334 replies to this topic

[DrHat]

Hawkeye 72, on 17 March 2012 - 03:02 PM, said:

This is something I have yet to see addressed but is critical when working with any MMO. Now most of us here have respect for the game and see something morally wrong with pumping a gauss rifle into the rear of your lancemate. However we are also a minority. Any online game runs the risk of seeing a swath of destruction by players hell-bent on ruining your day. This isn't limited to team-killing either, but any actions which ruin the spirit of the game.

As with any free system, things like this comes with responsibility. However the moment you delegate this task to anybody with actual power, as opposed to community dynamics of encouraging people to play well with one another, you will have started down a path that is *potentially* (to my mind) very detrimental to the game's reputation and development.

Hawkeye 72, on 17 March 2012 - 03:02 PM, said:

Now obviously the role warfare aspect of this game encourages communication, so you probably won't be dropping into a combat zone with your scout/recon unit unleashing all manner of threats and obscenities to his teammates. But what happens when you pick up a lone wolf player who just had his cheerios pooped in? Or face an opposing lance of mechs spamming the game in a manner we haven't figured out yet?

Its his loss as much as yours. If he is in anything thats big and bad enough to ruin your day, he will lose it which will cost him. If he isn't in anything worth mentioning but can still be of enough of a nuisance to turn the tide of battle against you - You do the best you can with it and maybe do a post-match report (think League of Legends) or just get an in-game option to avoid playing with this person. Sooner or later he'll be out of people to play with.

Hawkeye 72, on 17 March 2012 - 03:02 PM, said:

The internet is littered with a$$holes, so obviously this game will need some enforcers. The dedication of the PGI team so far gives me confidence, but what does the community think? My own suggestions:

Reporting system: This goes beyond just filing an online report. Instead games should display players ratings so others can see if someone has a reputation for foul play. It's on the developer just as much as the community to ensure unwanted play stays away. I am also in favor of bans for players causing problems or c-bill reductions.

Moderators: Just like the forum, it wouldn't hurt having a small number of trusted individuals who play the game to spot foul play and step in. In-game police? However this runs the risk of power abuse. In that case maybe the removal of players from the House or Merc unit?

Kill switch: In the event of a rogue unit, maybe give a commander the ability to shut down a rogue team member? Not so much boot him from the game, but keep his mech shutdown so he suffers for his transgressions lol. Once again I recognize the window for such a feature to be abused. Just throwing out ideas for now.

The rating system only works as well as the people who uses it. In other words if you have a great bunch of people who are determined (which I promise you some of them will be) and just want to see the system suffer for its ability to exclude people from the game on no basis at all other than your reports - They will mass report people from here to the stone-age and that poor person will never see the inside of a match ever again.
There is a system that might work in here somewhere but it still needs to be worked out.

The "in-game police" - Yeah, bad idea, never do it.

The "Killswitch" - See above.

Hawkeye 72, on 17 March 2012 - 03:02 PM, said:

If you have any experience with online games, you know people exist whose sole purpose in the game is to sabotage their teammates and break everything. Too much behavior like this can ruin the fun.

Thoughts? Ideas? Should we start forging our own lovely ban-hammers? Nothing says street justice like a well placed PPC

Also remember that too much moderating, too many rules, too much etiquette and too many regulations will have the exact same, or worse, effect - As soon as you question the status quo ..perhaps even for valid reasons..you are stuck in being unable to do anything about it because of the trap you set for yourself in your beloved rules, switches, policing and so on.
I sincerely mean this, because I'm not saying there shouldn't be any boundaries at all or no systems in place..however I sincerely mean it and can not begin to stress how important it is when I say, be VERY careful about the rules you make for yourself, please.

[Bloody Moon]

Existing friendly fire adds to the immersion in my opinion, while existing punishment for team damage encourages careful aiming when there are friendlies present around a target, tho the punishment should be severe after a certain amount of team-damage from c-bill penalty up to a temporary ban.

While some of you may fear the occasional unintended TK most friendly players won't jump around in front of your cross-hairs screaming "Hello! I'm Lindsay Lohan!".

Edited by Bloody Moon, 17 March 2012 - 04:25 PM.

[mockingfox]

FF is an important aspect of this game and is important to combat and tactics, and not having it would severly lessen the expirience for me as a whole.
however TKers and A-holes are abundant in online gaming and it is quite possibly the worst thing you can ever go through. Since I've delt with this issue and had a simmilar discussion over this for both halo 3 and halo:reach I would like to make a few points.

1. a match with a confirmed TKer should NOT COUNT FOR YOUR BATTLE RECORD FOR ANYONE! as in wins/lose kills/deaths
getting tked is one thing but having it mess up your perminent score card is even worse!

2. you should have a public "reputation" that tracks bad actions that can be viewed by everyone and will apply time penalties along side increased credit costs, also if you TK you get no reward and have to pay a heavy fine(which is based on all the damages dealt to your team and possibly their entire bill for the match because if your TKing their gonna lose) This would scale depending on your reputation, starting as a pain in the *** considering you not only made nothing but lost some till suddenly Tking means you can barelly repair your own mech.

Stopping TKers is impossible, you must simply inconvienence them greatly to the point where its no longer worth the "kicks" they seem to get out of enraging us.

on a side note: the reutation would be an average based on how many good games vs how many bad games you've played
what this means is that players that only TK/hurt on a rare and minimal basis shouldnt have much of a problem or none at all

however those who frequent or have just created an account (or remade so they can troll more) will be impacted more and more, this also means that a player can reform and that the penalties are not perminant as they play more games the good ones should start to outway the bads in time. Another possibilitie is for players who have gone a long number of matches to be forgiven of games more and more stedilly encouraging them to reform so that they can get back on track and STAY LOYAL MEMEBRS OF MW:O

tl:dr read it its good

Edited by mockingfox, 17 March 2012 - 04:34 PM.

[Vernius Ix]

FF should always be a factor in a game like this. It forces players to be aware of their teammates field of fire and move accordingly. And lets face it, there is always some jackass that needs to be Tk'd for their idiocy.

[FACEman Peck]

I know what wouldn't work at all, reflected fire. The damage you deal to your teammate is dealt to you instead is a horrible idea. They did it in Modern Warfare 3 hardcore modes, and I practically stopped playing the game because of it. Even if you accidentally shot the guy, you would die instantly, and it was a real pain for whenever you called in killstreaks, like the B2 stealth bomber. Before they put in "ricochet", or reflected fire, you could possibly wipe out the whole map, friend and foe. Now, you are guaranteed to take a death when you call in that bomber, among other things.

[cinco]

people only start goofing off and trolling when the game itselfs gets boring. the best deterrent against this behavior is to make the game as deep, complex and interesting so that people have a vested interest in playing the right way.

if a game is dumbed down and arcade like like world of tanks, people aren't going to keep playing. they're just gonna grief until they're kicked/banned whatever.

[The Cheese]

mockingfox, on 17 March 2012 - 04:33 PM, said:

1. a match with a confirmed TKer should NOT COUNT FOR YOUR BATTLE RECORD FOR ANYONE! as in wins/lose kills/deaths
getting tked is one thing but having it mess up your perminent score card is even worse!

Ok, but how do you define someone as a "confirmed TKer"?

mockingfox, on 17 March 2012 - 04:33 PM, said:

2. you should have a public "reputation" that tracks bad actions that can be viewed by everyone and will apply time penalties along side increased credit costs, also if you TK you get no reward and have to pay a heavy fine(which is based on all the damages dealt to your team and possibly their entire bill for the match because if your TKing their gonna lose) This would scale depending on your reputation, starting as a pain in the *** considering you not only made nothing but lost some till suddenly Tking means you can barelly repair your own mech.

How would you separate "bad actions" from accidents? How do you separate an accidental team kill (some derp walks through your missile stream and gets killed, for example) from an intentional one?

mockingfox, on 17 March 2012 - 04:33 PM, said:

Stopping TKers is impossible, you must simply inconvienence them greatly to the point where its no longer worth the "kicks" they seem to get out of enraging us.

Agreed, but the problem is deciding what kind of system will be able to differentiate TKers from rookies who have/cause accidents all the time, while having the fewest false positives. I don't think for a second that it should be decided by the players, as those systems are too readily abused.

I once played a game which employed a saint/sinner system. There was a scale from 0-100. Every time you caused damage to another player, you would lose some points. Over time, you would regenerate points as long as you don't damage another player. The colour of your player name would change from gold (saint) to black (sinner), depending on your score. Everyone knew that a player with a black name was trouble, and a gold name was A-OK.

I think a system like this could help here as well. It would be player-enforced, but no voting system which can be abused. A player with a black name might be a TKer, or they could just be terrible at aiming. You won't know which until the game is under way, but you DO know that you should keep an eye on them.

[Storm McIntyre]

I started to post a reply stating that I couldn't imagine a TKer causing that big of a stir, but then all of a sudden two words entered my mind:

Leeroy Jenkins.


Okay. Yeah. I'm firmly in the corner of the Bounty system. Just sayin'.

[mockingfox]

I didnt specify what did and did not count as a TK/negative action because their was nothing i could add to the conversation that wasnt already here.

also i have a 3rd point

3. players with poor reputation's would have a tendency to get matched with other poor tendancie players and the same goes for good tendencie players, this way those who never troll should never be trolled. (of course this would be a very low weight in the matchmaking system so that it doesnt slow down match finding times, and would only really mater for the worser of the offenders)

[anglomanii]

how about we just assume our mechs have a decent IFF system and dont shoot each other......to me it serves it's purpose without getting complicated, just assume you lasers detect a Friend and even if they fire shut of too quickly to cause damage, missiles could be assumed not to detonate as well as AC ammo, and PPC's and gauss? hell i dont know maybe the magic leprechauns make em not work!

[Roh]

This is easy to address. You pay for any damage you do to a friendly mech. You pay for the repairs. If you do enough damage that it seems excessive you begin to pay for the repairs and a penalty. At some point the intentional tkers wont be able to afford to field their mech.

This also covers those ****** that aren't trying to tk you but are selfish douchebags that won't check their fire.

Edited by Roh, 17 March 2012 - 05:11 PM.

[Insidious Johnson]

Bounty sounds good. Bored players go for the infamy and 'who has the bigger' one game to play. Everyone else gets bounty revenge. Win for Win, grief for grief. I say go for it, can't have heroes without villains. The guys in black hats are cooler anyways.

[Fastway]

Teaming killing Holocaust is the first thing i plan on doing after loading the game, so team kills are a must!

[Dras Black]

anglomanii, on 17 March 2012 - 05:01 PM, said:

how about we just assume our mechs have a decent IFF system and dont shoot each other......to me it serves it's purpose without getting complicated, just assume you lasers detect a Friend and even if they fire shut of too quickly to cause damage, missiles could be assumed not to detonate as well as AC ammo, and PPC's and gauss? hell i dont know maybe the magic leprechauns make em not work!

If were going that route it would be something like this:
If you're crosshair is over a friendly the IFF locks up the gun controls Missiles would need IFF receivers to detonate the missiles a safe distance away from friendly targets, the problem with this is that it leaves out the possibility that a friendly just happens to pop infront of a PPC shot or the intentional grief of friendlies standing in front of you're mech to lock out you're guns..

Not trying to start anything, Just chipping in. Its not a bad idea.. although i like bounties more the "No FF"

The one thing we haven't touched on is the "Danger Close" environment.
What happens when you're in an area and under heavy attack, request some danger close fire mission and well, like i said earlier (only thing more accurate then incoming enemy fire is friendly fire) and a shell happens to reduce you to scrap, is the Commander really responsible for an artery piece thats not even really aimed by him? (Yeah he places the pie plate but he doesn't actually send shot over.)

[Darkrasp]

League of Legends has a horrible, horrible matchmaking system that deals with this in the worst possible way. This is kind of a tangent and deals with matchmaking, but the two are closely related.

On the one hand, you can get a terrible teammate, maybe someone new, maybe someone casual, whatever. They aren't trying to suck, they just aren't very good. As soon as you get one of these "anchors" on your team, your chances of winning are drastically reduced. You can still win, but only if the rest of your team is good enough to compensate for this one player being an active detriment to the team. There is a difference between a noob and a griefer, but the effects on the rest of the team are the same.

End of match reporting could possibly have an option to report players who are very skilled, average skill, unskilled, actively griefing, etc.. This information could then be used by matchmaking to assist people in getting put into games with the proper level of players. Maybe you don't get to vote on players that you are "in a group" with, but only strangers. I'm not really sure what the best way to handle it is, but a simple "you get grouped with people with the same win/loss ratio as you" is not a good one. Then you end up losing games because of griefers, so your ELO drops, then you get put on teams with even worse players who are anchors, so your ELO drops, so you get placed on teams with even worse players, until you get into ELO hell and you can't ever escape.

I also liked the idea with the gold/black "reputation" bar that regenerated over time if you didn't do anything bad.

[Hawkeye 72]

Friendly fire should never be disabled to keep a level of realism. I also recognize that putting certain powers in individuals or players hands can and will result in abuses. However there needs to be some law in the land. Xbox live uses a reporting/rating system. However they spend a majority of their efforts looking for modders and such. The player ratings are never actively displayed/used, reports often go unheard, and I've often ended up playing with players who I selected to avoid.

I would like to see a more active rating system that allows pilots, commanders, and other high ranking game officials to see reports and player complaints. Almost a pilot dossier where any house or merc employer can research his pilots history. If I am running a merc unit I want more info than just a kill record.

Also this topic wasn't just in regards to team killing, but a system for people who commit any kind of spam, cheating, foul play, etc. There are other ways to ruin a game than team killing alone. We don't know all the ways this can happen in the game since its still in production, but conversations like these are important to have now, not three days before launch.

[neodym]

if there will be friendly fire I will not play the game,easy as that,when played Bad Company 2 on hardcore mode on average I suffered more damage from retarded or trolling team mates,I had more than enough please dont put friendly fire in this game

friendly fire will be like opening portal to hell,it will unleash these cretins all over the place and ruin gameplay,please dont give these idiots power to destroy this wonderfull game


and about player rating system,I can see being with low rating being called Assault ***** and camper, being put to same rating value as team killer and thats not fair

Edited by neodym, 17 March 2012 - 05:34 PM.

[Fabe]

Fastway, on 17 March 2012 - 05:17 PM, said:

Teaming killing Holocaust is the first thing i plan on doing after loading the game, so team kills are a must!

Games not even out and we already have griefers on stand by .

Edited by Fabe, 17 March 2012 - 05:36 PM.

[Verminaard]

The gold/black rep bar seems like a great idea, even if it's in addition to other stuff. it lets you know which teammates are reliable and which maybe less so. I'd love to see it regardless if it is, or isn't, the main griefing defense.

[Darkrasp]

neodym, on 17 March 2012 - 05:32 PM, said:

and about player rating system,I can see being with low rating being called Assault ***** and camper, being put to same rating value as team killer and thats not fair

I agree with this. There needs to be some way to differentiate a "noob" from a "troll". Maybe a grace period of X games when the account is first created? You only get groups with people who have played less than 100 games until you hit 100 games yourself, then you only get grouped with players who have played more than 100 games.. I'm not really sure.

Edit: What I want to get at is that you don't want your new players being forced into groups with your griefers and trolls. That's a good way to chase away new players before they ever get interested in the game.

Edited by Darkrasp, 17 March 2012 - 05:39 PM.