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>Sure, but I don't see a good alternative Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide th

• lossolo 7y ago
  > Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems. How would that work in case of MMORPG with open world ? One clan would votekick competing clan? Any group votekick whoever they want? Or in case of FPS games lets vote to kick player X because he is just too good (killing us all) so he is cheating for sure? > Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems. Dosen't apply for most MMO games.
  • anonymousab 7y ago
    The false positive of someone getting kicked for being too good is a better negative outcome than the false positive of a ban, especially in an opaque system with poor support staffing and resolution processes. When users can trivially provide and administrate and experiment with their own servers, then the effect of not being able to return to the same server is lessened. >MMO games They're a different beast entirely. But in the case of battlefield, you have a capped playercount that is orders of magnitude smaller than an MMO, and much more manageable.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • zttxc 7y ago
      You have no idea of how much a votekick system will get abused. Nobody would ever seriously consider such a system in 2020. Teammates will kick you out for stealing kills from them. Teammates will leave bots on even if they are flagrant bots if they are helping the team. Enemies will kick you out if you are too good.
      • jeltz 7y ago
        Why would it be abused more today? It was not abused that much back when I played Quake 1 and Quake 2.
        • hinkley 7y ago
          I believe the loot system changes in WoW were inspired by occurrences of groups of people joining matchmaking together, then kicking a person after the boss died and taking all the stuff for themselves. I only saw this sort of behavior firsthand once or twice, but I’ve heard from others who thought it was widespread.
          • zttxc 7y ago
            And in WoW too, given how the honor rank system works, imagine if people could kick others from battlegrounds: they would kick those with higher ranks so they could climb the ranks faster themselves.
            • Nullabillity 7y ago
              So.. don't design systems that encourage toxic behaviour? In the case of WoW, they realized their mistake and ripped out the global PvP ladder over a decade ago.
              • 7y ago
  • WorldMaker 7y ago
    > How would that work in case of MMORPG with open world ? One clan would votekick competing clan? Any group votekick whoever they want? Checks and balances. It's a political problem at that point. MUDs had sometimes very traditional political institutions for bans/player behavior issues, and the same can directly apply to MMOs: "councils of multiple clans", for instance. You can already think of most corporations running MMOs as "BFDLs" (benevolent dictators for life) and there's good reason to ask them to add juries/trials for a more open democratic process to bans, as one common political solution to dictatorship. The same obviously goes the other direction that if players want more involvement in bans/kicks, they need structures like juries/trials to keep things transparent and to bubble up such issues as appropriate. You can't always solve political problems with technical solutions, but more importantly sometimes technical problems have good political solutions. >> Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems. > Dosen't apply for most MMO games. Arguably it should. At the very least for long term archival, MMO games should feel more pressure to provide server software access to players to host their own servers. There's also a lot of interesting history associated with MMOs that had open servers (many MUDs), or reverse engineered server shards (things like various Ultima Online player-created shards). Even if most players would prefer a "canon" experience in BFDL hosted shards, that isn't necessarily a strong reason to avoid offering players a choice to host their own servers. Arguably most good MMOs hosting your own server cluster is a great amount of effort and would be A) self-limiting (only certain groups of players would have the combo of resources/interests/skills), and B) at least somewhat useful to the game owner themselves as a form of CI/CD test (if other people can reproduce your Production environment you are more resilient against possible mistakes/failures in your Production environment).
    • munk-a 7y ago
      MUDs, while wonderful, occasionally devolved into closed ecosystems where RP enforcement and opinions ended up creating a toxic community with the playerbase eventually shrinking to nothing. MUDs are amazing but I think they're a bad example to call on in this case.
      • WorldMaker 7y ago
• nerdponx 7y ago
  Only if you provide a robust and empowered support staff to quickly unban and resolve false positives. That is, actually take responsibility, which is something game developers and major publishers seem allergic to. It costs money to hire, train, and oversee said staff. Game companies don't want to spend that money.
  • logfromblammo 7y ago
    Those game companies could always exit the company-hosted company-moderated multiplayer space and go back to either privately-hosted servers or single-player games. If you can't accept the costs of central servers, don't make them an essential part of your business model.
  • sidlls 7y ago
    They would be more inclined if gamers were willing to pay the additional cost. Unfortunately they rarely are. The gaming community, especially the hard core community, is one of the most oddly-miserly communities I’ve ever seen. Some of them will spend thousands on liquid cooling and high end graphic cards, specialized input devices, etc., but balk or even rage at paying an additional few bucks over the lifetime of a game for improved features and support.
    • zttxc 7y ago
      Uh? Have you seen the price of AAA games?
      • sidlls 7y ago
        They’re flat for years. Ten years ago a premium AAA title would typically release at $49.99 to $59.99 and still have expansions and other DLC for sale. In constant dollars the retail price of top-end games is basically flat, or even lower now.
        • Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
          Your argument is disingenuous. Most aaa titles have significant dlc that hardly expands the game. Gtav is an exception, and that's only because stupid/rich people whale on shark cards. Also repeat purchases from banned players. Cod is now $120/yr. Without and iaps. If you don't buy the dlc you'll have a hard timemaking friends and playing pvp. Most games are like that now. Looking at title prices is a flawed metric. A good metric total cost of all iaps. If there are unlimited purchases available then you can be sure that the game has been crippled to coerce vulnerable players into spending irrational amounts. This trend is unethical and everyone involved in allowing this to continue is no better than the sacklers.
• ssully 7y ago
  > Allow users to votekick and voteban. This is usually just a band aid and can be pretty ineffective in a game like Battlefield where there are a large number of players in a single match. Specifically, a cheater has to be really obvious for enough people to notice and actually care enough to cast a vote.
  • EamonnMR 7y ago
    I, for one, only notice when it's a real obvious cheater. And in those circumstances the perception of a fair game would go way up if we where able to ban the fool ourselves as players.
  • anonymousab 7y ago
    If the cheater isn't obvious enough then they aren't having much worse of an effect than a really good player. But that's why I mention giving server control to users; they can experiment with their own alternative anti cheat and moderation solutions.
  • janoc 7y ago
    Plus this is easily gamed - most games where voting has been enabled just had storms of vote requests being generated. Some by butt-hurt snowflakes that can't handle better players but most by explicit trolls trying to cause mayhem, spam and hopefully getting someone kicked for fun. At some point the voting gets either ignored or disabled outright.
    • Terr_ 7y ago
      IMO this goes to how per-server "communities" were destroyed by the rise of new business models involving follow-on purchases. Previously (e.g. CS 1.x) you could have a loose federation of privately-run servers, with a certain amount of darwinian-selection for good or bad communities. However once GameCo starts selling exclusive skins and weapons and XP-boosters and things, they can't allow the possibility of rogue servers just unlocking everything, so everything was brought together under a corporate-hosting-only umbrella. This also destroyed the capacity to leverage volunteer admins, unless the company invested in a mechanism for "you pay we host" servers.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Seems to me the shift to "Matchmaking" style online multiplayer has caused a whole lot of problems that weren't that big a deal back in the "community server" days. I personally think one can blame the rampant toxicity of players on this removal of the community aspect.
  • Nasrudith 7y ago
    There were plenty of toxic jerks online period with community lobbies. Although if you found a good server or set of them it mitigated the exposure. A big difference experience wise but the underlying problem was the same. Ranked Ladder, PUG Teams, PVP, and especially "griefing mechanics" related to losses for the loser from the stakes can all cumulatively contribute to toxicity.
  • nkrisc 7y ago
    I have to agree. There were good alternative approaches. For example, I used to play Battlefield 1942 a lot when it was current. A lot of the larger communities had public servers, but also private servers that only people who the mods got to know would be whitelisted for. In the more well-run communities, the mods would hang out and spend some time on the public server to keep order, or were at least accessible (via TeamSpeak, often) if they weren't actively on it. Cheaters quickly got banned from the public servers and people who stuck with the community could enjoy the private server where they knew there'd be a good group of people and usually very little toxicity.
    • CodeWriter23 7y ago
      I made some really good friends playing 1942. Guys I met up with IRL, in other states even. The only probs we had were the “defeat the ceiling by flying upside down” pilots and trash talking with other clans could get a little spammy. The rivalry was welcome though and we mostly resolved it by kicking ass on various ladders. And occasionally getting our asses handed to us. WoW coming along and deflating our numbers made me sad.
      • nkrisc 7y ago
• wyldfire 7y ago
  > Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems. This might still be the best compromise but it is terribly frustrating to be accused of cheating because of different skill levels or tactics.
  • McAtNite 7y ago
    Not to mention the ease that that feature can be abused. What’s to stop the opposing team from just vote kicking the top players on your team? I spent my entire middle school life playing Starcraft. When SC2 came out the same rush tactics I learned in SC1 worked. I was often accused of hacking simply because I had years of experience tweaking the fastest build method.
    • smabie 7y ago
      Assuming you need a majority to ban and teams are equal, everything?
    • vitaflo 7y ago
      >Not to mention the ease that that feature can be abused. What’s to stop the opposing team from just vote kicking the top players on your team? This is exactly what happened when they had this feature in Overwatch. One of the top (legit) Widow players could not find a game because everyone he played against vote banned him from their games. He was basically unable to play the game because he was too good at it.
      • bsder 7y ago
        Sure, but you have to expect that. So, you look at the votebans, and you zap the people doing it unfairly. Or, even better, a voteban, legitimate or not, always costs you something--so you think twice before swinging the hammer. These systems always seem to fail because there is no accountability. You can't allow actions without accountability for those same actions. The problem is that accountability means involving humans and humans don't scale.
      • 7y ago
• fzeroracer 7y ago
  > Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems. If you want to see a game where that effort fails, one needs not look further than Mordhau. It's an incredibly awful community where players will initiate votekicks simply for getting killed, and cause players to get kicked/banned because the community finds overabusing the feature to be funny.
  • LaGrange 7y ago
    > It's an incredibly awful community where players will initiate votekicks simply for getting killed ...lol, that's nothing, expect people getting kicked for having a feminine voice.
    • fzeroracer 7y ago
      Well yes, that was more or less a benign example of the community issues in Mordhau. I wasn't too interested in getting into a deep argument on the issues of extremely toxic communities and the various *phobic issues within because that inevitably causes bad faith arguments here sadly.
• debaserab2 7y ago
  > These are tools and approaches that we had in past games and while they are not perfect, they are better than these black box invasive anticheat solutions born from a desire to avoid giving community control to users. There are still games with votekick/ban. They work for cheaters, but the collateral damage that comes with votekick/ban is far, far greater than anticheat wave bans. People votekick for very petty reasons and people often reflexively vote yes on the assumption that the votekick is done in good faith.
  • reroute1 7y ago
    That depends on the community, if there is a mature group of people playing these aren't really big issues. Not that it's going to fix everything, but when I play games with these features they seem to help more than they are abused.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • jdnenej 7y ago
      Vote kicks rarely seen to work because the rest of the players don't know what is going on. A vote starts and you think "wait what, what did they do" even if someone says "they were cheating" most people playing wouldn't have seen it and have no idea if this is true.
  • jimmaswell 7y ago
    Reminds me of Rainbow 6 where you're kicked the instant you lose a gunfight or anyone just doesn't like you.
• babypuncher 7y ago
  Surely you can see how mob mentality makes vote kicking and vote banning a terrible idea
  • close04 7y ago
    That would quickly turn into a popularity contest rather than a cheater elimination tool. I'm not really qualified to tell the difference between a cheater and a really good player on many occasions. I can vote for lack of fairplay of course but give the average player a chance to vote and they'll quickly vote out anyone they don't like.
• baby 7y ago
  None of your solutions make sense. Which is obvious to anyone who has played a game with cheaters. > Allow users to votekick and voteban. People love to say others are cheating when they are losing. Not going to work. Allowing users to provide their own solutions? That’s funny you say that. Tournaments and leagues on CS pretty much made you install software that would periodically take screenshot of your computer to prove you were not cheating.
• philliphaydon 7y ago
  > Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems. I used to play Counter Strike starting at Beta 1.3, on a 56k modem. In NZ we had some team who went off overseas to represent NZ in a competition. They lost the first round. After they got back I found their practice server. They didn’t seem to mind if randoms joined. I got 3 headshots and they banned me for “cheating” My point is, if you leave it up to the players. They will kick and ban anyone for any reason because they can. You simply cannot rely on such a system.
  • hutzlibu 7y ago
    Your cheating guys lost in a real contest. Seems to be a working system. And idiots are idiots, I don't want to play with them anyway. So if a server is full of them who kock people for the sake of it ... then I just choose a different server.
    • mattigames 7y ago
      In many many games you don't have any alternative to "playing with idiots" so no, it wouldn't be a working system in any significant way.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• vlozko 7y ago
  Battlefield 4 had rentable servers. It wasn’t fun getting kicked for being good, despite playing on a PS4 where cheating didn’t really exist.