The biggest problems for online games are not bugs or lag. The biggest problem for online games are people displaying poor and inconsiderate behaviour on public servers.
It is very annoying to be confronted with lamers, who blocks passages or teamkills, or cheaters abusing bugs or using external means to gain an unfair advantage. But even more annoying, because far more common, are people acting like asses by using foul language, by insulting fellow players or simply by acting like spoiled little children. We all witness all kinds of poor behaviour far too many times when playing the pubs. The general lack of teamwork and proper approach is bad enough, but having people spamming nonsense or insults on mm1, doing their worst to piss off other players and to - deliberately or not - ruin the game for others.
People feel encouraged or even entitled to such behaviour because they feel not to be accountable for their actions. The worst thing that can happen to them is being banned from that particular server for their behaviour, which on top requires an admin to be present. On unmonitored servers a player can get away with all kind of behaviour without any repercussions.
In real life a group of people would apply social pressure to people misbehaving. If social pressure would fail people would still have other means to uphold an appropriate code of behaviour (either by talk, by exclusion or different kinds of punishment). Yet most of these means don’t exist in online games or don’t apply to the world of online games. What makes things worse is the anonymity of the player. People can act poorly rather anonymously by playing under different names.
With the increasing size of the online playing community the problem gets worse every day. The fact that there’s a large percentage of young people playing who have not yet learned to act responsibly in real life or deliberately enjoying the freedom of acting against such rules isn’t exactly helping (note: I do not accuse young people in general of showing poor behaviour, I merely point out that young people more likely display such behaviour). Repercussions are very limited, as mentioned. Being banned on one server still leave a couple of hundred other servers to pester. And those large commercial servers will sadly always be safe territory of lame behaviour of any kind.
This has to change, for the sake of the future of online games. IMO we need to held people accountable for the behaviour they show when playing with other people.
The question at hand is how to accomplish that ...
The means are there.
People showing poor behaviour can be gagged, kicked or banned. Bans can range from minutes to lifetime. Creating a single WON-ID prior to the last patch was very helpful as well.
Kicking or banning a player is a - granted: poor - method of holding a person accountable for his actions. Now as mentioned banning does not teach much of a lesson when this particular player can just join the next server and continue his lame behaviour.
But imagine - just speaking theoretically for a moment - being banned on one server would deny a person to play at any server for... let’s say ... 24 hours! Don’t you think people would think twice before they teamkill, before they spam profanity or insults? And let’s assume being banned a second time would deny access to any server for 48 hours. It would be so easy to teach people to act more friendly and responsible.
Yet this is at most part just a sweet dream for a number of reasons.
1) The game companies could not pull off such a system gameside. Legally they would have no right to deny people playing the game they’d paid for.
2) We will have to acknowledge that mentioned commercial servers will never do anything else than running a game by default values. They don’t admin or even monitor the servers. Such servers would never be actively part of such a system, and likely not passively as well.
3) The standards of which behaviour would be poor or lame will always differ between people. Profanity is a big issue to one, but no issue at all to another. Respawn camping is lame to some, but valid to others. On top of that admins are not free of personal prejudice and character flaws. An admin might ban a person for personal reasons regardless of that person’s general behaviour.
Yet I think many admins could create a common ground on which to act. Cheating is an easy issue. Many kinds of lame behaviour, like teamkill, hiding with flags or blocking passages should be easy as well. And I would hope that many admins would support such annoying behaviour as message spams or profanity as well. Remember that in my example I spoke of a limited ban. We are not talking of severe punishment, more of a friendly clap on the fingers, as a reminder.
I’m sure there are already admins exchanging ban lists to keep the worse lamers and cheaters off each other’s server. Yet of course this is a rather clumsy method and achieves nothing on the banned players (with some very few exceptions).
Any system working with bans more efficiently and along the idea of enforcing accountability would require a database to work with and a tool importing/exporting updates on a regular basis. Actually I’d assume this to be fairly easy to create. The database would b required to keep records of bans (how often has a player been banned, on which server and for what reasons) and to handle the duration/expiration of bans. And it would create a central place for players to ask for being removed from a ban list.
The biggest challenge would not be to establish the technical means but to convince admins to participate on such a problem (the more if it would involve having a 3rd party tool running on the server). The biggest problem on the other hand would be to determine if an admin was trustworthy and responsible enough to participate on such a project. It would provide a powerful position and could easily be abused.
In fact a similar utility does already exist. HLACS was created for CounterStrike, but according to the website can be used on any HL-MOD. What I dislike on HLACS - at least based on the limited information from the website - is that it basically just creates a more efficient way to share bans. I don’t see any approach to teach people to act more cooperatively. I also think it puts too much power into the hand of the admins ("only the Admin who banned someone can edit/remove the ban"). Yet it is a step into the right direction. I have contacted the creator of HLACS for an interview, but I’m still waiting for his answers.
In the future I would wish game developers would consider to provide tools - or at least the interfaces - to help the respective communities to enforce players accountability.
Just providing a game and then leave the trouble with assholes and lamers to the gamers is no longer a reasonable attitude. A game might be ever so cool, but with people continuously and increasingly being unpleasant and irresponsible the pleasure dies fast.
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