Over the years, I've heard people talk about toxicity in online multiplayer games but no good answer or solution has come from it. So I would like to propose a solution. This is my opinion on why the reporting systems in online competitive games currently fail to govern bad behavior, and what can be done about it.
The main issue is you can mute someone to not hear them, and report them so they are punished later, but you can't stop them right now. You can yell at them, but you can't enforce real power over them. Even when a player is temporarily banned they don't actually know what they were banned for. They get a vague "communication abuse" message and that's it. It doesn't explain to them what the hurtful "joke" was. So they keep doing it.
In the days of dedicated servers, we had community admins that fostered small like-minded communities and took action against jerks. If the admins did a bad job, you found a different community. Matchmaking has benefits, especially for competitive play, but it has made the policing problem much worse because all the communities are lumped together. If you put everyone on your bus commute on a soccer team, you wouldn’t have a team of like-minded individuals.
How do we make a fully automatic system with no major oversight that makes hundreds of thousands of players from different backgrounds play nice? I honestly don't have a good answer to that. A lot of players don’t know that they’re not communicating nicely, they are still learning those skills. I was part of a wonderful gaming server in my teens which was managed by people who were generally good influences on me and I still carry those communication skills. That’s the benefit of having real community oversight.
I want to share a moment of my teenage years where I was on a part of a community server admin team that had to address a major issue. Players who were on the server a lot became our friends, joined the community, and usually got minor admin privileges. The incident happened with such a longstanding member who we considered a friend. They, and an older player who was a bad influence, recorded themselves bullying a player who had autism for YouTube. The other admins, including myself, discovered the video. Our friend got a major warning, was required to take the video down, and lost all their admin privileges. The older player who was a bad influence got banned permanently. I don’t think any automatic reporting system could have navigated this sort of complexity or understood which of these players was supposed to be the adult. The other thing to notice is the victim was someone with a disability. Someone who is disabled or a minority is often the victim.
Suggestions
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Competitive mode should be pure-skill-based matchmaking, but I’d argue casual play is better served with community-based matchmaking. If you make clans more likely to match together on the same team, a lot of players will start joining large clans. This has the benefits of well-managed communities because you can hold clans responsible for their members and you can give leaders moderation tools.
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Muting a player could start a hidden vote to mute them match-wide, lasting until the end of the game.
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I want people to know why they got reported. We don’t currently do this to protect the reporter from being discovered by the reported, but there are ways around that if the report is given with a delay.
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Reporting needs to be easily accessible. This isn’t always the case currently. A lot of reporting systems are hidden deep in the menus or aren’t accessible until after the game when I just want out.
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Hold toxic streamers accountable and actually ban them if they are bullies. They are teaching people what is cool and acceptable. They shouldn't be harassing people for their viewer’s amusement. Streamers should understand that the visibility they offer goes both ways.
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Your company can help foster a better community in other ways. Hold yourself to a high standard and communicate with your gaming community. Let people reward each other at the end of the game for playing nicely, design your game to feel less awful to lose in casual mode, encourage players to give gifts that mutually benefit both players.
