Feedback Desired: The Report System

Anet is on the right track here. Like they said, they're continuing to review and tune the system.

Anet has heard of the potential problems with /report abuse and was probably already aware of them before today. They'll get it worked out.

So this time, either I don't debate which means you win, or I do...in which case I fall right into your trap, since you've already tried to out me as a pointless debater. Oooooo, you're clever.

I'll be clearer this time. I don't support a person's right to offend another person. A good free speech law prevents exactly that. But...offending another person means intent. Are you judging SotiCoto's choice of name by the name itself or the reasoning he used to make it? Based only on what you've quoted from him, it's the latter. I could ask you what you'd say if he gave a different reasoning (say a non-offensive one) but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't back peddle your assertion. Hell, I'm pretty sure you won't reply at all if you truly believe this is pointless. (lol, prove me wrong!)

Lets get off the subject of SotiCoto for a minute. This one example is muddying the waters. What about the other people he mentioned...say...people who's names suggest some kind of sexual innuendo? That's fairly ambiguous, and a little crass, but is it as boldly offensive? I say not...but other people might not agree, and as I said before - offense is based on intent. We know Soti's intent...what about everyone else on the fence?

In the meantime, I think I'll reread the EULA like you suggested.

The main issue here is in the inappropriate behavior area, and maybe the bot area.

Griefing has no definable terms really. If I pug with you and do not rez you fast enough and I griefing? Or if I heal a bit too slow and you die? Or if I accidentally aggro a mob. Or dear lord if I do not play to the standards imposed by people who "beat the game already."

As for botting we all know there are plenty of bot watchers. However when I mega farm, I adds are will mimic a bot. Click sign, click gate. Do quick kills remap. Repeat. Now suddenly I am a bot. To make issues more complex recently I been farming for faction, but am lazy so I just flag henchies while on aim. They kill said groups, I get drops, map back.

weeee censorship =D

Ra>Ab
I got about 40 glad points in RA today because of no-monk and all assasin teams ^^

Dude you have some serious issues...
you sure dont help this thread..except prove /report is required

Well I popped into Kamadan today and guess what. No spam!

I'm for the /report system. I'm sure it will be abused, mostly by the generation that requires parental permission to play (and one wonders whether some of them have it) and I'm equally sure that Anet aren't going to jump to attention for every single /report sent it. It would be too much work. I think there would need to be a substantial body of /report against an individual before Anet even starts its review procedure.

So far the moans I've seen are all from people who have suddenly discovered they're expected to behave like socialised adults in a social situation. Just like having a drunkard throw up all over your shoes while complaining he was thrown out of the pub for drinking too much.

I view the in-game /report system as a phenomenal step toward making Guild Wars a real MMORPG, and a more fun place to play in. Abusing players can get you locked out of PvP. Abusing the /report system can get you banned. So its play nice or don't play, and this is something Anet should have been doing from the getgo.

Every successful Online RPG I've played had an in-game feature to report players for bad behavior. GW was the only one that required civic minded players to log out. the old system felt like it was penalizing players for reporting abusers and griefers. the new system is quick, simple and--fromt he sounds of things--effective.

Some people will get reported that shouldn't be. Thats the nature of the beast (letting players police themselves is a recipe for trouble). Some of those people will see penalties for the reports they incur. But if (and its a big "if" right now) the new report system acts the way its supposed to and Anet does monitor it so that a few bad eggs won't /report spam innocent players and get away with it, this could be the answer casula PvPers have been looking for.

GGs

People kept asking for a way to punish leavers, so now you have an system in place to try police players. However, this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease. Leavers were only really an issue in three formats (AB, Competitive Missions, and RA.) Furthermore the leaving problems in AB and CMs are directly aggravated by a number of changes made by arena.net and could have been fixed without these measures. The best way to get this system fixed it to break it.

The first problem is the low barrier of 33% combined with the relative freedom of reports. 50 per day is quite a few. Did you used to grief people by running around in RA for 15 minutes? Well, A.net was nice enough to hand you a new way to grief people on a silver plater and all it requires is 1-2 like minded friends. 33% is only 3 people in a CM and 2 people in your AB team. Due to the low population of CMs it is very probable to get 3 friends in the same AB. Once you have 3 people in, you have the 33% required to give any player you want 6 dishonor points. That's enough to stop him from continuing to CM as long as you and your team of griefers are around. Simply pick a target and have all three of your members report him. If you accompany this with accusations that he is trying to sabotage the team (like "OMG Player X keeps opening the gates for them") you can probably convince a few other players to unwittingly report him also. In RA and ABs you need 2 players to meet 33% and report with impunity. That means synching 2 players in international districts (if you hate synched teams you can do this to scare players away from synching RA) or picking up 1-2 hapless players in AB.

Another problem is that once you report the player he has little recourse. If he attempts to report you back he will just accumulate more dishonor points as you have a large portion of the team in collusion. If you are verbally abusive to the player he cannot leave, he already accrued 4-6 dishonor points from your report spike. If he leaves he will now have 9-11 dishonor points and get dishonorable status. If you have 33% of the team working together, you control things. The rest of the team will rarely be organized enough to do anything about it.

Furthermore, outside of pure malicious abuse people are going to extend this system greater than it is intended. You may not be leeching, but it turns out your build is bad or you are a bad player. People are going to report you. If one reports you in an RA team it only take one other player thinking it is a good idea also. In fact now that good players can't leave when they have bad players on their team, they are more encouraged to abuse the report system. How many of you went into RA with a Mo/W with swordsmanship or an x/Mo who tries to heal when you were a newbie? If you do that now you are going to accumulate dishonor points so fast your head will spin (try it and see.) In fact going in with a monk that does anything other than healing will get you reported quite a bit.

On top of this, the system it going to make actual reporting of players (for spamming ect, not reporting for dishonor points) far less effective. People are going to be reporting players for trivial matters. People will attempt to get players mass reported. Every quasi offensive utterance will be reported using the new /report. This will deluge the system with a lot of false reports and significantly increase the error in their player review system.

The people whining about thing probably deserve this flawed system and all the bad that is coming with it. However, for the rest of is this thing is going to be a colossal pain in the butt. A.net doesn't listen very well either. Reasonable explanations about this system may get it changed, but it will happen very slowly if at all. Honestly, throw all concept of honor out the window this weekend. Abuse the living daylights out of this system. Grief, ruin things for other players, it needs to be thoroughly demonstrated that this system is a terrible idea. Demonstrate the collateral damage that will be inflicted and prevent this thing from becoming a permanent mainstay. You may thing it is cruel, but there are players out there who will abuse this system in every way possible. If it isn't clearly shown that the system is flawed you will have to deal with people abusing this system for at least 3 months once it gets implemented.

In addition post every single loop hole and flaw you can find in the system here. If you want things fixed wave the red flag for all to see.

Remember:
-3 people synching into CMs can report whoever they like
-2 people synching into RA can report whoever they like
-2 people forming an AB team together can report their teammates for whatever they like

I was actually thinking that the immediate, automated punishment system was a bit excessive. I think there should be a push from the automated, 'objective' element, to the human review element.

Say, for instance;

• Raising the threshold for dishonor status to 20 points.
• Reducing the report limit to 20 on accounts by default.
• Reducing point gain for leaving to 4.
• Giving individuals who report other individuals 2 points for a solo report, and 1 point for a multiple report; That is, no report made is completely without penalty.
• Scaling point decay based on amount of current points; Less points decay faster, while more points decay more slowly. People who are consistently receiving points must either sit out more, or they'll end up receiving dishonor status, while people occasionally grief-pointed should not usually accrue the requisite 20.
• Removing the temporary mission/match dishonor status.
• Removing GvG and HA from being affected by dishonor status.
• Reducing duration of Dishonor status to ~30 minutes.
• Automatically generating a support team ticket to be reviewed upon reaching dishonor status. At this point, the validity of reports should be checked, and penalties meted out as appropriate, including, but not limited to; Extended dishonor status, temporary disabling of the reporting system... no clue what else? Individuals with a history of this may receive stiffer penalties.
• Perhaps automatically generating a support team ticket to be reviewed upon reaching X amount of reports, clearing over Y time period?

Ideally, around these numbers, the level of abuse declines, while individuals who consistently cause problems, such as repetitive leechers, are taken out for a period, and brought to the attention of the support team.
Whether or not a leecher gets to go a few rounds before being restricted doesn't really matter as long as they're eventually taken out of circulation.

It sucks how I have to wait the full duration against a team of 4 ZB/Prot monks who will stand and grief for the duration. Beforehand I had the freedom to leave which I feel I deserve.

You can ask your team to type resign but you can't make them and poor design means that if you're European, you are put on mixed-language teams who don't understand what you're saying (and vice-versa). As a result I am forced to stay there or face punishment which I do not feel is fair.

Wrong.
As I have already explained in no shortage of detail.
... Do you know, there is a word used for people who insist on being deliberately wrong. I'll leave you to figure that one out for yourself.

So... in fact... you're just attacking me out of spite.
Well good for you.
If I had an ignore list here, I'd now be putting you on it.


When the cause of the problems you want to escape from is other people.... then running to somewhere full of other people isn't the solution. There is no other way to put it. Anyone who plays Guild Wars to escape from people being immature has quite clearly got the wrong idea about the game entirely, and should try something like Oblivion instead.... Equally entertaining... but without the possibility of being offended on the fly by other people.
Simple... no?


Whoever told you that only did so because they want respect handed to them on a silver platter for no additional cost.
Respect, if wanted, must be earned.
If it isn't wanted.... no problem.
It certainly is NOT mandatory.


What do you think Lawyers exist for?
One person's screw-up is another person's benefit.... and vice versa.


Who died and made you President of the Universe?
Who made your opinion the be-all and end-all of existence?

Oh yeah... that's right. Nobody.

Well just to take a break from the arguments and such.. I'm glad that this has been cinluded as I have used it a couple of times today in AB, though I'm not really much of a PvP player. It's easy to use and if you get a group of people at the same time, it's more than a case of the leechers getting banned.

One of my concerns is though, that if you have a 'leecher' who stands there for the whole match and notices he/she has been reported 2 or 3 times and begins moving right near the end.. will that still count to the Dishonour System/Banning List or not :/ It happened to me today and I've gotten a little worride that my account may be banned, even though it's once it's really happened.

~The Goldenwolf~

These are legitimate concerns. However, I think they can be addressed without scrapping the system altogether.

Essentially the problems you see boil down to:
1. Synchers can issue false reports without getting dishonor points themselves, and
2. The system will quickly become overloaded with trivial stuff.

To deal with the synchers, a-net could:
1. Raise the number of players needed to report without getting a point yourself. (Even if honest players simply got 1 point for every report, unavoidably, they shouldn't be reporting enough to ever get dishonorable through those points alone.)
2. Limit the number of points Player A can receive in a given time period based on reports from Player B. ie If Player B in (collusion with Player C) reports Player A every match in a string of AB matches, only the first report by B causes A to get a point; later reports only serve to "verify" reports from other teammates who have not reported A before.
3. Simply scan the logs for synchronized reporting activity. If Player A and Player B both report Players T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z during the same match as each other, kick out a flag that a real human needs to review the logs, and then ban A and B if their reports where phony.

To deal with the flood of trivial stuff:
1. Start with an automated verification before a human being has to look at it. For example, if you get a foul language report: Run an automated scan of the chat log with your dirty-word-dictionary bot. If the automated scan finds nothing, log the report, but don't send it to a human being (but see below). If the automated scan finds something, it can "highlight" the relevant parts of the logs to eliminate the need for the human being to do any search -- they can just read and ban.
2. Investigate an account when a large number of reports that failed automated verification, form different users, pile up. 25 or 50 reports of bad language that fail the automated verification probably means you left a word out of your dictionary.

Two points:
- Just because you can doesn't mean you should. That's exactly why this argument is even taking place. Clearly Anet can put whatever they want in the EULA; that's not even worth discussing.

- Botting is not subjective, because it has real and measurable in-game effects. For instance, bot farmers (and associated eBaying) causes market inflation and disadvantage normal players through third-party means (see: fairness). In contrast, offending someone has no real or measurable effect on the game, and everyone will take something differently.

I just had to strongly disagree with this statement, if you ban offensive speech you do not have free speech, furthermore if you want to ban offensive speech you do not even believe in free speech. Free speech means just that, the freedom to speak what you wish. Most western societies limit free speech to prevent inciting violence (and Canada has a 'hate speech" law) but I'd hate to live anywhere that banned offensive speech.

Of course that was pretty much off topic, because, as has been frequently pointed out ANet has a right to ban whatever they feel like, and we have no right to demand "free speech" on their private servers.

Well, as anticipated, this system of punishment and the reporting function each have their own significant flaws, and I had the unfortunate pleasure of experiencing both of them first-hand today.

Let us begin with the RA match from hell, where I was a monk attempting to keep an extremely incompetent rambo warrior alive. The rest of the team consisted of a stoneflesh elementalist, and what appeared to be another warrior with the default skills. As much as I enjoy having "Charge!" on me as often as possible, I had to admit that this team was pure trash from the get-go. Ultimately, I had no choice but to play until we got obliterated, and that's exactly what I did.

And obliterated we were. Naturally, the rambo stance warrior who believed my energy was unlimited started complaining about how I was terrible at the game and sucked at life - you know, typical RA banter. After all of the res sigs were used and the team died a slow, painful death, he managed to convince the other two numbskulls to report me for leeching. He described it as means to stop "people like him (me)" from playing the game. During the entire incident, I didn't even bother dignifying this imbecile with a response, which is really my only regret. Shortly after his tirade, I was slapped with a punishment for leeching. It would have at least made me feel better if I gave them a reason to abuse the tool. Anyway, that's 6 points.

But the fun doesn't stop there. I ultimately decided to stop playing RA from that point on, which was no big deal, because I was only trying it out for test purposes anyway. I had a few fond memories of playing Fort Aspenwood back in the day and decided to give that a try instead. I went Luxon and after a disgustingly delayed group-up time, the game began. Right off the bat, we had an immediate leaver, which I guess was an omen for things to come. The Kurzick had at least 2 bonders this game, and we were unable to penetrate either outer gate. I was once again playing monk, so there was nothing I could personally do either. About 1/3 into the game, most of the Luxons left, leaving myself and 2 others to suffer the remainder of the match. The Kurzick we're equally retarded and none of them left the base to run amber, which added to the time it took to end. I couldn't even leave the match because the previous abuse of the report tool would have resulted in my being unable to playing PvP for an even longer period of time.

Now, if this doesn’t scream completely and utterly broken to everyone else, then I don’t know what will. In the 25-minute time frame this took place, it was among one of the worst gaming experiences I’ve ever had. This system is fatally flawed and needs a significant change that doesn’t grant overzealous 12-year-olds the ability to directly affect one's capacity to play the game. Furthermore, the punishment for leaving games is quite excessive, as two quits within a one hour time period will prevent you from playing for an additional hour. That’s just overkill, and in combination with the report abuse, unfairly required me to endure tedium of the highest level. No game should do that, ever.

Flu, I understand your concerns. I even appreciate what you're saying. But in the end, the /report system is necessary to make the game a better place for everyone. In general, if you're reported a few times, you're not likely to get any action on your account. If you're reported a lot, but it's clear from the reports that it's a concerted effort (harassment) by a group, again, I feel sure you'll be safe. You can always appeal an account action to Support. But in the end, honestly, the system will be good for the game, and the game will be better for the system.

May I ask that you give it a few days, even a week, and see how things shake out? First of all, we'll like make some small modifications, based on player feedback. Secondly, a few days or a week will give players a better view of how the system works and how much it improves the game. If it is found that people are getting blocked unjustly, we'll definitely change it. I say we all take a look in a few days, and thanks to everyone for your feedback.

Wheeew! Go-go Big Brother, go!

So when will you be making the appeal process as easy to use as reporting now? Or will we continue to have to jump through hoops to appeal something that took another person five minutes to cause?