Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

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Man, I wouldn't want to be a community manager in those games. Trash-talking is one thing – and I'm quite quick with the mute-button (and usually let them know), but something that is incredibly hard to spot/punish is behavior in competitive games. Once you reach a certain skill level, a single guy on the team makes or breaks the entire match.

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.

The only real solution I know of is to not play multiplayer games.

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.

The real solution is not to play on a team with randoms, and not allow comms between competing teams.

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.

> The real solution is not to play on a team with randoms

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.

I disagree, it is a solution that you yourself can actually implement. It isn't dependent on anyone else. I've only played PUBG with randoms once, before PUBG changed the interface there was one time my team forgot to uncheck the box and the guy we played with was actually really cool. Even though most of the people were screaming "CHINA NUMBA ONE" in the lobby.

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.

The solution is to block the person you don't like, never having to see or hear from him again. Seems pretty fair. You'll be matched with less "toxic" people, they'll be matched with similar minded people, which they may or may not like. No need for suspensions or bans, imo.

That is the most obvious solution, and completely wrong.

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.

I'd much rather have a system which may fail for a small subset of players, than having a game company tell me what constitutes good or bad behaviour.

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.)

I'm not sure whether you're agreeing with me or not, because, while I don't think it's possible to solve this problem using a central authority, it is a problem that affects a very large portion of the playerbase, so your dichotomy is false. It is not a problem that affects a "small subset of players"

No the "small subset of players" was referring to top players that would be affected by people misusing blocking other players.

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.

And the games companies, the ones making the games, disagree. They believe that this toxic behavior is affecting more people than the alternative options are, and so they want to nip it in the bud.

I think a better solution (better than what currently exists) would entail centralizing gaming profiles which would require you to share profile data across games and game companies so bad behavior in one game is reported to all of your games.

Yeah, I didn't think about that. I just played for fun, not competitiveness.

> The solution is to block the person you don't like

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

Keep in mind that this is also the same game where people will report other players for "choosing the wrong character".

I think the said the "solution is", it does not matter if the functionality exist today. Its more of how the gaming industry should handle these situations. Simply blocking somebody should make it so you can't ever be matched with, or have to communicate with them again.

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.

Not very great for the community to make every single person play with a toxic player and then block them. You want to do the work for them.

Would you say that's a solution for hackers, too? "Meh, just block them."

The entire problem though is what is 'toxic' is subjective. Today we find this behavior okay, and tomorrow we don't.

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.

It would be great if many of the games worked like that. Sadly, in my experience, you can report/block someone and then immediately be matched with them again. This is especially true in games like Heroes of the Storm which have smaller player bases.

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.

Valve already implemented that in Dota 2 with a hidden tier where game ruiners, bot users/exploiters, etc would be grouped together. They also capped the max ELO you could gain during calibration if you are in that shadowbanned tier. It was calculated based on the number of reports you received in the last n games.

Overwatch tried that. People started blocking everyone better than them. In the end, one of the top widowmaker players couldn't find a match, because everyone who didn't want to play against him had blocked him.

Actually, I'm not sure block is the word blizzard used. Avoid, maybe? The end result was more or less the same.

That's not really a great solution, because it doesn't really work all that well. Toxic people are toxic and they work to find ways to actively subvert the mitigations against their toxic behavior.

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.

> Sure, you can report those players, but ultimately, someone has to review the games and I suspect this is quite impossible to achieve.

They don't have to review the games if one account has many reports of "Unsportsmanlike conduct".

Tried and failed. You just reinvented the downvote button.

Decent sized Twitch streamers can easily get a big enough group of people to overwhelm the report thingy.

Then people who had a bad game get reported and banned.

But why? If someone always has a bad game, their matchmaking is seriously miscalibrated.

"But why?"

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.

I really don’t get what you’re suggesting.

Why would the reports be anomalous?

Are you confused with this idea that people can be assholes, and in a moment of frustration would do something bad in the hopes of screwing over someone else?

There really isn't a deep thing here.

Do you believe that people are assholes in such an inconsistent manner that it can’t be adjusted for in large datasets?

yes, valve has had constant problems in dota2 with abusive reports leading to bans. Streamers that stream all their gameplay that have never even once done or said anything abusive got bans.

If someone is a woman they will get brigaded by Gamergaters.

When designing any system you have to think about how it can be abused.

Let me make sure I understand your position correctly. You want to punish players who, for whatever reason, play worse than their rank/score/position would imply they should play?

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.

I re-read their post and don't see how you understood their post that way.

The main complaint of the op is someone 'playing like an idiot'. That sounds very much like underperforming compared to their rank.

I meant troll playing by that. Feeding in LoL or HotS, kicking in the own goal in Rocket League etc.

I think they were referring to purposely tanking.

You missed an important qualifier. OP is talking about players who play badly relative to their rank on purpose in retaliation for perceiving a team member's skill level as not being high enough. It sounds like it's overly specific, but is indeed a common issue. Especially in LoL.

The fairest matchmaking system is one where you can advance ranks when the matchmaker predicts you will lose.

How much have you played as far as ranked games go?

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.

This is already against the rules in many online games.

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.

Don't the matchmaking algorithms correct for this though?

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"?

Not necessarily.

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.

If you're an "A" player, there's a good chance that you could make up that penalty, and still remain an "A" rank player.

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