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Tag: Toxicity
Court Bans Toxic Roblox Player
Riot Games Is Killing /All Chat
Blizzard Releases Over 18,000 Partial Usernames Of Toxic Players (From Korea)
Nobody likes a cheater, I know this because of how many times the phrase has appeared in court dockets whenever Epic Games takes a Fortnite cheater to court, but Blizzard really hates toxic gamers and isn’t afraid of laying down the banhammer to let them know just how unwelcome they are. Case in point, Blizzard’s Korean sector has released a partially redacted list of over 18,000 usernames of Korean gamers banned for toxic behavior including abusive language and non-participation which presumably refers to players either ducking out of games or deliberately going AFK to throw a match.
The list of names is heavily redacted and involves the Korean player base, so odds are no one on the list will be familiar to anyone reading this website. It also seems unlikely that Blizzard will replicate this tactic in North America or Europe.
As stated by Blizzard (and translated somewhat poorly through Google):
“As indicated in previous blog, players who use inappropriate language in the game will be subject to silence penalties and will not be allowed to access the game if the silenced penalties are repeatedly used in inappropriate language without sanction Sanctions are under way. In addition to profanity and inappropriate language punishment for players who reported to bimaeneo acts such as deliberate interference ally, the game has been absent from recent enhancements, for more information on this Notice can be found through.”
The entire list of names can be found at the link below.
Source: Battle.net
Blizzard Again Promises Tough Punishment For Overwatch Trolls
If you could formulate a plan to effectively punish, and get rid of, toxic players in your community, you might just become the richest person in the gaming industry. Until then, we’ll need to sit back and watch as developers continue to commit to punishing toxic community members and hope that everything works out for the best.
For Blizzard, the ongoing discussion of toxicity has come back up after director Jeff Kaplan posted on the official forums regarding an account that had miraculously accrued more than two thousand complaints, been silenced for more than a year’s worth of time, and has been suspended three times.
"That account has a total of 2247 complaints filed against it — making it one of the worst offending accounts we’ve seen. The account has also been silenced for a total of 9216 hours. There are 3 gameplay suspensions on the account as well as 7 silences against this account (these are for abusive chat and/or spam). There is also a manual GM account suspension for "massive griefing" levied."
Blizzard’s plans to alleviate grief include removing silencing altogether and utilizing suspensions/bans more. For competitive, Kaplan stated that the company is in the process of handing out bans/suspensions for players who boosted in Season 5 of competitive mode, also adding that players will be permanently banned from competitive if they are found to be abusing it repeatedly.
"We will do this as it is our responsibility but we’d like to spend more time rewarding good players rather than having to focus on poor sportsmanship and unacceptable bad behavior so much. Like it or not, this is an "us, the OW community problem" and not just an "OW team problem". For better or for worse, we’re in this together."
Long term plans involve promoting positive behavior. Toxic behavior is a problem that MMO Fallout has reported endlessly on, with various developers flexing their muscles and threatening harsher punishments and longer bans. For developers, especially those with large competitive communities, the fight against toxicity is a constant uphill battle.
ArcheAge Issues Warning Against Toxic Behavior
Stomping down toxic behavior is all the rage these days, between Riot Games putting the kibosh and permanently banning certain players for life, to Blizzard pledging to tackle racism after the latest Dreamhack conference, Jagex taking on streamer harassment and KKK cosplay (a phrase that shouldn’t exist), and now Trion Worlds with ArcheAge. The game has become a lot less friendly and Trion’s customer service isn’t happy.
In a news post published yesterday, Trion Worlds has committed to taking a more hands on approach with toxic behavior.
We are going to be much more conscious about what we allow to be said in public chat channels. We know that some will do their best to test boundaries and try to skirt our intent and then appeal the action with a technicality. Ultimately if our determination is that your chat is contributing nothing except grief to a player or community we will take actions to prevent that.
So what does this mean? Well, you can call a boss a bitch but you can’t call another player a bitch. Personal attacks, using alternate accounts to harass a player who has put you on ignore, spamming the chat channel, physical threats, and more will result in action taken against offenders. Trion also reminds players that this only extends to in-game chat, and that the company can’t extend its reach to outside platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
(Source: ArcheAge)
Top 5: Ideas Twitch Can Adopt To Curb Racism
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.
Rant: Customer Service Doesn’t Get Much Worse Than A Full Guild Suspension
As you read this, Daybreak Game Company is busy cleaning up the mess of another incident in a series of customer service missteps. This time it involves the unfair suspension of several hundred (sources place the figure at least 400 and possibly upwards of 600), in a guild-wide three day ban in retaliation for the actions of one member. Yes, an entire guild had their accounts suspended because one player broke not the terms of service, but player-agreed rules.
Here’s how the story goes: Everquest’s lack of instancing means that the community has to compete for raids, leading to a raid schedule agreed upon by the leaders of the top guilds. If your guild isn’t scheduled to raid, and they do so anyway, breaking the rotation can result in penalties levied against the entire guild. Yes, the entire guild, even you members who don’t raid or might raid every once in a while.
That’s exactly what happened when one player from the Modest Man guild was recorded on video killing mobs outside of the Sky raid. In total, the player allegedly killed two mobs with a multi-box group of five accounts. The player was reportedly booted from Modest Man before Daybreak Game Company handed out a three day suspension to every single member of the guild. The suspensions were quickly overturned with players being allowed back into the game, but the policy that would hand 3-day and potentially 7-day suspensions to entire guilds still seems to be in place.
It also doesn’t address the underlying problems here. The fact that, as one player put it, a single player can “blow a 4-6 hour block for a whole guild” is ridiculous, a sign of a game far out of touch with today’s expectations. The idea that Daybreak is willing to suspend an entire guild, hundreds of players in total, for the dissociated actions of one member (who was kicked out) is unacceptable, regardless of it being overturned, and the fact that it was even considered for a moment to be an appropriate response should be worrying to Daybreak’s customers, aside from perhaps the toxic portion that supported the decision.
But ultimately every fiasco that seems to come out of Everquest’s timelocked servers is Daybreak’s fault, fostering and encouraging an atmosphere of exclusion, and nothing encompasses the attitude of a company that once stated that casual players don’t deserve to access content like Nagafen, than punishing an entire guild for the actions of one person. Again they pretty quickly reversed the decision, but they went ahead with it in the first place. And that is the problem.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
Trion Bans May Now Revoke Game Access
In case you haven’t seen, Trion Worlds has announced the introduction of a new “forum toxicity” policy. In short, the developer has issued an ultimatum that trolling, threats, and abuse will no longer be tolerated, and swift action will be taken to ensure that the forums remain a squeaky clean place for squeaky clean boys and girls. One issue that seems to have been tossed into the spotlight is the idea that Trion is now suspending and revoking game access for behavior on the forums. That is half true.
As explained on the forums, revoking game access is apparently reserved for players who repeatedly return on alternate accounts to continue trolling.
Users who have previously had their forum access revoked, and create second, third, fourth, fifth…and so on, troll accounts, may now see penalties on their game accounts. (Yes, people really do this.) Those penalties range from suspensions to revocation of game access.
With the proper execution, Rift may actually wind up having one of the few official MMO forums worth visiting.
MMO Fallout 