flaws. That is a good step in the right direction. I do hope that the development continues to look to players for feedback while also hoping the the players themselves will not let things slide, despite the game being pre-alpha. Glorious players, look for every bug, observe the combat for even the most miniscule of off-putting details, and feel the music and ask yourself if you're on an adventure or in a circus. The pre-launch is the most important part of how a game will turn out.
Goodluck!
Toxicity has nothing to do with the game itself. Mostly, it comes from lack of coping mechanisms of the player. Even in the most perfect game, a toxic player would eventually show their toxicity, simply because they do not get their way for once. Same with elitism or whatever petty subject some of the players will work themselves up over.
Thinking that "doing everything right" will reduce toxicity is naive. It will just shift the reason for it to other fields. Toxic behavior is best reduced by ignore lists that have no maximum length, i would oppose bans. Take away a toxic player's audience by having their targets ignore them. And mechanisms that make sure if you mute one character of a player, all his characters are likewise muted. That you will not see his offers on the markets and that he cannot send you in-game mail either.
Overly toxic people will then find themselves in a world of their own after a while and either move on or quit. And that is my experience from roughly 3 decades of online multiplayer PvP gaming.
- Ignore/Mute has solved nearly all my problems. (Don't like the way someone is talking to you? Then ignore them, don't feed into it.)
- Reporting players, a feature to add screenshots for proof (That way you can't just say Player A did this or said this )
- Maybe a system that monitors certain words (But honestly, if people want to be toxic they'll find a way to get around a system like that- but that's where screenshots help)
If the game lacks a monitoring system, I've seen communities out players on other platforms. Forums, tumblr, etc. Their bad behavior will hurt them later.
Screenshots shouldn't be necessary as a GM can look at the chat log around the time the report was sent.
If a report was sent without an actual incident happening (trolls), the sender should be punished. On repeated offence even block their account for a few days for wasting GMs time.
Eternal Guild
( Web | Discord )
I never understood why they'd put a maximum length on the Ignore list. It was always a much shorter limit than the Friends list, too, which in my experience was the wrong way around! Hahahaha
Funny, I read the topic and thought that it deserved an answer, then I read the first post and thought there was nothing more to say! But thought it might give weight to reiterate.
exactly my thoughts.
Ragnarok Online had the same.
You insult my guild members and we come knocking on your doorstep with a force to be reckoned with.
In the end Combat would decide who is right and the winner has all the rights to shit talk the looser.
Ahh Good times
There is a line and sometimes people cross it.
I think most people would agree to hand wave all in game actions as long as it isn't explicitly exploitative and hurting other players.
I think most people agree that some things should not be typed in the chat or direct messaged to players and players who do this should have the ability to type in chat revoked until they can be a good boy/girl.
Ability to mute people is assumed.
The ethical liability of a game designer on the real lives of the players outside of the game is an interesting subject. I think the things you are doing with the 5 day warnings before sieges and thinking about the people who can't play everyday are good things in this regard. If you do see a strong correlation between game systems and out of game toxicity, I would suggest looking into that and see if that is something you want to keep in the game or if you can change something to make people's lives better outside the game.
Idk why this just made me think of a suggestion someone on the Fallout New Vegas Multiplayer discord channel said.
Make it so that players names are hidden. That way you can only add someone to a group or PM them if they choose to tell you their name.
That would add an interesting dynamic to the game(immersive as well considering its based on RL) and at least prevent against people harassing someone out of nowhere through PMs. It would also make it so that randoms have to say what they say out in public where other people can hear and have the ability to report them.
Cause there will be thousands of reports a day, a lot of fake reports along with real ones, and there surely will not be enough staff to comb through them all. A logical report system would put reports with the most reports at the top of the list, which this would help with.
I mean, if combat is mutual then it shouldn't matter, but if it's just someone, or even a guild, is stalking a player then it could be an issue.
I don't mean like one or two kills, or even a dozen, but if it's egregious there should be some type of system to deal with it.
I'm not sure the specifics exactly of how the corruption system will work, but maybe a scaling corruption penalty for each kill of player who is a "non combatant" in a short period of time, regardless of who kills the particular player. By scaling, I mean the penalty grows with each kill, maybe geometrically even.
Players these days are smart enough to rotate who does the pk to avoid "harassment", so only a universal counter of some kind would work imo. This shouldn't apply to combatants or guild wars (if that's a thing in this game). Ie.. guilds that have declared war on each other.
And, no, it doesn't apply to Combatants or Guild Wars.
I felt the need to clarify because some people get in a huff about misconstruing a statement.
Repeated PKs as harrasment is going to be about repeatedly killing Non-Combatants.
I'm old school. I believe in the sticks and stones might break my bones but words will never break me mentality.
In general Jalal's first post sums up my other thoughts. But I want to add 2 thoughts:
From a verbal perspective, I believe a blacklist and maybe a redlist is sufficient. A redlist would be something you can add someone to that eliminates communication for a limited duration that also sends a system message to the redlisted player informing them that they've been redlisted - thus informing them that their behavior was not approved of. It's basically telling someone you need space. If they continue after the redlist timer runs out then just blacklist them.
Action wise, I think that your criminal system should take care of it. In a territorial dispute game you should 100% be allowed to steal mobs, hunt down a player in a territory you are trying to attack/defend and if they keep coming back it's their fault. In-game community defensive action should be all that is needed to stop someone from harassing others, killing lowbies/newbies, etc. If you're a solo player who refuses to interact with others, well, you reap what you sow. This is an MMO after all.
That said, please, for the love of god don't go as extreme as New World. You get banned for mildly calling out someone's mistake in global chat. It's asanine.
Who said combat is always mutual?
Repeatedly killing a Non-Combatant is harrasment.
It depends on the game philosophy for AoC. I know they want contested content, and as Raeyik mentioned, people should be able to claim and protect territory for themselves.
If someone is foolish enough to keep trying to move into a spot that a guild is claiming, I think it's fine to kill them repeatedly.