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Cleaning up Thunder Bluff
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 18, 2007 11:10 AM
from the weild-the-banhammer-of-infinite-justice dept.
from the weild-the-banhammer-of-infinite-justice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Colleen Hannon at Gamers With Jobs is mad as hell, and she's not going to take it anymore. 'Unless you're playing Neopets, online servers are full of foul-mouthed, racist junk-monkeys. The hate-filled miasma they spatter around them has reached the point where many people who could be on those services won't go, and those who do brave it won't go without a posse and riot gear.' She plays out every side of the argument: why things have gotten as bad as they've become, what publishers have and haven't done about it, and why she thinks things are now at unacceptable levels of incivility. She's calling on us gamers to get together and figure this out, because: 'If we wait for the new sheriff in town to fight this battle for us we might not like the town we're left with.' Is it as bad as she says?"
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Just leave general chat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:5, Insightful)
That takes care of all the profanity, but now I get in-game spam-mail and spam-tells from 'xssdfjbv' or 'jwedexxsd' about gold prices. And if I
Blizzard needs to do 2 things: 1) a "mark as spam" button which automatically logs a complaint and the evidence, and ignores the user for chat, tell, and mail; 2) as another poster put it, if I
Parent
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course I'm speaking from a position of ignorance, never having played the game (*gasp* blasphemy?).
Re: spamsentry (Score:3, Informative)
Better use of spamsentry is this:
That'll ignore tells from all players below level 2. I have yet to see a spambot bother to level up a character. They may start doing that at some point, but by th
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:5, Interesting)
Not saying that there isn't good people on WoW, over the year or so that I played I managed to get a nice friends list, and join a guild filled with very adult people. I did manage to have some very nice conversations while sitting around in Stranglethorn being bored at 3am. But the more populous places were almost unplayable, like the Crossroads.
I'd say this would fall into the "tragedy of the commons" ideology. Just because you can be a moron, doesn't mean you HAVE TO be a moron. Arguments of character building aside, why should I accept being called a "fag", ever? How is this acceptable in a polite society?
Parent
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Tell the abuser to leave.
B) Tell your customers to deal with the abuser.
Which do you think is better for your business?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I know my aruguments are guild centric...
Now that's a timely article (Score:3, Funny)
On the other hand, it's always funny when they fall for the "Alt-F4 to kickban" trick.
Just give us the option (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just give us the option (Score:5, Insightful)
I have my preferences, you have yours. Big fucking deal. If there are a lot of people like me out there, why shouldn't a game company cater to us? It's not like the people like you and the people like me can't both be satisfied.
Seriously, get a clue before you spout off your nonsense. If you ever have kids, you'll learn that parenting is not easy, and that making sure your kids are exposed to the right influences is one of the keys to ensuring that they establish behavior patterns that are healthy for them. Teaching them to be able to handle bad situations and assholes is important, but I want to be able to do that on my own terms. Then again, I *care* how my kids turn out, so the above may not apply to you.
Parent
obPA (Score:5, Funny)
Ignoreing them doesnt solve the issue really. (Score:3, Insightful)
Thunder Bluff? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thunder Bluff? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe... just maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Maybe... just maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Maybe... just maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the nature of the games themselves, which is of course a side effect of the people who work in the game industry, but also a cause. It's a vicious cycle. However, there is hope on the horizon, and it comes from the (unlikely) direction of Valve software and Team Fortress 2. Have you seen the latest trailer for Team Fortress 2 [teamxbox.com]? The facial animation software is nothing short of incredible. This is a key tool that has been missing from games for years. If it can be merged with a procedural animation system, Valve will have finally brought down the barriers to creating movie-quality character development and plots in games.
Team Fortress won't have a movie-worthy in-game plot, to be sure, but the personality and above all *humor* infused into Valve's characters is already a welcome change from typical FPS fare. OTOH, something like Portal could be a breakthrough game.
Parent
Play more civilized games (Score:4, Informative)
It would be nice to play a game against my nephew (the only person I know with an unhacked 360) without having to worry about colorful metaphors. Yes I know its nothing he hasnt heard before and its probably more distubing to me than him, but for grown-ups live is almost unusable for 90% of the games out there.
While I hate censorship, I do wish Xbox Live had some sort of rating system for games with a reporting structure for violators. I think it would work, they could still allow free-for-all matchups that let the explicatives fly, just allow an easy way to designate gamers that dont want to hear it. Maybe an icon on the gamertag? It just looks like there should be some way to do it that allows freedom for both people who want to hear 12 year olds cuss and those that dont.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thunder Bluff? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lack of Accountability (Score:5, Informative)
If someone were to act in real life the way some of those idiots act online, they'd get punched in the face pretty quickly. Unfortunately, there's no way to punch someone in the face over the net.
Options in WoW (Score:4, Informative)
- Use the profanity filter. This will block out the most offensive words that you may come across in chat.
- Put them on your ignore list. I know that there's a limited number of people you can put on the ignore list, but if one person's irritating you enough, put them there.
- Leave general chat. You can always rejoin it at a later time.
- Finally, you can report someone that's being excessively rude and using slurs. Bans are usually temporary, but they can get the point across. Too many temporary bans will result in a permanent one.
Of course, these are the options that are present in WoW, I can only assume that other MMOs have similar steps. YMMV.
Thunder Bluff? (Score:5, Funny)
Despite our bovine nature, and its accompanying production of large piles of waste product, we boast of the cleanest cities on Azeroth or Outlands, free from the usual blight of urban sprawl, like the putrid sewers of Undercity, the molten magma "waste processing" of Ironforge, or the dumbasses in Stormwind who let a dragon take over the city just because she could shapeshift into a "hawt bb." Meanwhile, we have continued to maintain a healthy tourism industry, and, unlike our druidic friends in Darnassus, people actually go to Thunder Bluff on purpose, not just because their cat hit the mouse and they were trying to go to Winterspring to farm.
In summary, I expect a full apology to be delivered to Cairne by the end of the week. Reparations in the form of well chewed grass, some decent low level balance druid armor, or a free pass to
Celticow
(Azjol-Nerub)
Go home care bear! (Score:4, Interesting)
I blame anonymity myself. I mean I think that everyone from the Pope down to Jimmy Swaggart is pretty much an asshole at heart. Most of us have a handle on it most of the time and some people even try to avoid pushing other people's "buttons". But lack of accountability is a huge problem, add anonymity and some abstraction to the mix and many people loose their only reason for not being a jerk. It doesnt help that many people refuse to accept or assign accountability based on their own political motivations or worse, whim.
It is believed by some that many people are perfectly nice in person but for some unknown reason they become animalistic online... I think this is flawed logic. It's far more likely that said person(s) is a jerk, but concequences keep them from acting out.
So yea, a meaningful identity online would help tremendously. But that's a can of toxic, radio active worms, even if you did open it and balance exposure/anonymity in a way that kept people happy. Eventually (and not very long I'm sure) some politician somewhere would wreck it for everyone in a dead of nigh bill, or simply declare it their purview.
In the long run I think I would prefer to live with it as-is, and if I want decorum I'll get within arms reach.
The more you try to clean things up... (Score:4, Insightful)
What a dumb article though. Really, how can anyone believe that they can clean up the chat rooms where people with anonymity reside. It just wont happen. It takes people years of online participation in one community or another to stop using LOL let along stop attacking people.
You can use this as your litmus test though. If "teh" and "pwn" are still in use, nothing has changed and people are still tards online.
There are a few things (Score:3, Insightful)
2) Find a game not filled with immature teenagers (or adults, trust me they can be just as dumb) or another server. I played WoW for a LONG time and never had much problem with the discussions on RP servers. I never did play on a straight PvP or general server. I have since moved to Ryzom, and the CSRs are quick to mute or kick off anyone doing this sort of stupidity.
3) For games with voice chat, turn it off. Seriously, I would not make people suffer through hearing my voice, even for helpful communication. Please do not torture us with yours. Of course, it is muted whenever I do play an online FPS, so I guess I am saving my own ears.
4) If people are being offensive, report it to the Moderators (or whatever your game calls them). I do not think an MMO exists where there are not moderators of some form. Most of them are willing to help and will resolve issues like this, if you present the issues in a calm and reasonable manner.
Now, you can almost forget everyone suddenly changing their ways, and unfortunately there isn't much you can do to force them to change. While people can be muted or temporarily banned, you will almost never get permanent removal unless you blatantly violent the EULA. Short of making threats or committing some sort of illegal act, they will probably return. The best you can do is limit exposure using the tools provided by the game. It is not the best solution, but if the people acting like total idiots find out they are without any friends and that no one wants to play with them, perhaps they will finally leave. (Though, that may also be wishful thinking.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So if your neighborhood is getting worse, you should just move? No point in trying to fund the police better to up patrols, etc? Moving is n
The U.S. Army solution (Score:5, Interesting)
America's Army still has the best solution. Their in-game implementation of the United States Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. They just put griefers in a barred cell from which there is no escape, and keep them there for a while. There's nothing to do in the cell, except peer out the little barred window and watch the sun go down.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Example:
Offensive Language/Behaviour - your toon is locked in prison for X number of hours. 2nd Offense, its X *days*. Plus you get fined say 20% of your current bank acc
Tseric just quit WoW (Score:3, Informative)
taboo words, racism, and trash talk (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about a street basketball game and the "yo momma's so fat" jokes. The same thing happens in online FPS games.
Players tend to build up an immunity to such insults, so there is an arms race of conceiving increasingly offensive verbal jabs. It gets worse and worse.
The solution, of course, is to just ignore offensive words altogether. Think "sticks and stones" and get on with the game! Racism in online games is a joke anyway--nobody knows your race so they can't mean it seriously. There is nothing special or magical about taboo words, either. Hearing "swear" words only hurts your feelings because you let them. You have nobody to blame but yourself.
If you can't handle trash talk in competitive games, whether they are on the court or on the net, you can either stop playing or stop giving taboo words power over you.
Alternatively, start a girls league or have referees which enforce a code of good sportsmanship. Pick-up games of basketball and of counter-strike don't have refs, so you will always have boys' competitive spirits showing in the language.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Online, there are no 'fighting words'. There is no barrier, no repercussions for actions, no tarnishing of your actual name by your behavior i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope to God you're never involved in a game of street basketball. What does harassment have to do with rape? Rape is a violent crime, harassment is not. They are totally different.
Also, harassment is certainly not always the harasser's fault. It's subjective. One person's insult is another person's friendly jab. I can
This the Reality of ANY Pick Up Game (Score:5, Insightful)
Filtering Fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Because this was a family service, we had to try to police conduct in the general channel, and because we didn't have the staff to monitor it live 24/7, it fell to me to try to automate some of this. That actually worked fairly well. We had a very large dictionary of naughty words and phrases. When you said something, my filters basically looked for any of those things, and '*'ed them out. The filter ignored whitespace, and it also considered certain characters to be equivalent, so if you wrote 5h17, that would match 'shit', since it knew a 5 could take the place of an s, and so on. However, before filtering, it did a spell check on your text, and marked all the words that were spelled right and were not on the bad word list as safe. For example, if you said "wash it", it would not see the "sh it" as something bad.
This worked surprisingly well. It caught it when people tried tricks like inserting spaces to break up the bad words, but usually did not get false positives, because of the spell check protector stuff. Well, unless you were a lousy speller, but if a lousy speller got kicked off incorrectly for profanity, it still improved things. :-)
One other little trick it did. When it filtered out something in your message, it only did that on the message sent to other people. The copy that echoed back to your system was uncensored.
When you got caught, it would send you a message warning you to watch your language. If you ignored the warning, an admin bot would ban you for a period of time. Repeared bans would be for longer times.
One thing that disappointed me: no one ever tried to use Klingon profanity to get around the filters. I had that covered in the filters, and was hoping to see the reaction when the users discovered that.
Re:There's this thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:There's this thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I implore anyone who uses voicechat to use some kind of push-to-talk button. I don't want to hear you breathing. I don't want to hear you argue with your mom. I basically don't need to hear you unless you saying something you want me to hear.
Other party-line systems solved this long ago (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the designers realized that letting people lock on their mics could get pretty annoying in a hurry, for
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Re:They are just words. (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus I love the English language. If you have to put profanity in every sentence, you're doing a lousy job of speaking it, and that annoys me. It's like watching someone drive a ferrari without knowing how to shift; it makes me wince.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
1) Idiot A mouths off to Idiot B on-line
2) Idiot B looks up the real name and address of Idiot A.
3) Idiot B drives to Idiot A's house and shoots him.
4) Jack Thompson threatens to ban all video games
5) Idiot C drives to Thompsons house and shoots him.
6) ???
7) Profit!
And no, before someone says it I do not condone the shooting of Jack Thompson...
Shooting would be too good for him. He should be disbarred and die a lonely broken man, although considering his mental state (I don't believe for a minute he's actually sane, whether he passed a psych test or not) he'd probably just retreat into Thompson land and sit gibbering in a corner... actually, that
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You do NOT have the right to say whatever you want, whereever you want, espcially in someone elses home. OR in this case, on someone elses virtual worlds. It's there's they own it. It is not censorship, it is a rule. No one is making you play thr game, it'sd voluntary. In exchange for agreeing to play by the rules, and usually a fee, you can play.
"Would you like to be locked out of all games your favorite publisher makes for NOT using "profanity"?"
no, bur I wouldn't play, and I wouldn't tell them they can't