[GAME] /suspect and /report system | Improvements and Innovations

[Salvick 248]

 

Back in the days when I started playing this game I noticed the lack of admins presence ingame and the lack of a proper and dynamic way to report undesired behaviors on-the-fly such as griefing, harassment, excessive bad language and such so I posted this suggestion that I'd like to bring back now that we might have huge improvements in the game management.

 

The concept is based in my previous experience in different games where notifying an admin about someone breaking the rules or ruining the game experience for the other players wasn't a big deal and even if someone would be abusing this kind of communication channels that also was something easy to handle for ingame admins and moderators.

 

Let's get into it:

.

/SUSPECT

Use /suspect <name> <reason> command to send an instant report about a suspected cheater.


ie:

/suspect TehGod shooting to the wall

/suspect AGoat spotted tracking my team mates through buildings and objects

/suspect  SilverNoobs priming grenades and shooting rockets to the corners before I shown up

 

 

This might sound as something not useful once we have BattleEye + FairFight enabled but as in the examples above, the major concern is when someone might be using wallhacks since either of those anticheats might fail to detect it, that's why I believe it is very important that when you are in the middle of a match against someone who apparently (or clearly) is predicting all your moves and even in these cases when you can easily identify an opponent tracking your teammates through the walls since you can see your teammates name tags at all time, it would be useful to have an admin instantly spectating the suspected player to determine whether the player is indeed wallhacking or not. Anyways, in some different games I'm aware that some cheats allow you to spot also invisible admins in the radar so we don't know yet if this will be the case and how all this is going to work.
 


The mechanics behind /suspect  function
 

This will allow you to send an instant message to in-game mods or remote server monitoring tools (if there exist something like that)
so they can take a minute to follow and spectate a player who is suspected of cheating and take actions if it is necessary.

It would work only for players who are on opposed missions.

Once you send the /suspect  message you lose the ability to use this function again for half hour (or an entire hour) to avoid spam/abuse of the command.

You are allowed to report both opponents and teammates.

Abuse or bad use of this command can towards to a warning from an admin or an auto-kick to ensure a responsible use of the command and even losing the ability to use this function for a couple of days or for ever.

 

Admins should have access to a log and ability to flag players who actually did a proper or an improper use of the command, as some sort of rep system.




/REPORT

Use /report <name> <reason> command to report a player who is harassing, team hampering, griefing, excessively insulting, antagonizing or abusing of some aspect of the game that could disrupt the gaming experience for the other players including symbols and other customization features where they spam racist symbols, nudity and such.

 


ie.

/report TehGrieffer blocking objectives from outside of the mission

/report TKillah killing teammates and shooting us to assist our opponents ruining the mission

/report ProDThreater not playing the mission / attempting to dethreat

/report SymbolMaker spamming nudity on displays

 

The mechanics behind /report function


This will allow you to make a report on a player who is explicitly ruining your game experience so in-game moderators can follow and spectate the reported player and take actions if it is necessary.

You can use this function at any moment in any server instance including Social District. (Or maybe not at Social?)

 

This command will be locked for half hour (or an entire hour) once you use it.

This command could be used only a couple of times each 24 hours, let's say a max of 2 or 3 times each 24 hours (neither could be used against the same player twice)

The abuse of this command could toward to a temporary kick if an admin/moderator consider it. (ie. "/report Timmy is a silver noob, ban him for wearing rainbows")

 

Admins should have access to a log and ability to flag players who actually did a proper or an improper use of the command, as some sort of rep system.

 

 


This suggestion tries to bring the idea of a "votekick" system that allows everyone to report suspected players without let them notice they are being reported, and also help moderators to filter complains and spot players who repeatedly and systematically break the rules by having a more precise way to follow a suspected player.

 

Maybe this could be improved if they can get some extra info about the player who made the report, let's say that when someone uses this function it not only triggers the message that the admins will read but along with it it brings some brief info of the player reporting such like this:

 

REPORT RECEIVED

Reported player: TehGoat

Reason: speed running in Social

Faction: Enforcer

Server: Jericho

Instance: Social District 1

Timestamp: 05/25/2018, 00:00:00hs

Amount of reports on him: 4728

Flags/Rep: already reviewed by TehAdminNumbahOne

Reporting Player: SilverNoob

Time Online: 00:00:46

Faction: Criminal

Amount of reports sent: 36

Flags/Rep: unknown

 

This way the admins could use that info to give priority to certain reports when there are too many reports flooding the system, also they could just pull that info on request by a command to avoid a wall of text on their chat HUD every time a report is received.

Also I think it could be a good idea if there is a "/rep <name> <score>" command for the admins so they can tag an experienced player that already did proper reports or if someone has been doing reports based on his subjective perception and made the admins just waste time spectating someone playing decently.
 

Also everybody could be able to use a command such as "/rep <name>"  to see what is the global score of a player who already reported several players. This way when some players are arguing about if someone is cheating or not they could simply call this function to see if the one who is talking about what they saw or did to defend or support the hackusation is someone who actually did proper reports in the past or just a compulsive hackusator.
 

 


I always wanted to see such functions in other games where we are able to send a message to an admin without interrupt our match to let them come and spectate or simply ask in chat what's going on when we need help.

 

I remember in 2012 when I made the original post I was like "who knows, maybe someday we could see something that makes us the customers/players, feel a bit more comfortable with the game support" then they added the /report placebo later around 2014/2015 with the arrival of FairFight but nothing changed and indeed the cheaters issue escalated worst.

Since we are here to play and have fun I don't think we should be creating report tickets and forum topics everyday, recording, editing, uploading and forwarding videos while the majority of the players shouldn't be expected to have the knowledge regarding all these procedures to record and report an issue, besides of how hard is to record actual proof of a cheater when you are just another player obviously following them.

 

Also I don't like to see how we the players sometimes complain like children, trying to create drama on forums about these players we believe are breaking the rules, I think we should let the developers focus on their job as same as let the customer support be able to address important issues instead of make them watch useless videos and read through walls of texts of why we think TimmyTheGoat is cheating and such.

At last, and as part of this suggestion, I wanna say to the developers and moderators who read this that as same as for us is hard to understand your job and effort when many players are complaining about how things should be, which I consider is wrong, also the game staff, devs and mods should keep in mind that we are here just to play and have fun and many players are not able to record and properly report a cheater.  Back in the days I said this in my original post because it pissed me off to have to record and upload a video every time I had to report someone as if I was being part of a beta filling forms and reports and such.

 

Many players might not be an experienced, mature and "cool" person who can handle every situation without losing their nerve then contact support through the lot of steps we used to have while still dealing with the people involved in their issue along the days it takes for CS to address ingame issues through support tickets.

I say this because while some people might be able to communicate and argue to stand their position, the vast majority in my opinion might remain silent and slightly stepping back from taking part of an aggressive community as we have here were a minority of players always manage to convince everyone else that the evil is in the game management and not in the toxic player's behaviors.


Thanks Little Orbit for all your efforts put on this transition and to all the the new and the former staff for making this game and keeping it alive for so long for our enjoyment.
 

Regards,

Sal.
 

 

TL:DR:

 

Would be great if we could have an ingame report system where we could add another parameter next to the name to describe the reason of the report.

 

This way we could specify if we are reporting a suspected cheater or a griefer, harasser, exploiter and even more detailed if it is clarifying if we suspect the cheater of wall hacking, aimbotting, speed hacks, or in the case of griefers and other bad behaviors specifying if he is blocking our objectives on a mission, using racial slurs or insulting other players excessively, etc. so the admins know what they should be looking at from such players.

 

With a few restrictions to use it only a few times in a given lapse of time or such this could help a lot to the admins/GMs to be aware of which situations might require an urgent intervention to caught the player violating the CoC in the moment he is doing it or if it is something that just puts a flag on someone who could be just subject of some closer monitoring.

And of course this helps to completely reduce the need of the customer support team to go through these reports that most of the time I bet must be senseless stuff.

 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Salvick
TL:DR