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Revisiting Kick: What good is it for?

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The kick command seems to be commonly used by salty players recently. It's seen a lot of use by certain individuals. Rarely, if ever, do these kick votes actually have a stated reason. So what's the purpose of the kick command, if what is being done to warrant a temporary ban from zk (effectively, cuz of 1rc) is not properly communicated nor standardized?

Standardization is required in communities. There needs to be set standards that people can follow and measure perceived grievances against. Since the certain members of this community are neither communicating properly nor laying standards, these kick votes are doing absolutely nothing but removing "undesirable" players from the big game for reasons they themselves do not even know why. How is bad behavior supposed to be rehabilitated if a punishment is neither linked to a defined grievance nor properly communicated to alleged perpetrator?

Sure, we can hide behind "removing griefers" and "TKers" but the actual use case for kicking those are next to 0 or when they DO happen to get called, they have near 0 traction unless its particularly bad. So why is this command allowed for random people to just suddenly call random kick votes for no communicated reason? For instance, while waiting for a game to finish, I saw a kick vote for the user Dhrama_khan. No reason was communicated for this kick. It just was called. I don't even know what he was doing wrong. So what does this communicate to the offender and what does that communicate to the innocent? Nothing. So what is its purpose? To be there "just in case" while it is being effectively abused by individuals of this community to facilitate their petty feuds?

Honestly kick needs to require a reason field (probably at least 7 characters) or be removed from autohosts entirely. All welcome should not be a place where we're just kicking people for lulz, blood feuds, minor offenses or abstract things like "playing poorly" (if that's even the reason, who even knows at this point). Since this is effectively a temporary ban from zk multiplayer, it should have a lot stricter requirements (along with severe penalties for misuse) or be outright removed.
+3 / -1

4 years ago
Since it requires a majority of votes to pass why does a reason need to be stated? If there is no reason it wont pass, if there is a reason it will pass. Who cares about the mere act of calling a vote? It has no effect on anything. At best its a minor nuisance when you want to call a vote for something else.
+2 / -0
4 years ago
I disagree, spurious kick votes are not common in my experience. Most kick votes are the result of people playing like shit in an intentional-looking fashion. Kick votes also rarely pass, as most of the playerbase seems to be on board with not kicking people for silly reasons.

Having the command around is occasionally useful. Vote spam of all kinds could use a nerf though.

+1 / -0
quote:
Most kick votes are the result of people playing like shit in an intentional-looking fashion.


I don't think it is their place to decide if someone is or is not intentionally playing like shit, no less empowering them to create temporary bans. I see these kicks way too often for no stated reason and I do not think it is conductive to retaining or growing this player base to be kicking anyone who plays or is to be perceived to play subpar for one game. I had a game tonight where people were tired of useless spam votes being called. One explicitly stated they were so tired of the useless exit votes that they were ready to call it quits ( NZrankScholar_NZ ). So after seeing another attempted exit vote I tried to kick the exit initiator (or who I thought was the culprit) with a clearly defined reason. I was later then almost kicked (3/4 yes votes) for absolutely no reason.

This is the state of our game. Useless votes being spammed and spurious kick votes plague this community while nothing is done socially or administratively.

To further show you how bad this has gotten, I saw one user tonight complain about playing the same map twice, called an exit vote, then tried to call a start vote immediately after when the game was exited and a new replacement map. Not even joking. Then I saw one player complain about "maps being too small" while voting for maps that were too small and calling exit votes. But this is a tangent.

quote:
Who cares about the mere act of calling a vote? It has no effect on anything.


It does have an affect when the meme votes pass on occasion and someone gets kicked for spurious reasons due to vote-k syndrome. It clogs up people's attention, it clogs up resign votes, and over time it gets old. Really old. It gets old when I see 3-4 kick votes a day because someone gets a little upset over losing that they want to kick people for what they perceive to be subpar play. In the ALL WELCOME room even. This is beside the point as I asked what the purpose of a kick without a reason is from a sociological standpoint. How is it enforcing any norms if the norms it is trying to enforce aren't defined or a reason given? The offender is left questioning what they did and the rest of the group is left questioning what they did. We can assume for that matter that the offender might have been playing below expectations, which quite frankly is a stupid reason to kick anyone unless they're actually doing negative contributing things (such as TK or reclaiming allied stuff). Let's put this to an analogy:
You are arrested (kicked). The police do not even tell you on what charge you're arrested for. Why is this bad? In order for punishment (for normal social people) to be effective, a wrong must be conveyed to associate an effect to the cause of perpetrating some offense. If that wrong is not conveyed effectively, then you run into the issue of having an ineffective punishment system. This is one of my criticisms of the current kick command as a socialization tool.

Worse yet: let's look at it from a person's perspective who is starting to engage with the community. They play their first multiplayer game and they're exposed to a "random" kick vote of someone who is "perceived to play poorly (whether intentionally or not)" by someone else and a kick vote is called. How does this player associate the punishment with the cause? They see a player kicking @Dhrama_Khan and go "why are they kicking him?"-> no answer -> speculation. Congratulations, you have ineffective socialization. This is why admin bans and mutes have a reason and get communicated with by CZrankAdminNightwatch to the offender. If you get banned for a day and the reason is "Teamkilling in B99999", you associate teamkilling with getting banned. (That aside, I wished that they'd bring back ban/mutes being announced in #zk for this exact reason, but that's a topic for another day)

Now onto further elaboration of why kicking players for subjectively poor performance is bad:
Going back to the example mentioned before. You have someone just starting to engage in the community. They are looking at player behavior for norms. They see these random kick votes and let's say they understood the reason that this person was kicked for ("bad play"). They now have to deal with anxiety and worrying about getting kicked or are repulsed by this idea and never engage in zero-k again. Zero-K doesn't grow and inevitably dies off all because some players get a little fussy and immediately escalate to kick voting a poor performer. This is not a desirable outcome.

quote:
Since it requires a majority of votes to pass why does a reason need to be stated?

For the record, it requires only a marginal majority of the team. Half plus one if I recall correctly. Which makes abusing it in larger games easier (double so thanks to Clan balance putting your buddies who will back you up in with you).
+1 / -2
4 years ago
@_Shaman
quote:
I don't think it is their place to decide if someone is or is not intentionally playing like shit

I don't like a mob ruling over an individual. I also don't like players ignoring the team part of a team game just to be a special snowflake.

If you do any of these I will gladly vote yes on a kick:

Gravity unit cannon
Perpetual commander leveling
Superweapon rush
Detri rush
Storage spam
Ships on land
Scylla on land
Strider hub as first factory
Singularity rush
Nonsensical terraforming
Going afk repeatedly
Reclaiming everything to do any of the above

All of these can of course succeed, but only if you get carried by your team putting in actual effort. You're not winning the game, you're not trying to win the game. You're gambling on your team being able to carry you.
+1 / -4

4 years ago
Newton cannon killing 2+ singus and nuke. Multiplayer B819339 8 on Aberdeen3v3v3
+0 / -0
4 years ago
quote:
All of these can of course succeed
+0 / -0

4 years ago
I think kicking players just for using a specific strategy is a good reason to remove the kick command. If they are playing bad and insist on using a strategy they are bad at using, that's something else.
+0 / -0
Removing kick vote has the unfortunate effect of removing the ability of the community to deal with blatant teamkillers, spec cheaters, et cetera when there isn't an admin active. The downsides of kickvote are pretty real but they would have to pile up a lot to overcome the downsides of removing it.

quote:
If you do any of these I will gladly vote yes on a kick:
...

I definitely think unit-cannon, ships on land, Scylla on land, and even maybe Singularity rush belong in a different category to everything else on that list. All of those things *in the right situation* are potentially quite strong and are not necessarily only winning because they got carried. Most of the other things on that list are just flat out useless.

I know for a fact you think several things @_Shaman has done are kickable or modactionable when they weren't even bad play. I also know you've wanted to kick at least one newbie on the incorrect assumption they were a smurf. You need to chill out rather a lot.

quote:
If they are playing bad and insist on using a strategy they are bad at using, that's something else.

Should somebody be kicked for being bad at planefac while they are learning to play it? This seems like a dubious yardstick to me.
+5 / -0

4 years ago
My last kick vote was about speccheast and it succed (resigned player speecheated).
But i didnt notica kick vote spamming in teams room. Onlu rarely. An most persons ignore them.
+0 / -0

4 years ago
While I am only human and might occasionally go with the flow, for the most part I'll ignore a kick vote unless there is a reason given, and even then I hope I consistently only vote yes on a kick if the complaint was easily verifiable. I don't think there is a big problem with kick votes as they stand. They are a tool that is generally used responsibly and as others have observed, when they're not, they don't often succeed.
+1 / -0
4 years ago
Ships on land are a stupid idea, unless you built them to do things in the sea and later won sea so hard that all you can do with those ships is throw them on land.

Rush strategies are ok in my book as long as they aren't absurd (detri rush) and you query your team about your intentions first.
+0 / -0
4 years ago
I do kick votes from time to time, primarily when I'm too busy with the game to flame someone. The usual result tends to be the vote failing and everyone telling me how I'm overreacting to someone plopping a fucking airfield midway to enemy spawn (if you ever happen read this, fuck you now and forever) or "just play" when I try to kick DaKeys.
+0 / -0

4 years ago
quote:

Removing kick vote has the unfortunate effect of removing the ability of the community to deal with blatant teamkillers, spec cheaters, et cetera when there isn't an admin active.

I don't think anybody can disagree with this statement.

By the way, since I'm rarely vote for kicks, I'm not sure whose voices are counted: only of the team the player to be kicked belongs to, or of the other team too? I'm asking because I can see the kick voting of the opposite team, and I'm not sure why should I see it.
+1 / -0
4 years ago
Only the votes from the same team count
+0 / -0
Kick is good for your ass when i'm out of bubble gum.

[Spoiler]
+1 / -0

4 years ago
The Kick votes need to have some way to effectively communicate the reason why to all the players: when someone calls a vote they should have to place a beacon on the map that has a link above the vote counter so everyone can quickly jump to and see why the vote is being called. This will allow people to quickly make a decision and get back to the game with as little interruption as possible, and it will communicate to the kicked player why they are being kicked. Normal beacons in the chat are easily lost in the chat if multiple people are asking what is wrong and where to look. This solutions will stream line the kicking processes. Vote beacons will then delete themselves from the map after the vote concludes


Also, to deal with a vote spam if a player calls 3 failed votes they lose the privilege to call for a vote for the duration of the game.
+2 / -0


4 years ago
quote:
Removing kick vote has the unfortunate effect of removing the ability of the community to deal with blatant teamkillers, spec cheaters, et cetera when there isn't an admin active.


I don't disagree that removing it would have this undesirable effect. However, I would like to point out that in living memory I have no recollection that anyone has been kicked for blatant teamkilling, speccheating, etc. I've seen a lot of rage kicks and reasonless kicks. Granted I am a single observer and infrequently on.

I think it would be a better position to request an update to kick conditions such that the following criteria are met:

1.) Kick requestee camera position (at time of vote) displayable to users.
This would give us a non-explicitly communicated reason to kick someone (eg: for people who dont speak english)

2.) Require reason field, add reason field.
This again dissuades causal kick voting for no reason. Recommend minimum size: 5

3.) Punishment for kick vote abusers.
Kick vote abusers should have kick vote initiation rights removed on repeat occurrences.

I can at least supply code for #1 and possibly #3 if I knew how to test and build infra.
+1 / -0
Starting a list of all no reason kicks and abuse kicks here:


Multiplayer B849543 8 on LLTAComplexV2 -- @TheLovelyDecaftihs was a target of no reason kick. [Failed, 2/3 Y,0/3 N]
Multiplayer B849586 14 on Zed 2.3 (?) -- CYrankMedlazer (May be misremembering)
+0 / -0

4 years ago
Kick and exit tools are fine. What's not fine is spamming the commands. Maybe each person should be limited to calling a single vote every 5-10 minutes. Otherwise you get a single player like DaKeys for example, who would spam vote after vote just to piss you off.
+1 / -0
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