32 replies to this topic

[Senor Cataclysmo]

Hi everyone,

With VOIP, faction chat and more ways to communicate with each other in game just around the corner, I've seen a few people raise concerns that allowing players more scope in their communications will lead to abuse and foster a toxic environment.

Trash talking and abuse are not something I personally have ever had a problem with in MWO, but I've certainly seen people complain about certain members of certain units on here and speculate that the advent of VOIP is only going to make this problem worse

I was watching a youtube video on this very topic earlier (which I've linked below) and it contained some really good ideas that might be applicable to MWO as a good way to limit the influence of abusive players without seriously restricting the functionality of player communication tools:

1. to combat abusive individual players

Take a metric on how often a player is muted by other players. If a player is muted more than say, 10% above the norm, start them in game as auto muted. This won't prevent them from talking, and won't stop people who want to from hearing them talk, but it will make it less easy for them to abuse other players. It would also attach a social stigma to bad behaviour; if you see someone spawn and they're auto muted, you'll know what to expect from them.

2. to combat abusive units and members of units.

If units had a shared, unit wide 'reputation' rating, so that bad behaviour on the part of any individual lessened the efficacy of the unit as a whole, there would be social pressure from unit mates for abusive players to change their behaviour. What the in game effects of a unit having 'negative reputation' could be are up for debate, but it would ideally foster a culture of responsibility for the units reputation among its members.

Thoughts?

If anyone is interested in the original video these ideas came from, it can be watched in full here:

Spoiler

[Brody319]

or just make the mute button easy to use and quick.

boom problem solved.

[Troutmonkey]

Make it so that if you mute a player in one game, it carries over to other games.
Adding a reputation system and an in game report button would also be good ideas to prevent abuse.

I'm not a fan of Auto-Mute, but I do like the idea of a Unit wide reputation system. Self regulating units could help to bring abusive players in line (or just boot them) so as to improve the whole units rep.

[Brody319]

why do we have to have a complete punishment system for something that is entirely personal?
What one person finds offensive is not what someone else finds offensive.

wouldn't it just save time and money to just have a "mute this person, not have to see text or hear a person in any future games unless you unmute them"?

I mean almost every multiplayer source game gets away with this system and they don't have to go around banning everyone because enough people were offended.

[PurpleNinja]

VOIP option turned off.
Sometimes I even disable the chat.

[Dirus Nigh]

Brody319, on 15 February 2015 - 05:13 PM, said:

or just make the mute button easy to use and quick.

boom problem solved.

/thread

[Senor Cataclysmo]

Brody319, on 15 February 2015 - 05:13 PM, said:

or just make the mute button easy to use and quick.

boom problem solved.

Ideally, this should also be the case

Brody319, on 15 February 2015 - 08:11 PM, said:

why do we have to have a complete punishment system for something that is entirely personal?
What one person finds offensive is not what someone else finds offensive.

wouldn't it just save time and money to just have a "mute this person, not have to see text or hear a person in any future games unless you unmute them"?

Cos thats treating the symptoms, not the cause of the problem. Sure, we definitely *should* have a mute button, and it should be very quick and easy to use, but while muting a given player is a quick fix for one player who receives abuse, it doesnt stop the muted player from just doing the same thing again. The methods I suggest are designed to encourage people to just behave better so no one needs to be muted.

As far as your 'something thats entirely personal' point goes, I agree, that something one person finds funny another may find offensive and being muted by one person is no cause for punishment. This is why I suggested applying the auto mute based on whether a player is getting muted consistently above the average amount it happens to people, indicating that there is a problem with his or her behaviour rather than them just getting on the wrong side of a particularly sensitive person.

Brody319, on 15 February 2015 - 08:11 PM, said:

I mean almost every multiplayer source game gets away with this system and they don't have to go around banning everyone because enough people were offended.

I never suggested banning anyone. If you think Im suggesting banning people because they offend one person, you've massively misunderstood my original post.

[Kilo 40]

Senor Cataclysmo, on 15 February 2015 - 05:11 PM, said:

2. to combat abusive units and members of units.

this will never happen. Russ is like a battered house wife when it comes to competitive units. That's why CW was catered to them.

Abusive units will not ever be dealt with by PGI. at least not anytime soon.

[Ralgas]

my biggest concern is what happens to netcode stability when we have 4 idiots in a drop on substances that think it's a smart idea to leave their channel open blaring music...... and if there's a certain point at which it does affect things which could make it "gameable".

Past that, meh. Units will still use their private channels, and the public ones will be as rife with trolls as chat (only worse, because now they don't have to worry about typing something coherent)

[STEF_]

Ralgas, on 16 February 2015 - 01:29 AM, said:

my biggest concern is what happens to netcode stability when we have 4 idiots in a drop on substances that think it's a smart idea to leave their channel open blaring music...... and if there's a certain point at which it does affect things which could make it "gameable".

Past that, meh. Units will still use their private channels, and the public ones will be as rife with trolls as chat (only worse, because now they don't have to worry about typing something coherent)

This.

VOIP will be used in puglandia (and it can be usefull or weird depending on players), but in group que: TS as always.

[Insects]

Ralgas, on 16 February 2015 - 01:29 AM, said:

my biggest concern is what happens to netcode stability when we have 4 idiots in a drop on substances that think it's a smart idea to leave their channel open blaring music...... and if there's a certain point at which it does affect things which could make it "gameable".

Hopefully PGI aren't dumb enough to put the VOIP server (teamspeak3 SDK I believe I saw mentioned?) on the same hardware as the game server, that would be a special level of stupid design.
On its own hardware it can only load up peoples own connections, and a quick mute solves that problem.

Perma mute list, never hear an idiot again and a lot of problems go away.

No need to mass sensor, if your ears don't like it simply block them from getting in.

[Ralgas]

joelmuzz, on 16 February 2015 - 01:54 AM, said:

Hopefully PGI aren't dumb enough to put the VOIP server (teamspeak3 SDK I believe I saw mentioned?) on the same hardware as the game server, that would be a special level of stupid design.
On its own hardware it can only load up peoples own connections, and a quick mute solves that problem.

Perma mute list, never hear an idiot again and a lot of problems go away.

No need to mass sensor, if your ears don't like it simply block them from getting in.

over long distance server connections such as us oceanic's are subject to the "bandwidth stutters" it can cause leads to issues. I remember our WoW raid team used to get ping spikes off a private TS server on days the game server/route was being picky, wasn't too much of an issue there most times but when you apply it to fps with hsr..........

Edited by Ralgas, 16 February 2015 - 02:05 AM.

[Mudhutwarrior]

The need to segregate is strong with these ones.....

[Vassago Rain]

>extra credits.

lolno.

[Jolly Llama]

Senor Cataclysmo, on 15 February 2015 - 05:11 PM, said:

Hi everyone,

With VOIP, faction chat and more ways to communicate with each other in game just around the corner, I've seen a few people raise concerns that allowing players more scope in their communications will lead to abuse and foster a toxic environment.

Trash talking and abuse are not something I personally have ever had a problem with in MWO, but I've certainly seen people complain about certain members of certain units on here and speculate that the advent of VOIP is only going to make this problem worse

I was watching a youtube video on this very topic earlier (which I've linked below) and it contained some really good ideas that might be applicable to MWO as a good way to limit the influence of abusive players without seriously restricting the functionality of player communication tools:

1. to combat abusive individual players

Take a metric on how often a player is muted by other players. If a player is muted more than say, 10% above the norm, start them in game as auto muted. This won't prevent them from talking, and won't stop people who want to from hearing them talk, but it will make it less easy for them to abuse other players. It would also attach a social stigma to bad behaviour; if you see someone spawn and they're auto muted, you'll know what to expect from them.

2. to combat abusive units and members of units.

If units had a shared, unit wide 'reputation' rating, so that bad behaviour on the part of any individual lessened the efficacy of the unit as a whole, there would be social pressure from unit mates for abusive players to change their behaviour. What the in game effects of a unit having 'negative reputation' could be are up for debate, but it would ideally foster a culture of responsibility for the units reputation among its members.

Thoughts?

If anyone is interested in the original video these ideas came from, it can be watched in full here:

Spoiler

[Paigan]

Why is ingame voice called VOIP (= "voice over IP"-address)?
For the same reason that the word "meta" is used to describe being overpowered, apparent pure retardation?

The age of idiocracy is upon us...

Edited by Paigan, 16 February 2015 - 05:52 AM.

[Xythius]

None of these suggestions really matter. The units you are worried about will have the VOIP turned off and will be using TS as normal. A mute button will allow folks in the solo queue to ignore those who are offensive to them.

Auto-mutes and the like are simply unecessary and will add to the workload of an already stressed dev team. You're already trying to implement fixes for problems that don't exist.

[PurpleNinja]

Paigan, on 16 February 2015 - 05:50 AM, said:

Why is ingame voice called VOIP (= "voice over IP"-address)?
For the same reason that the word "meta" is used to describe being overpowered, apparent pure retardation?

The age of idiocracy is upon us...

It's like calling someone a retar*, he's not really a retar*, but you call it anyway.
I hope you can understand...

[Ursh]

You can tell some of the players of this game are suburban parents, or one of them folk from Utah, because they're overly concerned about things that are very unlikely to be real issues, and are accentuating the more remote scenarios of abusive language.

There's going to be a mute button, PGI has already confirmed it. If you don't like it, you can also just turn it off completely and totally miss out on the whole team oriented concept of the game.

Oh, there's also this thing called headphones you can use if you're worried about your mom being described 100% accurately by your teammates after you mess up a match.

Edited by Ursh, 16 February 2015 - 08:38 AM.

[Dulahan]

I'm more... yeah, I'm not concerned. There's always a chance of one person being a killjoy here and there. But I've rarely ever had a problem.
As long as we're mainly communicating with our own team and the opfor can't talk too, I just don't see a problem (If the system has a way to talk to them too, or all people... well then I forsee some hilarious miscoms just like we get on the text chat! but that's a different issue). I think the trash talking trolls who cuss out their own team will quickly see a majority of said team verbally beating them down in ways that the type to chat doesn't.

Not to mention this will make it easier to give advice to people and the likes. It's SO easy to miss a chat message on a high resolution screen especially, even more when you're in the heat of battle. Talking? That you can hear.