This may not belong in suggestions, but I think it fits here more than anywhere else. Also please leave any personal battles with me outside this thread, those of you who have obviously inspired me to bring this up.

Anyway, when I play, there's a bunch of people who're REALLY fun to play with, either in terms of RP/stories, or they're good matches in combat, or they just spice things up. VO is lucky to have a fanbase of so many of these people. However, due to the way VO is played, one person who uses less than honorable tactics can ruin it for the other people. Countless times I've had to, a) Stop playing, b) Go somewhere else, or c) Try to grief them, which isn't fun for either of us. In all these cases, my playing time, and in C the other person's playing time, is made much less fun because of one person.

As VO does have such a small player count, and relatively such a small number of people, it is possible to log off or something to get rid of the problem temporarily. However, when VO grows, as we all know it will, I think it's reasonable to expect a lot more of these killjoy players.

The devs handled the Arolte case, although it took a long time and was at the expense of a bunch of good, contributing members of the community (I'm not criticizing, this is just how it happened), and if that's from just one player, what'll happen when we get fifty of those?

This thread is mainly just me wondering what Incarnate or the other devs have in mind for dealing with this situation of players who obviously ruin the fun for other players, and if no plan is in place we could possibly have some community brainstorming.

The difficulty in dealing with "annoying" players is that rules would have to be created in order to adequately describe and act upon the behaviour, and then the rules would have to be universally enforced. The trick is to discover the acceptable ratio of oppression to annoying behaviour. Given enough people, there will always be an antisocial element who will go to great lengths to annoy others in any way possible.

I realize the difficulties in the issue, which is why I started this up now, as opposed to in a year when you can't jump into a system without getting spammed. So really the point of this thread, is according to a dev, what are these rules? What is this ratio? What will we do?

Smitty, it would help if we knew what "the Arolte case" was. I remember the guy, but I never knew what happened to him... How did the devs handle it?

-Calder

"The Arolte case" was the most ridiculous example of how a bunch of people whining can blow things out of proportion. I shudder to think what these carebears would have done when, say, 3.2.0 came out.

maybe vendetta online is not a game for you?
or maybe you misunderstood the gameplay of VO?

A says to B: hey ****** you are annoying me!
B sayd to A: stop whining ****** you are annoying me!

who is right?

Go away.

I think that once there's content besides "Sit in Sedina B8/DenebB12-C10 and fight whomever comes along" this problem will take care of itself.

When we have 10 x players as we have now, you'll have to just suck it up and deal with the annoying folks. I don't really have a problem with the runners. I'll try to warpkill them if they run from me, but I don't always succeed. I count it as a victory, even though the stats say otherwise.

And in fact, that's what this comes down to. Stats. I think some people get more annoyed that they lose a PK point. If there were no such thing as PK points, I'd wager that this would be much less of an issue.

Actually, the Arolte case was when a player by that name was consistently ruining the fun for a group of good people, so much so that they quit in protest until Arolte was banned.

Like Spacehunter. I took the longest break I ever have from VO because of him, and there were many others who flat out left.

-Calder

roguelazer speaks : "The Arolte case" was the most ridiculous example of how a bunch of people whining can blow things out of proportion. I shudder to think what these carebears would have done when, say, 3.2.0 came out.

As opposed, to say, the "Roguelazer Case" :D, or the "Genka Case".

/me watches this thread in anticipation of much hilarity.

Both Whistler and Roguelazer brought up excellent points.
I think “annoying” is far too subjective a term to be even remotely considered as terms for punitive action. My threshold for irritation is pretty high, so one player’s actions might not be as big a party-killer for me as it is to you. Likewise, constraining a player to maintain a code of what another player or group of players consider “honorable”, in the context of this game, might be reason to exclude him from your circle of friends or guild, but not the game.

I like this thread, it's funny.

softy, you just hopping on the threads for fun, or are you actually ingame still? (If so come to Deneb - I require dual gauss vulture training)

I've played with plenty of pilots that I find annoying, but no one has ever annoyed me enough to quit the game. I really still believe it's an ego issue, and nothing else.

I am mostly with LeberMac and Will Roberts on this. There will always be people with different attitudes and play styles and as many as possible should be accomodated within reason. Most of this will probably be fixed with the faction system overhaul, a friendly-fire overhaul/removal, and otherwise fixing known problems. However, I think what smittens is looking for is, as he stated, what is "within reason", where is the line to be drawn between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Unfortunately, I believe this will only be resolved once problems actually start cropping up. Once new content is added, what constitutes a killjoy play style will need to be re-examined anyway. Still, I am interested in hearing what the Devs think the line(s) will be. I assume that ones own location will eventually have a lot to do with it. One can hardly complain about being shot at going through Sedina, but being station-killed in Divinia is another story...

Will, Leber, Whistler, and partially LostCommander, when using terms like "annoying" and "honorable" I'm just using what I thought were easier terms for the general concept, which is that there are players who, in those terms "are not honorable" or "are annoying" when I really meant "They ruin the enjoyment of others to an extent that forces the abused party to stop playing temporarily or permanently"

So while this is totally subjective, I think it still is slightly easier to pick out than using the above terms. There will obviously be many grey areas (Get it? Like grey space! Haha!), but when one player is doing something to purposely make it less fun for another to play, that is usually easily recognizable.

You know, scrap the second paragraph of that. I'm really tired (little sleep this weekend, and none expected this week), I'm angry (my internet is crapping out), and I've still got a lot to do tonight, and that's obviously affecting my logic.

Obviously if I kill someone, that is me purposely ruining their enjoyment. So scrap that paragraph 2. My point was just that the terms "Lack of honor" and "annoying" I was using to convey "they are purposely being little ****heads"

/vote explode "space hunter"

Gather 5 votes and poof.

Gather 20 votes and SF chases him everywhere for the next 10 mins!

Wooo!!!!

*any use of "space hunter" in this post is for illustrative purpose only. SH would actually require a macro like /sh

The problem is, who is "honorable" or "not honorable" is a matter of perspective. This would be much simpler if we just did what every other MMO does: don't allow non-consensual PVP combat. But, we aren't going to do that. This is a dangerous game, where people can get killed without warning when they don't plan on getting killed.

A percentage of people, when killed, become frustrated and unhappy, blaming their deaths on the other player. Even vets do this, on their off-days or if they're feeling particularly irritable. Even *I* do it. But it's part of the game. And I can't get rid of it without removing my favorite aspect of a PVP MMO: the fact that some areas are actually *dangerous*.

There also seem to be some misconceptions about the "Arolte situation". I did not ban Arolte. In fact, I very outspokenly (and unpopularly) defended the fact that much of what he was doing was not contrary to the fundamental tenets of the game. The parts that *were* contrary (really going overboard on following people around the universe and hassling them), I talked to him about. He eventually left of his own accord, months after the event, because he needed more time for school.

Getting back to the subject at hand, it is my intention to let the player base handle itself in the long run. We do not have the money or the personnel to hire a whole bunch of people to watch over the userbase. And we also don't have the money or personnel to hire people to watch over the people who watch over the userbase. Our guides do a fantastic job, but an empowering "guide" system is just as problematic as anything else: we're all human. And it gives some authoritarian system for people to rail against.

In the long run, I am in favor of a greatly expanded and dynamic version of the "/vote mute" concept. We will let you guys decide what needs to be done. In the event of a major long-term impact (long term muting, outright banning, and so on), someone from the company will directly audit and approve/disapprove of major administrative action.

Think of it, there's a tremendous amount we can do. The /vote mute thing is a simplistic hack, but we can really implement a democratic system for you. Even if say.. the required percentage of currently-online users aren't interested in taking the immediate action (like muting, or whatever), if enough complaints are registered against someone, it pushes up to a longer-term vote amongst the playerbase. You could all write descriptions of what people do or do not do, argue about it and eventually take a vote.

Systems like this already exist in online games. I read an example about A Tale In The Desert, where a really annoying user accumulated a lot of negative votes and commentary, and was on the verge of being banned (by the userbase! they don't even require a higher level of intervention). Another user came forward and offered to try and help instruct the abusive player about how to play productively. The userbase gave him a second chance, and the abusive player ended up becoming a productive part of their society.

*This* is the sort of thing that's really useful, and really scales to as many players as we need. We can scale the needed votes based on the recent averages of how many are online, or however many parameters are needed to make it fluctuate dynamically with the userbase (small or large). The future of MMO management is not in me, or Sony/Verant, or Blizzard being an authoritative overlord. Someone is always going to not-agree with me. And I would prefer for them to not agree with.. you, since you're the people they need to play with, and give you all a well-defined forum for making your cases. And frankly, on a purely personal level, I would much rather focus on making games than being some sort of administrative nazi.

Now someone is going to point out how a democratic system could still lead to undesired abuses, based on public opinion and so on (the care bears will kick out all the PVPers#@!@!). Obviously, any democratic system can be subverted. However, we have a tremendous amount of recorded information that we can use to tune and refine and define our system of "government". We know who killed who, and when, and where, and with what weapon. We can record what shots were fired and what kind of altercation it was, or chat leading up to it. We can allow people to securely post sections of log by submitting timestamps to the server and having the server post its own logs of the issue. There's a great deal we can do to make this system effective.

"But how long will it take?" Well, I'm not sure :). But I can make /vote mute work more intelligently in the near term (as has been recently requested), and potentially expand on it. This will be as much of a work-in-progress as the rest of the game, but it'll work a lot better in the long run than my picking guides, and then guides for the guides, and then hoping that everyone is cool.

Griefer: Someone who's primary objective is to cause other player(s) grief.

Griefing: The act of harrasing other player(s) for the primary purpose of annoying them.

Griefing should not be confused with lame, cowardly, stupid, or even anti-social (although any or all of these elements may be present as well).

Dealing with griefers:

Griefers view game mechanics and context as limiting. The first thing you should do with a griefer is force them into the game's context. The /ignore command is an important tool in forcing a griefer to shut up and put up. By limiting a griefer to the game's context and mechanics, you are forcing them to play them game that you logged on to play. They hate that. Most griefers are very dependant on verbage, so avoid the verbage game (unless thats what you logged for, in which case, have fun (are you a griefer?)). Once a griefer is forced into a game's context, they are only a griefer for as long as you view them as such, otherwise, they are just a fancy bot (that needs killing). bot them, win or lose, you are still getting to play your game (griefers hate that). In the act of limiting a griefer, expext the griefer to redouble thier efforts to grief. practally every effort will be made to reopen a channel of verbage, or any other channel outside of the game's context. The ball is in your court, remember to play the game that you logged in to play. gl.

Extrapolating on Inc's comment, based on the Tale In Desert story, we could have

/vote rehab playername

to force that player into a civility mission or else he looses XP!

Incarnate, on a more serious note, you say that all starts are kept as to who killed who and when?

I'd really love to be able to pull the list of whom I've ever poped. Limited in details. nothing too fancy.