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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Xenos @, Shores of Time, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 12:08 (3909 days ago)

Edge posted an article about how Bungie plans to prevent trolls through design in Destiny. Read it here

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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Kermit @, Raleigh, NC, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 14:55 (3909 days ago) @ Xenos

This is one the areas I've been most interested in since we were first told about public spaces. I'm very curious to see how it works out.

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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Ragashingo ⌂, Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 16:20 (3909 days ago) @ Xenos

Edge posted an article about how Bungie plans to prevent trolls through design in Destiny. Read it here

Edge did what now? All I saw was an article saying that Bungie said they had a way to prevent people from ruining your experience… without actually telling us or really even hinting at what that way or ways are. :/

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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Xenos @, Shores of Time, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 16:31 (3909 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Edge posted an article about how Bungie plans to prevent trolls through design in Destiny. Read it here


Edge did what now? All I saw was an article saying that Bungie said they had a way to prevent people from ruining your experience… without actually telling us or really even hinting at what that way or ways are. :/

Yeah the article was lacking in specific information, but I still think my description is accurate.

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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Ragashingo ⌂, Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 16:54 (3909 days ago) @ Xenos

Yeah, your description was fine. It's more I take issues with articles that don't say anything.

There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by kapowaz, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 02:23 (3909 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Edge did what now? All I saw was an article saying that Bungie said they had a way to prevent people from ruining your experience… without actually telling us or really even hinting at what that way or ways are. :/

Ah, you see:

Up to wave, Down to dance, Left to salute, Right to point

They've used all four directions — none left for trolling!

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Diagonals, man. Diagonals

by ZackDark @, Not behind you. NO! Don't look., Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 06:22 (3908 days ago) @ kapowaz

- No text -

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Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Pyromancy @, discovering fire every week, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 17:23 (3909 days ago) @ Xenos
edited by Pyromancy, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 17:29

We know it will
Because adding in 4 character gestures is not going to help encourage positivity or prevent negativity within the inevitable sect of griefers

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Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Ragashingo ⌂, Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 17:34 (3909 days ago) @ Pyromancy

What I read into the oh so subtle message is that perhaps, maybe, Bungie will give us more control over seeing Griefers. Think about it. People outside you party are only matchmade in on the fly anyway, seems like it'd be trivial to point at them and press a button and have the matchmade out. It wouldn't be like kicking them from a multiplayer game. You and they would still be in the same spots, you just wouldn't see each other anymore. Plus Destiny would quickly matchmake a new Guardian in to help you.

Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by kapowaz, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 02:29 (3909 days ago) @ Pyromancy

We know it will
Because adding in 4 character gestures is not going to help encourage positivity or prevent negativity within the inevitable sect of griefers

This is part of why I think Bungie needs to be a little more forthcoming in their dialogue with the community. A game like Destiny, like any MMO, will involve a massively greater degree of investment on the part of players, and so bans come with a far, far higher cost. My understanding* is that bans handed out in Halo were always permanent and given for egregious incidents of cheating. I still assume that will be the case, but there will almost certainly be a raft of other, more minor offences possible in Destiny, ranging from the antisocial to the actively disruptive.

I'm obviously speculating here, but let's say somebody discovers a gameplay bug which permits a player to ‘bring home’ a hostile and dangerous enemy, which then goes on a rampage in the Guardian Tower, killing players all over the shop. Does this player deserve a ban? Maybe. Permanent? Hmm, maybe not. Luckily we do have analogues in other MMOs, but if you recall the Zul Gurub plague in World of Warcraft, whilst this lead to a lot of disruption for low-level players at the time, it was also a fascinating incident which people even talked about in terms of how pandemics spread.

I suspect that whatever safeguards Bungie has put in place, there will be players who will make it their job to try and be disruptive to others whilst staying within the official rules of the road. I'm very curious to hear how Bungie intends to deal with these and other similar offenders.

*I could be wrong — I've not heard of any temporary XBL bans, but maybe they did exist?

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Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Xenos @, Shores of Time, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 07:39 (3908 days ago) @ kapowaz

They used a variety of different kind of bans. You can read about it on the Halo Wikia: Ban

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They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by MrPadraig08 ⌂ @, Steel City, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 11:12 (3908 days ago) @ kapowaz

Ask Bluerunner about his ban during Reach, pretty sucky.

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They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by bluerunner @, Music City, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 12:48 (3908 days ago) @ MrPadraig08

It was more of a reset than a ban. I got everything back. I also was told that I was only 1 of 2 people to get the reset returned.

They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by kapowaz, Friday, August 09, 2013, 03:04 (3907 days ago) @ bluerunner

It was more of a reset than a ban. I got everything back. I also was told that I was only 1 of 2 people to get the reset returned.

What happened?

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They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by bluerunner @, Music City, Friday, August 09, 2013, 10:56 (3906 days ago) @ kapowaz

I let Lil' Blue play firefight arcade off and on. He was only 4 at the time, and just learning to play. They had set up an automated system to deter people from going afk in firefight to get credits. Apparently it saw me having games with a lot of kills, then games with hardly any kills (when lil blue played), and games where me and a guest played and the guest didn't do much. And sometimes he would get distracted and not move around a lot. This caused their system to reset all my credits. I posted about it, and some of the Bungie guys that frequent the forum knew me and knew I wasn't doing anything with an ill intent, so they put the credits back. It was a really nice gesture and sealed me and lil' blue as fans for life. Since then he and I only play custom firefight games together. And now Lil' Blue is getting pretty good.

And it was crazy to see 3 million credits suddenly pop back into the game. I had to purchase the armor again, but it gave me a chance to buy what I wanted first and not buy some things I had wished I hadn't bought.

They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by kapowaz, Friday, August 09, 2013, 11:18 (3906 days ago) @ bluerunner

Interesting. The way that game companies hand out bans and adjudicate in situations like this is interesting, as in many ways it's analogous to being prosecuted for a criminal act, only unlike a proper judicial system you don't automatically start out with a presumption of innocence. I think the fact that they could false-positive flag you is a little unsettling; the behaviour itself might have been suspicious, but clearly they had no proof of wrongdoing whatsoever. And if atypical patterns of play can trigger this system, it's quite feasible it happened more often than we know about.

Disconcerting.

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They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by Xenos @, Shores of Time, Friday, August 09, 2013, 12:09 (3906 days ago) @ kapowaz

Interesting. The way that game companies hand out bans and adjudicate in situations like this is interesting, as in many ways it's analogous to being prosecuted for a criminal act, only unlike a proper judicial system you don't automatically start out with a presumption of innocence. I think the fact that they could false-positive flag you is a little unsettling; the behaviour itself might have been suspicious, but clearly they had no proof of wrongdoing whatsoever. And if atypical patterns of play can trigger this system, it's quite feasible it happened more often than we know about.

Disconcerting.

Honestly I don't find these stories disconcerting because everyone I know that's been unjustly banned by Bungie has been unbanned. The reason the system has to be this way is because there are way more people doing questionable things in online games than any reasonably sized group of people can check on. Many on these forums already complain about the cost of games and DLC etc., which unfortunately is part of the way game companies make a living nowadays, but imagine if they also had to basically employ a call center sized group of employees just to review every single flag that pops up for every player that might be cheating?

The much simpler way is to autoban people that are doing things that are almost always seen as behavior of an abuser and if they file a request for a review you check and make sure. If you remember from Bungie's old weekly updates they even at one point had an entire section devoted to people that would write in claiming they weren't cheating and Bungie would confirm they were. They even told us that they constantly monitor the banhammer and that the accuracy was as close as they could make it to 100%.

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They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by General Vagueness @, The Vault of Sass, Sunday, August 11, 2013, 13:34 (3904 days ago) @ Xenos

Honestly I don't find these stories disconcerting because everyone I know that's been unjustly banned by Bungie has been unbanned. The reason the system has to be this way is because there are way more people doing questionable things in online games than any reasonably sized group of people can check on. Many on these forums already complain about the cost of games and DLC etc., which unfortunately is part of the way game companies make a living nowadays, but imagine if they also had to basically employ a call center sized group of employees just to review every single flag that pops up for every player that might be cheating?

I don't mind the price of games, it's low if you take past games and inflation into account. I'm not sure what to say on DLC. What concerns me is XBL, especially since they raised the price and especially Sony decided to copy them even though most of us remember their security failings.

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They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by bluerunner @, Music City, Friday, August 09, 2013, 12:18 (3906 days ago) @ kapowaz

Based on my conversations with them, they take false flags very seriously and put a lot of time and effort into making sure it doesn't happen. They also offered an opportunity for people to contest the resets. I was told only one other person had a legitimate false flag out of the hundreds or thousands that the system identified, but they were still concerned that the parameters were too tight. I think they take it seriously and are very concerned that it's done correctly.

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They have not always been completely accurate with autobans

by Cody Miller @, Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 12:51 (3908 days ago) @ MrPadraig08

Ask Bluerunner about his ban during Reach, pretty sucky.

I recall getting autobanned from XBL one time because I had been playing a ton of cave shooters. On the phone, they told me I got banned because I was playing import games, and this meant I was modding. I had to explain that yes the games were import, but that they were REGION FREE and could be easily played on a regular console.

It got cleared up, but it shouldn't have happened at all.

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Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Cody Miller @, Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 12:55 (3908 days ago) @ kapowaz

I'm obviously speculating here, but let's say somebody discovers a gameplay bug which permits a player to ‘bring home’ a hostile and dangerous enemy, which then goes on a rampage in the Guardian Tower, killing players all over the shop. Does this player deserve a ban? Maybe. Permanent? Hmm, maybe not. Luckily we do have analogues in other MMOs, but if you recall the Zul Gurub plague in World of Warcraft, whilst this lead to a lot of disruption for low-level players at the time, it was also a fascinating incident which people even talked about in terms of how pandemics spread.

This is a concern of mine as well. There are many cases of MMO players being banned for nothing more than being clever, and by that I mean simply exploiting game rules to their benefit in unusual ways. I like to push the envelope so to speak, and I cannot know ahead of time what Bungie deems acceptable and what they deem bannable.

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Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Xenos @, Shores of Time, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 13:01 (3908 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I know this has caused some controversy on Guild Wars 2. They had a glitch where you could buy a weapon for half the regular price and sell it for full price and make a boatload of money. They banned ~3000 people who were using the glitch extensively to make money (meaning buying and reselling the weapons hundreds of times or more). Personally I think this is an acceptable ban, especially because all they had to do was send a ticket to the IT team saying they deleted the items/money and their ban was reduced to 3 days. In an MMO you have to very carefully protect your economy so that makes sense, but a lot of people were upset (even if they didn't take advantage of the exploit). It'll be interesting to see how complicated Bungie's banning policies have to be.

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Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Cody Miller @, Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 16:25 (3908 days ago) @ Xenos

In an MMO you have to very carefully protect your economy so that makes sense, but a lot of people were upset (even if they didn't take advantage of the exploit). It'll be interesting to see how complicated Bungie's banning policies have to be.

Do we even know if Destiny will have an economy?

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Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Xenos @, Shores of Time, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 16:41 (3908 days ago) @ Cody Miller

In an MMO you have to very carefully protect your economy so that makes sense, but a lot of people were upset (even if they didn't take advantage of the exploit). It'll be interesting to see how complicated Bungie's banning policies have to be.


Do we even know if Destiny will have an economy?

That's the main reason I added the question at the end. It is hard to know from what we've seen how complicated or not the banning system will be. On the other hand though Bungie was looking for an economy designer for Destiny at one point (not sure if they still are, can't access Bungie.net at work).

Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by Risay117, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 19:34 (3908 days ago) @ Xenos

They still are as far as a month ago.

Hope the renewed Banhammer swings swift & true as always :)

by kapowaz, Friday, August 09, 2013, 03:03 (3907 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Do we even know if Destiny will have an economy?

They haven't confirmed it, but the Edge article strongly hinted at a crafting system. Crafting systems mean raw resources, and that kind of a system is always more interesting if there is an economy for trading the raw resources in some form.

There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Jabberwok, Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 04:50 (3908 days ago) @ Xenos

I wonder what this means for friendly fire in public events. Because not having it at all may be excessive, but it would be incredibly easy for any troll to cause trouble just by shooting teammates. Which wouldn't be such a big deal in actual coop matchmaking, but if I'm playing by myself, I may not want to be randomly killed by a stranger when I happen to pass through a public area.

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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Leisandir @, Virginia, USA, Monday, August 12, 2013, 08:21 (3903 days ago) @ Jabberwok

Most MMOs don't utilize any form of friendly fire. Then again, most of them are straight-up RPGs. You can do whatever you want to your allies in Planetside 2.

I get really iritated when a game leaves out friendly fire. I recognize that there are assholes out there, but it always feels like a significant aspect of strategy has just been cut out; powerful area of effect weapons are only overpowered if you don't have to worry about who's in the target area.

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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Xenos @, Shores of Time, Monday, August 12, 2013, 08:37 (3903 days ago) @ Leisandir

I get really iritated when a game leaves out friendly fire. I recognize that there are assholes out there, but it always feels like a significant aspect of strategy has just been cut out; powerful area of effect weapons are only overpowered if you don't have to worry about who's in the target area.

I go back and forth on this. I agree with you with the strategy part but I also love the Battlefield franchise which by default has friendly fire on. The reason Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 were so good was they incentivise and encourage players to not be jerks, the major way is by giving you points for helping your team (and more for helping your squad) and the other is by leaving friendly fire off. Because of this Battlefield 3 games tend to be much more fun and strategic than say Call of Duty games. So I guess my point is no friendly fire can be bad, but if done right it at least is not a big deal.

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There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by Leisandir @, Virginia, USA, Monday, August 12, 2013, 10:54 (3903 days ago) @ Xenos

I suppose it's contextual, but I think I have thick enough skin to deal with griefers in exchange for a more thoughtfully complex contest. I've started playing Guns of Icarus recently (which is excellent, by the by), and one of my main complaints about it is that you can't damage allied ships. That means that, in a game which puts an enormous focus on positioning, dangerous maneuvers, and firing arcs, you can totally ignore your buddies. You can collide with them at full speed and do absolutely nothing to your ship, so there's no worry. They can drift in front of your cannon barrage and the worst that happens is your shots don't hit the enemy. The game is all about flying by the seat of your pants, rushing around to get components functional and put fires out while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and trying to keep enemy ships in your line of fire while staying out of theirs; removing the concern of friendly fire in a game which is otherwise so punishing feels out of place.

There Will Be No Bridges in Destiny (Getting rid of trolls)

by crazybydefault @, Seattle, WA, Monday, August 12, 2013, 12:44 (3903 days ago) @ Xenos

I get really iritated when a game leaves out friendly fire. I recognize that there are assholes out there, but it always feels like a significant aspect of strategy has just been cut out; powerful area of effect weapons are only overpowered if you don't have to worry about who's in the target area.


I go back and forth on this. I agree with you with the strategy part but I also love the Battlefield franchise which by default has friendly fire on. The reason Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 were so good was they incentivise and encourage players to not be jerks, the major way is by giving you points for helping your team (and more for helping your squad) and the other is by leaving friendly fire off. Because of this Battlefield 3 games tend to be much more fun and strategic than say Call of Duty games. So I guess my point is no friendly fire can be bad, but if done right it at least is not a big deal.

I'm in the same boat. I used to be an avid defender of keeping friendly fire enabled, as I loved the additional layer of gameplay it provided. I was painfully aware of the consequences, but the positives outweighed the negatives. Now that I've played a few games in which friendly fire is (for the most part) disabled, I'm torn. It has been quite nice to pick up a sniper rifle without worrying about some self-professed sniper god whacking me in the back for it...

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