Greetings, glorious testers!
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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Killing Non-Combatants is punished with Corruption, so...
You could try repeatedly killing them, sure...
Ahh, for most MMOs I've played, harassment has been used to describe behavior that will get a player banned.
I wanted to clarify that I don't think people should be banned for repeatedly killing a player that violates territory a guild is claiming.
To clarify further for you, there doesn't have to be a physical system built into a game for territory to be claimed.
I could proclaim in general chat that a part of the map is mine and anyone entering will be killed. I mean you can be free to contest it back and fight for it, but it's not harassment (ie bannable) imo because territory is meant to be contested from what I've gathered.
Not completely prevent it, but to keep it fairly infrequent.
Claiming territory in chat is meaningless.
You could try to enforce it though. You might end up with a bunch of Corruption, but it's all fair game.
Everything i see in this game is reputation built. a real penalty system in place needs to be implemented, including world chat lock outs, and voice lock outs for the real toxic players.
Players assigning toxic numbers to players will be abused, one streamer with 1000 followers can get an adversary banned, that is not what I'm talking about.
You the developers need to assign your own values, to phrases, words, actions, and stick with it, even if players hate it. Locking out the toxic players is tricky as to what people in the world define as toxic in their own eyes and can lead to abuses and your own staff trying to mediate.
If you develop a system of toxic in game, chat, world chat, voice chat, you will cut down on needing CSR to deal with complaints and harassment charges.
if you're not willing to deal with CSR hiring to watch every chat 24 hours as your servers are up, then this is a must type of system. Let the interaction of reputation evolve to deal with all humans in game issues that arise, assign values and lock toxic players out of the game by them not being able to interact in game. Even to the point that NPC Super Guards appear and yank a toxic player to a faraway location that makes them fight with no loot, no xp gain, just to get back to the game.
Make it so they have to delete the character, start over and begin anew and hopefully this time, they evolve into a community member and not a toxic butter ball.
Just my 2 cents, The developers set the tone, not the player.
Players who had clean records and after they had reached a certain level were able to vote for what remarks in chat deserved punishment.
Everything was anonymous and there wasn't really much benefit to it from a player perspective but it did mean that players got to decide what was acceptable things to say or wasn't.
So look, I get that on forums and in games where your reputation doesn't actually affect your gameplay that moderators are needed. Valorant, or moba's like DOTA are great examples. You can, in theory, be as viscious and nasty as you want to someone and they have no recourse against you except to report you for a ban. But you can keep being nasty until you get banned, then take a day or two off and come back being your belligerent self. I know people like that.
But here's something to keep in mind with Ashes. Ashes is being designed to be a community game where your in-game actions and choices will follow you. Sure, this requires things like NOT having a random anonymous party finder, having a bounty hunter system, criminal system, and other mechanics but here's the thing.
If you're "toxic" in a way that upsets enough people, you're reputation will precede you and you won't get raid or dungeon invites. You'll be hunted to an extreme and might even get a KOS from an entire server. People won't sell goods to you, won't caravan with you, etc. They'll kill you while you gather or try to level. Your progression in any way that isn't 100% getting attacked and roadblocked will not exist. If 90% of a server blacklists you, then you can spam racist comments all you want in world chat because no one will see it, no one will speak to you, and you will be shut out of interacting with others.
Tangent Suggestion: If you get blacklisted it should be account wide in order to prevent someone from making extra chars to harass someone with.
Tangent idea 2: durational mutes on all public chat channels to squelch noisy folk who might just be having a noisy kinda day but don't really need b-listing.
Tangent idea 3: no world /global chat. Whispers can go the length of the world but otherwise restrict distance to a maximum of a node or only immediately adjacent ones.
Back on topic, that's the power of a smaller server with player mayors and jury, a robust and punishing criminal system, and a server where reputation matters. Most games fall short of giving the right tools for this type of community policing to happen but it is possible.
Devil's advocate: maybe that closed off, full everyone-against-me situation appeals to a few people. Well, that creates a lot of opportunity to strengthen the positive community, to connect lowbies with mentors, the white knights and one winged angels to exact their ideas of justice. The blue sentinels of dark souls if you will. Every hero needs a foil or reason to exist. Games are great places for these types of desires to become a reality.
Maybe that means that on some servers there will be people who have their feelings hurt for a bit. Maybe someone won't be able to farm solo in a node or for a certain mob. Maybe a crew of 10 denies a leveling spot until a bigger opposing faction can drive them out.
But I believe that Ashes has the potential to help people gain resiliency, lifelong friendships, to triumph over adversity and grow as both individual gamers as well as a community.
Give us the tools to ramp up consequences, to hold players accountable for their words and actions, but let us decide how to handle the misfits as a server based community. Create a system where this decision making power is relegated to a cohesive greater majority of a server (65%+), not just the ideals of a few 100 players.
They aren’t objective enough.
On one hand, being able to mute or block someone helps people manage their own reactions to other players.
On the other hand, when the game allows people to essentially harass another player, preventing them from enjoying the game - that is a problem. In a PVP-Only game, the risk of that happening is higher.
I think that the more the developers engage with the community, listen to them, etc - it breed an emotional connection, and lowers general toxicity - and the player base will self regulate.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP31ixSBO7GHKLBefWVcJaA
A key element to design well will be the in-game reporting mechanics for violations of the rules. This needs to be as automated as possible, with the relevant chat logs automatically collected and a list of violations to choose from in the report. Maybe some local activity logs that can be used to validate the violation claims made about game-breaking bugs or exploits or BOTS. All the information that is needed to assess a claim needs to be there by default when we press "report".
Now the downside to a nice automated system like this is that it's easy to spam report everyone that annoys you. To counter this fact, there needs to be some kind of punishment for numerous spurious reports. I'm not sure what the punishment should look like.
If getting to the task is a task in and of itself. People are far more likely to be helpful instead. Any type of summoning of players jeopardises this.
Something which also helps is forced downtime. What I mean is the resources used to defeat enemies. (Typically health points and mana points) don't regenerate nearly as fast in none rested areas (aka outside of cities) you need to replenish in other ways.
A problem with this is respawns, especially in something open-world. Giving certain classes the ability to self-ress every so often could alleviate this. Or even an item in ones inventory.
Other people mentioned rewards for being opposite of toxic. I don't personally think that's a good idea. As it stands, MMOs are entirely too full of rewards.
I am not against rewarding the player, far from it. But if you get rewarded often, and for the little things. Rewards itself sort of lose their meaning.
If you want to promote teamwork and friendliness amongst your playerbase. You should design it more altruistically. To use an Ashes of Creation example. Remember that dragon that may spawn in your node's influence after a certain threshold? Or any such open-world dungeons. If you clear it, you don't get personal rewards, other then recognition within your node. Like the whole town would know it was you that actually repelled the dragon. And doing this helps your node in some significant way.
The reward here would be that now, other node activities are easier. Or perhaps because the mountain is now safe, a passive city income of special ore that unlocks special items/gear. You still benefit, but it's far more altruistic.
Of course this doesn't mean the dragon can't drop stuff. Everyone that helped slay it could get a scale for example, that allows them to enhance the gear you've now unlocked for everyone with some bonus of your choice, doesn't even have to be combat related. Perhaps the bonus you want is a faster mount, or a higher chance for a successful high level craft.
I know you probably won't read this, but it always feels good to dream about my ideal systems
There are ingame mechanics to punish "toxic" players enough as it is
I think that there is definitely a universal line of tolerable behavior that transcends opinion and requires intervention by a higher authority - in this case Intrepid/GMs. To me, this categorizes behavior that otherwise someone has no recourse against.
For an extreme example: player 1 decides to stalk player 2. They "play by the rules" but constantly follow player 1, are in their face and on their freehold property, constantly heckle them even though they're blacklisted, kill their pve mobs, disrupt their travel if they can, and no matter what player 2 does, even if they flag to try to kill player 1, player 1 won't give up. I believe a term that might apply would be 'legal harassment'.
In this example, player 1 is presenting an extreme behavior that is violating the physical, emotional, and mental space of player 2 in a way that player 2 can't do anything about so a GM needs to intervene. This is of course my personal opinion, but it is an example of something I consider extreme that should have several layers of intervention to prevent such an extreme from ever getting this far. In this example, I believe that this goes beyond the communities capability to police which is why I think it falls into Intrepid's court.
This example is, in my eyes, very different from someone who just camps a leveling spot and kills anyone who comes into it or even goes out in search of easy marks. It's also different from someone who verbally 'abuses' someone else. The reason it's different is because in both of these latter examples, the targeted player has other ways to disengage. Some examples of disengagement: They can stop trying to enter the zone or go to another area. They can call in friends to defend them until the aggressor gives up. They can decide to craft or gather or travel to another area. They can blacklist a player to stop the verbal abuse.
I realize that my line is far more tolerant than what many would like to see. I'm not saying that this is the "right" way to go about things. Not everyone is as resilient as me or can see things in as broad of a brush stroke. It's just more ideas to throw into the pot from a moral/philosophical perspective on behavior in a game that, while indeed a reflection of our world due to the human race playing it, has no requirement* to be beholden to a single set of laws, morals, or principles.
*Legal principles/laws based on country of games operation may exist.