Riot, Blizzard, Twitch and others are teaming up to fight toxic gaming behavior
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
With League of Legends, the problem is that a match lasts at least 20 minutes (not sure if this is still the case) until someone can surrender. A while back, I then played Heroes of the Storm, where most matches aren't longer than 20 minutes.
Nowadays, I played a lot of Rocket League, where each match is 5 minutes (or 7 at most, depending on the amount of "goal cams"). But still, they can feel a bit like an eternity, if your mate decides that "you're a fucking noob, because you missed the ball 10 seconds into the game and we certainly can't win in the next 4:50 minutes" and just plays like an idiot. Sure, you can report those players, but ultimately, someone has to review the games and I suspect this is quite impossible to achieve.
So, what's the solution? I don't know. Maybe the solution is on an individual level – stop playing "for the win", but try to enjoy the ingame moments (like "I hit the ball mid-air" or "I achieved a pentakill"). Or only play with friends on your team and mute the other team.
After all, in most competitive games, you achieve about 50% win rate anyways, once you reach a certain mid-range skill level and don't play with your friends, because the match making algorithms will sometimes give you good team mates and other times bad, or toxic, ones.
Every single multiplayer game suffers from toxicity at some level. Even in 1 vs 1 games the other play can mess with you until you go full tilt.
PUBG is a perfect example of this. You can play on 1 to 4 person squads, so if friends aren't online, just play it solo. You're not forced into a match with randoms on your team. You can easily turn off comms with enemies (and it's proximity only anyway).
I've never played a less toxic multiplayer game for this reason. If you just reduce comms with enemies, and give players the ability to play a game with 1 - N friends without needing randoms, the problem solves itself.
That's not a solution, that's a workaround. It's like saying "The solution to a community being toxic is to leave it". It's only a solution if only the toxic members follow that advice.
A game like that depends a lot on communication though and even if randoms aren't toxic, they won't universally be willing to use a mic, or have one. There are lots of other reasons it is better to play with people you already know. Even while mostly playing with friends, I've still managed to meet cool people through these games that I've become friends with.
Eventually the toxic people will realize that their toxicity isn't getting an outlet and will either move on to another game or change their behavior.
Point being, there are steps you can personally take to mitigate the toxicity you experience and giving you those tools is pretty much all a developer can do.
If you give people the ability to block others from being matchmade with them, they will use it to keep themselves from being matched with players who play poorly, but aren't at all toxic. At higher skill ranks, where the player pool is small and there is a high chance of being matched with the same players repeatedly, it has huge opportunity for abuse.
It is a good demonstration of why it is a hard problem, because you can't just implement the most naively obvious solution: you have to design against the abuse-case.
This is a problem which _can't_ be solved by a central authority. That's like asking the police to go around making people be nice to each other:
Yes, they can control the most blatant abuses (IRL: violence, theft, etc. -> Online: Cheating, DDosing, etc.), but they will never be able to - and should never have the right to - control for every possible sub-optimal communication. You yourself have the tools to do that (IRL: go away, call someone out, etc. -> online: Mute, Leave the game, etc.)
As for all the players "affected" by this problem: People should learn to chill out. In a virtual, anonymous setting, some people will use the opportunity to be mean to you. That's why muting and block was introduced. I don't get the big deal, even though a big number of people seem to be "affected".
Actually, one of the wort statements in the whole article:
"There’s no IRL and online anymore. This is just all reality now."
WTF? That is the _point_ of creating virtual spaces or play per se. If I want a dose of reality I might as well watch the news and do some bookkeeping.
No. This doesn't work in Overwatch. Because Blizzard removed this ability.
Right when Overwatch came out, you could select a player's profile and essentially tell Blizzard's algorithm that you didn't want to play with this person anymore (Avoid Player).
But Blizzard decided to remove it because they found out a very good Widowmaker (a sniper character) was being excluded by a ton of people so they decided to just remove the feature altogether so that scenario doesn't happen.
However, at the time the Widowmaker character was overpowered where Widowmaker should have just gotten a nerf to her abilities (she went through a nerf and a buff since then) but instead, nope, now you can't stop playing with toxic players until they've been banned by Blizzard.
Now blocking players just means, I don't want to read messages from them. It doesn't prevent players from throwing matches, which is the biggest issue since you can't "block" bad play
In some games that might be harder said then done, but you could at least make sure you are never on the same team, and that if the player becomes an opponent that its name is obfuscated and they can't chat back.
Would you say that's a solution for hackers, too? "Meh, just block them."
It could be simply having a MAGA hat on could be 'toxic'.
You also have to worry about /toxic/ group behavior. The masses are not always right. So just because somebody has had a lot of people report them does not mean they are toxic.
For any of this to work the very behavior that is not allowed must be defined to the T.
But anyways, This is not my argument, I was merely trying to correct the assumptions of a post. And suggesting that because some feature does not exist today is not a very good reason why a suggested solution can't work or should not be considered.
Being able to block someone and not be matched with them again is also a great mechanism to dodge better players. If you have a hard time beating a particular player? Block/report them, avoid being matched with them, and have an easier time winning.
Actually, I'm not sure block is the word blizzard used. Avoid, maybe? The end result was more or less the same.
It puts the onus on the people just trying to have fun to carefully manage and curate their experience just so they can have a good time.
These companies care and take these measures because as a player, if I open Overwatch and my first match of the day is full of assholes actively trying to ruin my experience instead of just playing the game, I'm just going to log off and not play anymore.
They don't have to review the games if one account has many reports of "Unsportsmanlike conduct".
Because people are assholes. They'll blame that person for them losing a couple points on their rating, and report them as a form of revenge.
Why would the reports be anomalous?
There really isn't a deep thing here.
When designing any system you have to think about how it can be abused.
This sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. There can be dozens of reasons for a player "underperforming". Take whatever punishment the game gives for conceding and leave the game if you are stuck with a bad team of randoms. Or, better yet, make friends or join a clan of like-minded players.
Even if someone is being rude in chat/voice chat - mute them and move on. It's weird to me to see you and other posters in this thread look to a higher authority to solve such a trivial problem instead of doing this yourself.
Throwers and leavers are a huge problem in ranked competitive games, like League of Legends or Overwatch. There's a difference between having a poor game, and throwing with Hanzo because your team needed you to play a healer.
It is called "intentional feeding".
If you are playing a game and purposefully f stuff up, you will be banned.
It has to be pretty egregious, but yes this is ALREADY against the rules in the vast majority of online competitive games.
If you're an "A" player and you throw a game, I thought penalties generally applied and you could eventually find yourself downgraded to "B"?
For example, what if a teammate only "throws" a game when the game is already lost (but the game will likely last for another 10 minutes or so)
That wouldn't effect win rate very much, but it is still a bad player experience to be with a teammate who is intentionally trying to be bad.
In the past 10 years or so new games have mostly stopped including this, in favor of matchmaking systems. I guess having a single, official server makes easier to enforce "progression" systems and sell microtransactions. I'd also suspect the the disappearance of community servers has to do with the rise of online multiplayer on consoles, which never really had that as an option.
Split screen is gone too. It used to be mandatory in the 1990s-2000s for FPS, now your lucky if a current gen title has split screen at all. This ruins one of the primary fun things to do with a game which is couch play.
Both of these things make it harder to microtransact and make games RPG like, so I get it. But I hate it really. The games are worse.
Game devs and designers nowadays go out of their way to prevent people from being assholes to each other in games, but it still happens. Even games such as Hearthstone or Clash Royale, that are entirely limited to emotes, still develop a language around telling the opponent "fuck you".
I'd argue that in games, it's worse than around the web. If someone's being a jerk to me on HN, Facebook, Twitter etc I can just choose to ignore them, block them, not mind them, etc. But in games you are forced to interact, either as co-op or opponent.
Being matched up with respectful people (either as teammate or opponent) is one of the most rewarding things in gaming. And being matched up with assholes is one of the worst experiences. So every match you roll the dice on whether you're going to feel great or feel like shit by the end of the game, and it usually has nothing to do with winning or losing. I find that whenever I start truly enjoying a game, regularly being paired up with toxic people impacts the experience to the point of quitting. Both Overwatch and Rocket League, two delightful, fantastic and rewarding games, were completely ruined for me because of that.
Blizzard has no way to report people for making shitty comments in chat. So you just never talk to anyone.
"But in games you are forced to interact, either as co-op or opponent."
The typical response here is to give players a greater degree of blocking and selection, which I find to be particularly unappealling as it becomes a case of "whack-a-mole". Similarly muting toxic players works the same way, you have to expose yourself to it to find out if you want it blocked.
For me, I'd opt for an option that is muting/deafening myself. Allow me to say I don't want to interact or be acted upon and have that apply globally. There is never an instance where I'd turn this back on and have these set throughout the duration of the game (I.E, I can't turn it back on, just to emote my fuck you and block the opponent from replying.)
My ideal scenario in multiplayer games is to have the skill and randomness of human players without any of their personality. Games that do this reasonably well are games like PUBG, where I can mute the mic and there is no text chat. Similarly the game is frantic enough that taking the 20 seconds to emote your way to some obnoxious point backfires more routinely than not. (However I'm not a fan of the fact they have just introduced emotes... it bodes not well.)
I think because of this there is a class of "not-multiplayer" online game players who want all the game play aspects that multiplayer has to offer, but none of the interactions. I'd sacrifice the respectful people matching rewards (and you're right, it's awesome when that happens) if it meant getting rid of dickheads. But that is up to the individual.
That being said, as a teen I loved Ultima Online exactly because you could steal from players, block them, kill them, loot everything, kill their horse, steal the house key and loot the house, steal their boat etc.
The thrill was amazing because it didn't happen all the time. Might be you are on a guild trip and a group of other pass by and kill you all. But often it did not happen, or you needed a couple PvP savvy people with you as escort.
When they later split the world into a PvP and PvE mirror, the thrill was gone. The PvE world was boring and the PvP world was only full of people attacking you anyway (actually it was awfully empty but the couple of guys you met wanted to strangle you)
That seems like the weakness in someone's naive weekend-ware implementation, but is there a reason it cannot be improved?
For me, this isn't a problem to be solved on such a high level. After all, a mute function exists already and can be applied to anyone and the best thing is that it's a power within the hands of a player.
An issue with muting is that, depending on the implementation, the person behaving badly may not be aware they are being muted, and certainly won't know why. Providing some sort of feedback mechanism so that people being immature online get some sort of encouragement to change their behavior. Maybe a reputation system, that is viewable by others, so they can choose to not interact with toxic players.
It's not about having tons of moderators policing everything, it's about the fundamental mechanics of the system you are creating, the incentives. This can involve the peripherals of the game like player chat, community events and outreach, and even the core mechanics. A competitive multiplayer game where the mechanics are set up so that each team is only as strong as their weakest player, for example, is naturally going to increase tension and be unfriendly to new players. This was (possibly) alluded to in one sentence in the article: "the team emerged with a new focus not just on disruptive players, but on the ways competitive games can make assholes of us all."
All this goes to say that preventing a game community from becoming toxic is not a simple or trivial thing, and it's important if you want your game to succeed. It sounds like a coalition sharing ideas and experiences dealing with toxic behavior is exactly what we need.
That, and blaming someone for not muting is blaming the victim, rather than blaming the other person for being toxic in the first place.
Someone writes hateful/immature messages in the chat? Ignore them. Someone's audio-spamming the voice chat with their stupid music? Mute them. I mute voice chats by default these days because I am not interested in hearing other peoples' voices when I'm immersed in a game. I rarely use the chat, often removing it from my HUD altogether. It's a distraction and I think it gets in the way of the gameplay.
Are we so easily offended that we'd rather be overly-sensitive towards the immaturity of others? Do we all need to remember the sticks and stones rhyme our parents taught us? Aren't we better off by learning how to be unbothered by this stuff?
Actually when I was a teen it didn't bother me at all. I so played counterstrike when it was a HL mod, Ultima Online when killing, cleanlooting, horsekilling, resskilling, notokilling, blocking and cleanlooting, house raids etc were still the norm. Didn't bother me.
Actually the older I get the more I don't have the nerves anymore for all this crap.
Just because it doesn't bother you doesn't mean that it shouldn't bother others. I've talked to gay people who play games, and they want to do so as an escape from the world, like everyone else. But it's really hard for that to happen when they constantly have these slurs hurled at them just like they do in real life.
"Are we so easily offended "
Why do you find it acceptable to blame the targets of this, instead of blaming those that are hurling the toxicity.
"Do we all need to remember the sticks and stones rhyme our parents taught us?"
You mean the one that has never, ever been true?
"Aren't we better off by learning how to be unbothered by this stuff?"
Again, why do you seem to want to encourage toxic people to be toxic?
Frustrating game experiences where players feel like they've had no agency in their loss lead to people being upset, which leads to people venting, which leads to people avoiding communication unless they vent. Most games that have this cycle start off fairly pleasant, and become increasingly angry places over time.
I'd be exceptionally surprised if this initiative actually deals with the core issues of frustration and poor skill conveyance rather than improved methods of having people suppress their anger while playing.
Nowadays you are just thrown in a blender with every other player.
I hope everybody wins.
It seems like they're going to heavily censor popular streamers:
"This is just all reality now. So streamers are ambassadors of culture bigger than just League of Legends or whichever game. They’re ambassadors of online life."
Blizzard already do.
Edit: The only thing that makes me sad about these changes is you can't mess around any more. It is sometimes fun to grief. It's fun to learn new characters or play shitty ones. Everyone is so hyper competitive now and if you don't look like you're giving 1000% effort and getting mad at your failures you're called toxic. It's a game though, have fun, mess with your team a little.
In my opinion, some of these games are bound to create toxic situations when playing with randoms. Take a game like League, where a single player that's underperforming can cause the entire team to lose. This dynamic is core to the game, and it's the root cause of toxicity.
Compare that to a game like Counter Strike, where an underperformer might not drag their team down that much, and there is an option to kick the person from the team. The game is still winnable -- it will be harder, but it would not be impossible like in League.
Also, surprised not to see Valve in this list. Dota 2 and Counter Strike are still pretty big titles, even if they haven't made a game in a while.
For starters the problem isn't the games, or the enforcement mechanisms, it's the gamers. There are plenty of other competitive activities with "randoms" that do not result in this type of behavior.
Another issue is that there will be those that get punished/removed that will play the victim and attribute it to politics, etc. You can see this beginning already in some of the comments in this thread about "dictating morality" and "silencing non-progressive behavior."
Throughly and clearly defined shitty behavior that had wide agreement. Had an effective form of zero tolerance that was both deterrent and enforcement. Had a clear code of conduct that was neutral to all. Correctly identified players and prevented false positives. Was willing to remove anyone, no matter how popular they were. Was willing to remove anyone, no matter how profitable they were.
You know what else would make for a better community? Better citizens.
A far more enjoyable experience even if i do meet a shockingly large number of my moms sexual partners.
It turns out the whole idea of freedom is nothing but a degree of how alone one can live. The more alone the more free, but that isn't what freedom stands for...
Corporations absolutely quality for one of those. If every game manufacturer starts enforcing draconian free speech rules, players have no recourse beside "don't play". That's an option. If it gets bad enough, hopefully "good business" kicks in and they pull back.
The big problem is the reasoning behind why these policies are in place. They aren't really doing it because they think it'll lead to better business; these games are already ridiculously popular, and are approaching the carrying capacity of their respective markets.
Instead, they're implementing them because they think its the morally correct thing to do. That's a very dangerous road to go down, because its politically very hard to reverse a policy like this. Once you start restricting what people can say under the guise of something as buzzwordy and pure as "preventing toxic behavior", no one will be "that guy" who says "we're losing business because people are afraid to even speak, we should pull back". All it takes is one softer soul to call that person a bigot or an enabler of toxic behavior, and they're fired.
I worry about platforms like Twitch, where "twitch chat" has become such a meme that it almost defines the platform. Its not about whether that definition is good or bad; its about trying to fundamentally change who you are. YouTube tried it with their comments section. No good discussion ever happens there. Not before their change, not after. But at least before it was fun and people used it. In essence, they destroyed legitimate business value in the pursuit of perceived business value based on moral righteousness, that perceived business value was never realized, and now they can't go back.
The management of an online community is just a pocket sized version of a full blown government. There's no reason to not make a comparison due to lolbertarian rationales.
The behaviors of community moderation are comparable to those of a government.
If you want the benefits of society, you cannot ignore the needs of others.
This has nothing to do with freedom and you know it.
I'll bet this will turn into the usual identity politics nightmare that ultimately caters to a tiny fraction of gamers while worsening the experience for the majority. If this were such a massive problem, millions of people wouldn't be spending billions of dollars and hundreds millions of man hours playing these games.
This is about politics, not gaming experience.
You know what, I would.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't want these same people regulating speech or whatever. But I do want them regulating their own userbases. I do want moderators on HN enforcing the HN guidelines, just like I want Blizzard to enforce the "Blizzard guidelines" in their games, whatever they may be.
And honestly, the fact you think this "ultimately caters to a tiny fraction of gamers while worsening the experience for the majority" tells me you're part of the problem; you're probably often toxic to other players (even if you don't notice it), get your account muted/locked out/whatever, and then think that you did nothing wrong and everyone's in the same boat as you.
You wouldn't believe how many times I've seen this. People who think their behaviour is OK, who think they're not making the experience worse for other players. Then they wonder why they got banned. They go on the game's forums, subreddit, etc and complain "[studio] is banning people randomly!". And then some fed up dev from the studio pulls up chat logs and reveals some disgusting behaviour.
> If this were such a massive problem, millions of people wouldn't be spending billions of dollars and hundreds millions of man hours playing these games.
Thousands of companies are spending millions of dollars fighting that problem because it's affecting their players' experience, which ultimately affects players' willingness to buy and play the studio's games. Once again, that you think they'd willingly cater to a "tiny fraction" of their base, is absurd and gives a glimpse of your true nature.
Sorry for having the wrong opinion, but personal attacks are uncalled for.
Ironic.
So, to illustrate my point, would you prefer that heavy handed mods step in to censor you according to their definition of toxicity, or would you rather have the freedom to continue this discussion to possibly reach some resolution?
I prefer to put faith in peoples' ability to resolve conflict without vague rules regarding inconsistent notions of toxicity, especially in the context of gaming, where I can leave and join another game more or less any time.
Heavy handed modding has flagged me and even limited my ability to post in the past. I don't necessarily agree with it (although it was deserved a few times), but mods are the arbiters of the community, not me. They have the option of listening to user feedback in aggregate.
It works the same in games. The studio is the arbiter of the community, not the players. The players give feedback to the studio. The studio has the option of listening.
And players have been giving feedback in troves that toxicity sucks, that toxic players ruin other players' gaming experience, and that they want that gone. Studios are listening. If you're getting caught on the wrong end of this, try being nicer to people.
Like billions of dollars and probably billions of man hours worth of gaming in an industry that is only growing?
Have you considered further that some degree of so called toxicity is inherent to the fun of gaming?
Why stop there? Why not set standards for content as well? You're talking about games that simulate violence, killing, war in general, but you demand that the playerbase act in accordance to your personal sensibilities?
What proof do you have that the majority of gamers aren't fine with the status quo? Why are you so convinced that arbitrary rules against toxicity don't lessen the experience for the majority?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc: just because the industry is growing doesn't mean that people don't mind toxicity. It's possible the industry would be growing even faster if there was less toxicity, for example.
> Have you considered further that some degree of so called toxicity is inherent to the fun of gaming?
Maybe some people enjoy being called a faggot by randoms on Xbox, but I don't. I'd go so far as to say the majority of people prefer not to be called slurs by random strangers. Can't we do something to stop that?
> Why stop there? Why not set standards for content as well? You're talking about games that simulate violence, killing, war in general, but you demand that the playerbase act in accordance to your personal sensibilities?
Why is any attempt to prevent any form of toxicity a slippery slope that can only lead to some sort of Orwellian nightmare of censorship?
Unless you're using your own servers for the game and they're still doing this, they aren't really forcing you to do anything. They're their servers, so they go by their rules. If you don't like it, you can just, y'know, not play the game.
Moreover, when these developers have access to the minds of hundreds of millions of people, including children, there is a degree of cultural forcing involved. These developers' ideas of right and wrong are potentially influencing society, and this is something that non gamers have little control over.
At the very least, journalists have a responsibility to recognize that toxicity is not universal. One could argue that there is potential for priming young people toward obscenity laws and nanny statism, when they are conditioned to look toward authority for resolution of all problems.
Farfetched, perhaps, but I personally believe that people need to learn to deal with such problems on their own, because external solutions are not always available or enforceable. This could easily have unforseen consequences.
I really don't understand why people think it's okay to push a perfectly sanitary online gaming atmosphere. To me the whole point is that it's NOT sanitary.
You're at the median of your own experience, but what if you're near the far left of the bell curve across all players?
I probably am - I honestly enjoy the trash-talking, even when it grossly violates cultural norms. I feel like it's a part of the "gamer culture" that I enjoy.
I also get that there are (probably a lot) of people that don't want it. I just hope that there will continue to be a place for people who don't want to be subject to the censorship.
I don't want either of those to happen. When they do, it ruins the fun for me. After a while, I will stop playing. Plenty of others agree with me, which is why these companies are taking this seriously. They don't want people to stop playing.
For example, by allowing toxicity to be rampant, you're really just catering to a tiny fraction of people, the toxic people. The opposite of what you think.
If you want to play with quality, respectful players, you'll need to put in the elbow grease to create that ecosystem. Compare the average HN comment (moderated) to the average /r/programming comment (unmoderated). I don't see a lot of "identity politics" going on around the moderation here as you seem to suggest must coexist with such moderation.
As for people who intentionally cause harm, that's a very real issue which I was not addressing with my above comments.
It doesn't matter if they don't think it's abusive or not. It's still abusive, and they need to be informed of that. If, after that, they amend their behavior, then great. They've learned and grown as humans are supposed to do. But if they continue to insist on the behavior, then they're abusive, full stop.