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Abuse of the !kick command and its impact on new players

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21 months ago
I took a long break from ZK. Upon returning I now see a problem which was annoying before has become a real issue. Too many players use open lobbies for private games. I was kicked from 90% of the open coop lobbies I joined - by people I don't know and have never seen before. I think that would make for quite an awful experience for new players. I can't think of another game that is this bad for open multiplayer lobbies.

Partial solution: Remove the !kick command for lobbies that were created without a password. Possibly make voting to kick someone more difficult from the lobby, especially when a new player has just joined.
+9 / -4
21 months ago
Yeah, that is a good idea. New players don't know that All Teams Welcome room is "the" room for all, and anything else might be private despite lacking a password. I can imagine that being kicked from those might be discouraging.
+0 / -0
21 months ago
I used to go into some rooms and try to carefully provide some useful comments to new players. Most were grateful. I don't do that anymore because you can't enter a room without getting kicked nowadays.

See also:
https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/33572
+0 / -0
21 months ago
You'd have to be extremely new to online games to be surprised about getting kicked from self-hosted rooms. Zero-K is a complete anomaly in kick related moderation.

How did such a generation come to be?
+2 / -1

21 months ago
quote:
You'd have to be extremely new to online games to be surprised about getting kicked from self-hosted rooms. Zero-K is a complete anomaly in kick related moderation.

How did such a generation come to be?

Just because that's the way it is everywhere else doesn't mean that's the way it should be.
+4 / -0
21 months ago
Lawesome coming in with the fax
+0 / -0
unknownrankTinySpider I'm normally a fan of yours but USrankLawesome9's right, it shouldn't be like that.

I'd say most people can get their feelings hurt pretty easily and in some situations I'd just tell them to suck it up, but in this case it's bad for the health and growth of the ZK community, especially for the noobs.
+0 / -0
quote:
Just because that's the way it is everywhere else doesn't mean that's the way it should be.

You can invert your control scheme for camera movement just to spite rest of the world, I'm sure someone would call it an improvement.

quote:
bad for the health and growth of the ZK community, especially for the noobs.

You know what else is bad for health and growth of a community? Not allowing anyone any control over hosting their own public rooms where they can kick undesirables at will. You can never have more than 1 room active because everyone is forced at gunpoint to tolerate eachother. There's no conflict to drive segregation which would naturally result in multiple hosts for groups of people that dislike one another.

Official public hosts are great for new players, private hosts create longterm investment.
+2 / -0
The OP and some of the rest of this thread are talking about different things.
quote:
Too many players use open lobbies for private games. I was kicked from 90% of the open coop lobbies I joined - by people I don't know and have never seen before.

Random co-op lobbies are often started by people who do not have deep links with the "core" Zero-K community, are here to play with their friends, and don't really want to play with randoms on the Internet.

We could try to find some gentle way to encourage these people to put a password on their lobbies, but I do not think it is appropriate to force them to play with randoms on the Internet.

--

As for kicks from the main active hosts for the "core" Zero-K community, report any inappropriate kicks. The moderators will take action to punish and/or prevent such kicks.

quote:
There's no conflict to drive segregation which would naturally result in multiple hosts for groups of people that dislike one another.

This is a nice sounding theory. Unfortunately, available data strongly suggests that the likely outcome of this is people getting ostracised and leaving the community entirely.

There are not, by and large, large monolithic "groups" that dislike each other in the Zero-K community. There are individuals who get bullied (or just play poorly), cliques that like to bully them (or get triggered by poor play), and a bunch of bystanders that will typically just stick around and play the larger game rather than split off to follow somebody who got kicked out. (The departure of Firepluk, snoke, et al. has markedly improved this situation but certainly has not and will not eliminate it.)
+3 / -0


21 months ago
Does anyone have nice ways to do the following:
  • Make it more obvious when you're hosting a public room.
  • Make it more obvious when you're joining a hosted room rather than an autohost.
  • Make hosted rooms default to private.
These would help I think, but are hard to fit in.
+2 / -0
Instead of a "Custom Game" button, have a "Official Hosts" and a "Private Hosts" button. Official hosts would be operating on a whitelist (as in only these hosts are listed here), private hosts would be for everything else someone hosted. That way it doesn't matter if someone has a password, it's clear where one is joining.
+1 / -0
it might be good to set the default hosting to private, and to opt into an open lobby during creation or when its hosted

edit: it would require a slight change to how the hosting interrface.

something like a checkbox that hides the passwordbox, to signify an open game, and requirement for a password for privat lobbys

(i guess the passwordbox could also stay empty for a private game that can only be entered through invite but that might confuse people due to the similarities to the current system)
+1 / -0
21 months ago
Just encourage people to password their private stuff. Dont reinvent the wheel and dont get rid of an usefull feature!

Just imagining NOT being able to kick some "special cases" from Lobpot without mods gives me shivers.
+2 / -0


21 months ago
I agree with TinySpider, custom open lobbies aren't a democracy, they're a dictatorship and rightfully so.

Sometimes I just want to have fun playing Suicidal Chickens with random experienced players, not some grey level 3 that hasn't even completed the tutorial yet and decides to join my game to spam storages. It's my host, and so I'm entitled to choose who joins, what map, and what settings. Sometimes I just don't have the patience to deal with noobs.

Additionally, if I could make a rating cap so people below or over a certain rating or level couldn't join, I would use it.
+0 / -0

21 months ago
Here's half of the idea I want to put forward for lobbies. very WIP concept/I don't know how to code

https://steelbluezk.github.io/Colapseable%20features.html

Currently, we need to create autohosts as moderators and then they persist. So there are autohosts that are empty taking up a lot of space, meaning that the large room can be hard to find. Also, it's hard to find any specific room because it could be at the top of the list or in the middle of the list in the running battles. Separate lobbies like such, and have them collapseable(if I want to hide private lobbies it should be collapseable like a reddit thread). This would hopefully make it easier for me to find the active autohosts better. OH and also allow any user to spawn a new autohost under certain conditions(can only make a new teams room if there's (number of players in teams autohosts)/(2*max players allowed in teams autohosts) or cannot make new autohost of a certain type if there's an empty autohost/ empty autohosts get culled).
+0 / -0
quote:
Does anyone have nice ways to do the following:

Make it more obvious when you're hosting a public room.
Make it more obvious when you're joining a hosted room rather than an autohost.
Make hosted rooms default to private.

These would help I think, but are hard to fit in.


How about turning the match list into a table and have a check box column that's checked if it's public/autohost/private? That could also lead into sorting the available matches, which is something I'd love to see.
+0 / -0
quote:
I agree with TinySpider, custom open lobbies aren't a democracy, they're a dictatorship and rightfully so.

Make no mistake, even as the "dictator" of a public room you still answer to the moderators.

quote:
Sometimes I just want to have fun playing Suicidal Chickens with random experienced players, not some grey level 3 that hasn't even completed the tutorial yet and decides to join my game to spam storages. It's my host, and so I'm entitled to choose who joins, what map, and what settings. Sometimes I just don't have the patience to deal with noobs.

If you are talking about a small chickens room, then fine. However, you don't get to make these choices if you are running what is essentially the main teams host.

[Spoiler]

quote:
Additionally, if I could make a rating cap so people below or over a certain rating or level couldn't join, I would use it.

I believe you have the power to do this for a room with max players 8 or less. Type !help in the battle room and look up the command.
+0 / -0
21 months ago
quote:
when we allowed room hosts to wield this power

Are there any player count stats from that time?
+0 / -0
Player counts/retention/whatever has been tracked for a while (although possibly history gets deleted after a while? idk I don't use these tools regularly). Narrowing down exactly what window of time a particular moderation policy applied in would be difficult, especially since this is a pretty shades-of-grey issue.

That being said, I can say with high confidence that the community didn't magically stop growing when we started cracking down on abusive kicks, if that's what you're after.
+1 / -0
21 months ago
I can also make confident statements that support my ideas.
+1 / -0
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