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1.Allow us to ignore text messages from players. This is pretty self-explanatory, just two people flooding chat with off topic nonsense is enough to prevent anyone else from using the chat and is technically not against the COC. All you have to do is claim that you and your friend were having a conversation.
2.Allow us to put players on a "do not play" list so we will never have to play with them again. These are the type of people who are complete killjoys and ruin the game for everyone else but stop just short of blatant violations of the COC that would get them banned.
Benefits :
1. You can ignore people who are annoying you in chat or cluttering up chat with off topic stuff.
2. You dont have to play with people you dont want to. This is a pretty big deal, imagine the guy you hate at work but have to deal with everyday. Now imagine being forced to play with him everytime you try to relax.
3. People will be more inclined to use these features instead of reporting people to GMs, which means less work for GMs. And if no action can be taken against a player because hes technically not breaking the COC, people can choose not to play with him instead of sending more and more reports to the GMs that just get marked as "technically not illegal".
Drawbacks :
None, except for coding time.
Explanation :
With any large playerbase (not that the playerbase is particularly large now, but hopefully at sometime in the future), you are going to run into a lot of people you simply do not want to associate with.
These are people who trash talk, spam the chat with gibberish, or simply play the game in a way that kills fun for everyone else, which may or may not involve violation of the code of conduct.
Reporting players is time consuming, especially for GMs who have to investigate every report, and what might be multiple reports against the same person.
Theres also the problem where people rules lawyer to stay within the code of conduct, technically, but play the game in a way that ruins it for everyone else.
An example of this might be dropping in a fast mech with only a few MGs and then running straight into the enemy team solo, while saying "well its not MY fault the MGs are short ranged! And i'm scouting, its not my fault if i die!". Which is just a disguised way of suiciding. Or deciding that, well, he doesnt want to help his team win, so hes going to let enemies kill his teammates, maybe while firing off a few shots at out of range enemies to make it look good. Or hiding in a corner of the map till his team is dead then running out to die (hey, theres no rule saying i have to stick with the group!).
I dont know what tools GMs have access to for checking reports, but im guessing its pretty hard to tell whether someone is just really bad, or trying to make his team lose on purpose. It would be pretty easy to come up with plausible excuses for any suspicious behaviour.
Since the matchmaker doesnt let you choose who to play with (unless you play the rewardless private matches 100% of the time), you are stuck with these guys everytime the MM decides to put you together. Which can happen very very frequently. I ran into the same 8 man sync drop nearly a dozen times in one night, according to my screenshots anyway.
Everytime one of their 4 man groups ended up on my team, they would go out of their way to try and make us lose. Nothing as obvious as blatant tking or yelling out teammate locations in chat, but generally they refused to engage enemies and would hide in a corner of the map till everyone else was dead, THEN start fighting. Im pretty sure they were revealing teammate locations to their friends on the other team over voice chat whenever they got split up as well. Everytime they did this, the game was effectively ruined for everyone else and the worst thing is, we cannot opt out of playing with people like these. The matchmaker will continue to put us in the same match as them. And we really need a way to avoid people like that, that doesnt involve bringing in the GMs and hoping they get banned, which is a long and complex process with no guarantees. Not exactly hard to make a new account either.
Edited by Jun Watarase, 01 May 2014 - 03:15 PM.
