Combatting anti-social behavior on the mp serv

[Doc Paterson]

I think system must follow KISS principle

Just registration and black/white lists.

Karma system will be quickly abused.

Agreed, and I think Taurus is right-on.

For some reason this proposal rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps it goes against my perception of Wesnoth. I myself have always viewed Wesnoth as pretty casual, and relaxed. Ratings, registrations, the and all that other red tape/restrictions don't really exist. You get to know peoples personalities and skill level from personally playing and intereacting with them, or other people that know them. It kind of resembles real life in the way that everyone isn't walking around all the time with this or that rating or title strapped to their forehead.

[mrchadt]

Thanks Dave, I am very happy to see you have decided to address this problem. Unsocial behavior spoils a friendly and fun gaming enviroment. I'm not sure about the karma rating idea, maybe something as simple as a black list in the forum where people can post their experiences anonymously.
This could be abused but at least the person could see what someone had said about him(her) and give an explanation of the context or deny the accusation. Maybe this would let the offender realise they have caused offense, I think some immature individuals do not realise they are behaving badly.

[Eleazar]

First, I think we should make it possible to register user names. Registration wouldn't be mandatory, but guests wouldn't be able to use registered names. This would stop people from impersonating each other. Also there'd be a reasonable limit on the number of names that could be registered from the same IP address.

Most people seem to want to be able to register their names. But anyway this seems to be common sense. Anonymous-ness seems to encourage bad behavior in some. This is generally recognized among forum admins— i've seen very few that allow anonymous posting. Even though it not that hard to generate an additional forum identity, forum registration seem to help people behave. Of course, part of the benefit is lost if registration is optional.

Allowing the registered player to create his own personal black/white lists seems like the next logical step. I don't see how that could be really abused, and it would generally be useful since people want to easily find their friends anyway.

If these measures aren't sufficient then maybe it's time to consider more extreme (and complex) solutions like ratings or karma.

[NeoPhile]

for other people it depends on how often they appear on the whitelists and blacklists of people I trust... they can join only if they appear in more whitelists than blacklists.

How do you plan to do this when the lists are stored on the client side?

[Noy]

First, I think we should make it possible to register user names. Registration wouldn't be mandatory, but guests wouldn't be able to use registered names. This would stop people from impersonating each other. Also there'd be a reasonable limit on the number of names that could be registered from the same IP address.

Most people seem to want to be able to register their names. But anyway this seems to be common sense. Anonymous-ness seems to encourage bad behavior in some. This is generally recognized among forum admins— i've seen very few that allow anonymous posting. Even though it not that hard to generate an additional forum identity, forum registration seem to help people behave. Of course, part of the benefit is lost if registration is optional.

Allowing the registered player to create his own personal black/white lists seems like the next logical step. I don't see how that could be really abused, and it would generally be useful since people want to easily find their friends anyway.

If these measures aren't sufficient then maybe it's time to consider more extreme (and complex) solutions like ratings or karma.

I don't think it will have an effect at all, and honestly eleazar, I don't think you really understand the problem or its real scale, which is not very large. The people who are committing the ASBOs don't care about their nicks. If they did they wouldn't come back after they are banned to cause more trouble. I doubt someone is wedded to an explitive laced name that they would worry about losing it. As much as registering nicks is a nice idea, its not going to do a thing to stop the problem. And on the subject of impersonations, beyond a few cases Its never been a problem, and among friends its pretty easy to figure out when someone is a fraud. Its nice to have, but I don't think its the be all and end all that people like.

As as other people have pointed out, the Karma system is just asking for abuse, and I think we should shy away from any ranking system. Not only will it do nothing to stop the problem, it would just make it worse. We already have personal friends lists scheduled in the next version, so that should really be enough. Even so I think that its not really going to do much anyway, since if you play a bit, you quickly learn who to trust.

The reality is that the wesnoth community will have to deal with this problem and get used to it. We're growing, and as we do, we will attract more undesirable elements. Nobody at this point had really brought forward any sort of idea that will really do much to solve the problem. Adopting draconian moderation policy won't really solve it entirely either, but it may put a slight damper on it. To be honest, I think we've been pretty fair on that subject though.

In my opinion however, I don't believe the problem is as bad as people are making it out to be, and I'm the person who usually has to go in there and ban people. This is particularly true if you compared wesnoth to similarly sized gaming communities.

[Viliam]

for other people it depends on how often they appear on the whitelists and blacklists of people I trust... they can join only if they appear in more whitelists than blacklists.

How do you plan to do this when the lists are stored on the client side?

The ratings would be stored on client side in a text file. But it would be possible to download my friends' files too. For example my file would be in "userdata/rating.cfg", but downloaded mirror files of my friends would be like "userdata/ratings/001.cfg". The game would allow me to download other person's ratings, if I am on the other person's whitelist (and maybe if the person has clicked in preferences "share ratings").

[krotop]

Can it lead to some sort of lobby slowness or lag, or (for the worst) more server crashes ? Because if so, the solution is worst than the problem IMHO.

I think people toast themselves when they act anti-social and they build their own reputation through the games. Most Wesnoth players build their own white/black list without any help of informatic tools, don't they ?

[Sapient]

Maybe, instead of IP address, the server could send some one-way function that generates a unique number based on the IP Address. This way you could mute, ban, or personally rate a player based on IP without actually receiving their IP Address.

[taro]

A karma system can and will be abused quickly, not worth the effort.

Probably every regular MP player already has it's own black and white list. The only problem I see is the possibility to impersonate a player. So maybe it's a good idea to allow people to register player names. But don't try to force people to register or even bother them with requests to register. Provide the option to register and let every player decide for himself to register or not.

A registration based on IP addresses is problematic, you have people sharing the same IP address and you have a lot of people with dynamic IP addresses, changing every day. Use a simple name/password sytem. If you want to make it a bit harder to register a new player name require a valid e-mail address for the registration.

[Darkmoon]

I think registration system is a very good idea, but karma is not(not necessearily).


What I propose is to create something akin to forum post star rating. Each registered member would either no stars,.. or one, two,.. or three starts tops. These stars would be displayed beside the name inside the server(or perhaps when joining the game)

Stars would simply represent a number of "FINISHED" games. Not out of synch, the games that you left before the game ended, but actual games that you were in when they were finished.


My proposed star ratings would be
No stars, up to 20 games
One star, up to 50 games
Two stars, over 50 games,

I think these would be sufficient, but we could still have 3 star rating, which could simply represent "Veteran" level or something like that with over 200 games.




I think this way that any player that gets to one star or two star rating would try to at least be courteous towards others since his/her name would a be known. ((and playing and finishing this name of games while behaving nicely might be a feat for some people))




……
Imo, that could be supplemented with type of good/bad system... each player could vote on any other single name only once per name... either Cool person,. or Not Cool. AGAIN, one could only vote on any specific name only once(to prevent abuse) and only once you get to "TWO STAR" rating. This way, no one would create accounts only to vote someone bad or good, to much work. Of course, we could also have black list for extreme cases… proven repeated cheating, stuff like that.

[commanderkeen]

Maybe just have MP mods who can kick/ban people from games no matter who the host is. Then, if someone is being awful a mod can kick/ban them, so it matters not whether the host knows what he/she is doing or even if the host is ther nasty one.

[telly]

With more tournaments happening registration is a big help otherwise you have people impersonating others and playing their matches for them.

[krotop]

The advantage of star system is that it can insitate people not to leave before the end of the game. This is quite an impolite behaviour...

But it is against the spirit of Wesnoth I think. Contrarily to multiplayer RPG stuffs like Everquest or so, Wesnoth don't rewards people that play for a long time but people that have strategic skills. This is what I like in this game, a guy with a month or two of experience but blessed with a good sense of strategy can beat old wesnothians. Whereas in most internet games, you beat someone when you have played more hours and your character has better weapons, armor, and magic powers. Star system tends to reward those who played more games, not nice persons or good players (even if in most cases good players = old players).

[Thrawn]

if we were to do the registering thing, just a suggestion:

have a different color of name for those who have nicks that are registered and those who have nicks but are "guests" that way, as long as you registered first, they could only take the name as a guest, and it would be obvious if someone is copying a name, due to the different color.

just throwing this out there...not sure if doable or even useful

[Taurus]

Rating someone on number of games compleated has been discussed many times before. It has always been concluded with scraping the idea because a big chunk of games end when one side surrenders, or both teams decide to call it a draw. Technically the game is still unfinshed, but in real life, it has been concluded. I can't speek for others, but I would say around 40% of my games end in aggreements like that.

I also would direct you all a few posts up and read what Noy has to say again. Out of all the developers - and even most of the players - I personally see him on the multiplayer server the most. This could just be concidintal of course, but he definatley knows what he is talking about.

As it is, I aggree with him. This problem isn't as big as a problem as many people seem to think it is, and all of these ratings, regestrations and red tape will just bog things down, make more unecessary work for the developers and destroy the whole relaxed, casual, laid back mood that Wesnoth has.