However my logical deduction how it comes from the will to force people to switch hinges on the assumption of “has motive + mean = guilty”, while there is a simpler assumption: “they believe the community is always right, so they ban anyone who is reported”. But I can simply disprove that.
World of Warcraft has random teams like Overwatch, both game made by Blizzard. In WoW players are just as often dislike teammates as in Overwatch. In WoW there is a much lighter way of reporting: votekick. This needs the majority of the team to agree that you are disruptive, while in Overwatch if just one guy in several game hates you while the other 4 agree with you, you get banned. Also, being kicked from a single dungeon is different from being banned from the game. Ergo, Blizzard should be much more careful about bans than kicks.
Yet they do the opposite: votekick is very severely limited, if you initiate votekicks “too often” (even if they pass, so the team agrees with you), you can’t use the feature. “Too often” is such a low limit, that practically nobody has active votekick ability in WoW. So Blizzard is actively preventing people to kick others from a dungeon based on clear team vote, while they allow players to ban other players from the game with nothing but a single disgruntled fellow whining every other game. This is very self-contradictory.
The only difference is monetization. The solution is that WoW is a subscription game. If you votekick a player, you likely lose his subscription. In Overwatch, which is a pay-to-buy + shop game, Blizzard loses nothing by banning a non-switcher. Ergo, they ban them if the prospective paying players are complaining, even if the fault is theirs.
Ok. Gunna need a better explanation of “has motive + mean = guilty”
I assume this is the ban equation, so has_motive is the motive to ban, like “Oh! This guy is promoting one-tricking!” and the result, “guilty” is self explanatory.
But it “mean” what I think it is? A statistical possibility of ban, based on an aggregate number of has_motive inputs moderated by an algo?
Obviously… you can’t know the exact formula used. No one on the outside can.
My other issue is here: “The only difference is monetization. The solution is that WoW is a subscription game. If you votekick a player, you likely lose his subscription.”
I will certainly agree the difference is monetization. But when a player is votekicked, he will only lose the current dungeon, and will just assume the other people were assholes… very little risk that he will cancel his account over that. But the ban for “disruptive gameplay” is essentially out of the blue and from nowhere. AND (As I understand it.) incrementing in time as you have repeat offenses. This is SO MUCH worse than a one match kick… you’re being told “Quit playing and uninstall.”
So… the difference isn’t between the enforcement mechanics, the difference is in what Blizzard risks… “votekick” is a softball because you are still a valuable gold dropping NPC in that you are probably paying a sub. Whereas “promoting one tricking” means you are a dangerous agitator that must be eliminated.
LikeLike
It seems Blizzard has developed a self governing system to deal with toxic players. I do not see a whole lot wrong with it, except that it catches some innocents in the net sometimes. What it seems they are doing is enforcing conformity, so people are disincentivized from causing conflict. The natural byproduct of this is someone who frequently insists on a non-popular strategy will get caught in the auto-ban net.
The ban is temporary, so the average player will probably adjust his behavior, but I understand if you do not want to, since that defeats your goals for the game.
But this is not some sinister conspiracy against you. You tend to tilt at windmills too much when something like this happens, making the developer your enemy time after time. I honestly don’t think Blizzard cares what meta develops in their game, so long as it stays competitive and fun. They just want things to evolve without too many people getting upset in the process. I think you are just a cog in the massive machine.
LikeLike
@Smokeman: Unless someone is votekicked for toxicity (unlikely, most people chat nothing), he is kicked for bad performance. He’ll likely perform bad in other dungeons and gets kicked too, concludes that “everyone is an elitist asshole” instead of “I damaged less than the healer” and quits the game.
In Overwatch Blizzard WANTS one-trickers to uninstall, because they annoy most customers and they are not customers themselves.
@eatenbyagrue: the problem is that conformity =/= non-toxicity. Mass reporting might work on chat mutes, but it’s definitely counter-productive in case of “disruptive gameplay” which is a nonsense at the first place. It’s simply “I report you because we lose and I blame you”. The problem is that when the last Hanzo, Widowmaker, Bastion, Symmetra, Torb and Sombra are banned/bullied out of the game, Arthasdklol will still report somebody every time he loses. This is why Blizzard doesn’t officially make one-tricking impossible. They want some to linger for scapegoating (half the players must lose in a game). But unless the game has constant one-tricker influx, they will die out and than the lootbox buyers will have no one else to report than each other.
So it is a sinister conspiracy against everyone who want to play competitively and doesn’t have a premade at the start. These players MUST do things differently from their team, because the team is low rated, so if you follow their advises, you’ll remain low rated. Imagine if in the WoW battleground the bridge-fighting majority could report the base defenders because they “dun help fighting just idle by flagz”. The “you can climb up” is a lie. You either fit in to your bronze-silver team and remain there forever, or you don’t fit in and get banned.
LikeLike
@Smokeman: If I understand correctly, you took Gevlon’s “mean” to mean “average” instead of the probably intended “means”. In other words: Blizzard has the motive to ban people. Blizzard also has the means to ban people. Therefore, they are probably guilty. Hope that helps.
LikeLike
There are many games, where people use reporting for bullying.
Interesting: Blizzard has HOTS (free to play + lootboxes) yet I experience less flaming, less reporting (almost 0 penality for reports). Same guys flame you even in vs AI games – but I also hear often: “play your best hero”.
Usually there is a meta 1-1-3, but mostly no problem if you don’t follow. How can this game (or the players) so much different from Overwatch?
LikeLike
Is there no ‘right’ type of monetization that would facilitate good game design?
If there’s just the one-time purchase, developer has little reason to care beyond one-time ‘bait’ to make as many people as possible to buy game at release when most sales happen. There are exceptions that gain popularity and sales as time goes on due to devs sticking with them and fixing them, but those are indeed exceptions and it’s hard to say if that dev-time and resources wouldn’t have bigger returns put into a new project instead.
If there’s subscription model, we get the ‘everybody is entitled because we need to keep everybody subscribed’ approach of WoW, in which case it both made the game worse and caused mass player leave. Still, it would probably always look attractive to executives.
If there’s microtransactions, with or without one-time price or subscription, developer has a reason to make game design decisions aimed at making people make more purchases, no matter if in form of lootboxes or buying specific items.
If the game is entirely free… it would probably have big problems sustaining itself no matter what design decisions are made.
Is there any way out of this?
LikeLike
Problem with your hypothesis is that there is no motive to ban. There might be motive to incentivise not using one trick strategy, whilst playing, but there is no way more certain for a player to not buy more boxes then to ban him. Once somebody is banned he will definetly not buy anything. Ergo your premiss is wrong.
I also dont buy that a player playing off meta (and winning) is going to piss off other players. If somebody will rant at you becouse you picked “wrong”, he will find somebody to rant about something, when you are gone.
LikeLike
@Anon: I still think that various forms of “pay to get access to the game” are good, while “pay for items” are bad and necessarily lead to corruption. Funnily, the open P2W is exception, since it doesn’t need hidden corruption, as the P2W is done openly.
@Artahm: I fully agree that someone who rants about a wrong pick will rant about something else. This is EXACTLY the reason for bans. Blizzard try to keep him playing while constantly catering to him by banning people who annoy him. Sure, now that I’m gone, they will rant about someone else. But there will always be a one-trick to blame, because some people want to win and try to win.
LikeLike
@Gevlon: the ranter does not know he has been catered to though. In all liekliehood, even if he would have been notified that his rant led to a ban he would not remember you and why did he report you. The motive for banning therefore has to be diffrent then the one you are suggesting. IMO you yet have to prove a causal link between the ban and Blizzards revanue stream. At this point there is evidence to the contrary if anything as banning is the only 100%way to make sure you will not buy any lootboxes, furthermore you will create a page titled “dont play Overwatch”, discouraging others from purchasing the game and subsequent lootboxes. I stand by my opinion, that your premiss is wrong.
LikeLike
@Artahm: I have a much simpler link: one-tricking is winning strategy for casual players (who play less than 100 hours per month), simply because they don’t have time to develop muscle memory for more than 1-2 heroes . Ergo, if the community is left alone, it would become dominant strategy and Blizzard would not sell lootboxes. So they have to ban one-trickers regularly to prevent the idea spreading.
LikeLike
@gevlon I think you weigh too heavily team composition here and underestimate the importance of general skill level. Just Google for “bronze to gm overwatch”and you will see many videos of people not getting stuck in bronze.
You have to be honest with yourself as to how good you are at this game. You feel yourself stuck in silver and see a shortcut up – a superior team composition. And you may be right about this in silver, but even you admitted that 2-2-2 may work better at higher levels. So at best you are railing against a composition you will have to get used to playing in perhaps as soon as you get into gold. So what is the long term strategy here? I don’t get it.
Also, looking at the standard line you give your teammates, I am not sure it is the best. It has some positive message, but is also snarky. The main point seems to be that you are all the same rating, so no one has to listen to anyone else, as no one is any better than anyone. The problem with this message is that it can be applied to any random team at any level, even GM. So no one should take any advice from a peer? Communication and directions are part of cooperation on a team, so yes, sometimes people will tell others what to do to try to advance a team goal, and that is OK. So by shutting down communications preemptively like this, you are not being a great teammate.
Perhaps a better approach would just be honest. Say “Hey, 2-2-2 at silver level is not the optimum strategy because players have not mastered optimal positions with regard to tanks and healers, and a more DPS heavy approach is easier to pull off. So guys, let’s try it this way!” Try being honest and friendly with people instead of manipulative. But I never played this game, so maybe it is just toxic as hell and no one will listen to anyone, and if that is the case, why do you want to be in that environment anyway – better to quit.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Eatenbyagrue: I stopped railing against 222 some time ago. My “silver bullet” was encouraging players to play their main, regardless what kind of team it creates. Ergo: encouraging one-tricking, because until you have 50+ hours with a hero, you play significantly below possible output. Those Hanzo+Widow+Symmetra+Sombra games were brilliant. Probably also got me reported by the remaining guy who was flaming “fkn throwers”, even after we won
LikeLike
I don’t find the argument of malicious intent from Blizzard terribly compelling; just because you can think up some sort of reasoning that would count as motive doesn’t mean that’s why you got banned. Especially since the idea that Blizzard’s reasoning is in anyway similar to yours in any other way (like in the actual design of their games for instance) is pretty obviously false.
I think the argument that you drew attention to yourself by your methods, which gives the other players a convenient scapegoat is much more solid. Bear in mind that when you refuse to change your own pick you force other players out of their comfort zone (their wrongheaded meta). Your chat message pushing your own agenda does it’s job of pushing people into playing your way rather than pushing their meta by adjusting their own picks, but it does something else on top of this: it effectively puts you in the position of being the group’s leader. You were “elected” by the other players choosing to go along with your plan, but this means you will also have to bear the responsibility for your team’s losses.
The ban system discourages players from doing exactly this primarily because Blizzard has no desire to enable one player to put their whole team into a dilemma every game. In this sense your style was absolutely disruptive to the rest of the players who just want to play the game they are familiar with (even if they are terrible at it). In the case where nobody speaks out, they can (and likely will) still report at the end of the game, but the reports will effectively be at random since objective performance is hidden. Therefore few players are reported an inordinate amount without putting themselves into that position, in some sense.
The key to rising through the ranks, as always, is to simply outperform the average player of your current rank. You can’t win every game, but as long as you win the games that are in your power to win, you’ll rise. The second step being to simply play enough games for your incremental gains to add up. A great many people (the M&S to use your terms) are angry enough to report every game because they willfully blind themselves to the truth that their play is not good enough, or they are not patient enough for their rank to increase.
I think this is true in just about any of these “team” video games, because of the nature of matchmaking being adapted to the lowest common denominator. I think the idea of “solo-queue” matchmaking is one of the most harmful things to happen in gaming in terms of its effect on gaming communities. It’s probably the thing that turned me off of video games more than any other factor, in fact. But it’s hard to blame the developers, since it has also been the single most positive contributor toward raising the player(read: customer) base for online games in general. It’s basically impossible to compete in the marketplace at this point without appealing to the writhing masses, from a multiplayer game perspective (and multiplayer is what drives continuing sales to a large degree).
tl;dr “The nail that stands out gets hammered down.” And Gevlon’s perpetual aim is to stand out as hard as he can. I don’t think developers are malicious to the extent that Gevlon thinks; they just seek to appeal to the M&S as they are the majority of their customers (just like every other aspect of the world). Also I’m cynical.
LikeLike
@Anon: can you imagine a WoW raid leader banned for bad strat? Or a BG leader?
I understand that some players are upset about me, but banning someone because his play IN A PVP GAME is upsetting players is insane.
LikeLike
@Anon
“The ban system discourages players from doing exactly this primarily because Blizzard has no desire to enable one player to put their whole team into a dilemma every game.”
I see Gevlon’s point with this. Who decides who switches? What this ban system is doing is rewarding those who choose to speak up first and demand that someone “else” switch. It’s akin to the old saying of “he who poisons the soup first, wins”. Blizzard is shooting itself in the foot here by going on record saying that they don’t ban for one-tricking, yet they resort to circular logic in issuing bans for that very reason by allowing players to claim that it’s “disruptive” to -their- preferred playstyle, which is bullshit.
A simple fix to this would be to let anyone play any character they want in non-competitive matches, without bans, and design a simple “class selection” screen for competitive matches where players agree and “lock-in” their choices before the match starts. Then Blizzard could ban for obvious disruptive behaviors like leaving a match or using inflammatory language…etc.
LikeLike
Seems a very easy way to get evidence – create new accounts using VPN playing the exact same way, if true it should end in the same outcome.
LikeLike
I have not played Overwatch but I would think that a good way to prevent some of the auto-banning would be to only allow reporting after a player has won a match. If they are only allowed to report after a win then I think it is less likely that they would report players.
LikeLike
@Case: there is no need for that. All you need is a google search for “overwatch disruptive gameplay” and you find countless banned “one-tricks”
@Harusame: fair idea, however trolls work to make the game fail, so good trolls would never be reported.
LikeLike
“@Anon: can you imagine a WoW raid leader banned for bad strat? Or a BG leader?
I understand that some players are upset about me, but banning someone because his play IN A PVP GAME is upsetting players is insane.”
What do you think happens if you play pick-up games of sports and refuse to acknowledge your teammates? You get ostracized by the community and are no longer able to play! The reporting tool in Overwatch functions exactly the same way. By your own admission it is not interfered with by Blizzard; it is the community itself policing you. Whether your strategy has merit has nothing to do with it. Now the fact that the internet environment leads toward much more aggressive bias against one’s own team is surely a massive problem, but if there is any solution to that it sure as hell won’t be Blizzard that finds it.
In my eyes the one major failing of Blizzard with regard to Overwatch is simply a lack of tools to form your own communities to more easily organize premades. This is a relatively small oversight in a world where tools like Discord exist and you can easily make your own communities outside the game, but as the only real explanation for it is pure laziness I still find it pretty offensive. I don’t think it’s conspiratorial as they could take much more direct action against grouping if the goal was simply to force people to play in matchmade groups to cause diversification in character picks.
LikeLike
@Anon: they introduced a “avoid this player” feature for a good reason. Arthasdklol has the right to not play with me. But just because Arthasdklol is unhappy about my, he shouldn’t be able to ban me.
Also, you are dead wrong about “the community” policing me. There are no team votes on any issues. It’s very possible that 4 out of 5 teammates agree with me, but the 5th reports me. The other 4 aren’t asked about it.
LikeLike