Comments on: Social Morals

By: Tesh

Tesh — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:24:18 +0000

Beej, casual, solo and short session play (all different things) didn’t make a blacklist irrelevant, devs just dropped it, probably because it could be abused. Even being “blackspotted” in Puzzle Pirates is a temporary thing (though repeat offenders are flagged for ban review) specifically to keep it from being abused. (Also, those who indiscriminately wield the blackspot power are often called to task.) It’s theoretically nice to give power to players to police their servers, in a way, but practically, players will abuse whatever power you give them. Blacklists can be griefing tools, which is probably why they fell out of use.

I do think that there’s room for a blacklist still, and wish we’d see more of it, but it would have to be on the back end. It’s not mutually exclusive with short session/casual/solo play. (Also, if the penalty of being a jerk is more than a perpetual /generalmute, it might be useful.) Say, a player who gets muted a lot gets flagged for review, and chatlogs are archived for the GMs. Sufficient abuse of chat earns a ban with no appeal, since it’s all part of the record. (There could be other metrics, too, like emote usage patterns.)

MMO providers could do that already, without any sort of public blacklist. Smart devs probably do.

Then again, “Barrens chat” is a common term for a reason. Some devs just don’t police their community, or don’t police it well, and in the absence of enforcement, there will be abuses.

By: Debby

Debby — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:11:52 +0000

The true measure of a person is how they behave when they think no one is looking. Is one honest because they fear they’ll be caught or are they honest because it is the morally right way to behave? The anonymous nature of the internet allows people to follow their instincts with little or no consequence and this brings out the worst in some.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:07:25 +0000

As I get older (heh, funny saying that) I definitely favour casual and solo play more and more. 5 years ago I easily had the time to play EQ for 4 hour sessions but now it’s a lot harder because of my work and wife… and it’s only going to get tougher. Ironically though, it seems that newer games like Darkfall which promote the ’sandbox’ style of play actually have very poor etiquette and a lot of cheating in them. Now contrast that to EQ, in which you could really screw people over by ninja loot or by running trains through dungeons, and it was a lot less socially acceptable.

By: Beej

Beej — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:57:01 +0000

I worry about the future of MMORPGs. With more of an inclusion of casual and solo play (which I am all for), there is also introduced a penchant for players to behave more selfishly because their actions will solely benefit them and cause no consequences. In most MMOs today, a blacklist doesn’t matter. In the first EQ, being blacklisted could mean your character never gains any more XP. The social stigma of being a jerk is protected by the anonymity of the internet and negatively reinforced by game mechanics.

I am working on a post myself regarding a similar topic of internet anonymity and why some games (or subcultures within a game like WoW PvP) train people to exclude anything new or slightly non-conformist.