30 gaming co. come together to form Fair Play Alliance, to monitor/curb toxicity - Sensationalist Headlines

I was sort of hoping Kotaku wouldn't be the only source, but alas. Here's an archive if you want the full article. Here's the group's website. The Fair Play Alliance is a coalition made up of over 30 different companies, including Riot, Blizzard, Twitch, CCP, and Epic, that aims to share research and lessons learned around gaming communities in the hopes of cutting down on “disruptive behavior.” The goal, Riot senior technical designer Kimberly Voll toldKotaku, is to create a consistent set of behavior standards between companies and a common understanding of the underlying issues that cause poor behavior in online communities. The hope is that developers won’t have to start from square one anymore when creating online games. The first step in that process is a day-long summit at GDC hosted by the Fair Play Alliance, which begins on Wednesday morning with a keynote by Voll. Developers and creators from Activision, Epic, Supercell, and more will openly discuss research, issues they’ve faced, mistakes they’ve made, and what they’ve learned in the process. It’s a solid first step, but it seems like The Fair Play Alliance is still working to secure a foothold beyond that. I asked Voll what lies ahead, and she joked that while the Fair Play Alliance has a website, there are not many other tangible elements to discuss just yet. It’s still working to solidify things like shared resources, and a system that’ll allow developers to reach out to knowledgeable individuals when they’re struggling to solve abuse- or harassment-related issues.

I'm all for this, say what you want about "trash talk" but high levels are racism and sexism that I see don't count, that goes under "being an insufferable cunt".

I'm glad that Riot games is part of this. The amount of toxicity in League of Legends is off the charts and you can't just mute everyone or you'll miss out on important information.

I stopped playing Dota entirely and don't play nearly as much Overwatch as I used to because there's toxicity in most games. And that isn't even an over reaction. Something needs to change and whatever measures Blizzard are taking it clearly isn't enough.

I miss trash talking but that sort of culture died a long time ago.

The first step is to get rid of this ‘win at all costs’ mentality that most games have. Now I’m not saying that games shouldn’t be competitive, but eg when you have a racing game where the only way you can progress through singleplayer is to come first in every single race, where in each race you must make your way from the very back of the grid to first place within a few laps, players are going to take the attitudes they use in singleplayer over to multiplayer. How you could fix that kind of problem is let players ‘win’ if they finish with a podium placing, or even better, have winning be a podium placing in a championship of multiple races. Let players qualify for grid placement etc. All of these reduce the costs of winning, so players will not resort to desperate measures, and ideally, they won’t take those measures over to multiplayer as well. There was one hopper in Forza 6 which was called the ABC’s. Unlike every other hopper where there are often 16 players but only 1 player can finish 1st, meaning if you start in 16th then yeah you would absolutely have to race dirty, ABC’s was multi-class, so you’d often have four players in class A cars, 4 players in class B cars etc. That way, there could be multiple winners, and even if you started in last place for your class, you had a realistic chance to make first with clean racing.

Why can't everyone just relax and have fun, and realize it's just a game?

this is a step in the right direction honestly, id rather have fun and not hear some stupid sexist, racist shit for the "lulz" because its just tiring and played out

I personally think NellySmigger69 had a lot to add to the Siege community, and his passing is tragic.

trash talking the other team in csgo is half the fun the other day, there was this guy going off, up until the last decisive round when he just got HS'd 20 seconds in without doing a thing. he just left right away

Yeah but most of the people partaking in trash talking these days are also the kind of people who start messaging said person well after the game ended.

That hasn't been true of my experience on the PC, but I know that's common on console.

Nah, on PC you'll be mostly fine. Fortnite being f2p and on console would guarantee hateful messages all day erry day.

Something tells me, while this is an appreciated effort, I feel its going to fail like every other time a company has tried to monitor the Toxic players and often makes things worse to the Non-toxic players. Its sadly something just to expect in competitive game, even some people I know in real life that are pretty nice outside of a match, they turn into complete monsters when they get into those serious Competitive LoL matches or whatever other game with a big competitive scene. Like damn, the toxicity in Overwatch or nearly every Competitive game is a lot worse than say, TF2, yeah there are some assholes in that game too but in comparison to Overwatch, its its a goddamn walk in the park when it comes to the community. I guess thats because TF2 is a lot more dumb fun than serious competitive stuff. Also this might not fix everything, but what about Dedicated servers? yeah some are absolute trash, but with a good admin and some mods, they could keep a good peace on the place. plus they can keep a game last for a long while.

There's a racing game I can't remember the name of where you're not allowed to play online until you can complete a singleplayer tournament with all clean races. You don't have to win, just get through the tournament cleanly.

It's always some bottom fragger trash talking after their team wins, thinking he's hot shit.

Do games these days not have mute buttons? If someone says something you don't like, mute em'.

Back 2008-10 I remember people in tf2 who would refuse to mute micspammers/shit talkers and demand they stop. It was so weird to see.

Some don't, actually. R6: Siege is either "deal with the other team's trash talk" or "disable text chat entirely and hope everyone on your team has a mic." Kind of a no-brainer for a competitive shooter.

why relax when you can shout homophobic slurs at someone from across the world through the internet to feed your tiny ego?

ignore block and report nobody's gonna go out of their way to get a handful of people to bug you anyway

Well I guess this explains this decision: https://www.cnet.com/news/blizzard-discourages-pepe-the-frog-memes-overwatch/

Having the game be pay-to-play doesn't always stop it either. Always been the most bizarre thing to me that people will spend 60 bucks beg their mom to spend 60 bucks on a game and spend half the time chat spamming edgy bullshit. Really hurts the quality of an experience that I've paid for.

I found that the best way to counter toxic assholes is to call them rude and tell them to stop acting like that. It drives them fucking crazy and they go retarded since you acknowledged them but did not take their bait so they feel like fools

I would think this was a good step if companies like blizzard actually did anything to help keep people from becoming toxic. They've fucked up HOTS so much that the only thing it's good for is tilting people and turning them toxic. I've literally been happier since I haven't played in a while.

please god I'm sick of lenny spam in tf2. even after 6 years since its creation that shit is still the apex predator of chat, killing all reason, all logic, all teamwork, and all of my faith in you being a above the age of 14.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I miss the days when you could rib each other with both parties understanding that it was a part of the competitive nature, rather than this nearly-sociopathic abusive behavioural pattern that a lot of comp players seem to exude nowadays. I remember back when I played comp games with my comp-sparring-partner we'd regularly call each other shitty things when we made mistakes, or outright call each other out on bad decisions, but it was never outright abusive. I just hope they're not gonna go the Blizzard route of banning people who say "fudge" in the heat of the moment.

Call me old fashioned, but much like what TheFerries already mentioned, maybe these "AAA" publishers could help curb toxicity by... you know... giving us Source-era dedicated servers and admin tools back? It's so embarrassing seeing these big corporations spending microtransaction money doing these feel-good measures, making these hilariously-named "Alliances" when I don't recall most of these problems being that big with decent community servers years back. Might be a poor analogy but this reminds me of the story about ballpoint pens in space. Just use old working tech you billionaire babies.

Not all trash talking is bad though, the in-game banter between two teams in games like Rising Storm 2 and Battlefield 1 are the most entertaining thing I've seen in a while.