Good. Again, fuck Sony

Who gives a shit. Arrowhead made a good game. Fuck Sony. No one wants your dumbass PSN account.

You say that as if it removes the possibility but I don’t think I need to provide specific examples of obviously foolish decisions ruining modern games. There are plenty to choose from.

They’re gonna block mod tools, just wait.

Sounds like something a lameman would say

You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don’t currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It’s a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.

You can say there’s no issues with that system as many times as you like but it’s not going to make it true. Some people definitely disagree with you on that point and I know that because I’m one of them. You don’t seem all that interested in having that opinion challenged so I’m not going to bother writing out why here but I’ve said more on the topic in this thread if you’d like to understand another perspective more clearly.

Just because they’re already doing it doesn’t mean there’s no issues with it.

It does talk about some steps they’re taking right at the beginning. I missed those initially because on mobile it looks like an ad before the actual article starts so I skimmed over it.

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Sure, but who decides who the assholes are? What standard of proof do they use? What happens to people who almost meet that definition but don’t quite? Some cases are pretty straightforward but many have too much grey area for a simple concept like ‘ban all the assholes’ to hold up without a huge amount of effort that often can’t be provided effectively.

Evidence is key and that can be difficult to get. Additionally, players often edit clips to get the reaction they want from moderators or the community as a whole. The video in the linked article could potentially be a great example of this. The streamer obviously wants you to think they were attacked unprovoked but is that really what happened? We have no context for what led to the recorded exchange. Did the streamer refer to him using a racial slur for failing to hold what they thought was the proper position during the round immediately before the video begins? That doesn’t excuse what the player said in response but it does change the context significantly. If you ban the rape guy and then he releases a video showing the streamer saying even more outrageous things do you reverse the ban, ban them both, or give them both a warning not to be dicks in the future? This is not an isolated incident either. Multiple situations just like this happen every day on platforms with any significant number of users. How do you give each one the time it requires to be resolved correctly? Will you have any players left if you ban everyone who offends someone else?

The point is, policing people’s behavior is very challenging. There are tons of ways to abuse any system you can design unless you record literally everything your users do and that comes with it’s own set of moral and logistical issues. The simplest and most universally applicable solution is to enable users to block other players themselves. Making that impact matchmaking is kind of dumb in my opinion as it just opens up the potential for abuse as you noted. Set up a few very simple ground rules and then let players sort out who they want to be able to communicate with based on how they treat them. That’s the only solution I can see that is realistic and sustainable but it requires users to take an active role in maintaining the community, which they should be doing anyway if they want it to be the kind of place you’re describing.

For most people gaming is a social activity. The popularity and prevalence of multiplayer games vs single player games bears this out. Playing single player games is not a viable solution to avoiding harassment for people who are interested in the social and/or multiplayer aspects of gaming. Muting people who are dicks is a viable solution and that’s exactly what I’ve been advocating for in this discussion. Many others seem to think they shouldn’t need to be involved in the process and game devs or other communication platforms should do all the work for them. I don’t think that’s a realistic suggestion.

I understand the comparison but you can’t exactly mute people with minimal effort in real life. Additionally, the threat of rape in person is significantly different than anonymously online from a legal perspective because the person making the threat knows who and where the target is at the moment the threat is made.

At a high level I don’t disagree with most of what you’re saying. The point I’m making is that there’s a pretty large gap between “something should be done about online harassment” and “this is our plan for stopping online harassment”. Most calls for action appeal to the first without much concern for the second, and the solution is the difficult part, not identifying the problem.

While that is true in many respects, voice chat is quite difficult to police compared to text chat. I’m not sure how you go about automating or even monitoring that without recording everything people say using your service. Which then brings up a whole host of issues from data storage costs to privacy concerns to consent to record laws. You pretty much have to rely on users to submit evidence of their claims and that leads us back to the idea that users need to expect to have an active role in enforcing any sort of moderation policy.

I didn’t say no attempts should be made to improve things. In fact in one of my comments I explicitly said the opposite. I’m saying people need to be both realistic in their expectations of what any moderation policy can achieve and proactive in the pursuit of their own online safety. Moderators will never be able to fully eliminate this problem because it is an inherent part of the behavior of a subset of humanity and humans are involved in the activities where this harassment takes place.

If you expect every person you meet, online or in person, to respect the rules you are going to be disappointed. By all means, make suggestions for improvement. But understand any solution will be imperfect and accept your role in dealing with those imperfections. To put the sentiment in a more succint form, get thicker skin.

Yes that is how moderation has worked in some places in the past. It’s also been historically unpaid volunteer work and not particularly effective, especially at large scales. Most of the people here have at least one story about bad moderation on reddit precisely because that kind of moderation is inefficient and heavily influenced by the personal bias of the moderator reviewing a report. You still needed to block people on a regular basis if you wanted to both participate and avoid harassment from a subset of users. That’s how it is all over the internet and there is nothing that can be done to completely remove that element of online activity. Hence the need for thicker skin.

Ok so what exactly is your proposal? We’ve already established that what happened in this video is not illegal based on the laws of any of the countries that the people involved likely live in so what’s next? How do you go from where we are now to the system you want to see implemented?

You’re talking about abstract ideas and I’m talking about actionable realities. The two often conflict with each other. The world you’re describing isn’t the one we live in so if you you want to make it a reality you need to get much more specific about how to implement your vision. It’s easy to say “do more” when you don’t have to worry about the resources required or side effects of what you’re asking for.

Normally I’d agree with the blanket statement that companies are allowed to get away with too much but the way you’re applying that argument here doesn’t make sense. You’re also saying that people don’t have any responsibility to protect themselves and I just can’t agree with that statement. It’s way too idealistic to be applicable to real life in any significant way.

I don’t know that that’s true. Some games may be worse than others but I don’t think there are any specific games, or for that matter places online in general, where some form of harassment is not an issue. If you want to avoid it entirely then you need to avoid people entirely and that’s not really a teneble solution.

I’m not a lawyer but it is my understanding of US law that something like what you see in the video does not meet the legal definition of a threat. There is no indication that the offender knows the real identity or location of the person they are speaking to, both of which are required to establish the intent necessary to define something as a threat in the legal sense of the word. Furthermore, the person speaking appears to be from another country, likely the UK or Australia, both of which have different laws than the US. Is Riot supposed to evaluate this situation based on the laws of the country in which they have their corporate HQ, the country the speaker resides in, or the country in which the listener resides? I don’t think a lawyer in any of those three countries would advise this streamer to press charges based on the content of this video alone which would indicate that this kind of behavior is not illegal. Perhaps it should be, but that’s another matter entirely.

To reiterate, none of this is meant to be interpreted as a defense of what that guy said. It’s just to illustrate the point that moderation is not a simple thing to enforce even in situations where a surface level evaluation seems like it should be. It’s much simpler to mute this guy or leave the lobby or whatever else you feel like you need to do to protect yourself. The unfortunate reality remains that people like this will always be around no matter what system is in place to minimize their impact. That’s not to say that no steps should be taken with that goal in mind, just that when all is said and done you will always bear some responsibility in protecting yourself from content or behavior you don’t want to be exposed to.

Why do game makers need to be the responsible party? I’ve never played a game that didn’t let you block and/or mute people you’re playing with. That doesn’t make assholes disappear but it stops the problem from impacting you. Why add a middleman to the equation? Taking care of it yourself is much faster and doesn’t depend on convincing someone else that what’s happening needs to be dealt with. You can block people for having the wrong favorite color if you want to.

There’s too much inconsistency in what people perceive to be inappropriate behavior for a central authority to have the final say on the matter. Moderator action should be reserved for situations that explicitly violate the law, and even that varies significantly based on location and interpretation. It’s much simpler to let players decide what they will tolerate on their own.