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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.
In-game harrassment. MMO Drama
Hedgemon
Member, Alpha Two
As the spotlight in current MMO drama fall upon the large games WOW, FFIVX, and the streamer Asmongold, the topic of harassment has been quite prevalent. Asmongold recently switched to play FFIVX, where some malicious players actively sought to interrupt his gameplay negatively and the actions resulted a known ban, likely more.
The topic of WoW being toxic has also been pretty relevant. With IIRC wow classic removing /spit from the game to appease players who purchase store mounts. While leaving in things such as racial slurs. I believe that both FFIVX and WOW handle their community moderation quite differently, where WOW protects its profits and large spenders, while FFIVX protects its general community. ( I wont even get into how some wow dev's are using twitter to support attacks against individuals)
I think the biggest difference in creating a anti-harassment culture is having a somewhat large amount of active mods who are in-game regularly, and spend their time and energy to resolve conflicts, issues, and reports, to include botting.
If there is to be in-game VOIP communications. I can only imagine that harassment will not only be harder to moderate, but also will be even more targeted to some demographics of players. I.E. Streamers, girls, mayors, world first guilds, ext.
How does Ashes Of Creation plan on dealing with these potential problems, are there any systems in place as alpha is beginning to wrap up that deals with the aforementioned issues? If not, what are the plans moving forward, because in a open world forced pvp environment, toxicity is going to be around. But letting it breed and replicate uncontested can quickly kill off a potentially amazing game and sour its community.
The topic of WoW being toxic has also been pretty relevant. With IIRC wow classic removing /spit from the game to appease players who purchase store mounts. While leaving in things such as racial slurs. I believe that both FFIVX and WOW handle their community moderation quite differently, where WOW protects its profits and large spenders, while FFIVX protects its general community. ( I wont even get into how some wow dev's are using twitter to support attacks against individuals)
I think the biggest difference in creating a anti-harassment culture is having a somewhat large amount of active mods who are in-game regularly, and spend their time and energy to resolve conflicts, issues, and reports, to include botting.
If there is to be in-game VOIP communications. I can only imagine that harassment will not only be harder to moderate, but also will be even more targeted to some demographics of players. I.E. Streamers, girls, mayors, world first guilds, ext.
How does Ashes Of Creation plan on dealing with these potential problems, are there any systems in place as alpha is beginning to wrap up that deals with the aforementioned issues? If not, what are the plans moving forward, because in a open world forced pvp environment, toxicity is going to be around. But letting it breed and replicate uncontested can quickly kill off a potentially amazing game and sour its community.
Trample the dead and hurdle the fallen. Run, and you will only die tired.
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The frustration people go through by being limited from the game design leads them to ridiculous activities.
In games like L2 Tera and other open world pvp settings, if someone bothered you you'd gank them a couple times and then move on with your happy gaming entrertainment.
Again, Im not surprised that people from games with instanced content and factions act the most childish.
This. and "mega servers"
Harassment gets many way. WoW, FFXIV are full of it. With different subject, and origin. But the more the game is individual, the more harassment will born in it. And toxicity in the whole.
All kind of toxicity comes from the anonymity. Instanced system in modern MMORPG are mostly bind to a Duty Finder. When you go in dungeon with duty finder, you don't go with 3 or 4 other player, but 3 or 4 other characters : you are unknown people, you will most probably never meet again. It would be AI it would'nt change anything.
What destroyed the "community" part of MMORPG, the "MMO" mindset was finally... when population becomes too massiv. I mean... on FFXIV you can literally play with 1 million+ people (8 datacenter sharing the whole player base)
When you live in a village, with 200 citizen, it is easy to know them all. now go in a town with just 100k citizen... it feels so large big that you will stick to your neighbors, your coworkers, and people you do hobby with. Even more true in 1m population city...
This is the same in MMORPG, too much people => you will never meet them again. and because we are "just in a game" and "they don't know who i am" there is this feeling of freedom to be an ass...
The best way to fight harassment is not moderators but :
1) having usefull guilds.
Guilds won't like having people complaining about one specific member, it damages the guild reputation, renown. The guild will force him to stop his shits, or kick him. If guild are an important thing, this kick will be a sanction.
2) Massively but with limits.
Not going to "million". If we have way to share information about the sillyness of one guy... little by little all will know it... The well known toxic people can be avoided, never invited/kicked from party/raid just because of its reputation.
With both those thing The community will moderate itself for most of problem. Moderator will remain usefull... But again lets see Real life : far before the law, what avoid us to be ass all time to unknown people is the fear to be Fired from work. And becoming little by little alone. (also because we are well educated people... but the "well educated people" are not the toxic one in MMORPG
How game is designed will lead how the community will moderate itself. And it can be far more efficient than spending too much in moderator team. Allowing to keep this team in a more modest size...
Openworld non instanced mmos, you have to maintain your reputation
Exactly, the game will self-regulate. If you tarnish your own reputation it's on you. You'll be targeted and excluded from raids, barred(KOS'd, most likely.) from entering towns, etc.
It is likely that your experience says it is, but in truth, any game without an automated matchmaking system requires players to maintain their reputation.
Even games with a large amount of instanced content require it - as long as there is no matchmaking system. I have seen many players in a number of MMO's (most notably EQ2) who simply could not get any current level group content done because literally no one on the server would group with them.
This is obviously vastly different to playing a game where people will just kill your character if you piss them off, but the end result of needing to maintain reputation is exactly the same.
My guess would be paying admins to handle this stuff and actually letting them do their jobs.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
If you have time take a gander at this.
(Open image in a new tab to enlarge it)
Not only did they get a multiple day ban, they are now under investigation for any other bullcrap they might have committed, and are potentially up for a perma-ban if anything is found. That's the kind of moderation I like to see. No bull crap, there's a line and if a player crosses it they get smacked with the full force of the moderation team. So if you want a nicer community you have to cull the clowns that don't want to be nice.
Edit: this is by no means an easy job, at the beginning it will be tons of work to pull off. However after a month or two of hardcore moderation you can build up a reputation and this alone will protect your game from toxic players. At that time the work should start to get easier to manage.
What an excessive response to something they could've avoided by making quest givers accessible through players. And that's in a game where you can't open-world PVP "grief" too. Now I wonder how Intrepid would handle the situation if a streamer was camped and PK'd for hours on end, would that break the rules? Would that warrant a mini-mod coming over and removing them, allowing the player to continue on in the world? If getting banned requires you to abuse a bug or exploit, that's completely understandable, but, to some, being PK'd constantly is harassment. So, what do we do?
Um... They DO have an option to click through players. That's not the point at all. Those players were maliciously attempting to ruin Asmongold's player experience. They weren't fighting him in pvp, they weren't stealing his stuff on a rust server, they were breaking the terms of service by blocking out his entire screen.
For someone getting farmed by PK's you tell them to get friends. That is their issue to deal with. As long as the developers work towards getting rid of "you cant play the game" antics that players can pull of with their systems, they are doing their job. There are some games *cough cough* Mortal Online *cough* that for YEARS let players build walls around the main cities that new players started at, effectively walling them off from the rest of the world. That is not the players fault, that is the game developers being inept.
FFXIV is more than a decade old. Are we to assume that this is the first time someone has done this? Have others reported it and Square Enix did nothing at all about it for a full decade?
I mean, this is a situation that literally every other game has dealt with one way or another - it's not like there aren't multiple potential solutions to it.
It would seem, what has happened here is that Square Enix simply wants to support a popular streamer that has just moved to their game. They clearly don't care about the bulk of their players, or this would have been fixed years ago.
Then we could look at the need to investigate the account in question. If there are things that this account has done that are questionable, why did it take the involvement of a streamer to even get them looked at?
While I appreciate the notion of a swift and decisive hand, honestly, if that is what this is about, they just lost any respect at all that I would have ever had for them as a company.
Exactly what I am talking about. When the admins are allowed to do their job, everybody wins.
My only issue with FFXIVs moderation is that it can be too heavy-handed at times. There are times when people are afraid to speak up about other player's poor performance due to fear of getting punished by admins. Sometimes this holds back conversations that would lead to a bad player improving. Many people would sooner just drop out of a group and find another party than risk constructive critique being mistaken as harassment. That is a problem too, and it only seems to be a problem in FFXIV.
Overall, I do agree that FFXIV is among the best admin teams, though. I have been reported many times in FFXIV, and I have never been banned because the admins take the time to look at the situation and see if a ban is justified.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Right, and honestly that might be better than the exact opposite. Not to mention you should be much more at ease to do this with friends and guildies that you know want to progress on certain things. I can't tell you how many times my friend gets mad that he's pulling more damage as a healer than one of the dpses in our groups. Lol but it's not something you can call out and, to be honest, the more important thing is that the boss dies. All you really need for most fights in FF14 is to do the mechanics right so many can get by without min-maxing their rotations.
if it was a pvp game, the dead can't interrupt your gameplay
just look at the disgrace Minecraft became, just because you can't kill others, then carebears log in the server and destroy your stuff. What happened next? Now Minecraft has private land plots and invulnerable construction, then there's problems about not being able to interact properly LOL... oh the band-aids
The dev who made Minecraft sold it and became a bazilionaire, all his backers are poor and begging money on the street and he could never program something meaningful about griefing or pvp
But knowing the owner of this game is gay himself, and our amazing Director of Communications representing the AAPI community, I feel confident that Intrepid will have 0 tolerance for unnecessary racial/homophobic/transphobic slurs.
Toxicity will always exist though, in some shape or form, unfortunately. But sometimes it is just taken to a level that is immature, ignorant and unnecessary.
I agree though about mini mods running everywhere shouldn't be a thing. This is a pvp game there is going to be drama, people / guilds will have perma decs on them it is part of the nature and story.
Here is a false accusation against AoC
It is not a PvP game, it is a game about the dynamic high fantasy world of Verra, it has PvE and some forms of limited PvP...
PvP is not limited, unsure why you are making weird view points. Clearly the game is PvX, but PvP is what guides the change of content with the destruction of nodes based on player interaction.
False accusation if the fact you are assuming its limited pvp when pvp is the main change of the world content based on their systems. You are no helping the game, you simply would be giving the wrong message to purely pve players lol.
I can meme on this comment by simply saying let me show you limited pvp in the ocean.
You are judging others poorly, never gain call AoC a PvP game and never again imply that others understand the game less than you. You are very very mistaken
The PvP is limited and here is proof:
So the pvp is all over the game, but this pvp feeds the dynamic world of Verra, this pvp exist in a meaningful way for the Verra experience
This is not a PvP sandbox, not a PvP game, it has pvp and it serves a purpose within the world, the game is not about PvP
PvP doesn't direct the game, what directs the game is mostly PvE and it's systems around the node, almost everything is related to the node and the people interacting with the node
im just going to go over your entire post with actual logic
That is how games work in this kind of setting, just because you need to push towards an objective does not mean it limits PvP. It is called a balance that is needed, people don't need to be warring every second when the changes are giant to the server. This does not mean pvp is limited as there are other forms of pvp besides the end game raid scene...
don't remember cities being a safe zone (though they should) ganking in a city is not pvp. I have to question if you are even a pvper to begin with if that is your view point.
You have a guild war and you gank them it is not that difficult. Also killing someone over and over again with corruption gain is just griefing you aren't getting anything. Again if this si your view on pvp I have to question if you have played pvp in mmorpgs games or survival games...
This has nothing to do with limited pvp you you understand what I mean when I say this is a PvP mmorpg? If a mmorpg is PvX Ill also say its a pvp mmorpg if it has actual pvp elements...
Because they have balance in the game to create meaningful pvp and prevent griefers like you from ruining it, doesn't mean the pvp is limited, pvp is a huge factor in the game. What is limited is a true griefs attempt to ruin the game for all people. Anyone wanting to have meaningful pvp with have content 24/7 to take part in with enough searching.
I won't even read, because the point of PvP in AoC is a PvP that is meaningful to the world, it fits this high fantasy dynamic world and it has many counter balances within the sanctioned pvp
This is no gank box game, you are doing a disservice calling it a PvP game, saying that will deceive pvpers and pvers
pk is pvp and depending on the game is assymetrical pvp
a kill is a kill
I call those people gank bears, when the target fights back these gankers start whinning
I love when people fight back, even if i die
I think I get what you're saying Nikr. That picking on people weaker than you, certainly doing it repeatedly, is kind of "low" in many contexts. Certainly when the pker is doing it for that exact reason and no other. No argument there. The types of people who do stuff like this are usually identified pretty early on in the games I've played. And meme'd on in various ways.
But PKing is pvp in general. I've been pk'd. Many times. There's this funny thing that happens. The more full your inventory gets, the less you want to pvp. It's like magic. Some kind of magical force that just makes it work out like that.
But I've been attacked in open world pvp games built on concepts of risk vs reward and contesting of resources. I've been attacked before, as the pvper I am, where in that instance I made the decision I'm not taking this fight. I thought I had a better chance of protecting my inventory by trying to get away. Countless times things like this have happened over 25 years of my gaming. I might have thought I could reach city limits before being killed, or a friendly grouping of players, or just a random grouping of players that my attacker wouldn't pursue me near. But I was wrong, didn't make it, probably should have fought back. Got pk'd.
It's pvp. A player vs player struggle. My goal was to get away. His goal was to stop me from doing so and kill me. Both sides of this struggle takes skill. There's people that are very skilled on both sides of the equation. And I've been on both sides of this equation. Thousands of times. It was all pvp. Just because I didn't fight back doesn't mean it wasn't pvp.
This is where our experience differ widely enough where I can't agree. I haven't played "resources drop on death" games, so I never saw a reason to chase someone for a long time just to kill them (well, unless they were a PKer who's been terrorizing a location with weaker people).
Maybe Ashes will change my outlook on pvp, if it somehow keeps the currently planned design (which I kinda doubt at this point).
And I slaughtered them. They thought they could get back to their keep before I got to them. Or back to their zerg a few hundred yards away. Whatever the case, they thought they could get away. Sometimes they were right, sometimes they were wrong. Clearly they didn't want to fight. But they're in the pvp end game zone of ESO, where that's exactly what you do...fight. Should I have let them go? Because what I was about to do might not be considered pvp by some people.
Well sometimes I did let them go. I mean you're getting killed at least once. But there were certain people that when I'd see them again on the battlefield, I found the way they acted kind of cute and charming. They'd emote, cry emote, and I'd give them a pass. I'm not going to repeatedly kill, or at least not focus on killing, someone who just wants to get out and experience Cyrodiil. These were generally max levels, same as me, but I was clearly in a different weight class, whether by gearing or skill. So I'd make decisions like that to give passes to people. Others might not.
I mean it's all pvp. I and my faction have chased down retreating enemy faction armies in ESO. A retreating army that is trying to make it to a keep that my faction is currently sieging. If they make it to the keep, they become defenders of that keep, making it that much harder to take that keep, perhaps even impossible.
But I've chased armies down like this. People who were not fighting back at all, just mercilessly slaughtered. Was that pvp? Of course it was. I was usually part of a very skilled splinter group doing this. You had to stop reinforcements from getting inside the actual keep, because once they were inside, that keep became much harder to take. Our skill in chasing these people down turned the tide of many keep sieges.
Whether or not someone fights back or not is an incredibly low bar of what pvp is or isn't.