Warcraft 2 Ru's Policy on harassment

[~ToRa~]

Out of around 200 players active in the community 17 took part (it represents 8.5% of the total sample).

You are greatly exaggerating the number of players. There are around 25-50 active players with 50-100 inactive players.
It’s not unreasonable to say that the poll is an accurate assessment of what the majority of the community wants.

[O4L]

I rather it be userbased but I think there are thousands more players then what you are counting here.

[O4L]

Just get rid of all the rules ill give you common sense who needs to go and who dont.

[Cel]

@~ToRa~
I am pretty sure you didn't read what I wrote up there for you to answer something like that...

Or you genuinely do not understand what the point was which is understandable since for you 47% in a 17 people week poll is a good enough sign that all is for the best the way it is and things should not be discussed anymore...

I am sorry to say it is unreasonable to say that 8 person represent that much, even if we say that we care only about the 25 persons you talk about.

I guess it is to be expected of a group of individuals that respond that badly to change, but still, saying you don't want to hear what Igognito has to say because of a 1 week poll that 17 people participated on is quite ridiculous.
Especially since it was not even 50% said that things are ok as they are and even then that would still be ridiculous...

So if you want to shut people's mouth up just don't use awfully self made numbers they simply do not back you up...
Just because you are allergic to change does not justify to shut @Igognito or anyone up when they try to find a solution to something that a significant part of your 25 remaining members say is a problem.

LOL 25 active players now that is some next level community...

Now considering your numbers:

Talk about things being perfect when you have 25 members and the few new players that you talk to all say that even though they love the game the environment is just too hostile each of these players that gave up on you represents 4% of your happy community.
13 of them represent more than half of what you have now tell me there is nothing to talk about and that everything is perfect as it is.

Accurate assessment of what you and 7 people including bullies want yes then again you are happy with your 25 members community if you want people to stay in that community and have more than 8 active members in the end maybe you should start listening to what they have to say before shutting them up because you and 7 others think there is no place for discussion...

Yet again it is not about perma-banning more people it is about giving a direction helping people to behave and stop hurting each others and ultimately the community...

[~ToRa~]

^^The majority of the players don’t want people banned for trash talking. That has been the consensus for years now.
Players do want hackers to be banned which is why the SS rules are enforced.
However trash talking has never been seen as a banable offense

Your insisting that the community wants people banned for trash talking based off what?

[Cel]

Just get rid of all the rules ill give you common sense who needs to go and who dont.

Common sense rules are pretty much what battle.net's code of conduct is all about. Just a set of global direction that pretty much give incentives it is rarely followed by bans because, when it is out there, people tend to behave and also forgive more :-)

@~ToRa~ Just stop saying majority when you talk about 25 people over all the people that gave war2.ru a chance it is just ridiculous.

Read my previous answer especially the last sentence about banning people clearly you missed something...

Read my previous answer about why I believe something is a significant issue and should at least be discussed freely and with an open mind.

Also:

players don’t want people banned for trash talking. That has been the consensus for years now.
However trash talking has never been seen as a banable offense

Given the fact that you estimate your remaining active players to be around 25-50 players I can only imagine how well it worked out for you so far.

You know the  Allegory of the cave?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

This is what I believe is happening here.
I am not saying you should just accept everything other people say I say you should let them at least express themselves and keep an open mind.

[~ToRa~]

War2ru is not battle net. Saying “battle net and other gaming platforms ban people for racism and derogatory comments towards minorities,” isn’t a good enough reason for it to be done on this gaming platform.
This poll isn’t the 1st poll in regards to harassment on the server. There have been discussions on the subject for over 10 years. It has been decided again and again the community doesn’t want more punishments handed down.

[~ToRa~]

Also I would like to add the reason we have a small player base has less to do with the toxicity of the community and more to do with the learning curb of the game.
That and the fact this game is over 20 years old and has limited updates.

[Cel]

Now yet again my main point is for you to respect other people ideas and keep an open mind and not act like there is nothing to be said or done when people are expressing a different point of view.

-About more punishment being handed down again look up previous answers.
-About why these polls and your policy for over 10 years could be wrong look previous answers too and specifically the allegory of the cave.

More on that last point if all polls and discussions went like this I can easily see why no changes were  ever made in the past 10 years no offense here but the way you react to change proposals are pretty much self explanatory...

You believe the game is too hard to learn ok that is your point of view.
Now consider people may think differently for example:
That if that was the case maybe people would not say they would love to play if people weren't so toxic.
Or that maybe if the game was that hard that would mean we all are just geniuses to play this utterly complicated game at this unreachable level?
Look at them geniuses talking for a minute and try not to laugh at yourself for thinking that could be the case.

Now bare with me as I am going to go over what I believe:
I believe this game is the simplest strategy game ever made, both to take in hands and to enjoy at any skill levels.
That I believe is because it is the essence of a real time strategy game with no extra features and complicated mechanics just the basics plain and simple.
It is to me the definition of easy to get into and hard to master. Much easier to get into than say Starcraft 2 there is so little to learn to get started.
You say the game looks too old I say people freaking play modern games that look older and uglier than that.
And also that a lot of old games that were never updated still are being played and enjoyed by people that are not even good at them.

But all this is what I believe I could be completely wrong and because of that I accept your opinion maybe the game being old has something to do with it.
Now I am not telling you what to think and what to say I am showing you that we can have different point of views on things and respect each others opinions.

Say you are right and the game is too old then if there is nothing special about it:
-Why do we keep playing it then?
-Whether we ask people to behave or not then the player base is going to leave anyway as the game and its players are getting older?

If there is on the other hand something good and special about it:
-Then why other people wont see it and stay?
-Why people that do see it eventually leave? Do they all just get tired of the game?
-Do you think people leave because they feel they are too bad? I agree! What then makes them feel that it matters and they have to be good to enjoy the game? What are the signs we as a community give them that makes them feel they cannot casually enjoy/play the game? What can we do to try and change that so that people stick around until they are good?

If the game being old and too hard to learn is the only reason for you that people leave then there is nothing to be done the player base is going to drop in any case right?

Now if we consider for one little moment that some of us might be right saying players being toxic is one of the reasons people leave or stop playing.

Then something can be done and what do we risk really in the end to act? Like for real lets have a look at what we loose if it comes to banning someone that we would not have banned otherwise (and I mean after all warnings and all that shit):

-We should be morning some very toxic guy that is not even willing to behave a bit better to help the game not die out? Because he does not like another member?
-Was that guy that cannot just ignore/respect fellow players even worth it he was worth what exactly you enjoy being harassed and reading disgusting chat in game that much?
-If the game is dying anyway well if he is in that position it was him or the other guy maybe even silent others that just didn't take the time to say something in the forum and rather left because yeah the game is not that fresh anymore?
-How many people are we willing to give up just so that one guy can feel at home being toxic and insulting/harassing everyone else?

And this is not even considering that they could and mostly would start to behave because of the new rules.

So yeah if I am right we have little to loose and potentially a lot to win.
If I am wrong we risk loosing some very very positive beings and hours of pure fun reading general chat... Oh and yeah the game would utterly die but that as you said we can't do anything about. If there was a solution we would have found it and done it 10 years ago right, obviously these things are so easy to discuss I cannot see how we would have missed it... (:
 

[Lambchops]

It's very hard to make RULES about people being assholes. Sometimes it's even appropriate for a player to say something negative to another player. There can be cases of baiting, where troublemakers deliberatly taunt another player to get them to say something 'illegal' so they can report them... etc.

... in any case such rules tend to be SUBJECTIVE anyway, which means that the admins have to adjudicate on a case by case basis anyway - which ends up being pretty much what we have already.

That being said I would like to say that:

  A) Yes there is some really toxic attitude - i believe too much
  B) I'm sure it is a contributing factor to people leaving the game - it definately makes me log off sometimes
  C) I trust that the admins actually are trying to reduce this rubbish. It is bad, and it is a problem.


.... but back in 1998 blah blah blah ...

 ...people who wre BORN in '98 are now turning 20. It's a different world and a different internet, and if I was a kid I wouldn't want to play a game and get abused by a bunch of fat old assholes.

[~ToRa~]

Now yet again my main point is for you to respect other people ideas and keep an open mind and not act like there is nothing to be said or done when people are expressing a different point of view.

Your welcome to express your own view points on this issue. I’ll read what you have to say and respond accordingly.
 

[LTFan]

Trash talking is a part of the game. What needs to be moderated is the cancer to this community who literally just log on to be assholes to every single person they see whether they know who it is or not. That kind of behavior has no place in any sort of society and is a huge reason people dont log on anymore. Take me for example. I get tired of logging on and seeing the same 2 people repeatedly being terrible human beings to every single person in chat. So do not moderate trash talking but get rid of the cancers of our community.

[Cel]

I think both you Tora being worried we would ban/drive away from the game more of our members, and Igognito saying we should care that there are some behaviors that hurt our community which could be addressed better are both legitimate concerns that should be taken into account for that matter.

First off I would like to underline that my point about battle.net was that it could be a start to look for other successful communities to see if there is a way they handle thing that we could inspire ourselves from to handle our own problems better without damaging what we already have. It is not about applying their rules to our server blindly.

I dont think we should instantly permaban every single transgressions, that would be kinda insane given our few members and how persistent some of our members can be when they go at it.
It could be more like counting the number of times a player is being so toxic that others take the time to report him and if that count becomes too high (like say 5 players reported him over 5 different issues), then we should look what it is all about using logs or other pieces of evidence we have and if appears that indeed the guy is clearly being toxic and oversteps we would punish him starting from a symbolic very small duration ban and punish further transgressions harder until either he stops or gets a very very long bans.

That could be one way of doing things I am not saying its the one way we should do it I say that is one way I can think of that could work. Maybe there are better ways out there like community tribunals (some games use that)  etc... This is what discussions are for maybe we can come up with something great of our own adapted to our own issues.

We could for example start by establishing a list of behaviors that we think are both pretty easy to stop doing for them bullies in one hand and that are damaging our community and driving people away in the other hand. Like how hard that would really be for oneself to stop harassing players with insults every time they log into the game?
For real is that to much to ask, for a member of our community to try and just be nice to others or at least not be too toxic so that we can still have some people to play with in like 20 years from now?
Shouldn't they be willing to do so in the first place?
It is a little effort for a common improved welfare right?
Like say: to avoid harassing others using racist and/or antisemitic insults over and over how big of an effort do you think that is to ask from our members? Would that be too much?

Because it really should be about that shouldn't it?
Trying to maximize the fun of the many at a minimal cost for the rest.

 

As a matter of fact I pretty much agree with LTFan on that one.

[mousEtopher]

Cel makes decent points about the poll not being representative, esp when you consider the newbs who show up briefly and are almost immediately driven away by abuse & exclusion; that figure is easily in the high dozens and likely some hundreds over all the years. but i still think the stated policy is the only one that's really practical to enforce -- pvpgn moderation tools are too outdated & easy to circumvent + it's too time consuming to do for volunteer admins esp for the reasons lamby said.

there's a very clear demarcation between the two types of players, old generation that enjoys gratuitous saltiness & new generation that is more geared towards friendliess, fun & tolerance. rather than trying to forcefully integrate these two types of players by policing behavior on ru, it's always seemed more sensible to me to just segregate the two types altogether, e.g. direct new players towards war2.me or the ru backup server to play & avoid the hateful environment altogether. this would be hard to get off the ground though & would take some dedicated arranging times to play in advance, advertising to get new people to show up at those times, etc. to gradually build up the initial population from scratch. imo it's probably the only realistic way to cultivate a stable population of new players though & would make it much more possible to enforce niceness standards + wouldn't interfere with the regular players.

[Igognito]

hmmm there are many difficult problems here.

First of all, I agree that the poll is not representative at all.
Second, I agree that ban might not be the best punishment.
Third, I do believe that we need to make a concrete policy for what is considered unacceptable.
Fourth and very important for me, we need to communicate better to the new players.
Fifth, Protect the new players by being stricter when someone harasses them!

Suggested solutions:
for 2) My suggestion: in the line of Cel, we make a SS policy that someone can report toxic behavior (just reporting has no punishment) but after a few reports (like 5 from different players) then the case is automatically going to be examined and if valid punished. After a month we can make a report to auto expire... Saying like you have 5 times to be toxic in the server for free...
We need to discuss the punishments for harassment. I'm more in favor of fame punishments rather than banning.
I like the idea of repeating punishment saying in the lobby: WARNING: Player XXX repetitively harasses, please use \ignore XXX.

for 3) Yes war2 always come with some toxicity and I think none of us here spoke about the provoking swearing... We are talking about harassment that is over the limits.
Take for example van. Van is toxic but I would never report him. I actually play with him and expect him to be toxic, I even want him to be toxic because I know it is van!
But we know that van shit talks to all of us and it is just his behavior of telling you he likes you :-P
When van doesn't shit talk to you is like darn he doesnt want to speak to me... lol
But then there are some people that start swearing to u like if you insulted whatever is more sacred to them. That is unacceptable. Difficult to define but unacceptable.

for 4)  We need to write a nice text with the policy for hacking and for harassing and have it easy to access for new and old players. Like a welcome message. Possibly given by a Bot that u can ask stuff. In practice we need to give access to the tools that the new players can use to be protected.

for 5) We can allow old players to defend new players (submit a ss for them). Also we can have a more severe punishment if you harass a new player (defined by common reason)

Cheers