[MMO] Dealing with trolls and other "special" individuals
One of the novelties of GW2 is the way this game handles potentially irritating activities that are related to the competition aspect in MMOs, the result being a minimisation of conflictive points, and perhaps a masking of human nature. In a comment with Azuriel on a previous post, we delved on the surface of philosophical thought for a moment, he stating that the repetition of an action creates a habit (“We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” -Aristotle), whereas I remain skeptic: Should not a positive, mature attitude come from ourselves, not incentivised by the system? Well, if that does work as Azuriel and our old buddy Aristotle state, perhaps we will see a new breed of more social-conscious players educated by the MMO genre. And that is something we really need right now.
Grumpy Granny Milady: "Back in the old days, people behaved because they had no other option if they wanted to engage in high-end content. The community could regulate itself by ostrasizing harmful elements such as ninjas, slackers and jerks. And what do we have now? A system that eliminates any rough areas so that we can ignore that we are actually playing side by side with a bunch of jerks! I dissent! People should learn that bad behaviour is not tolerated, not that there is no possibility of behaving bad! Etc, etc."
Perhaps it is too late for that, given the trend MMOs are following. WoW is implementing a looting system in Pandaria that completely eliminates the need-greed dichotomy when playing with strangers. The players saw that nobody could be trusted in an anonymous lawless situation and played the same game the ninjas did, rolling for everything as a self-defence. That system was aberrant and a solution had to be tailored for it. Instead, they removed the system completely. One more social aspect gone down the drain, and the Massive Multiplayer is dismantled little by little until we have dispensed with every social aspect that fostered that community which used to be generally good, spiced up by one or two jerks, gankers, etc. These patches into the Multiplayer areas of the genre strike me as a blindfold, so that we can play alongside jerks and their like without actually engaging with them, challenging them.
Some time ago, there was a post by Stubborn in which he told one particularly obnoxious LFD experience. That is the usual way of things these days, the anecdote was nothing new, but the way he reacted to the situation was. He stood up for what he believed instead of resigning to play under the conditions the jerks had established. Check it out, it is a good read and the comments are also diverse and insightful.
This post led me to reinforce my belief that each one of us can, and should, challenge the system. We have been overrun by jerks, not just in MMOs but all over the internet. Trolling is the expected response to almost anything said on the public sphere, specially when a sound discussion is attempted. On the internet, it falls on moderation and a combination of engaging and ignoring those trolls depending on the issue. I am more concerned with the trolls and jerks that populate our MMO space.
It falls on both the developer and the player to ensure that the MMO community is healthy. The former must at least provide the latter with tools to fight undesirable behaviour, and make sure that the system works properly and is not exploited. We could consider GW2 and Pandaria's approaches as an attempt to fight the jerkish community, but I actually see them as a way of rose-tinting the community. Perhaps social and good behaviour will breed good behaviour, so I will not complain too loud about GW2. Although I suspect that the intended result of this is that players do not have to deal with human-internet nature, and thus will not have to challenge its failings.
I prefer tools that encourage us players to deal with the trolls with some effectiveness, such as LoL's tribunal. But since we do not have such tools available to us in our MMOs, we will have to make do with what we have been given: reports, tickets, and being loud about respect and rights. Setting an example. Trade channel, or whatever its iteration is called in other games, has always brimmed with trolls, jerks and spammers, who have taken over a channel that is supposed to be the agora of commerce and grouping (and sometimes Hellenistic debate). Three or four trolls will sour a common spot for the whole server. The other day I read a very ill-intentioned joke along the lines of "The difference between football and rape is that women do not like football." Not only did I report that, but I also wrote a ticket to make sure that it would be looked into by a human being (this is the GM response if you're curious), and then I stated on that same trade chat that I had done so, for other players to know that it is in their hands to do something, and for the perpetrator to know that it is not an accepted behaviour.
Some people will say that I place too much importance on things most people do not care about. Well, I bet that that joke was read by a rape victim, and that it must have hurt her/him. I am also certain that most people, that silent majority, are sickened by the troll/jerk behaviour, and that they only need a little push to begin working against it themselves. Players should try to foster a healthy game environment and stop heeding the trolls who will tell them that "this is the internet." No, the internet is you, me, our neighbour. We are part of the problem if we do not engage with it. Silence sadly equals to agreement. I assure you, confronting the trolls on the public spaces does very often yield results in the manner of public support and troll-silencing, but someone has to step up for her beliefs.
I would rather work with other tools than the ones we were and will be given. I would like to see a player tribunal, some sort of reputation system that was carefully tailored to avoid exploiting, and more power to the game masters. It is needed more than ever because the community can no longer enforce respectful behaviour since players are more individualistic than ever.
An essential read on the topic of trollhood: "Racism, Harassment, Griefing, Bullying, Trolling…whatever you call it… just stop."
PD: I will be abroad for three weeks and might not be able to check the internet so much. I hope I can still post and comment around, but do not think I have been murdered by a furious troll if I don't.
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Milady,
Very good read. I’m glad to know that my quasi-tantrum has spread a little. If we get enough actively passive resistance going on, perhaps it can make a teeny, tiny, microscopic dent in such behavior.
I’ve continued that sort of thing, too, but have a prior tactic before I refuse to pull (which has only happened once since then, and worked). Since my VtK is on permanent 4 hr cooldown (I just got an idea to write a ticket about that. Something to do today!), I simply explain what I don’t like about the other player’s behavior, ask them to stop, and if they don’t, I ask the other people in the party to kick them. It’s worked every time but once, and it didn’t work that one time because EVERYONE’S Vote to Kick was on a 4 hour cooldown.
To be frank, since the Inmates post, I’ve only had one truly annoying other player, a DK in blood spec who’d queued as a tank, but wasn’t tanking and wasn’t in tanking gear who kept running ahead as soon as combat was over and pulling. Since my wife’s hots were often still ticking, his pulls frequently ran to her, which forced me to intervene rather than just let the pulls kill him. I finally told her not to heal me during a pull, blew pots, lots of defensive cooldowns, and self-healing. I survived, and he ran ahead, pulled, and didn’t.
Then we refused to rez him. He lied on the ground until the end of the instance, and right before the last boss (he was there to get quest credit, like we were), one of the other players vote to kick him. It was pretty sweet; I didn’t even have to ask in that case. Finally, a system working as intended.
Additionally, (hell, I should just post this comment on my site, you’ve got me so verbose), I’ve taken my no-nonsense behavior to The Secret World, and have already written four or five tickets on inappropriate general chat, specifically saying in the tickets that I hope Funcom isn’t planning on letting their game become a haven for trolls like Wow has, as I suspect that many people play TSW are there to avoid that kind of person. Maybe it will have some effect, maybe it won’t, but the constant reinforcement of that message (I’ve /whispered others upset by the negative talk instructions on how to put in a ticket and some specific language to include) can help shape a new game’s culture. Only time will tell.
Anyway, great post!
Sincerely,
Stubborn
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It’s a problem I’ve considered of late a lot. In fact I think the quality (or lack thereof) of a game’s general community is becoming more and more important to me when I choose to play a game or not.
I tried Aion back in June and the biggest reason why I dropped it was the toxic chat channels, the amount of kill stealing and the fact that in Aion you can trail a mob onto others if you run past them just right – so if you afk a player can get you killed quite easily by dumping a monster on you as they run past. That happened a few times.
Conversely one game that I go back to regularly is LoTRO, I play on the old EU RP server Laurelin. It’s by far the best community I have ever experienced in a MMO. Part of that is because channel-spam, those who ‘need’ on everything and other negative behaviour is quickly challenged by community members and always has been. I’ve been saved from death by an overpull or patrolling elite ambush several times by random players out in the wilds.
I remember a drive by racist attack in Goldshire in WoW many years ago, my partner playing a human priest of darker skin was called a very offensive word by a random player who was riding past. No interaction prior to this, the character just rode up, swore at the priest rather vilely and then mounted a rode off. Naturally we screen-shotted the chat window and reported him, but it was shocking that someone could be that calously nasty to a stranger. Of course we never heard if that player was banned or at least reprimanded for this.
I suspect, being realistic, that the lack of traditional griefing opportunities in GW2 will not make any real difference. GW1 had a pretty toxic community at least in terms of the random chat in the major cities. People will still argue over how to fight the big event monsters, they’ll call people noobs for not playing the way they do etc. It’ll be interesting to see if ANet cares enough to support the development of health communities.
They claim they’re going to be harshly enforcing behavior standards on the forums, but who knows about their ingame moderation plans.
I think the most important thing is for a company to nip toxic community behavior in the bud quickly and strongly early on, to set the tone for the overall population. That never happened in WoW, so it just allowed things to get progressively worse over time.
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I disagree with you – and I feel strongly about that. I believe that from a potential victim’s perspective I think it’s much better if the misconduct didn’t happen in the first place.
As for the people misbehaving, I will quote you: “The players saw that nobody could be trusted in an anonymous lawless situation and played the same game the ninjas did” Now, of course, there are people who will behave in a bad (or good) manner no matter what the incentives not to do so are but I believe that most of the potential offenders actually observe the others’ behaviours and will behave better or worse depending on how people behave towards them. If they see other people ninjaing, being rude etc., they will be more likely to behave the same way.
I find your opinion of other players very black-and-white. I understand there are many players who behave bad or good because it feels good but I am sure most of the players are in the middle of both extremes and I’d rather see these players pushed to become good rather than bad, I want them to be encouraged to play with others rather than broken and then told they were bad in the first place and it’s their fault.
Telwyn mentioned KS and mob training – something that was more common in older games but is not possible in many of the new ones, I am curious whether people think removing them had a bad effect on the community. The removal made the MMOs a little bit more enjoyable for me.
I apologize for my incoherent rambling, I think Azuriel said it much better in his blog post “Population vs Community” (http://inanage.com/2012/07/30/population-vs-community/).
My wife and I would like to adopt you into our family, Milady. You’re the kind of person we love to keep company with. Please do be careful not to get kidnapped and murdered by trolls. The community would miss your voice on these matters.
@Imakulata: Your reply didn’t sound like a disagreement to the article at all. What is it you disagree with? I’m sorry if it seems obvious but your response seemed supportive of the article’s conclusions.
@Telwyn: You have a point about group behaviors. People in general are more likely to fall into the general behavior of whatever group they’re with. From that perspective, MMOs must do more to reward groups for cooperation. Individual pieces of loot clearly won’t do it; a common goal is needed. This could probably never happen in WoW. It’s turned the corner on encouraging positive cooperation.
Overall I agree that better tools are needed for community policing. By far my favorite response from players defending the toxicity of the game is that many players believe that they’re not being who they are. Put another way, they believe that the way they act in games isn’t representative of the kind of person they are outside of games. The truth is the opposite: how one acts when they believe no one is watching is possibly the ONLY gauge of the kind of person one is. Therefore, on some fundamental level, I think we’re seeing a cultural phenomenon not unique to gamers; a strong dissonance between what people say/think and how they actually behave. It’s like they believe if they just say it, then it must be true. People generally respond with pessimism to any call for people to speak up against trolls as well. They feel very powerless, when in fact they’re the only ones who could possibly make it stop.
It’s a strange time we live in. I wish I knew of 2 or 5 solutions to this. A good start is definitely improved community tools and the PRESENCE of justice. The fact that you can report bad behavior and you never know if the company actually took action means there’s a very rogue-like mentality in MMOs — players, both the trolls and the victims, don’t see justice, so they don’t believe there’s any consequence. Victims get no comfort that someone with the power to put that troll in line won’t let them know how justice was served — names and account info aren’t needed to inform the plaintiff their harrasser got perma-banned. There’s no justice. There’s just money, and these companies won’t likely change such policies, because the truth is that most of these complaints get tossed and nothing happens to trolls. Nothing at all. Trolls pay. We’ve seen D3′s response to exploiters, hackers, and bots — an email that practically reinvites them back. Companies don’t care.
I think the onus falls on the players to get something done about this. We’re the only ones not paid to pretend we care :) We genuinely do.
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