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CountAntonio

Member
Oct 25, 2017
21,701
Via Forums
In light of recent publicity on the state of MORDHAU's community, we would like to discuss our stance on toxicity and the topic of gender and race in our game.​
First and foremost, Triternion does not, nor have we ever, had plans to add a customization option that would force a white male default. This is an absurd idea that stems from a misunderstanding in a recent interview by PC Gamer with two of our artists. These artists, both uninvolved with character development went into a verbal interview with minimal PR experience and ended up answering some of the questions in a misleading way, which combined with a lack of context, led to some very controversial statements. Again, we at Triternion do not, nor have we ever had any plans to implement any kind of ethnicity toggle on potential future character ethnicity customization additions.​
The responses given were referring to the gender part of the questions, which were based off an old controversial "gender toggle" idea, with the intention being to give the player options to play the game with only female characters, only male characters, or both. This concept was brought forth by one of our developers and posted prior to the game's release as a response to a large number of heated debates regarding the topic of realism. The idea to give players this ability was simply a theoretical solution to a difficult problem and was never intended to be the official stance of Triternion on this topic. This is a lesson for us that we must be excessively prudent with the wording we use in the future as it can be easy to misconstrue an individual's opinions and ideas as officially sanctioned.​
Shortly after launch and in internal discussions, the concept of a gender option toggle was dismissed as it would undermine the customization players work hard to create. The two artists featured in the interview were ill-informed of this decision, which was a major mistake and miscommunication on the side of Triternion; and in combination with a question on a sensitive issue of which they were underprepared to answer, strongly contributed to this misunderstanding. Our official stance is that these toggle options are out of the question.​
In regards to community toxicity, we do not have prior experience managing communities of this size, nor the manpower or resources that established studious can leverage. Our team consists of 11 first-time developers working remotely and volunteer moderators who try their best to curb this toxicity and behavior across all platforms, including in-game. At the moment we are stretched thin with major important content additions and unfortunately we do not have the staff nor systems in-place to moderate everything to our intended level of standards. We plan on improving in this regard. We hope our players understand our situation and will continue to place their faith in us, as improving these things will take time.​
mod edit: for context, see this thread
 
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fracas

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,636
Decent response but the lack of internal communication (provided their devs that spoke on the record really were ill-informed and gender toggles were never planned) is incredibly embarrassing, especially for such a small team.

I still have no interest in the game with the kind of community it attracts and refuses to moderate. It's not that hard to implement an automatic chat filter that blocks slurs. Cmon now.
 

TheJackdog

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,644
tldr: we fucked up giving people with no PR experience permission to speak on the game, we have plans to fix things, but we have no details to share cause our team is small.
 
Oct 26, 2017
9,859
Wait, so PCGamer spoke to some artists and not Triterion PR or someone in charge of communication?

Yyyesh, 11 developers? Welp, that's extremely low when your game is a million seller, i don't want to be in their position.
 

OrdinaryPrime

Self-requested ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
11,042
So most of this seems to make sense, but I don't agree that the moderators are trying their best. If anything they are encouraging the behavior. Get new moderators or this type of message will ring false.

It really is hard to believe them based on all of the discord and forum screenshots I've seen as well.
 
OP
OP
CountAntonio

CountAntonio

Member
Oct 25, 2017
21,701
I'll say they lack of moderation on their forum is something they have needed to address for a long time. It's a cesspool that has festered for too long.
 

P-Bo

One Winged Slayer
Member
Jun 17, 2019
4,405
Never even heard of Mordhau or these guys until this whole shitshow blew up--so much for first impressions.
 

pronk

Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,642
The phrase 'excessively cautious' doesn't sound great in that context but it's possibly just poorly worded.
 

Abuguet

Member
Apr 23, 2019
312
Tl;dr
"We didn't mean what you think we said. We can't do what we want to do. Plz don't hate".

So basically nothing yet. It's a shame they didn't comment on their stance regarding racism and sexual discrimination. Would be nice to hear them at least say they don't share the racist/sexist sentiment.
 

TheJackdog

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,644
they need a comms manager or PR rep desperately. even this statement right here should of had a line about how they are actively looking for someone to do that.
 

OnionPowder

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
9,323
Orlando, FL
The phrase 'excessively cautious' doesn't sound great in that context but it's possibly just poorly worded.

They've shown so far that they're very good at speaking poorly so I wouldn't be shocked.
I'm pretty sure they don't have full time moderators but members of development are moderating the forums and that's impossibile if you are working on the game at the same time. 11 people is extremely low for a MP centric game.

They have no community managers? Most muliplayer indie games i play usually have a team of volunteers that help with moderation and follow a guide put out by the devs on what they find acceptable or not.
 

Sunny

Member
Oct 25, 2017
376
In regards to community toxicity, we do not have prior experience managing communities of this size, nor the manpower or resources that established studious can leverage.

dog. one of the oldest threads is "Post your kniggas" it doesn't take a team to pull that shit down. fuck these guys.
 

OnionPowder

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
9,323
Orlando, FL
Oh look, how surprising. One of the first responses to that post:

"Just let boys be boys. People that can't take banter will be filtered out. Begone with the SJWs."

I wonder how you accidentally let a community this toxic fester. Impossible to know.
 

OrdinaryPrime

Self-requested ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
11,042
I'm pretty sure they don't have full time moderators but members of development are moderating the forums and that's impossibile if you are working on the game at the same time. 11 people is extremely low for a MP centric game.

I'm pretty sure that if you've sold 500k in your first week, you could afford to hire a community manager who could help figure this shit out. If they haven't already done so, they should immediately.


I don't think Steam should be relied upon for moderating festering communities of toxicity. They don't have a good track record.
 

Taker34

QA Tester
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
1,122
building stone people
dog. one of the oldest threads is "Post your kniggas" it doesn't take a team to pull that shit down. fuck these guys.
Yeah that's why I have a very hard time believing them to begin with. They also failed to distance themselves from the concerns around the right wingers problematic in their community in the apology and didn't even mention it.
Didn't they even state they don't see anything wrong with that thread title?
 

TheRulingRing

Banned
Apr 6, 2018
5,713
This whole thing is a perfect example of "Any publicity is good publicity".

Who the hell knew about this game prior to the outrage? They probably saw a decent boom in sales from this.
 

Lump

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,961
The controversial thread is still live and active with its original title

p9fwMR3.png
 

OrdinaryPrime

Self-requested ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
11,042

TheRuralJuror

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,497

Probably because steam also sucks at moderating their platform. I barely visit their forums for anything after that "we wuz Kings" bullshit from the AC origin launch.

That aside, if that "post your kniggas" thread is still going at this point, they're full of shit imo.

This whole thing is a perfect example of "Any publicity is good publicity".

Who the hell knew about this game prior to the outrage? They probably saw a decent boom in sales from this.

Was reading about this during the whole epic moneyhatting chivalry II debacle.
 

Eumi

Member
Nov 3, 2017
3,518
"The people the interview was with hadn't gone through the proper training to know that they shouldn't say racist and sexist stuff".

What an embarrassment. But good to know that there's no way they'll actually implement the feature now.

Take this and improve, don't just listen to the bigots who butter you up. Be better than you are now.
 

Fularu

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,609
11 man team and « artists » aren't privy to what goes on internally with the game?

Yeah right
 

Wok

Avenger
Oct 26, 2017
3,258
France
Steam does not offer free moderation. They still would have to do it themselves.

Valve offers free moderation done by their own moderators.

Our moderation team will start reviewing reported discussion posts in all game hubs on Steam. You can opt out if you wish.

How does this work?
Starting on Tuesday, when a discussion thread or post in your community is reported by a player, it will be added to a queue for our moderation team to review. We'll look at these reported posts (along with all other reported content we are already reviewing) and remove anything that violates our Community Guidelines.

Don't worry: We won't be actively perusing your community discussions or posting in threads - you have your own voice and your own style of communication with players about your game. We'll only be communicating with players if it's necessary when issuing a warning or ban for reported content.

You can also read more about the moderation approach that we will be applying in our Best Practices documentation.

Why now?
For quite a while now, our moderation team has been reviewing and taking appropriate action on many forms of reported community content across Steam, such as screenshots, artwork, guides, user profiles, community groups, and user reviews. In the past, we've been hesitant to get involved in the moderation of individual game discussions, as we didn't want to step on the toes of game developers that want to have their own style of communication with players and their own set of guidelines for behavior.

But over time, we've been hearing from more and more game developers that would actually prefer for us to take a more active role in discussion boards, at least to the extent of handling posts that are reported by other players.

Meanwhile, we've been expanding the Valve content moderation team to keep up with the increasing number of game communities and the amount of content added to the Steam community.
How can I opt out?
If you do already have your own moderation staff, or want complete control over the reported content in your hub, you can opt out of this service by visiting the Steamworks settings for your game (Edit Steamworks Settings > Community Tab > General).
 
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sweetmini

Member
Jun 12, 2019
3,921
Why do I feel like they just backtracked and put the blame of these two people...
Anyway, no option to satisfy the bigots , good.
If I ever played that thing, first character i would create would be an ebony Johann of Arc, to punish the haters.
I don't play online games, I hope the black Johanns will happen.
 

Thera

Banned
Feb 28, 2019
12,876
France
with minimal PR experience and ended up answering some of the questions in a misleading way
Are you telling me that honest response is misleading while PR (which is BS most of the times) is not misleading? You need to try an other explanation than that to convince me...
a response to a large number of heated debates regarding the topic of realism. The idea to give players this ability was simply a theoretical solution to a difficult problem
See, that is a classic PR sentence, and it is pure BS.
This is not about realism... at all. And you know that. So this is not a difficult problem. In fact, it is quite simple :
  1. You adressed it by doing the good thing and a big part of your community will leave.
  2. You take the money of the shitty part of the community
At the moment, it is 2 and I don't think they will change.
 

Wok

Avenger
Oct 26, 2017
3,258
France
I stand by what I said. Never saw a Valve mod outside of specific Steam/Valve forums.

You do not see them, but they can ban people for reported posts.

For instance, here is a post on a community hub for a software on Steam:

umeZQRy.png


I can report it. Every hub is opted-in for Valve moderation by default.
 

Unclebenny

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,766
Yeah, as so often with apologies, this is not a good apology.

The correct way to handle this is to set your stall out with respect to racism and misogyny. You don't stand for it, you don't want it in the community and if anyone has a problem with that, go and play something else.

This is what DICE did with Battlefield and it is the only way to make it unambivalent . "Our game isn't for racists, it's for everyone".

I can sympathize with the idea that the game blew up and they are now playing catch up but that apology underlines how they view this debate.

Instead, they've dodged the issue and said it was all a misunderstanding. Ignoring the that racist thread title completely.

The way their previous statements were worded made it very clear they were of the "I just want to play games, I don't want to hear about politics" mindset. It comes as no surprise that their apology is at best weak damage limitation and offers no talk of action against the racists in their midst.
 
Oct 25, 2017
12,192
You do not see them, but they can ban people for reported posts.
Sure.
But Steam still has over 30 thousand games. That's more or less the same amount of forums and god knows how many daily posts 24/7 (because time zones). An invisible moderation team doling out bans/post removals against this volume of posts is not a viable, reasonable or realistic option to moderating, as literally any imageboard of moderate popularity can showcase.

It's specially not an option to use instead of having your own moderation to keep things such as n-word spewing users in line.
 

ThreepQuest64

Avenger
Oct 29, 2017
5,735
Germany
Good response that makes sense. You can't prevent strange ideas coming from individuals during development, even if it's something that should have never been brought up in the first place, but it's more about how you deal with that. And obviously there is no such a thing as a toggle and it, when you take their word for it, they dismissed that idea during development. And with the lack of PR experience, when you tend to speak as freely as you want, this idea was brought into public discussion.

With the developers being a small team I can't even blame them for the lack of proper training that somehow probably hasn't seemed to be necessary at the beginning. Now they know, though, and can learn from it. Those issues have to be handled delicately and these artists properly didn't think about it. Shit happens. Now learn from it and move on.

Who the hell knew about this game prior to the outrage?
I know many people, myself included, that knew about this game since its release. And I'm not even into multiplayer brawlers but it was hard to not stumble across the game, actually.
 

Detail

Member
Dec 30, 2018
2,946
Can't they had a chat filter in game? I mean that's relatively easy to implement and goes a long way to reducing the toxic nature of it.
 

Fisty

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,207
Sounds like its time to use those sales $ to hire a PR person and a community manager