ReactiveDrop
Tools to address toxicity
Toxicity is common in online games these days, in this thread, we try to focus on the toxicity in Reactive Drop, and what has been done to prevent it, what has not been done, as well as starting a discussion in what can be done (without spending outrageous hours).
We can differentiate a few types of abuse:
- Verbal abuse;
- Friendly fire abuse;
- Lobby kick abuse;
- Technical abuse;
Let's start with a more global scope. In the past months we have spent immense time behind the screens to create a system to register things. A system that assigns a toxic score to players, and is able to register abuse. The goal is to create a system, that shares principles with the so called Overwatch system from CS:GO.
In phase one, we are not able to register a lot of things. Verbal abuse, friendly fire abuse, screenshots, kicks and more. The important thing here is, we have chosen to only investigate a player, when a report has been made. In our opinion, it is very important to report abusive players, so things are both completely transparent and clear.
Right now, we need to lay hands on the final touch of the reporting system, an in-game GUI. The api's & backend are already working. Any help with the final phase to speed up things is highly appreciated.
Now, how would this play out with the individual categories:
Verbal abuse
The first line of defense is the 'mute' button. Players can mute individual people.
If that is not enough, we would need a report of a player, complete with screenshots and small chat history of the lobby. It would be easy to determine if a player violated the Steam Conduct.
Friendly fire abuse
From the report, we would have a list of friendly fire this user has initiated. If there are multiple reports, it would be easy enough to see if there is a trend. It's important to have the report, to rule out accidental friendly fire or just people having fun.
Lobby kick abuse
Another issue is kick abuse. We have some data, and sadly this is becoming more of an issue. People kick players on public games for multiple reasons:
- they like to play only with friends
- they don't like specific people
If kicked in a public lobby, both would be a violation of the Steam Conduct. People should create friends-only games if they don't like to play with strangers and report people if they abuse the game. A kick after a report is fine, but players should not kick people without reason.
In real life, we have an accuser (report), an accused person, and a judge (moderator) for a reason.
With the report, we could determine if there is a trend and warn those users.
Technical abuse
This would be cheating, hacking and other stuff. We have some anticheat/anti tamper on ranked servers, but this will always be a cat and mouse play. With a player report, we could be warned about undetected cheats, but also increase the threshold of a player who has doubtful detections.
Summary
Now having this out of the way, what we have is:
- ability to mute people;
- detections;
- reporting infrastructure;
What we don't have yet:
- a GUI for the reporting
What we tried and didn't work according to us:
- Give more rights to lobby leader (reason: more kick abuse);
Verdict
For the public, we have already spent dozens of hours, maybe even hundred, in research, asking opinions, and asking professionals, not limited to Valve. There is no perfect solution, but in our opinion, the road we took has at least the potential to improve things, and is the most fair. It would all depend however on having players report people, and let a moderator (judge) determine the corrective action.
If there is any addition or suggestion based on this document, I prefer to discuss it on Discord or Steam, and write down the conclusion here.
Ps. there is a zero tolerance in this topic, comments with accusations or one-liners, that are not constructive will be removed
This topic relates to the following other topics:
- #518
- #475
- #337
- #259
- #418
- #609
On counter strike, if player are too toxic they are mute by default for others player, idk if it should be like that in rd but I put this here.
The main thing stopping us from making players muted-by-default is that we don't really have a good way to communicate that information. Ideally, we don't want it to be possible to look up a full list of muted players, so a leaderboard can't be used to store that information, for example. We also don't want to make AS:RD depend on a central server to run - it wouldn't be as much of an issue here if the server went down, because you'd just have to manually mute someone if they were being obnoxious, but the added load from every player querying the server every time anyone joins a public lobby would take away resources from other things.
The main thing stopping us from making players muted-by-default is that we don't really have a good way to communicate that information. Ideally, we don't want it to be possible to look up a full list of muted players, so a leaderboard can't be used to store that information, for example. We also don't want to make AS:RD depend on a central server to run - it wouldn't be as much of an issue here if the server went down, because you'd just have to manually mute someone if they were being obnoxious, but the added load from every player querying the server every time anyone joins a public lobby would take away resources from other things.
Then maybe need change the UI in game for a faster and easyer muting, like idk, a small liste of players name on side of screen with mute buttons when u presse tab so u Can mute very fast when u are playing.
could we use the steam api to check if you have blocked communication with a person? i think in cs it does that to have people muted by default
