Top 5: Ideas Twitch Can Adopt To Curb Racism


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Today must be a day ending in ‘day,’ because Dreamhack has come and gone and the internet has once again shown itself to be a cesspool of racism and harassment. In the wake of people piling on to the Hearthstone stream to throw racist comments at finalist Terrance Miller, both Blizzard and Twitch have committed to reducing problematic behavior on the platform.

Is there ultimately any difference between someone who posts racist remarks with the goal of trolling/harassment and someone who posts them because they are genuinely racist? Probably not, both are equally disruptive and in need of being stamped down. Because MMO Fallout’s modus operandi is to help solve problems rather than just point them out, I’ve decided to compile a list of ways Twitch can curb harmful behavior.

5. Prevent New Accounts From Using Chat

This one is simple and links in with one or two other suggestions on this list. Many MMOs already do this to curb gold farming, where accounts are not allowed to use chat or access certain trade/communication features until after they’ve hit a certain level. It doesn’t stop the problem completely, but it does lower the ability of people to mass produce burner accounts.

How would this system work with Twitch? You could theoretically introduce a minimum waiting period anywhere from a day to a week or more before an account can access chat. Said waiting period could be removed with the inclusion of two-factor authentication.

4. New Chat Mode: Authenticated

Right now there are only a few chat modes available to Twitch streamers, from subscriber only to off completely. Since Twitch already has two-factor authentication, it wouldn’t be that difficult to implement a chat mode allowing subscribers and non-subscribers that have been authenticated to chat.

Two-factor authentication also means that you have an outside identity tied to the account, be it a phone number or the hardware ID of the mobile device. This would give Twitch the ability to ban all accounts associated with that phone number/device and prevent it from being used to sign up for a new account for a period of time.

Valve already does this with Counter Strike: GO, where a ban will blacklist that person’s phone number for three months and ban all accounts associated with it.

3. Turn Off Chat For Big Events

This is a copout and not suggestion that actually fixes the problem, but right now it seems to be one of the easiest conclusions. Look at it this way, with tens of thousands of people watching these events, is having them all in one central chat room really logical? Imagine packing an entire stadium worth of people into one room letting them drown each other out. Then have a team of ten people try and keep the conversation in line. Impossible, right?

As much as I’m sure event organizers don’t want to use them, there are already systems in place on Twitch to aleviate these problems. Slow chat, subscriber-only, turning chat off, all of these are useful tools. The moderators of Dreamhack even admitted that they made mistakes, with moderators overwriting each other’s decisions.

2. Shadow Bans

Simple, efficient, and taking a card from Reddit’s book. If you aren’t familiar with a shadow ban, it is a special type of punishment where the poster can see his own messages but no one else can. The problem on Reddit is that it becomes readily apparent rather quickly that you’ve been shadow banned, as all of a sudden your posts stop receiving up-votes and replies.

The program works more effectively when the user can’t gauge reactions or isn’t paying attention to them, which is why it is a good idea for Twitch. When someone is shouting into the void (or in this case wall of text moving at 100mph), odds are they aren’t looking for a response. Banning outright tells the player to create a new account, by shadow banning they can go on for hours without realizing that no one is listening.

1. Unify Bans

I like to think of this method as the nuclear option, it is probably the most effective method while simultaneously capable of causing untold destruction with widespread nuclear fallout. It requires a collaboration by a group of people whose opinions and judgement can be trusted.

In short, a recipe for disaster.

How far you want to go with this depends on how much you really want to stomp down bad behavior. For instance, should Dreamhack share bans across all of its streams? Should Dreamhack partner with other associations to share bans? Would regular streamers have access to the ban list? Who decides who is added to the list?

It’s certainly a question, one that requires a lot of thought and planning, but one that could work.

Can toxic behavior be controlled on Twitch? Let us know in the comments below.

Jagex Releases Chat Logs Of Banned Players


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Yesterday we reported a backlash forming on the Old School RuneScape subreddit by players angry over multiple account bans that been instated over the previous night. Several accounts were allegedly banned for harassing a streamer, with players brigading the subreddit demanding proof in the form of chat logs that the players were legitimately punished.

While Jagex initially refused to release the chat logs, product manager Matthew Kemp has posted several redacted chat logs of the guilty parties.

The harassing streamers/players comment was used as that was why these accounts were initially looked into. The bug abuse rule was used as it was an appropriate length of punishment for the offence. Our systems do not work by applying a mute or ban and then deciding the time, but by choosing a rule which has been broken and applying a predetermined punishement. This system is not the best for all circumstances but we have to work with what we have.

Unsurprisingly, people who break rules and act toxic in games still lie and pass the blame when they are eventually punished. Even less surprising is that other toxic players on the subreddit have moved the goal posts as an excuse to ignore the proof that they demanded just yesterday.

(Source: Reddit)

Wildstar Soundtrack Coming


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If you’ve ever played Wildstar and really wanted to get your hands on the soundtrack, this news is for you. Carbine Studios and NCSoft have announced that, thanks to a partnership with Sumthing Else Music Works, the official soundtrack for Wildstar will be hitting digital stores beginning later this month. The soundtrack will be released in waves, with Volume 1 out May 31st.

Sumthing Else Music Works is the industry leader in licensing and distributing video game soundtracks. Their list of partners is massive and includes well known franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Halo, Far Cry, and Hitman.

Composer Jeff Kurtenacker (Pirates of the Burning Sea) fuses musical elements together that bring space adventure to life. Using synthesizers, a wide array of guitars, and a 75-piece Los Angeles orchestra, Kurtenacker’s approach to theWildStar universe is highly thematic, creating memorable and exciting music that engages players throughout their MMO experience.

You can pre-order the soundtrack and check out what else SEMW has to offer at their official website.

Electronic Arts Posts Growth In Q4 2016


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Electronic Arts has posted its year end results for the fiscal year 2016, and everything is coming up profit. The publishing behemoth raked in $4.5 billion in revenue this past year, up from the $4.3 billion in the fiscal year ending in 2015. According to the company’s own projections, the next year should continue the trend with an estimated $4.9 billion.

As sales of digital goods climb, packaged games continued to lose market share. Digital revenue has taken over physical media by a growing margin, $2.5 billion compared to $2.0 billion, while EA’s profit margin has increased to an eye-popping 82.7%. PC gamers make up 26% of EA’s revenue while consoles account for 51% with mobile making up the rest. The console market had the strongest growth the past year, a 22% increase in revenue year over year.

Gamers hoping to see the end of downloadable content will have to wait another year, as customers spent $1.1 billion on “extra content,” a separate figure from the $570 million spent on mobile. Subscriptions and ad revenue made up $339 million while full game downloads accounted for about half a billion.

Fiscal year 2017 sees the launch of several big name titles, including Battlefield 1, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, and Mass Effect Andromeda.

There was no mention of The Old Republic that we could find in any of the documents.

(Source: EA)

Get WoW Free With Your Movie Ticket


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The Warcraft movie launches in theaters somewhere between May 26th and June 10th, depending on your country, and you might find yourself leaving the theater thinking “boy that was a great film, if only they’d adapt it into a video game.” Well, Blizzard has you covered, and prepared for this moment by releasing World of Warcraft way back in 2004. To sweeten the deal, if you buy your Warcraft ticket from participating retailers, you’ll be able able to redeem a free copy of the game.

There are 11 European countries participating in the giveaway. For those on the other side of the Atlantic, North American movie-goers will be able to nab a free copy if they purchase their tickets through Regal Cinemas, United Artists Theaters, and Edwards Theaters. Latin American viewers can buy their tickets through ingresso.com, while Australia and New Zealand can go through HOYTS.

Check the link below to see where your country stands on the list.

(Source: Participating retailers)

Jagex Responds To Old School Ban Controversy


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Old School RuneScape’s Community Manager took to the game’s subreddit today to address a controversy that sparked up over a number of accounts getting banned overnight for alleged harassment of a popular streamer. According to player allegations, people were banned for the simple act of standing near the streamer while playing emotes.

The story Jagex is telling is very different from the one being passed around between members of the community. According to Jagex, the players were banned for a string of racist and abusive messages, and that only one person was permanently banned which was for dressing up as a KKK member.

Recently, several players were banned for repeatedly harassing a number of people within the community. We want to make one thing clear in this post: the actions of these players were completely unacceptable and we will not tolerate racism or harassment in Old School RuneScape.

The post goes on to state that Jagex took action on players who “spent their time spreading racism hatred, and abuse throughout the game.” Later on in the same Reddit thread, Kemp explains that the reason players were banned for “bug abuse” was because of the length that the ban carries.

Jagex has refused to publish the transcript evidence of players banned for abuse, due to not wanting to publicize the activity and out of fear that it would create a precedent obligating the company to release the transcripts every time someone demands it.

MMO Fallout will update if we get any more details.

 

(Source: Reddit)

[Rant] How To Defeat Evil Game Scores Forever


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If you haven’t been paying attention to the news, the Washington Post has taken quite a bit of heat over its review of Uncharted 4 published just a few days ago. Some of you might be confused, since stating one’s opinion on video games isn’t known for inciting vitriol while others might not detect the sarcasm in this sentence. The rest of you are probably thinking “Washington Post reviews video games?”

Before we go on, the usual statement needs to be repeated: Given that we are talking about opinions on video games, and not how to go about convicting a serial killer, the people who have been posting death threats and death wishes to Michael Thomsen, the guy who wrote the review, can kindly see yourselves out of any further discussion. The same goes for the people spouting a variety of hate speech, a population that does not include the readers of this website who are in my opinion the cream of the crop in terms of netizens.

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to write a guide on how to beat game review scores.

The first step is to find a publication that reviews games, or even more than one, that you believe you can trust. You might have to stick with one or two websites for a while in order to get a feel for how the editors work, what they look for in games, and how they evaluate titles. In fact, these sources can easily be Youtubers, streamers, or just simple bloggers. Find the people whose interests and focus meshes with your own.

I say this because I can say with relative certainty that 90% (hyperbole) of the people piling onto the Washington Post review either have never read, or don’t generally use, the paper as a source for their game reviews. In fact, I’ll go further and say that the majority probably don’t read the Washington Post straight out. The opinion of their staff, let alone one guy writing a game review, didn’t matter until he gave this game a bad score. And by the time the Washington Post publishes its next game review, most of the people in the comments section will have returned to not reading the Washington Post.

And for the record, Michael Thomsen isn’t exactly an unknown entity in games media. Thomsen is known for taking a contrarian approach, slamming popular titles by giving them low review scores. Does it make him an expert on games? No, and the review itself isn’t particularly insightful when it comes to convincing the reader why the game isn’t good.

The second step is to avoid making your purchasing decisions based off of the aggregated opinions of a small handful of people you don’t know and whose opinions you probably don’t agree with or respect. This goes hand in hand with the step above, if you go to Metacritic and see that Uncharted 4 only has one review below an 80, from a guy at the Washington Post, and you decide not to buy the game…well that’s on you.

The problem with scores is that each publication has its own system on how it scores games. You can’t compare different metrics and aggregate a mean score, but Metacritic does it anyway. The problem isn’t with the reviewers, it exists solely on Metacritic’s side, determining arbitrarily who deserves representation.

This also goes for developers and publishers who make deals based on the game’s aggregate review score. Publishers who force developers into contracts that hold multi-million dollar bonuses ransom behind the opinions of a few editors. I’ll echo Adam Sessler when I say that publishers have a great way of figuring out how a game performed, it’s called the sales charts, you have access to them. Withholding bonuses because a game sold great but scored less-than-perfect is about as asinine as giving a bonus when a game tanks but scored really high.

And finally, the best step is to stop feeding the clickbait machine that is the internet. Let me be completely frank, the sponsored post you saw on Facebook about the dog that grabs a stick and you wouldn’t believe what happens next? Odds are you will, in fact, believe what happens next. Unbelievable, surely.

For everyone who fell into clickbait in order to leave a post complaining about clickbait or share the post to attract more traffic to said clickbait, well you’re feeding the monster. Without you, clickbait articles would be…well they’d still be easy money makers, but they’d be making less money. If you were to go by the ratio of “this is clickbait” comments, they’d be making no money at all.

The thing about clickbaity headlines is that they work, and the thing about review scores is that they work. If The Washington Post hadn’t scored Uncharted 4, would anyone be talking about their review? Yes, but it would be a small handful of people shaking their head and tutting “oh that Washington Post, they don’t really play games do they?” And that would be it. No wide attention, no Troy Baker, no nothing.

They work, and I say this as someone whose website doesn’t run ads, I still look at metrics. The more sensational a headline is, the more people pay attention to it, and the more likely they will share it.

But let’s stick in reality land, shall we? Ultimately Metacritic made the mistake in not treating the review as an outlier and ignoring it, something that any aggregator worth its salt does. It is the job of Metacritic to properly curate its list of reviewers and the job of readers to take Metacritic to task when it fails at its job.

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

What Happened: Missing Ink Edition


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What Happened is a series of articles partially inspired by you, the community, and otherwise brought on by a fleeting moment where the flapping wires in my brain connect and memories are able to get through. Given the long development nature of MMOs, it isn’t uncommon to have a game announced and then never hear from it again, the developer drifting silently into the night only to resurface somewhere in another dimension.

I last talked about The Missing Ink in 2014, even then asking what happened to the game and its development crew at Redbedlam. The game (pictured above) shut down in early 2014 with the note that it would be coming back later that year, and we haven’t heard anything since. None of the social media accounts have been maintained since that announcement, and the game is clearly dead.

So what happened to Redbedlam? Are they dead as well? You might think so, but they are alive and kicking. They released a game last October, a shooter called Bedlam that has quite an odd mishmash of visual styles. Bedlam is available on sale today both on Steam and on Indiegala, the latter being much cheaper, and it currently holds a “very positive” rating on Steam.

It’s safe to say that The Missing Ink has probably been shelved for now, if not indefinitely, but it’s good to see that Redbedlam is still actively creating games that people like to play.

[Community] Should Developers Start Blacklisting Customers?


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Did you know that Riot Games maintains a very small blacklist of players deemed so toxic that they are banned from having an account for life? They do, and while it takes a lot to be added to the list, the end result is that any account that can be verified as owned by said person is immediately handed a permanent ban. Sounds fun, right?

It’s important to note that these blacklisted players aren’t one-time offenders, or even two-time. If you look at their stories, the players that Riot Games decides are no longer welcome in their community have gone through a multitude of accounts, all banned for death threats, denial of service attacks, and other actions that are toxic at best, illegal at worst.

While developers are constantly looking at methods of lowering the bar of entry, by converting their games to free to play or having regular sales, the increased convenience has only made it easier for the communities of said games to be infected by the rampaging plague that are cheaters and anti-social gamers. People who have no intentions on playing fair or fostering a welcoming community, but are only interested in watching the world burn, in a manner of speaking. And because creating an account is so easy, developers waste precious time and resources trying to keep problematic re-offenders from getting back in.

Valve recently adopted a policy in Counter Strike: Global Offensive to rid the game of cheaters. In order to use the “Prime” matchmaking service, you need to have two-factor authentication with a valid phone number. Get banned for cheating, and all accounts associated with that phone number will also receive a VAC ban. In addition, the phone number cannot be used for three months.

It goes further: If you don’t own the banned game, you can’t even purchase it on any of the affected accounts. Every time a phone number is banned, the ban length gets longer. With 95% of the Steam community making use of mobile authentication, according to Valve, it’s a lot harder to avoid.

So the question this week is, should developers begin blacklisting repeat offenders? If so, how should they go about doing it? Riot Games bans accounts completely and bans that person from competing in sanctioned tournaments, while Valve’s stance has always been to segregate said players to their own corners of the game where they can be ignored.

In MMOs, the issue of cheating has raised a lot of contempt between players and developers, the latter of whom have been seen on multiple occasions being lenient towards cheaters. As it turns out, the guy who spends a fair amount of real money to cheat in a game also tends to spend a lot of money in the game itself, and like an abusive customer who also happens to bankroll a small business, they are unwilling to throw him out the door without a heaping helping of warnings.

Riot Games is regularly accused of not dealing with abusive customers unless there is enough publicity to cause actual harm, like said abuser being a streamer with a large following. We’ve seen numerous accusations against companies like Trion Worlds for allowing high-paying guilds in ArcheAge to get away with exploits.

Would a blacklist work? How would you go about identifying a problematic customer and getting rid of them? Let us know in the comments below.

Wildstar Dropping NCoin, Picking Up Protobucks


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Hot off the heels of NCSoft’s first quarter finances, Carbine Studios has announced that Wildstar is dropping NCoin as its currency of choice for real-world purchases. Beginning May 18th, players will no longer purchase NCoin for Wildstar, nor will your wallet share between NCSoft’s games. Instead, you’ll need to purchase the game-specific currency available at the same rate, except now in its own segregated system.

According to the post, costs of items will remain the same, however the new currency will allow Carbine to introduce bonus tiers. Buy $10 or more in currency and receive bonus Protobucks. For players with NCoin already in their accounts, they have until June 15th in order to convert any NCoin to Protobucks or they will no longer be usable. Bonus Protobucks will be distributed June 22nd based on how much is converted.

One important note is that once NCoin have been converted to Protobucks, they cannot be changed back.

(Source: Wildstar)