In-game harrassment. MMO Drama

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.

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George_Black

That's what happens in games that you cant PK others in the open world.
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.

Aerlana

George Black wrote: »

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

). Then police will go only for people who goes over those moral limits. Like will do moderators.

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...

George_Black

Good point. Group finder, you are anonymous and people treat others as npcs they can abuse.

Openworld non instanced mmos, you have to maintain your reputation

Merek

They shouldn't do anything about it, unless it's against the ToS. I don't want mini-mods running around threatening to ban me like it's a roleplay server on a random game.

George Black wrote: »

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.

Noaani

George Black wrote: »

Openworld non instanced mmos, you have to maintain your reputation

This isn't a factor that is limited to open world, non-instanced MMO's.

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.

Vhaeyne

Hedgemon wrote: »

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?

My guess would be paying admins to handle this stuff and actually letting them do their jobs.

Sathrago

Final Fantasy 14 have my favorite moderation setup atm.

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.

Merek

Sathrago wrote: »

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.

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?

Sathrago

Merek wrote: »

Sathrago wrote: »

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.

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.

Noaani

Merek wrote: »

What an excessive response to something they could've avoided by making quest givers accessible through players.

Wait, that's what this is about?

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.

Vhaeyne

Sathrago wrote: »

Final Fantasy 14 have my favorite moderation setup atm.

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.

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.

Wyborn

Hopefully there will be an ignore function. The ignore function and turning off trade chat made my years in wow a lot more enjoyable.

Sathrago

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Sathrago wrote: »

Final Fantasy 14 have my favorite moderation setup atm.

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.

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.

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.

ZissLatz

I do worry, though, about in-game voice communication making harassment even more prevalent. It's tough to moderate and can be particularly targeted towards certain groups. It's important for developers to take that into account when implementing these features and work to minimize the risk. Speaking of online harassment, I recently came across an article about digital investigation and how it can help combat cybercrime. In particular, the article https://digitalinvestigation.com/blackmail https://digitalinvestigation.com/blackmail talks about how experts in the field can assist with investigating and prosecuting cases of online blackmail. I think it's great that there are professionals out there working to make the internet a safer place for everyone.

Arya_Yeshe

safe spaces work both ways, it is safe for the carebear to harass the other carebear, only carebears ask devs to change the game so they can be even more safe, carebears are the scorge of gaming, it is from them that most of the toxicity I faced in games came from

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

TheDarkSorcerer

I think, what makes Intrepid stand out VS other studios is that they have a diverse group of people on the team. As a gay guy who was dumb enough to use my instagram handle as my PSN name, I was met with countless of slurs while playing ESO PvP throughout the years with 0 action being taken towards those players.

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.

Mag7spy

If you are a streamer getting ganked on repeat and being harassed (most likely not just from one day) they have already said they would take action.

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.

Arya_Yeshe

Mag7spy wrote: »

This is a pvp game

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...

Caww

A-holes gonna a-hole... but we might get lucky and the AoC community turns out to be one of the better behaved ones, time will tell but there is a limited amount of moderating a game can provide.

Mag7spy

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

This is a pvp game

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.

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