Dakkaface, on 17 April 2013 - 01:30 PM, said:
On the other hand, I have no desire to hear a squeaky voiced teenager hurling inaccurate racial slurs at the team for 8 minutes because he ran off on his own and got killed without backup.
That is a really easy problem to fix, honestly.
First, make it easy to mute a teammate if you don't want to listen to him/her. Second, make it easy to "report" an abusive teammate. Third, log both of these things on the server-side and analyze the log data to determine what players are both reported for abuse AND being muted by teammates during a high percentage of the games they play.
Fourth, make it possible for the server to record the voice stream from a player, flag players who have often been reported for abuse to be recorded, and the next few times that player is reported by his teammates, kick those recording files up to a support person who will quickly review the transmissions from that player, and if needed, sanction them.
Fifth, if the player is a newbie account (one with few games played) and they quickly made it to step #4, completely skip the support review of stored audio, and ban that user from transmitting VOIP for 25 games, all by automation, with no personnel cost involved.
As someone with 16 years of experience in software development, I can tell you with absolute certainty, that abusive VOIP users exist only because the game companies do not care enough about the problem to do the very simple steps above to stream-line the process of dealing with them.
Before you know-it-alls start saying it's too expensive to record in-game VOIP transmissions: no, it isn't. Even uncompressed, telephone-quality audio is approximately 8KB/sec and this is not how VOIP clients typically transmit, anyway; they use lower-bit-rate codecs to conserve bandwidth. A G.729 stream can be as small as 2KB/sec and still have passable audio quality. But let's stay with 8KB/sec, worst case, for now.
Let's say the abusive user transmits continuously some terrible bagpipe music into every match he plays, all day long, for 26 hours, because he's taking really good drugs and can't find anything better to do but annoy people in MW:O. Even if no support person reviews the reports until the following day, that's a whopping 743MB of stored transmissions. You can easily store that (temporarily, while reports are queued) for tens of thousands of abusive users without spending any real money.
Now let's say you use your brain a little more, and you delete the stored files for any matches where there were no abuse reports. Also delete repeat reports by the same teammate (over some threshold.) Finally, just stop storing them once you've got that person being abusive dozens of times in a single day, with tons of people muting and reporting him. So now you'll cut his 26 hours of bagpipe crap down to maybe 2 hours, or 57MB.
Now get some "volunteer moderators" to screen the reports so the silly crap gets dropped, and build some automation to ignore reports by people who just push the "report" button because they think it's fun.
There you have it. No more VOIP abuse. Problem solved.
It's amazing what you can do if you use your brain. I've been doing it for decades!
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