Giving a vote kick to players for AFKers is a slippery slope, 1 day its for AFKers, the next its rainbow builds, the next its science, the next its speaking the wrong language, and then the next having the wrong name. There is no way a vote kick will remain civil and used only for an AFK player or someone who intentionaly tries to grief.
What will happen is it will be used to ruin someones game time because someone didnt like how they were doing and initiated a vote which almost always ends with a kick because humans are sadistic and plenty of them will just click YES.
What about the gear/dilithium events where you get the best reward for being the one to do the most DPS? How fast do you think vote kicking will start punishing people for being the best player? Day effing 1 of when vote kick would be released and This I have seen in FPS games. Top players get vote kicked to improve everyone elses standing in the match and is the reason we shut that option off on our server. It was abused nearly every single match an admin wasnt on. So no vote kicking will not remain used just on the worst of the worst. (Funny story about running that game server, some unknown player initiated a vote kick on me the server admin because he was told no spawn camping. I permanently banned him from the server.)
Ive seen people come into a match and just pick someone at random and initiate a vote, being a server admin i got to see how many votes were yes and there was always more than 3 in an 8 player server. Allot of people will just click YES to get the window off the screen without even reading it and there will always be some smacktard that initiates it every single match they join.
Just 1 kick for any other reason than afk or griefing is enough to justify not having a vote kick option. It is that simple and I think some of those that want the option want it for reasons above and beyond AFK/griefers, others have never got to withess the abuse from an administartion point of view that comes with the option.
Best option is Ignore = no queue together. This stops griefers from ever joining a match with you, stops people who are on the ignore list for other reasons, this stops AFKers, this cannot be abused to ruin someone elses gameplay by having them kicked for any reason.
Maybe we should look at the problem and not just a single solution.
The problem is usually one person sitting afk for an entire match leeching expertise/rewards or deliberately attempting to cause a match to fail (griefing).
What it looks like is being discussed here is a vote to kick feature where 3 players (one to initiate the vote, and two to vote in favor of) can kick another player out of a team of five.
I think the three to kick method is too open to abuse to be practical. I saw it in WoW, and despite it being moderately useful, I also saw it being abused, and was unable to prevent players from being kicked from my groups by small minded idiots. Also, a player who gets kicked under a 3toK system should not be put on a cooldown.
A better proposal would to make a vote kick system require all four of the other players in the match to vote in favor of kicking the fifth. This would mitigate some of the perceived abuse, as it would require the entire rest of the team. It could still be abused, but the bar would be raised for it to happen.
Any such vote-to-kick system should broadcast to the rest of the team, who is initiating the kick, and there should be a box that requires a reason to be given. Anonymous vote initiation is asking for abuse.
Also, any player who initiates a kick vote, would be put on a cooldown, and would not be able to initiate another vote for a certain amount of time (six hours as an example).
A token system could be used giving a player x amount of kick tokens in a given week (5 maybe). Once a players tokens are used up they cannot initiate a vote.
Another way to deal with the issue is to use a type of tool similar to the chat ignore function. Since chat is separate from the rest of the game mechanics, using an ignore list to keep from being grouped with people a player dislikes would more than likely be quite difficult and have unforeseen side effects.
Instead, create a Do Not Group tool to the queue. This would allow players to designate other players who they would like to avoid for whatever reason. Since it would be part of the queuing system, it would be unaffected by chat ignores. Also such a feature should be activated from within a group setting, and would only take effect once the event is ended, this way the event in progress is not disrupted.
An example of how this might work in practice:
Players A, B, C, D, E, F and G are in the queue.
Player A and G have clear lists
Player B has C and D tagged.
Player C has D Tagged.
Player E has D Tagged.
Players A, F, and G would get in the group with no problems. Player D has 3 players flagging him, player C has B flagging him. So the group that would be formed would be A, C, E, F, and G. B would remain in the queue because he has C flagged, and C has no other flags raised against him. D would also remain in the queue since he is flagged by multiple players.
With a system like this, flagging a player does not affect the player who has been flagged, other than the two players involved will never be in the same public match. It does not add them to the ignore list, it does not bar them from the public queue. The benefit to this is that players can avoid repeat afkers and griefers, and such players will find wait times longer and longer, as the pool of players willing to put up with them shrinks.
As pleasant as this sounds, it can also be a double edged sword. If you have too many players flagged, the chances of you getting into a public match go down with each player added. For things like Crystaline Entity, Mine trap, Big Dig, the 20 man Starbase defense, this would inflate the queue times, and the number of players appearing in the queue.
In the long term this would help weed out the real problem players, those who deliberately grief or routinely go afk. But as with any system, its possible that someone would find a way to abuse it.
I thought I would toss these ideas out as an alternative since 3toK is quite hotly debated.
Another way to deal with the issue is to use a type of tool similar to the chat ignore function. Since chat is separate from the rest of the game mechanics, using an ignore list to keep from being grouped with people a player dislikes would more than likely be quite difficult and have unforeseen side effects.
Instead, create a Do Not Group tool to the queue. This would allow players to designate other players who they would like to avoid for whatever reason. Since it would be part of the queuing system, it would be unaffected by chat ignores. Also such a feature should be activated from within a group setting, and would only take effect once the event is ended, this way the event in progress is not disrupted.
An example of how this might work in practice:
Players A, B, C, D, E, F and G are in the queue.
Player A and G have clear lists
Player B has C and D tagged.
Player C has D Tagged.
Player E has D Tagged.
Players A, F, and G would get in the group with no problems. Player D has 3 players flagging him, player C has B flagging him. So the group that would be formed would be A, C, E, F, and G. B would remain in the queue because he has C flagged, and C has no other flags raised against him. D would also remain in the queue since he is flagged by multiple players.
With a system like this, flagging a player does not affect the player who has been flagged, other than the two players involved will never be in the same public match. It does not add them to the ignore list, it does not bar them from the public queue. The benefit to this is that players can avoid repeat afkers and griefers, and such players will find wait times longer and longer, as the pool of players willing to put up with them shrinks.
As pleasant as this sounds, it can also be a double edged sword. If you have too many players flagged, the chances of you getting into a public match go down with each player added. For things like Crystaline Entity, Mine trap, Big Dig, the 20 man Starbase defense, this would inflate the queue times, and the number of players appearing in the queue.
In the long term this would help weed out the real problem players, those who deliberately grief or routinely go afk. But as with any system, its possible that someone would find a way to abuse it.
I thought I would toss these ideas out as an alternative since 3toK is quite hotly debated.
The 20 player events should be limited to that 1 team as they are all 5 player teams. otherwise the queue will never pop with 20 players having no team lists. but rewards and drops needs to be based on each team seperatly as well. Mine trap if team A fails B, C, and D should not lose any marks from it as an example.
I think this system would work perfectly but I think chat should also affect the no team setup as an option. i wont team with a racist from zone chat after he is put on my ignore list and i dont want the game deciding to team me anyway. So I would use the option to not team on chat ignore.
That system also being a double edged sword will eventualy remove the overjealous elitists who flip out over the tiniest infractions and mash the no team button after insulting the rest of the team. I have no complaints on that as i hate seeing a new player being berated over something stupid rather than have it explained nicely.
As for the kick vote option how you outlined it, that wont stop abuse, only make it less frequent. Any abuse is too much so vote kick should not even be on the table for discusion.
But on the other hand If Cryptic had GM's in game then having a vote 2 flag someone and GM's are alerted and have a job to observe the player then i wouldnt have an issue with that.
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Easy way to fix this problem is leechers or people that go AFK should not get the rewards. I don't like the idea of people being kicked cause the group votes on it or letting the team leader decide who gets booted. In all fairness I think the ability to boot another player form PVE queue would be abused.
The simplest way, IMO to set up a "No Reward for AFK" system would be to set a minimum damage and healing quota that has to be reached to get rewards. The quota would have to be high enough to prevent scripters and bots, but allows lower DPS players (Science Vessels and Cruisers) to get rewards.
Ideas are always good - and I think it's clear there is at least some problem here that could be either relieved or solved systematically. With any system like this, there are conflicting goals to consider: We want to improve the play experience of people who unfortunately get saddled with an AFK player, but we don't want to enable cliques of partly-premade players to bully another player for creating their own playstyle. We want to reward players for being good group participants and for helping other players, but we want to avoid any positive reinforcement tool we hypothetically create being exploited by friends or premade groups. We want to foster social interaction between players - that's kind of the purpose of a queue system, after all! - but we don't want to force it on people who really just want to play by themselves. So, there are a lot of variables to consider, and we'd have to be careful to make sure that we didn't just create more problems than we solved with any given implementation.
Pardon my rambling, but those are my thoughts on the matter. They're still pretty abstract at the moment, but I do agree there is both a collective action problem and an optimal rewards per minute problem here, where optimizing one's actions for personal gain per effort doesn't create a good collective experience, and society's normal controls for that sort of thing (reputation, word of mouth) are very much weakened by a random matchmaking system (our queue system).
EXACTLY!!! STO has in my opinion been the most friendly, most accomodating MMO in the world. I wouldn't still be playing if that wasn't the case. Any MMO has their "difficult" players, but where other MMO's take a more aggresive stance against these players, STO is more diplomatic in their approach. OK some players may not agree with me here, but the GM's are on call should a player or players need them, and the GM's DO take the apropriate action as and whern needed to do so.
Having a kick option while in an STF will only lead to collective bullying (or appear to look like that by others) If anyone comes across a player that is AFKing etc my stance is let that player AFK at the end of the day I am the better person for not allowing myself to get riled by them.
Other things to consider is if a player has gone AFK (or appears to be AFK) there might be a legitamate reason behind it, loss of connection to the net, an emergency call of nature, a telephone call etc. We can not see that player, and making snap judgements on what appears to be could actually be innocent.
I really don't see the point in this comment, if ANYONE abused it against another player/s than that would be the problem.
Most players don't steal from fleets, or seize control of fleets and kick other players from the fleet for no good reason. But it happens all the time. It's not an epidemic, but it's a problem.
Most people don't use exploits.
Most players don't join griefing fleets.
BUT SOME DO.
So you're saying that you're against any solution that has the potential to be abused. Even if it means trading a situation where a thousand players are negatively impacted for a situation where only one is.
That's an interesting point of view philosophically, but I think that most people would prefer the least harmful situation.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
So you're saying that you're against any solution that has the potential to be abused. Even if it means trading a situation where a thousand players are negatively impacted for a situation where only one is.
That's an interesting point of view philosophically, but I think that most people would prefer the least harmful situation.
Because it is better to let 99 guilty people go free than risk punishing 1 innocent person. now let's say you were the victim of this I can say your tone would be different.
I think a compromise could be like WoWs report AFK in battle grounds. If the majority of a team reports the person afk they get a debuff and have a set amount of time to get involved, if they don't then they are kicked from the BG and take a leavers penelty too. This could be applied to group setting here.
This still gives the players some power in the reporting part, however it gives an innocent player a chance to clear the debuff.
Giving a vote kick to players for AFKers is a slippery slope, 1 day its for AFKers, the next its rainbow builds, the next its science, the next its speaking the wrong language, and then the next having the wrong name. There is no way a vote kick will remain civil and used only for an AFK player or someone who intentionaly tries to grief.
What will happen is it will be used to ruin someones game time because someone didnt like how they were doing and initiated a vote which almost always ends with a kick because humans are sadistic and plenty of them will just click YES.
What about the gear/dilithium events where you get the best reward for being the one to do the most DPS? How fast do you think vote kicking will start punishing people for being the best player? Day effing 1 of when vote kick would be released and This I have seen in FPS games. Top players get vote kicked to improve everyone elses standing in the match and is the reason we shut that option off on our server. It was abused nearly every single match an admin wasnt on. So no vote kicking will not remain used just on the worst of the worst. (Funny story about running that game server, some unknown player initiated a vote kick on me the server admin because he was told no spawn camping. I permanently banned him from the server.)
Ive seen people come into a match and just pick someone at random and initiate a vote, being a server admin i got to see how many votes were yes and there was always more than 3 in an 8 player server. Allot of people will just click YES to get the window off the screen without even reading it and there will always be some smacktard that initiates it every single match they join.
Just 1 kick for any other reason than afk or griefing is enough to justify not having a vote kick option. It is that simple and I think some of those that want the option want it for reasons above and beyond AFK/griefers, others have never got to withess the abuse from an administartion point of view that comes with the option.
Best option is Ignore = no queue together. This stops griefers from ever joining a match with you, stops people who are on the ignore list for other reasons, this stops AFKers, this cannot be abused to ruin someone elses gameplay by having them kicked for any reason.
^^ Best post in the thread. Chapeau!
Also, I foresee people starting to kick for the loot. Always better to divvy the spoils between 2 people than between the lot, no?!
Seriously, humans come with the [Exploit] trait: at worst they'll abuse a system; at best they're looking for the edge (like using the mail system for extra 'bank' slots).
A vote kick system is also simply going to be on a massive gliding slope. It was already suggest people get kicked for showing up in a Miranda. And where one person draws the line at a noob ship, the other may feel the same about a Science ship, or any non-Escort; or at a noob altogether -- or one perceived to be a noob in their eyes (like someone blowing the Nanites too early, whereas currently that's no longer a real issue).
the problem with a vote to kick option is no player is just as bad as one that is sitting idle
i really think they should remove the leaver penalty so you can leave and rejoin a new team and also make it so people you ignore cant be placed on your team..
[12:35] Vessel Two of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 225232 (271723) Plasma Damage to you with Plasma Lance.
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
Best option is Ignore = no queue together. This stops griefers from ever joining a match with you, stops people who are on the ignore list for other reasons, this stops AFKers, this cannot be abused to ruin someone elses gameplay by having them kicked for any reason.
I'd also like to see a feature added like we had in CoH, where a player was able to use a personal rating system to easily identify the good and bad players they met.
A player would type in /notes and a pop up window would appear with 1-5 stars and a little notepad where you could type in a message to remind yourself why you gave a person a good or bad rating.
No one but you could see your stars or notes so no one could use them to abuse other people with phony ratings.
After you rated a person you would forever see 1-5 stars over that players characters. It didn't matter if they swapped characters because the stars were attached to the players @global name.
I like this idea. It's futile to remember stuff about players. The only indication I have atm is to put them on my friendslist.
The system would also queue us preferably with our highest star rated players if they are available for the same mission I presume?
The more you advocate a vote kick feature the more I do not trust you with one. I have allot of experiance from running a FPS game server that had vote kick enabled and it was abused every day and on weekends practicaly every map until we turned the feature off.
I have already made a proposal that does not allow other players to be abused and does not include vote kicking. It is a common alternative proposal to vote kicking. As for AFK/leeching that is Cryptics job to police the servers. not the players. A dev was in this thread and pretty much said they are working on something to fix the problem that would be fair to all.
Join Date: Nobody cares.
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Because it is better to let 99 guilty people go free than risk punishing 1 innocent person. now let's say you were the victim of this I can say your tone would be different.
Nope. If I were unjustly kicked I'd just move on because it would happen about a tenth as much as AFK leechers do now.
The standard that you propose, "99 guilty people go free than risk punishing 1 innocent person" is unrealistic. That makes sense for a criminal justice system, not a game where the stakes are, quite frankly, minimal.
Also, you've ignored the fact that in the current system, far more innocent people are being punished by the AFKers. So the situation is more like "it is better to let 99 guilty people go free than risk punishing 1 innocent person - so lets let the 10 innocent people currently locked up rot in jail rather than change the system."
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
The more you advocate a vote kick feature the more I do not trust you with one. I have allot of experiance from running a FPS game server that had vote kick enabled and it was abused every day and on weekends practicaly every map until we turned the feature off.
I don't believe this is relevant experience. Queue size, group size, population size, and player psychology are all going to be quite different in an MMO than an FPS game server. More relevant are the MMOs where this has been implemented, which show that abuse does occur, but not at an egregious rate.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
I can say from personal experience a vote kick feature will not work and will be abused. I have been griefed before for "not using the right weapons" (I use tetryon), for "not equipping turrets on the aft weapon slots (I use beam arrays), for "not using the right ship" (I use Breen chel grett warship) or ground armor (omega), for my fleet name, for not carrying on a conversation in chat while I'm playing, even for declining friend requests. I could name more. Now bear in mind that I do pull my weight, and more, in missions. And I do know what I'm doing. But to be kicked for not accepting someones friend request, or for not using turrets? No thanks. Not to mention that I could name a couple three fleets who will make it their mission in life to just kick people for laughs. I think everyone knows the ones I'm talking about.
And yes there are tools in game you can use to avoid leechers...private queues, friend list, etc. Why do you feel Cryptic has to do everything for you? Should they play the mission for you? Pick up the loot for you? Maybe come to your house at dinner time to cut your meat for you?
I don't care what the header says, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be, an "ARC user".
Ah yes the ever popular attacking the messenger when you can't refute the facts. How predictable.
No, more like "Methinks the requestor wants it too much."
And the messenger, contrary to normal way of doing things, is EXACTLY the one you should be looking at. And various of these 'messengers' have already let it slip they will use the vote kick for something else than AFK-ers. And *that* is precisely the problem with the proposed vote kick system: people will almost immediate start (ab)using it for other things (like showing up in the 'wrong' ship, not doing enough DPS, etc).
I can see this being abused...as just about everything that players have any amount of control over.
can you it being abused itwas allready tried and abused in STF"s PVE queue and PVP
the problem was people left teams to avoid need or gread and started the afkers in pvp
No, more like "Methinks the requestor wants it too much."
And the messenger, contrary to normal way of doing things, is EXACTLY the one you should be looking at. And various of these 'messengers' have already let it slip they will use the vote kick for something else than AFK-ers. And *that* is precisely the problem with the proposed vote kick system: people will almost immediate start (ab)using it for other things (like showing up in the 'wrong' ship, not doing enough DPS, etc).
Exactly my point. The messenger is just pushing way too hard and not considering the other proposals that are a proper solution that cannot be used to grief another player. That brings forth distrust about motivations.
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Ideas are always good - and I think it's clear there is at least some problem here that could be either relieved or solved systematically. With any system like this, there are conflicting goals to consider: We want to improve the play experience of people who unfortunately get saddled with an AFK player, but we don't want to enable cliques of partly-premade players to bully another player for creating their own playstyle. We want to reward players for being good group participants and for helping other players, but we want to avoid any positive reinforcement tool we hypothetically create being exploited by friends or premade groups. We want to foster social interaction between players - that's kind of the purpose of a queue system, after all! - but we don't want to force it on people who really just want to play by themselves. So, there are a lot of variables to consider, and we'd have to be careful to make sure that we didn't just create more problems than we solved with any given implementation.
Pardon my rambling, but those are my thoughts on the matter. They're still pretty abstract at the moment, but I do agree there is both a collective action problem and an optimal rewards per minute problem here, where optimizing one's actions for personal gain per effort doesn't create a good collective experience, and society's normal controls for that sort of thing (reputation, word of mouth) are very much weakened by a random matchmaking system (our queue system).
I think it's sufficient for me that you obviously get it and your response demonstrates that the problem has not been unrecognized.
I never believed there would be a simple solution, for you or for us, that didn't run the risk of causing as many problems as it solves. The STF "leaver penalty" being one pertinent example of how one thing affects other things.
I guess my question would be, what options has Cryptic considered to address the problem?
The queue system is not going away, obviously. It effectively solves one issue that some other MMO's have struggled with, which is finding players willing to form a team with strangers. I think there may be room for improvement in the process of matching people up, to improve the play experience by matching up players who are most likely to "click". The question is, what's reasonable from both a technical and a social perspective?
On the other hand, I firmly believe there needs to be some recourse for dealing with a "team member" who refuses to cooperate and makes the experience for everyone else "unfun". In another MMO, I happily left any group where some individuals were making the mission harder than it had to be -- as in repeatedly ramming their collective heads against a brick wall and refusing to be reasoned with. There was nothing stopping me from joining a different team and trying the mission again. I never did it out of spite -- I did it so that I wouldn't have to continue to waste my time running back to the mission door everytime I got knocked out because people weren't cooperating.
In this game, we have an increasing respawn timer that penalizes us for getting kaboomed too often. We also have the leaver penalty to deal with. It too had/has its' purpose. Some people were dropping out of STF's for their own reasons and causing other players grief. Do we get rid of it? Some say yes, but they don't say how to deal with the problem the penalty was supposed to fix. The thing is, the leaver penalty has created this Catch-22 situation where the cure is potentially worse than the disease. If I stay, it's going to take longer to complete the mission -- assuming I can. If I don't, I'm locked out of the queue and can't start over in a reasonable time frame.
If Cryptic is not going to institute some other form of control, then they need to reduce or eliminate the leaver penalty so that players are free to form new groups within a reasonable period of time, thus allowing players to reassert social control over the situation where other players are not cooperating.
The next question, assuming the leaver penalty is part of the issue, is "what's a reasonable period of time to wait before joining a new team?"
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In all honesty I dont see the issue with the option to kick, I have played many games where the group leader always had an option to kick someone and I never saw rampant abuse of it, in fact i cant remember a time when I ever heard of an issue/concern about it till I got to STO and I am sure it would be the same with this game.
Only exception: when I queue for an Elite, and Cryptic annoyingly has me join an already in-progress, failed Optional, mission, then I should have the right to leave with impunity.
Agree x10. This happened a couple of times this weekend. It gets maddening when you're also trying to squeeze in the rest of your missions and alt-y business.
I will say this, if they have a vote to kick feature as soon as I see a rainbow build, I will click to vote that person out....and I'm not alone on that.
No, more like "Methinks the requestor wants it too much."
And the messenger, contrary to normal way of doing things, is EXACTLY the one you should be looking at. And various of these 'messengers' have already let it slip they will use the vote kick for something else than AFK-ers. And *that* is precisely the problem with the proposed vote kick system: people will almost immediate start (ab)using it for other things (like showing up in the 'wrong' ship, not doing enough DPS, etc).
Absolutely meimeitoo. The ones pushing way too hard for this will be abusing it straight out of the gate. I've posted before what I've see this "feature" that was screamed for in SWTOR do. This is NOT about AFK'ers. The content of this thread proves it. This is about power happy griefers wanting more power over other players and to be able to control what they do in game.
The bottom line is this: I work my butt off in real life to pay for this entertainment. Having a vote to kick because I like a Mogai instead of a Scimitar, is the same as allowing my neighbors being able to vote me off the cable system because they don't like the idea that I watch espn instead of lifetime channel.
I pay for this, and as soon as a 12 year old, or anyone else for that matter, is dictating what I do while I'm in my form of after work entertainment I stop paying.
This is NOT about AFK'ers. The content of this thread proves it.
It doesn't prove anything of the sort. If you think it does, that's because of your own bias.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
Comments
I agree with every word
The problem is usually one person sitting afk for an entire match leeching expertise/rewards or deliberately attempting to cause a match to fail (griefing).
What it looks like is being discussed here is a vote to kick feature where 3 players (one to initiate the vote, and two to vote in favor of) can kick another player out of a team of five.
I think the three to kick method is too open to abuse to be practical. I saw it in WoW, and despite it being moderately useful, I also saw it being abused, and was unable to prevent players from being kicked from my groups by small minded idiots. Also, a player who gets kicked under a 3toK system should not be put on a cooldown.
A better proposal would to make a vote kick system require all four of the other players in the match to vote in favor of kicking the fifth. This would mitigate some of the perceived abuse, as it would require the entire rest of the team. It could still be abused, but the bar would be raised for it to happen.
Any such vote-to-kick system should broadcast to the rest of the team, who is initiating the kick, and there should be a box that requires a reason to be given. Anonymous vote initiation is asking for abuse.
Also, any player who initiates a kick vote, would be put on a cooldown, and would not be able to initiate another vote for a certain amount of time (six hours as an example).
A token system could be used giving a player x amount of kick tokens in a given week (5 maybe). Once a players tokens are used up they cannot initiate a vote.
Another way to deal with the issue is to use a type of tool similar to the chat ignore function. Since chat is separate from the rest of the game mechanics, using an ignore list to keep from being grouped with people a player dislikes would more than likely be quite difficult and have unforeseen side effects.
Instead, create a Do Not Group tool to the queue. This would allow players to designate other players who they would like to avoid for whatever reason. Since it would be part of the queuing system, it would be unaffected by chat ignores. Also such a feature should be activated from within a group setting, and would only take effect once the event is ended, this way the event in progress is not disrupted.
An example of how this might work in practice:
Players A, B, C, D, E, F and G are in the queue.
Player A and G have clear lists
Player B has C and D tagged.
Player C has D Tagged.
Player E has D Tagged.
Players A, F, and G would get in the group with no problems. Player D has 3 players flagging him, player C has B flagging him. So the group that would be formed would be A, C, E, F, and G. B would remain in the queue because he has C flagged, and C has no other flags raised against him. D would also remain in the queue since he is flagged by multiple players.
With a system like this, flagging a player does not affect the player who has been flagged, other than the two players involved will never be in the same public match. It does not add them to the ignore list, it does not bar them from the public queue. The benefit to this is that players can avoid repeat afkers and griefers, and such players will find wait times longer and longer, as the pool of players willing to put up with them shrinks.
As pleasant as this sounds, it can also be a double edged sword. If you have too many players flagged, the chances of you getting into a public match go down with each player added. For things like Crystaline Entity, Mine trap, Big Dig, the 20 man Starbase defense, this would inflate the queue times, and the number of players appearing in the queue.
In the long term this would help weed out the real problem players, those who deliberately grief or routinely go afk. But as with any system, its possible that someone would find a way to abuse it.
I thought I would toss these ideas out as an alternative since 3toK is quite hotly debated.
Hypothetical? Really? after the list you gave..........okay.
headdesk
The 20 player events should be limited to that 1 team as they are all 5 player teams. otherwise the queue will never pop with 20 players having no team lists. but rewards and drops needs to be based on each team seperatly as well. Mine trap if team A fails B, C, and D should not lose any marks from it as an example.
I think this system would work perfectly but I think chat should also affect the no team setup as an option. i wont team with a racist from zone chat after he is put on my ignore list and i dont want the game deciding to team me anyway. So I would use the option to not team on chat ignore.
That system also being a double edged sword will eventualy remove the overjealous elitists who flip out over the tiniest infractions and mash the no team button after insulting the rest of the team. I have no complaints on that as i hate seeing a new player being berated over something stupid rather than have it explained nicely.
As for the kick vote option how you outlined it, that wont stop abuse, only make it less frequent. Any abuse is too much so vote kick should not even be on the table for discusion.
But on the other hand If Cryptic had GM's in game then having a vote 2 flag someone and GM's are alerted and have a job to observe the player then i wouldnt have an issue with that.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
The simplest way, IMO to set up a "No Reward for AFK" system would be to set a minimum damage and healing quota that has to be reached to get rewards. The quota would have to be high enough to prevent scripters and bots, but allows lower DPS players (Science Vessels and Cruisers) to get rewards.
EXACTLY!!! STO has in my opinion been the most friendly, most accomodating MMO in the world. I wouldn't still be playing if that wasn't the case. Any MMO has their "difficult" players, but where other MMO's take a more aggresive stance against these players, STO is more diplomatic in their approach. OK some players may not agree with me here, but the GM's are on call should a player or players need them, and the GM's DO take the apropriate action as and whern needed to do so.
Having a kick option while in an STF will only lead to collective bullying (or appear to look like that by others) If anyone comes across a player that is AFKing etc my stance is let that player AFK at the end of the day I am the better person for not allowing myself to get riled by them.
Other things to consider is if a player has gone AFK (or appears to be AFK) there might be a legitamate reason behind it, loss of connection to the net, an emergency call of nature, a telephone call etc. We can not see that player, and making snap judgements on what appears to be could actually be innocent.
So you're saying that you're against any solution that has the potential to be abused. Even if it means trading a situation where a thousand players are negatively impacted for a situation where only one is.
That's an interesting point of view philosophically, but I think that most people would prefer the least harmful situation.
Because it is better to let 99 guilty people go free than risk punishing 1 innocent person. now let's say you were the victim of this I can say your tone would be different.
I think a compromise could be like WoWs report AFK in battle grounds. If the majority of a team reports the person afk they get a debuff and have a set amount of time to get involved, if they don't then they are kicked from the BG and take a leavers penelty too. This could be applied to group setting here.
This still gives the players some power in the reporting part, however it gives an innocent player a chance to clear the debuff.
^^ Best post in the thread. Chapeau!
Also, I foresee people starting to kick for the loot. Always better to divvy the spoils between 2 people than between the lot, no?!
Seriously, humans come with the [Exploit] trait: at worst they'll abuse a system; at best they're looking for the edge (like using the mail system for extra 'bank' slots).
A vote kick system is also simply going to be on a massive gliding slope. It was already suggest people get kicked for showing up in a Miranda. And where one person draws the line at a noob ship, the other may feel the same about a Science ship, or any non-Escort; or at a noob altogether -- or one perceived to be a noob in their eyes (like someone blowing the Nanites too early, whereas currently that's no longer a real issue).
So, I vote NO to the vote kick system!
i really think they should remove the leaver penalty so you can leave and rejoin a new team and also make it so people you ignore cant be placed on your team..
[12:44] Vessel One of Two Unimatrix 01 deals 1019527 (1157678) Kinetic Damage to you with Plasma Energy Bolt Explosion.
The P in PUG, is for "Public". not "Personal Preference"
I have good PUGs, and bad ones, but at the end of the day, I get over the bad ones.
I dug a grave, can we dump the rotting horse carcass in?
It's stinking up the Forum again.
+1 I like this suggestion.
I like this idea. It's futile to remember stuff about players. The only indication I have atm is to put them on my friendslist.
The system would also queue us preferably with our highest star rated players if they are available for the same mission I presume?
The more you advocate a vote kick feature the more I do not trust you with one. I have allot of experiance from running a FPS game server that had vote kick enabled and it was abused every day and on weekends practicaly every map until we turned the feature off.
I have already made a proposal that does not allow other players to be abused and does not include vote kicking. It is a common alternative proposal to vote kicking. As for AFK/leeching that is Cryptics job to police the servers. not the players. A dev was in this thread and pretty much said they are working on something to fix the problem that would be fair to all.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
Nope. If I were unjustly kicked I'd just move on because it would happen about a tenth as much as AFK leechers do now.
The standard that you propose, "99 guilty people go free than risk punishing 1 innocent person" is unrealistic. That makes sense for a criminal justice system, not a game where the stakes are, quite frankly, minimal.
Also, you've ignored the fact that in the current system, far more innocent people are being punished by the AFKers. So the situation is more like "it is better to let 99 guilty people go free than risk punishing 1 innocent person - so lets let the 10 innocent people currently locked up rot in jail rather than change the system."
I don't believe this is relevant experience. Queue size, group size, population size, and player psychology are all going to be quite different in an MMO than an FPS game server. More relevant are the MMOs where this has been implemented, which show that abuse does occur, but not at an egregious rate.
And yes there are tools in game you can use to avoid leechers...private queues, friend list, etc. Why do you feel Cryptic has to do everything for you? Should they play the mission for you? Pick up the loot for you? Maybe come to your house at dinner time to cut your meat for you?
No, more like "Methinks the requestor wants it too much."
And the messenger, contrary to normal way of doing things, is EXACTLY the one you should be looking at. And various of these 'messengers' have already let it slip they will use the vote kick for something else than AFK-ers. And *that* is precisely the problem with the proposed vote kick system: people will almost immediate start (ab)using it for other things (like showing up in the 'wrong' ship, not doing enough DPS, etc).
And some there be who consider wrongful kicking a form of griefing, is the point. And yeah, people should not have to put up with that! :P
can you it being abused itwas allready tried and abused in STF"s PVE queue and PVP
the problem was people left teams to avoid need or gread and started the afkers in pvp
Exactly my point. The messenger is just pushing way too hard and not considering the other proposals that are a proper solution that cannot be used to grief another player. That brings forth distrust about motivations.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek:
I think it's sufficient for me that you obviously get it and your response demonstrates that the problem has not been unrecognized.
I never believed there would be a simple solution, for you or for us, that didn't run the risk of causing as many problems as it solves. The STF "leaver penalty" being one pertinent example of how one thing affects other things.
I guess my question would be, what options has Cryptic considered to address the problem?
The queue system is not going away, obviously. It effectively solves one issue that some other MMO's have struggled with, which is finding players willing to form a team with strangers. I think there may be room for improvement in the process of matching people up, to improve the play experience by matching up players who are most likely to "click". The question is, what's reasonable from both a technical and a social perspective?
On the other hand, I firmly believe there needs to be some recourse for dealing with a "team member" who refuses to cooperate and makes the experience for everyone else "unfun". In another MMO, I happily left any group where some individuals were making the mission harder than it had to be -- as in repeatedly ramming their collective heads against a brick wall and refusing to be reasoned with. There was nothing stopping me from joining a different team and trying the mission again. I never did it out of spite -- I did it so that I wouldn't have to continue to waste my time running back to the mission door everytime I got knocked out because people weren't cooperating.
In this game, we have an increasing respawn timer that penalizes us for getting kaboomed too often. We also have the leaver penalty to deal with. It too had/has its' purpose. Some people were dropping out of STF's for their own reasons and causing other players grief. Do we get rid of it? Some say yes, but they don't say how to deal with the problem the penalty was supposed to fix. The thing is, the leaver penalty has created this Catch-22 situation where the cure is potentially worse than the disease. If I stay, it's going to take longer to complete the mission -- assuming I can. If I don't, I'm locked out of the queue and can't start over in a reasonable time frame.
If Cryptic is not going to institute some other form of control, then they need to reduce or eliminate the leaver penalty so that players are free to form new groups within a reasonable period of time, thus allowing players to reassert social control over the situation where other players are not cooperating.
The next question, assuming the leaver penalty is part of the issue, is "what's a reasonable period of time to wait before joining a new team?"
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Agree x10. This happened a couple of times this weekend. It gets maddening when you're also trying to squeeze in the rest of your missions and alt-y business.
Absolutely meimeitoo. The ones pushing way too hard for this will be abusing it straight out of the gate. I've posted before what I've see this "feature" that was screamed for in SWTOR do. This is NOT about AFK'ers. The content of this thread proves it. This is about power happy griefers wanting more power over other players and to be able to control what they do in game.
The bottom line is this: I work my butt off in real life to pay for this entertainment. Having a vote to kick because I like a Mogai instead of a Scimitar, is the same as allowing my neighbors being able to vote me off the cable system because they don't like the idea that I watch espn instead of lifetime channel.
I pay for this, and as soon as a 12 year old, or anyone else for that matter, is dictating what I do while I'm in my form of after work entertainment I stop paying.
this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUl6Czk_p7s
It doesn't prove anything of the sort. If you think it does, that's because of your own bias.