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Tag: trolls
Steam Introduces Updated Filtering, Adult Only Games
Several months after announcing impending changes to its storefront, Valve this week implemented a number of changes to Steam to alter what players see and what they can opt to ignore.
First and foremost, the upcoming release list is being changed to “take into account the pre-release interest in a game — that is to say, data we gather through wishlists, pre-purchase, and a developer’s or publisher’s past titles.” Users will be able to see a customized list of upcoming titles generated based on the developers they follow, their wishlists, their play data, and more.
The raw unfiltered list will still be available for those who prefer it.
Secondly to this update are improved tools that users can take advantage of to ignore certain things that they do not want to see on the Steam store. In addition to it now being possible to ignore games by developer/publisher, users can ignore up to ten tags as well as set their filtering to ignore games with mature content, or allow mature content but block sexual content.
A second set of changes was focused on improving how you can ignore things you’re not interested in. In the past you’ve been able to ignore individual games or product types (like VR, or Early Access) you didn’t want to see again. But now we’ve added ways for you to also easily ignore individual developers, publishers, and curators.
Developers will now be required to contextualize the mature content in their games, if there is any, similar to how the ESRB collects data to determine ratings. Valve will simply collect that data and use it to allow gamers to filter out titles that they do not want to see.
Finally, Valve noted action taken against a number of developers publishing titles that fell under the trolling rules that Steam has in place, noting that the wide variety of games and publishers were actually a very small number of bad actors. In regards to the new requirements above, Valve will be going through the back catalog to ensure compliance with titles that are already on the Steam store.
Valve also detailed how it determines a “troll game” in vague wording, which we have quoted in its entirety below:
“Our review of something that may be “a troll game” is a deep assessment that actually begins with the developer. We investigate who this developer is, what they’ve done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more. All of this is done to answer the question “who are we partnering with and why do they want to sell this game?” We get as much context around the creation and creator of the game and then make an assessment. A trend we’re seeing is that we often ban these people from Steam altogether instead of cherry-picking through their individual game submissions. In the words of someone here in the office: “it really does seem like bad games are made by bad people.”
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.
Top 5: Obnoxious Gamers Who Eventually Get Banned
The number one article request I get here at MMO Fallout is when someone gets banned from an MMO and wants me to write a scathing piece about how the developer wronged them. I don’t follow through with them, but that doesn’t mean I am not paying attention. Years of wrongful ban claims and actively engaging with communities has lead to my list of the top five obnoxious gamers who will eventually find their access to a game/forum revoked.
This list is mostly derived from my experience running several game servers (Counter Strike, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, etc) and GM’ing an MMO. I didn’t want to call this a list of trolls as it would imply that they are self-aware. Many remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability.
5. The Loudmouth
The loudmouth refers to the kind of person who inevitably gets banned or suspended from a large portion of the servers that he plays on. You’ll often find him on forums complaining about his forum/game suspensions, claiming innocence while using liberal amounts of expletives and comparing the customer support to Nazis. He doesn’t know why he was suspended for misbehaving, after all he didn’t do anything out of line unless you’re referring to the explicit and likely racist comment he made in chat in response to someone calling him a “noob.”
A short fuse grants this person with the ability to type and press enter before the reasoning center of their brain has time to act, and will be the root cause of much of their problems keeping out of trouble with customer service and in life for that matter. While some are aware of their position in this category and are actively working toward better behavior, others merely shift the blame for their actions (“people asking obvious questions make me angry”) or deny it completely (“they banned me because I’m too good at PvP”). Depending on their severity, this group also fits the gamers who send death threats to players and developers, or stalk people off-game after a loss.
One of the benefits of the loudmouth is their lack of subtlety. If you want to find them, just head into any game with global chat or forum of any topic and wait less than thirty seconds.
4. The Metal Ninja Fanboy
One consistency among each of the gamers on this list is that they have a habit of thinking that their work is more subtle than it really is. The metal ninja fanboy is the term I’ve given to the kind of person who hangs around on the forums or in chat to talk about how great the game he’s playing is. Not the one he’s talking in, mind you, a different one. One that has better graphics, controls, a more mature community, servers with less lag, and a better developer who provides more content, faster.
Yes, this gamer has fourteen days left on his subscription and he is going to log in every day to remind the people in [world] of this fact and how relieved he is and how awesome it will be when that day comes, and how he can’t wait to move on to his awesome new game. Really, he should have done it earlier. This idea of developer expecting people to pay money for this game? What kind of moron would enjoy it, he wonders out loud to himself in world chat.
This person won’t be banned from the game, but in all likelihood they will find their posting privileges revoked after the tenth time they create a thread asking why you mouth-breathing sheep continue to subscribe to this crap like the tools you are. If you happen to be in chat with one of these players, they are best left ignored. Responding will only feed their need for attention.
3. The “Loyal customer.”
The self-proclaimed “loyal customer” is my favorite kind, because I see them a lot. This is the person who you will find posting a thread about how they are quitting a game or want a refund because the company has performed a cardinal sin and gone against their wishes. As a loyal customer, you can understand that their quitting isn’t a decision that they came to lightly, and that they would never take such action if it wasn’t completely necessary, but that it is indeed still possible to win their favor back.
You will recognize this person because they posted the same thread two months ago following a previous set of patch notes, as well as two months before that and again in two months when they post another goodbye. The final straw was apparently lain nearly a year ago, but the camel’s back is taking longer than anticipated to break.
This person will inevitably be banned in a sea of expletives when someone digs up their previous quitting posts and responds them to the latest “I quit” thread with “why aren’t you gone yet?”
2. Edgeville’s Finest
I won’t try to deny that I was a horrible little bastard around the early teenage years, when kids are little more than short sociopaths. I do know that teens, and in many cases adults, often try to be as edgy as possible either to show off to their friends, feed a lack of self esteem, or because they watch Daniel Tosh and want to be a comedian. One thing all great comedians know is that comedy equals tragedy plus time, with a dash of comedic timing. In short, the time for your racist joke isn’t in world chat in a video game, or really anywhere else in public for that matter.
This person can most often be found post-ban showing their complete misunderstanding of what freedom of speech applies to.
1. The Frustrated Cheater
My personal favorite, as a former GM for several game servers and as customer support for an MMO. The question I get asked the most is why I don’t trust when someone posts an “I was banned” thread claiming not just innocence, but ignorance. I’ve heard every excuse in the book, many from blatant cheaters, some of whom we even caught boasting in chat about how their cheat was “undetectable.”
Believe it or not, but quite a few of these people are deluded enough to pay monthly subscriptions for the assurance that these cheats are “undetectable.” True story: One kid emailed us an invoice demanding that we pay his last month’s subscription for a cheat tool because he was guaranteed by the creator that he wouldn’t get banned, so in his claim we were violating the EULA.
Which isn’t to say that everyone who creates such a post is lying, mind you. I would be willing to put my money down, however, that most bans are due to account theft, which itself can be traced to poor security on the part of the user.
Whether their pleas are out of desperation or true ignorance is up for debate, but to make a list within a list, here are my favorite excuses.
- “I don’t even know how to cheat.”
- “The developer sold my account.”
- “My cat probably walked on the keyboard.”
- “My friend stole my account.”
Firefall Is Sick of Trolls, Will Be Kicking Them Out
I’ve talked about the fine line between trolling and constructive criticism, one that generally doesn’t seem to be understood by trolls. And while MMO developers aren’t fans of trolling, they are also generally reluctant to expel their (often paying) customers for throwing up a fuss either in the game or on the forums. Firefall developer Red 5 is not one of those developers. In a post on the forums, CEO Mark Kern posted a stern warning: Continue trolling, and you’re out.
So, I have to say for the first time that I’m disappointed in some of the community. The amount of threads here saying that e-sports is all we care about, despite all the information we’ve posted about PvE being our focus is disheartening to those of us working hard to make PvE awesome.
More so, the amount of shortsightedness and selfish trolling and self-important pontification I see from armchair game analysts is stunning. We’re not done with the game yet. We are showing you our early builds, warts and all, so you can share in shaping the game. We welcome your feedback, but not your Chicken Little “sky is falling” ranting from those whose imaginations are not capable of looking further than the nose in front of their face and who ignore everything we say and do and have done in the game for you.
We do listen to you guys, more than any other game company on the planet, and we have proof because we show you builds so early, that they are incomplete… so you can help us fill in the blanks. But instead of embracing the concept, a vocal minority of you have taken up arms in the forums, with pitchforks and a sense of selfish self-entitlement I have never even imagined possible.
If you intended to frustrate me, you have. From now on, we’re going to start moderating the negativity on these forums for the sake of healthier discussions.
Personally I remember a time where alphas and betas were a privilege to join. Granted, this was a long time ago. But when I play MMOs in their alpha/beta stage, I see and abundance of whining over features not being complete, the presence of bugs, or features not being completely worked out. And that in itself isn’t the problem, as negative feedback is how a game develops into a higher quality product. But the people who Kern is talking about are more along the lines of:
“This feature isn’t complete, wow this game sucks why do I even bother playing, this company is going to go bankrupt and the game will fail because the devs are all incompetent idiots.”
But it would behoove Mark Kern to take this new proclamation seriously. Quite often demands to remove trolls turn into a hard culling of any negative feedback from the community, and that often leads to far more than just the undesirable folk leaving, either of their own frustration or through overreaching policies. And a game like Firefall can’t afford to turn its community away before it even launches.
Yea, Well, The Old Republic Will Fail When…
You may not be aware of it, but here at MMO Fallout I have a very lax policy of commenting. I don’t require you register, or for that matter even fill out your username or email address (a good portion of the comments here are entirely anonymous). There are well over five hundred comments spanning 1,100 articles, and in the two and a half years since MMO Fallout was funded, I think I’ve had to delete one legitimate (not a spam bot) comment but only because the person was using a large amount of racial epithets. Still, there are a lot more comments about this website off site than on site.
I think it has something to do with not wanting to risk looking like a fool on the off chance that your premise is inaccurate and you are unable to edit the message, which is also why I receive more emails than I do comments. With The Old Republic, I managed to hit a nerve with a few people every time I referenced the game this past year as clearly “the biggest release of 2011.” First I was told to wait until I’d played the game. Truth be told, I started playing The Old Republic around the time the Electronics Entertainment Expo was still running, so I already had experience. Then the closed beta weekends started and those same people told me to wait until open beta for the game to flop.
Naturally, closed beta turned to head start and I was told to wait until launch, that was when the game would flop. Forget that, by this point, The Old Republic had already been referred to as the best selling preorder for Electronic Arts. Finally the game launched, and this is where those same people started sending me actual “proof,” in the form of empty guild channels. I was told to wait until the dreaded first month passed, and that is when I would see subscriber numbers drop off and the server mergers start.
Well now Bioware has stated that The Old Republic has sold two million copies and retained 1.7 million subscribers, most of whom are past the first month. No doubt the next step will be waiting for the initial three and six month subscribers to drop off, and then we’ll play it by expansion. Will The Old Republic grow or decline? I don’t know, I don’t claim to foresee Bioware’s production schedule to ensure players at end-game don’t get bored too quickly.
In other words: I’ve already talked about how Guild Wars 2 will be insanely profitable and popular, and some of the fans shouldn’t take good news for The Old Republic as a personal assault on their game of choice.
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