2019: Have massively multiplayer game publishers successfully handled the "toxicity" problem?

[fireflame]

For a long time, toxicity was a word commonly associated with multiplayer games. Among games that distinguished themselves for their level of toxicity, there were MOBAS . Nowadays, have publishers successfully solved the problem ? Since those games generate a lot of money, we could assume publishers want their community to prosper . Is it a "get used to it or leave" problem that players should be used to or is I up to publishers to try and fix the situation?

 

[Kr1spy]

What would 'solving the problem' even look like? An asshole-free internet? I don't think game publishers can do anything about humanity's worst tendencies.

 

[King Alamat]

Short of limiting game chat to canned phrases and emotes, nope.

 

[fireflame]

What would 'solving the problem' even look like? An asshole-free internet? I don't think game publishers can do anything about humanity's worst tendencies.

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An AI monitoring words written and possibly connected through software to your computer to detect what you say on a mic?Though it might be invasive.

 

[Rhaknar]

no

 

[Spark]

An AI monitoring words written and possibly connected through software to your computer to detect what you say on a mic?Though it might be invasive.

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"Might". That is as invasive as it gets.

 

[The Last Laugh]

You can close chat windows and mute people. You have all of the tools you need. There is nothing that devs can do nor honestly should they be expected to do something globally when you can easily control your own experience.

An AI monitoring words written and possibly connected through software to your computer to detect what you say on a mic?Though it might be invasive.

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Another amazing example of someone totally eager to throw away their personal freedom because they can not be trusted to use the tools at their disposal.
Here is a fantastic plan, do not use voice chat or if you do mute anyone not in your group. Discord servers are a thing.

 

[5taquitos]

Short of limiting game chat to canned phrases and emotes, nope.

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Nice save!
Nice save!
Nice save!

 

[Akronis]

Nice save!
Nice save!
Nice save!

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first thing I thought of when I read that lmao

 

[Moist_Owlet]

RB6 siege is still a cesspit

 

[Ascenion]

It's not really a solvable problem. Assholes always find a way to be assholes.

 

[ChronoMonarch]

Nope, not even in the slightest bit. There is toxicity everywhere in all online games. It is truly a blessing and miracle to be in the presence of nice people online... though even then, some of those nice people can be more clique-y than anything real substantial. Those same nice clique groups, could be the same ones that gossip and backbite you in the community. Sometimes you have to tolerate their abuse to eventually become one of them. Then of course there are the outright haters from the beginning to make your existence in the community a living hell. They will torment you while also getting their friends on your case too... those are the mafia groups that specifically target a person. Then in online communities, we have the hypocritical "nice" GMs to help maintain the community, but actually don't do a thing to make it positive... other than live off of attention from the dwellers of the community.

Me? What do I do to combat this? Either not play online games at all, or at least play with one friend that I can count on for a quality journey.

 

[Ruby-Eyed Witch]

No. Humans are utterly foul. They'll always be that way.

 

[AlexBasch]

Turning off all notifications and blocking all ways of contact (no messaging, or friend requests) is the way to go.

Just mind your fucking business while we're playing and that should be the bare minimum of online decency.

 

[Nome]

Not even close.
Personally I'd like to understand why you can even say certain words. Is there any legitimate context you'd say the N word in a multiplayer game?
Why doesn't that result in an instant infraction?

 

[fireflame]

Not even close.
Personally I'd like to understand why you can even say certain words. Is there any legitimate context you'd say the N word in a multiplayer game?
Why doesn't that result in an instant infraction?

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I wonder if it is related to "freedom speech" in usa and if it impacts the mindset of moderation in games

 

[Nanashrew]

Not even close. If anything from what we've seen of recent events, you're more likely to get quickly hard banned for opposing China's treatment of Hong Kong than if you were to call someone a slur.

 

[uncredited male mk2]

I should probably keep track of some of the players I report in ESO to see if anything is actually done other than the game automatically adding them to my ignore list.

 

[Lord Vatek]

No and they never will.

You can't stop people from being assholes.

 

[Dixie Flatline]

The only way to solve the problem would be for all games to not let anyone talk. Then the game that would allow those to talk would be wildly successful, then the cycle starts all over again. It's never going to be resolved as long as humans are humans.

 

[Deleted member 20284]

For me the ping system in games like Apex Legends go a long long way to dealing with asshats. You don't have to chat, can mute, allow your kids to play, stay in party chat and communicate with your team etc. There remains a large gap and much work to do with cleaning up toxicity vs solving the problem as some utopian ideal amongst gaming sub-communities. The systems these publishers/developers/platforms curate can at least tackle some en masse issues, the Apex system certainly increases the playability of games while removing oneself from the larger issue.

Ambiguously I do have to say there is a part of me that misses the good ol' days of Halo 2 open chat online and the trash talking that went with it.

 

[SapientWolf]

The only way to solve the problem would be for all games to not let anyone talk. Then the game that would allow those to talk would be wildly successful, then the cycle starts all over again. It's never going to be resolved as long as humans are humans.

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The other way to solve the problem is to allow administrators to maintain and moderate their own servers. But it seems publishers no longer want to relinquish that much control over to their own communities now. I mean, imagine what would happen to this forum if there were no moderation. The worst of the community favors spaces where their worst impulses are ignored or tolerated.

 

[Dixie Flatline]

The other way to solve the problem is to allow administrators to maintain and moderate their own servers. But it seems publishers no longer want to relinquish that much control over to their own communities now. I mean, imagine what would happen to this forum if there were no moderation. The worst of the community favors spaces where their worst impulses are ignored or tolerated.

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You can't compare moderating the activity of this forum to a massive game. It's impractical for a developer to supply that level of human moderation to that amount of users.

 

[SapientWolf]

You can't compare moderating the activity of this forum to a massive game. It's impractical for a developer to supply that level of human moderation to that amount of users.

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No, I don't expect them to do that. But as I was mentioning, publishers like EA used to allow people to perform that function on their own rented servers.

 

[Conkerkid11]

Nah, would rather have a couple bad eggs vs what most games seem to be doing when they remove text and voice chat, or make them opt-in.

Absolutely tired of communicating with people in Destiny through head nods and emotes.

Something like what FFXIV has is probably the best solution we'll get. Encourage people to act civilized with rewards.

 

[Deleted member 2254]

I like how Rocket League does it, where you can choose whether to display chat or take it off altogether, whether to display teammates only, you can quickly mute and report people, you can decide not to use voice chat if you want, and so on. I just wish there would be more activity on my reports of toxic people, in my thousandsomething hours I must have gotten a message back that somebody got indeed banned maybe like 8 times, and trust me, it's hard to go 2-3 matches in a row without a toxic idiot there that I reported. I understand that they may not have the resources to monitor what is hundreds of thousands of concurrent players at times.

What can they do to solve that? Maybe use some sort of AI that recognizes whether a person who got mass reported for toxicity did indeed use aggressive words in chat (easy enough in text chat, obviously harder with voice chat) so that he can get banned quick? Maybe actually heavily punish the toxic people out there just to ruin people's games instead of just little warning or couple hour bans? I don't know how it could be improved exactly, but it surely needs improvements because right now multiplayer experiences are way too toxic.

 

[Khanimus]

Fuck no

 

[Kerberosorthos]

This generation I think, can only speak for Xbox one, Ms solved that problem quite a bit with making text messaging more complicated.

Back in the 360 days I received within a round of COD up to 5 messages about how the guy hates me or insulting me and even voice messages where a common thing caused by the easy access to the messenger. With the Xbox one release things changed drastically day one and messages got very rare as it just takes too long to find the person you want to text to.

That's just my experience this generation.

 

[fanboi]

I was trying out DOTA 2 and my experienced friend said "THe first thing you do is just to mute all your team mates".

 

[Roshin]

An AI monitoring words written and possibly connected through software to your computer to detect what you say on a mic?Though it might be invasive.

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The chinese government would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[Parcas]

I been surprised by how polite and constructive people have been so far on Wow classic.

 

[texhnolyze]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/valve-bans-toxic-dota-2-players-till-2038.141723/

 

[fourfourfun]

Short of limiting game chat to canned phrases and emotes, nope.

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I want this world.

 

[Pellaidh]

Not even close. I recently started playing LoL again, and it's still terrible. The closest LoL has come to stopping toxicity was giving you an option to automatically mute all chat. And it took Riot literally 10 years to do that. Glacial doesn't even come close to describing the speed at which they're trying to solve this issue.

Sadly, people will always find a way. In LoL's case, that involves spamming pings on people for every perceived mistake. In Dota, it involves spamming "Well Played" whenever you die. And so on.

Even card games like Hearthstone and Eternal are filled with assholes, and those are super casual 1v1 card game where you'd really think there would be no reason to get mad at other people.

So I don't think there's any other way besides completely disabling communication (which works in something like Rocket League, but not so much in MOBAs) or just banning people. But in the case of MOBAs, that would mean banning most of their playerbase. And in case of LoL, it wouldn't really work since most people have like 10 alt accounts each.

 

[White Glint]

Depends on the game. Haven't had any trouble in FFXIV. Have pretty much only had trouble in R6 Siege.

Seriously Siege players are out of their minds, it's like a parody of 2007 Xbox Live that could probably make Ricky Gervais' self-perceived ego cry.

 

[TheEchosOfTheCyborg]

No and it really feels sometimes companies don't care or pay lip service to it, most of the time, the best they offer is report options that don't feel like you're accomplishing anything or mute buttons or mute chat or just muting your mic, the latter gets you yelled at or told off for "being toxic" for not wanting to deal with hate, abuse and toxicity in places like Overwatch forums and the like.

 

[Couscous]

No, absolutely not. Take Rainbow Six Siege as example. The devs have made a few systems that make team killing and picking on one player more difficult since the release of the game. However when you hear people in the lobby, you would think it's some kind of nazi meeting. The people are racist, sexist, antisemites and overall assholes.

 

[Ciao]

I've already seen several videos of people celebrating the return of in lobby chat in the new Call Of Duty. Arguing the toxic ultra aggressive banter is part of the community, the experience and part of what made them thick skin adults in the 360 CoD years. Ensue 10 min of unfunny homohobic and racist shit. Yay for casual stupidity.

 

[Deleted member 8784]

Not even close.
Personally I'd like to understand why you can even say certain words. Is there any legitimate context you'd say the N word in a multiplayer game?
Why doesn't that result in an instant infraction?

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It's difficult for them to take into account any 'heated gamer moments' you might be having at the time. You wouldn't want them to confuse your 'gamer moments' with purely just being a racist now would ya?

 

[Hyun Sai]

When I play Fighting games online, I always set messages to "friends only", works like a charm.

This is 1V1 games though, managing toxicity in team play can be a headache.

 

[nikos]

I honestly can't stand forced chat filters or any sort of communication limitations. Having the option to enable those things, for those who are easily offended, is fine.

PUBG removing pre-match voice chat is a recent offender. A lot of people said stupid shit, but there were just as many legitimately entertaining moments.

 

[Thera]

I wonder if it is related to "freedom speech" in usa and if it impacts the mindset of moderation in games

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"freedom of speech" isn't "freedom to say what you want", there are still law.

 

[Mitth'raw'nuruodo]

those games generate a lot of money

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That's IMO the biggest problem. Even an asshole buys MTX and that is sadly the most important thing.

 

[Kr1spy]

An AI monitoring words written and possibly connected through software to your computer to detect what you say on a mic?Though it might be invasive.

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Let's hypothetically say you had software that could translate what people say with 100% accuracy and then computer scans the text for... what? The total number of offensive ways a human can express themselves is essentially infinite.

Things like profanity filters work to prevent someone from typing offensive words; what you've offered is just data collection unless the computer you're playing on does something in response to what's said.

Even if the computer could 'understand' (which is an entirely different conversation) what was being said, what then? These are deep and complex problems that require much more thought and care than I think you've put in.

 

[Hours Left]

No, and the majority of their "efforts" to do so have been pathetic.

 

[Poppy]

nope, basically they just give you a mute option and a report option that hardly works and make you do the work

 

[Silky]

I got called a nigger in a game of Apex about 15 minutes ago, so

I think the last game thing that actually had a working report system was Overwatch ironically lol. I've conceded in hoping for anything better.

I'll stick to Discord for matching and keep muting I guess

 

[TacoSupreme]

One of the things that keeps online games toxic is the lack of resources dedicated to actually investigating reports. I know it's a difficult issue to solve, but it seems like ever so many online games rely on algorithms and hidden player toxicity scores based on numbers of reports from other users, rather than having actual humans review reports. As a result toxic and hateful people end up actually being better at using the reporting systems than regular people, because they have on qualms mass reporting people in an effort to get them banned. This results in punishments being softened, because a ton of innocent people get caught up by the system due to bad people mass reporting people for no good reason.

If even one in one hundred reports actually got reviewed it would make things better.

 

[Dixie Flatline]

I want this world.

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You already have this in Hearthstone and people still find a way to use them passive aggressively.

 

[dancingphlower]

People are constantly using racial and homophobic slurs over the mic and teabagging in MK11, so not in that game. Thankfully you can use a private party to mute players.