Xxar said:Unless there is a built in game recorder , prove it ? Also accidental pulls happen , was it intentional ? Prove it .... I FD next to you , im using a legit game mechanic you just happen to be there . See this debate can go around in circles all day long and in the end are nothing but a waste of a devs and GMs time , when it can all be solved from the start.
Fraps , can be doctored if someone wants to try hard enough. Why , even allow it in the first place?
As stated this discussion has already been discussed to death.
A built in one, or one that uses encryption through the client (so they don't have to use up server resources) would be a sufficent solution. The player would hit record and the client would package up screens, video, and logs, encrypt it and store it. Could this be maybe circumvented? Possibly, but in most cases it would be sufficient.
Personally, I think in this day and age, it will be needed. While there were always idiots, even back in release, todays generation of gamers are off the charts.
AAA or not, if it has FTP, it will have a large cesspool abusers.
TLDR: Special server with player created code of conduct and player praise/scold drop down menus affecting a reputation score with the score having in game effects.
The toxicity of online game environments if a very interesting study in human sociology when personal empathy and emotional context is removed from human interaction and personal consequences for causing negative personal interactions are virtually non-existent. This is lessened with voice chat as you can obviously get a lot of emotional subtext from voices that you can never get from written language alone.
Most of the world’s religions (outside of specific theological differences) are a form of social guide lines on how to behave for that community to function efficiently. Outside of religious institutions there are also societal constructs like the Victorian Era rules of polite society and even in its own way military rules of engagement. What online communities usually lack is some form of codified expectations of behavior and the penalties for failing to live up to those expectations. What results without a set of expectations is usually community that resembles Lord of the Flies when we usually actually want something similar to Lord of the Rings.
Both as a study of human cross cultural sociology and as a game community building experiment it would be exciting to see a server that had a code of expected behaviors created and enforced by the players on that server.
In my mind I see the players submitting paired behaviors one good and one bad. The behaviors should be paired in magnitude such that if you perform x bad action then the community expects you to perform good action Y to atone for it. These submissions would need to be condensed and codified by a smaller sub group peer review. This peer review sub-group could be assembled at random, voted on after a nomination sequence, composed of guild leaders and some members at large or directly controlled by VR.
Then once the list is codified the population at large will have a time period to vote on each line with either a no, yes, yes but lower magnitude, yes but higher magnitude. Only a simple majority is required to set the ruling on the initial code setup but the monthly amendment votes will require a 66% agreement to change an existing rule.
Now that all the hard work of setting up the expectations is completed (at least month by month) we can design the enforcement mechanics. Each character, and maybe account, will have its own social score and tab. Everyone starts out neutral with X number of scolds per time period and 2X praises in the same time period. Selecting a player avatar, a name in a log or a name from a list of present/recently present players in a zone you can access a social tab that allows you to select a praise or a scold from a list of actions.
Based on which selection is picked that character or accounts social score is increased or decreased. The receiving players will have a notification of their praises and scolds with hopefully some form of way to thank, apologize or contest should they wish too. Increasing your social score to higher tiers will increase the number of social actions you can take per time periods and lowering it will decrease them. Additionally I would tie real in-game mechanics to your social score, npcs will react to you differently, some quests will become available, vendor prices could improve and possibly certain offerings would only be available to people with high social scores.
Conversely low social scores could have the opposite effect of the above. Repeatedly doing the same negative behavior could flag your character for a specific time with a very negative effect. These effects would be voted on to be the repeat offender penalty in the behavior code. Examples being multiple instances of training could give you a steep exp penalty, botters could be flagged such that they receive no loot, and sexual harassment could shut off all NPC interactions. The repeat offence penalties could be quite severe but with a fairly high threshold to reach.
There would need to be a fair number of sub rules to prevent some of the more obvious abuses of the system. Some examples would be giving praise to guild members go onto the guild reputations and not the social reputations. There would be a limited number of scolds that can come from the same guild in a time period. Some form of targeted scolding protection would need to be built in or added as needed. For that matter one of the scolds could be abusing the social system that the repeat offend penalty is shutting off the player’s access to scold or praise options.
I could see all of the player associations having their own social reputations that is a conglomerate of all members’ reputations as well as praises and scolds received on an association scale. Being a member of a guild with low social reputation would negatively affect the player’s current social rating but leaving said association would remove the association’s effect on the player and the players rating on the guild.
This system would have both a overtime reputation score and a recent reputation score. Game mechanics are affected by the lower of your two scores but players only see your recent reputation score. This will prevent players from being good for a long time deciding to just be a jerk with no consequences and conversely will allow a player to turn over a new leaf and improve their reputation once they stop doing bad behaviors for a certain amount of time. There could even be a form of badges visible when you look at a player’s social tab to see what good or bad repeat behaviors they have been doing.
I would have the social system be account wide but only the current reputation and earned badges would be visible to other players not the list of actions that the player has earned recently.
There is a lot of thought and trial and error that would need to be done in order to come up with a system that really works. The ability to add and change guidelines over time could be used to adapt to future issues in a slightly emergent ways.
Side comment I was part of the “punish my griefers” crowd in WoW. My main was a raid geared feral druid and my roommates’ main was a subtlety rogue and we would park them in whatever zone we were leveling in. We never attacked anyone that did not attack us first and if there was a reasonable chance for us to win with our leveling characters we would fight straight up if battles happened. If on the other hand people would grief us or intentionally run around killing low level players we would switch to our raiders and spawn kill them till they logged out or died 10 times for each of our deaths. There are few duals that are more dangerous in open world pvp than a feral and a subtlety rogue and we racked up quite a few logouts over the time we played together.
I think it'd probably be less effort to simply change FD to have a very long re-use timer (45-60 min) and/or a guaranteed chance of death, if more creatures are following you, up to 100% snare percentage + 100% fail percentage, with something like 4 or more, for longer than 5 seconds of movement.
That way, the CS burden drops to pretty much zero for malicious training, but it could still be used for pulling, if that was desired. But then again, I'm very much in favor of using in-game mechanics to limit toxicity, given history.
Oh no. Are we going have to get a Pantheon Bill of Rights to protect our free speech in the game?
I've never understood this. If there is somebody bothering you who you don't like then you can just block them.
The only time I see it reasonable to punish a player is if they are doing something illegal. My reason for this is that nobody can agree on what is or isn't "toxic" and often it leads to over zealous moderation.
Also from what I've seen so far the majority of the Pantheon community seem to be an older more mature crowd anyway. I don't think this will be an issue that needs addressing.
So thats what i think
If you have a Server with about 2500-4000 Players on it max. And slow lvling pace so your character actually does matter to you. You might actually think before pissing off too many ppls. Cause your not just 1 in 1000000 megaserver guy that has to hit a group button to do a instanced dungeon run where you dont talk at all and never get to know anyone nor does anyone ever recognize you again.
In Pantheon this should be quite different if your going to play like some 8 years old do in modern Mmos you soon find way way less groups and might not ever get some of the fine things only groups can get. Since your name will actually be registered and reputation will matter much more then in some anonymous games today.
Since you wont be able to powerlvl your next Character with a different name of course to 50 in a week it will quite hurt if you dont have some manners.
Ondark said:So thats what i think
If you have a Server with about 2500-4000 Players on it max. And slow lvling pace so your character actually does matter to you. You might actually think before pissing off too many ppls. Cause your not just 1 in 1000000 megaserver guy that has to hit a group button to do a instanced dungeon run where you dont talk at all and never get to know anyone nor does anyone ever recognize you again.
In Pantheon this should be quite different if your going to play like some 8 years old do in modern Mmos you soon find way way less groups and might not ever get some of the fine things only groups can get. Since your name will actually be registered and reputation will matter much more then in some anonymous games today.
Since you wont be able to powerlvl your next Character with a different name of course to 50 in a week it will quite hurt if you dont have some manners.
This guy gets it! If you are bad mannered then you will quickly find that half the server has already blocked you by the time you start raiding.
The likes of WoW has problems like this because of systems like sharding and cross server play. There is no sense of permanence and most of the time grouping is disincentivised as it is more inefficient outside of dungeons. This leads to a fragmented community and then the problems emerge.
stellarmind said:good god man that sounds like the chinese social credit system.
My wife actually referred to that when she read what I was about to post and just now looked it up. That **** is scary, especially considering China’s human rights history. On a nation RL scale it’s a huge invasion of privacy and directly enforces the values of the State and not the people.
On the scale of a single server of an online game I think it would be an interesting sociology experiment that could be disabled if it goes poorly. While I would march in the streets if my nation tried to implement it in a game world where social toxicity is a major problem I am intrigued.
I'm fine with mechanics ingame that create a bit of drama. If people want to be antisocial let em, If people want to be antisocial to the antisocial let em. Don't give the antisocial the tools to make things worse. It's just a recipe for disaster. Free speech, that's all you need.
I think I'm in favor of a self-policing server environment with petitions/GM intervention as a last resort or for when serious cases of harassment, etc happen.
Chat features can take care of the verbal part. Honestly, I think there's some thing to be said for having people (learn) to suss things out themselves at times rather than relying on a higher power when possible.
"Toxicity" is going to be there. There is no systemic solution to this with the exception of being able to add a player to your block-list and adding right-click reporting. As with any community, there is usually a level of community policing, such as a blacklist thread in the forums, which usually leads to a flame-fest. In the end, you always end of with the greifers, elitist, and pervs in any social game, it's just a matter of ignoring them; afterall, all they want is attention.
Xxar said:I think character names being placed on a official in game forum , might constitute a issue as well..
Well all know that Tekzan guy kill steals and ninja loots! Oh , heres my 30 other guild members that vouch the same thing. See the issue ?
Not sure if I misunderstood what you said. Are you saying that characters names shouldn't appear on forum posts? If so that doesn't stop brigading. People will still lie about players on servers but then they will be able to do it anonymously.
Only thing I find troubling with is trying to put in systems to reduce toxic behavior because you will inadvertently kill off a lot of fun aspects of the game, mostly having to do with player interaction. Everything cool has a double edge sword. FD was amazing for spliting packs and having a constant stream of mobs and pretty good exp gains. On the other side FD was also used for killing people at certain camps they wanted and were pretty much scott free of dying with FD. I think VR should be careful in how much policing they add into the game because it will ultimately kill social aspects off.
Trasak,
What that sounds like to me is a helluva lot of work and time that could be better utilized making this game even more awesome.
Heres my take after reading every word of this post.
First this topic has been exhaustively discussed MANY times. Secondly, its been stated the intent is for player/community policed code of conduct, until it is at some extreme where it is felt GM intervention is required (what this is exactly is yet to be determined). Third, haters gonna hate, cant wipe it out.. people are turds and sometimes no matter how much you flush theres a floater... Lastly, this game is not going to be solo friendly, it will be hard, this game will encourage guilding. Its a game being based on its SOCIAL ASPECT. One thing to help manage griefers, is they will either be solo and have a hard time keeping up the leveling pace or will be guilded and that will be an easy way to send messages to their guild leaders/officers to report their conduct and expect it be policed inhouse.
As far as competition for spawn, there are already ideas and discussions on how to manage spawn camping etc and many great ideas are already on the table, but again this isnt a game for the faint of heart and is being designed with competition in mind. You will have to at times, deal with this aspect. If you are thin skinned or want to solo this may not be the game for you. But also if you are a grieftard you most likely wont survive the onslaught of community backlash and blacklisting.
It is my hope that people will just grow up and understand being a dick isnt funny or kool. But as with many things in the RL world, bad parenting is the real culprit and God only knows if thats ever gonna change.
Community solutions to toxicity only work in niche situations, and if Pantheon is released with the intention that the community will self-regulate, well... people are going to be in for a rude awakening. People who intend to behave poorly or to exhibit toxic behavior are now working in pre-established groups/guilds. Go ahead, put their names on a "blacklist" and watch them laugh as they continue on their merry way with no real consequences.
Community self-regulation is a fantasy.
Sicario said:Community solutions to toxicity only work in niche situations, and if Pantheon is released with the intention that the community will self-regulate, well... people are going to be in for a rude awakening. People who intend to behave poorly or to exhibit toxic behavior are now working in pre-established groups/guilds. Go ahead, put their names on a "blacklist" and watch them laugh as they continue on their merry way with no real consequences.
Community self-regulation is a fantasy.
What do you propose? Do we just ban everybody who you don't like? Why wouldn't a blacklist help if it stops them from communicating or interacting with you?
Drebin said:What do you propose? Do we just ban everybody who you don't like? Why wouldn't a blacklist help if it stops them from communicating or interacting with you?
When I'm referring to toxicity, I'm not referring to chat trolls. I actually find them somewhat hilarious, and if it ever gets to a point where I can't stand seeing someone in chat (extremely rare, I think I've only ignored 2 people throughout my many years of playing various MMOs) then I just /ignore them. What I am referring to are people who train camps w/ FD, kill steal, monopolize content/deny content from others, etc. No blacklist in existence can prevent these players from doing their toxic bs. Their "interaction" with others isn't something that's ever preventable. They don't care what the rest of the server thinks about them because they run in their groups/guilds (yes, there are entire guilds who have this mentality). So, how does a blacklist hurt them? It doesn't. Community self-regulation doesn't work at all since they just hang out in their own communities within the broader server community.
As for the solution, it requires in-game mechanics that prevent such abuse from happening to begin with, otherwise it will occur and be more common than many are willing to accept.
Sicario said:Drebin said:What do you propose? Do we just ban everybody who you don't like? Why wouldn't a blacklist help if it stops them from communicating or interacting with you?
When I'm referring to toxicity, I'm not referring to chat trolls. I actually find them somewhat hilarious, and if it ever gets to a point where I can't stand seeing someone in chat (extremely rare, I think I've only ignored 2 people throughout my many years of playing various MMOs) then I just /ignore them. What I am referring to are people who train camps w/ FD, kill steal, monopolize content/deny content from others, etc. No blacklist in existence can prevent these players from doing their toxic bs. Their "interaction" with others isn't something that's ever preventable. They don't care what the rest of the server thinks about them because they run in their groups/guilds (yes, there are entire guilds who have this mentality). So, how does a blacklist hurt them? It doesn't. Community self-regulation doesn't work at all since they just hang out in their own communities within the broader server community.
As for the solution, it requires in-game mechanics that prevent such abuse from happening to begin with, otherwise it will occur and be more common than many are willing to accept.
Ah right ok I see what you mean. That would be more of a problem with the game design rather than the playerbase being toxic. In my opinion competition over valuable resources can be good in games if done right but this is all subjective I suppose.
Sicario said: ... As for the solution, it requires in-game mechanics that prevent such abuse from happening to begin with, otherwise it will occur and be more common than many are willing to accept.
Completely true, in my opinion, and what history has demonstrated. I agree completely with your opinion on the solution, as well.
Yet, up until this moment, there has been no indication from Joppa, Kilsin, or anyone else at Visionary Realms that they would ever consider adjusting Feign Death so it can't be used for malicious training, despite all the very good community-generated solutions to the problem. Hell, for the entirety of 2017, they demonstrated this toxic behavior in their videos like it was a positive thing. :| I'm pretty sure this is what they're implementing, Sicario, regardless of the community feedback, if the past 4 years are any indication.