A plea to all players and devs
Hello everyone,
I'm currently in New York State, on Long Island, in an area hit really, really hard by the current crisis. The things I and the rest of my colleagues here have all seen by now are really, really awful. A lot of us have never imagined that things like rapid cadaver disposal would become a topic of conversation, not to mention an actual extenuating issue in all of our lifetimes. If it were just my colleagues and I that were exposed to this risk it would be one thing, but a lot of us have older close relatives with truly essential jobs (utilities, manufacturing, food processing , healthcare etc.) and if they stay home even more people will succumb to the virus.
All I am asking for is for players of DBD to take this into consideration and not be toxic. Everyone knows what it means to be toxic, and it is the quintesential example of "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" behavior.
Coming home is already a daunting process. My routine of disinfecting, undressing, disinfecting again, showering and then showering again, followed by doing separate daily laundry not only takes way over an hour, but also requires usage of already very scarce cleaning supplies.
FYI - and this is coming from someone who strictly plays as one of the survivors - I have absolutely no issue with things like using Moris, camping & tunneling "teabagging" and what not, "sweaty" play, and a bunch of other strategies. These things don't affect me in the slightest, but in fact make me think of ways to properly counteract them, which:
a) makes me a better survivor-player
b) takes my mind away from the truly horrible things I have to deal with everyday on the outside.
Similarly, it would also be nice if developers took this into consideration as well and - after developing some sort of consensus in terms of criteria for doing so - increased the severity of punishments for things like :
a) "trolling",
b) actually "taking the game hostage"
Yes, there as some very toxic ways of doing so. I will actually describe one of these in detail in a few weeks - and provide a Proof-of-Concept if necessary or not already discovered and attended to by coders - as doing so right now would certainly lead to players taking advantatge of it for "toxic" reasons before a patch could be released. For what its worth, the "exploit" does not covey any discernable benefit in its current form,unless someone decides to write a rather sophisticated script that operates based on desired conditions
c) intentional blocking of other survivors
d) intentional last second suicides
And the list certainly does not end there....
All I am asking for is to not make the situation and people's emotional well-being any worse at a time like this. Let people have that hour to relax , because that person you are playing with or against may actually be a funeral home employee that has had to fill a semi trailer that substitute for a mobile morgue with black body bags containing other people's mothers, fathers, grandparents and even sons and daughters, and on top of that cannot even pretend that these bodies will get any type of a proper burial.
Answers
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I'm sorry to hear about your situation, it's indeed taking it's toll on all of us, some more than others.
But without sounding like "that guy", I would like to elaborate more on what you're asking. While yes, some players will inherently be toxic to others (as is their nature), asking the "general public" on the forums will not stop it. If you're being harassed in-game about something (which is the vibe i'm getting here), than you can report them in-game and let the support team take care of it.
If they're harassing you outside of the game, say in PSN or Xbox messages, than you can report them to Xbox or Playstation and block them afterwards. It'll save you more time than it's worth if you engage with it.
This doesn't mean that it won't stop, since we'll always come across players like these (unfortunately), it'll just ensure that their behavior will not go unchecked. If you can't handle the potential toxicity that might happen in post-chat, than please close it so you don't have to worry about it. If it happens in-game, than ignore it. Be the bigger person and you'll feel a lot better because of it. Some players will always be aggressive towards others, but it's best to know that you can report them for this and even ignore them outright.
Don't let them get to you, that's what they want. Hopefully this helps, sorry if it's kind of short.
Something else I wanted to address
In my opinion, I don't agree with the idea of enforcing more punishments on "trolling" and holding the game hostage. To get the latter out of the way, it's already perma bannable to hold the game hostage, so it's hard to give harsher punishments on it. You could argue that it could be "less lenient", but it's already super non-lenient as is... As for trolling, trolling can be ignored entirely... It only gets to you if you let it.
You could also argue that "body blocking another Survivor (as a Survivor) is hard to ignore". Which I agree with, it's hard to ignore this when it's happening to you... But to be honest with you, it rarely happens to begin with. That's not to say it doesn't happen, but it's hard to really say if this should be punished or not, that's a debate in itself. You're not stuck there forever, and the crows notify the Killer, if the Killer starts working with that Survivor THAN that's ENTIRELY different.
As for last second suicides, If you mean when a Survivor dies on the hook when you're about to get to them, than that only hinders them to be honest. They died, lost, and move on. You can still progress, you can still Survivor. Albeit the goal is harder, it's still possible. There is an on-going debate about Suiciding on the hook being the equivalent to DCing, but that's ALSO another topic.
As for the rest of what you asked, that was said above. I'm sorry this might happen to you, that it causes you more stress on to your day, but I wouldn't let it get to you... It only piles on the stress.
Post edited by FireHazard on0 -
Honestly, I don't actually think anything can be done about it from the devs perspective, other than taking a game mechanism out of the game (NO, I am not suggesting it as an actual option. Not now, not ever), hence my plea to the actual players.
There will be a time to be toxic, as this is still just a video game, and those who take it too seriously in some ways deserve treatment that puts it back in perspective. Also, in terms of strategies you described, you and I both know that a player who has put 50 or more hours into DBD is likely to not only be able to distinguish toxic behavior from a valid strategy, but also be able to tell when another player happens to turn a strategy into an actually toxic behavior.A player of rank 18-20 gets the benefit of doubt everytime, but a rank 13-17 - as those ranks tend to facilitate toxic behavior the most due to the penalties not effectively reducing their rank - should really know better. As I said, it is very difficult to define "toxic" behavior in DBD, and hence the "I know it when I see it" legal test. In fact one of the ways of "judging" toxic behavior would be to allow players to watch reported matches, with players names blacked out, and have them examine the behavior and ultimately act as juries and reach verdicts regarding inappropriate conduct. This could even be rewarded with like 5 cells or 25 shards to facilitate its implementation. Yes, I realize this would more than likely open a whole new Pandora's Box but it is just a suggestion mostly driven by the current situation.
Imagine for a second you only get 1 hour to play DBD every evening. In those 60 minutes you are only going to play at most 4 trials to completion as you will lose at least 4 minutes on the Lobby delay in itself, another 4 minutes on any post trial analysis, another 4 minutes actually spending your BPs, and lets be optimistic and say there is only a 60 second wait between each trial. So, 44 minutes translates to 11 minutes per trial if played to completion, and 11 minutes may not be quite a full-throttle generator blitz but it also does not convey a full DBD trial experience .
As you can see, 3 trials may be a more realistic scenario for that 60 minute time limit. Now, please also imagine one of these 3 trials ends up being a trial where a player happens to offer either "Escape Cake" or "Bloody Party Streamers" and another survivor hinders not only the trial progress but also the overall game experience.
When this happens, not only do other players get needlessly stressed out (and stress is terrible right now, for everything from your immune system to your overall mental health) , they also happen to transfer a lot of emotions into and out of their "free/me time" . Given this substantial transference going on, the last thing anyone needs right now is to be thinking of some horse's ass player that made us lose faith in humanity for that one second for no reason what so ever.
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EDIT: One final point as far as holding the game hostage: Yes, I do agree that there is no higher punishment than a ban that could ever be enforced. However, I have reported at least 1 player for a particular exploit ( I will admit the following: my gaming PC currently does not allow me to record gameplay footage itself using Steam overlay, and I have not looked into installing a free 3rd party recording software , partially due to not having the time to examine the specs of the anti-cheat mechanism to ensure I do not run afoul of it, but if devs can somehow trace trials by crossmatching my player name with another player name I can provide for examination, I would be happy to do so again. In fact I am almost positive all the chats are logged and there was something that occurred in one of the chats that would be a definite proof of mild-to-severe level of illegal player behavior ). It would have been reassuring to have one dev to at least mention it in an emal/steam/ingame message or even better make a forum thread topic about it.
The exploit itself effectively allowed a survivor to "re-inject" themselves into the trial after in-game death. Another player already dead and in the post-trial lobby could actually "spectate" them, yet these survivors would not be seen by the killer (registered as dead within the trial environment itself) within the trial. While solo survivors could not actually exploit this bug, those SWF players could actually derive a huge advantage from it by having their dead teammate "shadow" the killer while the others still alive continued their progress. Apparently, this would cause the reanimated survivor to be stuck in the trial after its completion, forcing them to actually disconnect and get zero bloodpoints in order to leave.
This being said, players taking advantage of such exploits bother me less than survivors who for example block other survivors in non-exitable areas of maps, such as those where tokens often materialize. These situations force the locked-in survivors to wait for the killer, actually find a way to signal them to come over, or disconnect from the trial all together leading to a loss of acquired bloodpoints, in-game rank, and finally even longer delay when waiting for the next trial to begin.
IDEA: One possible suggestion is if for example both a survivor and a killer player happen to report another player for in-game conduct, such reports should automatically get added to a list for immediate review. Those players found guilty of illegal behavior could have the next 250K bloodpoints redistributed to the 4 other players in the affected trial, and each subsequent violation within a 90 day frame would lead to doubling of the penalty , such that 3 strikes would require you to earn 1 million BPs before you could spend them on leveling up perks of your own characters and acquiring items. This - on top of the behavior itself - would also lead toxic players to lose rank, forcing them to play with players of rank 18-20, who - without such penalties for illegal conduct - would move up in ranks and away from toxic players through the emblem awarding system on their own.
In vast majority of real-life situations, penalties that not only punish the perpetrator, but also reward the affected party, tend to be far more effective at reducing dangerous illegal behavior than stricter punishments on their own.
Post edited by madradfox on0 -
Holy cow this mans went mad lengths to stop survivors from body blocking. I wish you luck in your endeavors, however.
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"My routine of disinfecting, undressing, disinfecting again, showering and then showering again,"
Do you actually take a shower, get out and dry off. And then get back into the shower? Why don't you just take an extra long shower. There might be a problem with you. I don't support this behavior.
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Not to sound rude, but what are you talking about? I feel like you said a lot of words but I’m still unsure as to what point you’re trying to make. I want to hear your plea but I don’t understand it. Could you simplify a bit for me?
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Maybe he meant to say dressing and disinfecting :/
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I explained what I mean by "body blocking" in my second post. I do not mean one survivor blocking another survivor to "throw them under a bus" driven by the killer.
I get a huge kick out of it actually when I happen to be on the end of that strategy as a survivor because it reminds me of the saying: "you do not actually need to be faster than the bear, just slightly faster than the slowest camper".
In fact, yesterday when playing as Jane Romero everyone got a huge laugh in the postgame chat when I asked another survivor, who blaitantly dropped a pallet on my head as I was mending in that walkway, if they simply confused me for Bubba because of Jane's huge butt. I had no hard feelings because of it, even though it effectively pushed me towards the killer's path out of the blue. I actually thought it was a great move - accidental, or not - because, as Craig Robinson said in This is the End : " It's too late for you! You're in the hole already!"
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Oh I have to read two of these? I think I'll take a break, professor.
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Basically, the point being made is that people's lives are hard, and some people's lives are incredibly hard right now, and it would be nice if we could all have a bit more compassion on the people on the other side of the screen and not go out of our way to ruin their fun. Secondary to that, OP is also asking if the devs might consider being more harsh in punishing those who are incapable of behaving decently towards other players, in order to minimise the negative effects of their behaviour on the rest of the community.
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Outside of text which is easily reportable proof, it's hard to tell what actually goes on in game. It would probably take multiple reports against the same person by different players, and I'm not sure how their system works. For instance, does everything one player have reported against him get filed neatly, or are the reports scattered and would require a moderator being able to notice this same person being reported repeatedly? I've seen games & chat systems both work one way or the other.
Even for reporting hacking players, they prefer that you record your games and send it to them directly here or on Discord. That would be impossible to do with every bad manner Jack & Sally. So, probably one of the reasons they don't make BM'ing bannable (outside of severe cases) is just limitations. Not to mention, this sort of behavior is pretty normal in most PVP oriented games. After playing DBD for a while now, I'd say it's almost as bad as League. Compare these forums to non-PVP gaming forums and you'll see a big difference in the sorts of threads that appear with regularity.
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What is determined as behaving badly? Using noed? moris? using allowable in game mechanics/strategies such as tunneling/camping? Teabagging? Slugging? Flashlighting? Locker slamming? Using "no skill' perks?
The devs have a list of bannable offenses already.
If your mental state is beaten because of the situation you are experiencing, why play a game that could potentially add more stress to your mental state?
Sometimes we need to step back and decide if something(in this case dbd) is worth the added mental anguish.
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Yeah & this. BM is subjective. I can clicky clicky & tea bag one survivor and they think it's funny. Do it to another and they're ready to brawl.
I've walked away from this game a few times because I just started to get so frustrated. It's good to have feel good games in your back pocket. That can be anything from Assassin's Creed to Stardew Valley.
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It's not my point - I was just trying to clarify it for the person who didn't understand. However, the OP themselves did explicitly define what they meant by "toxic behaviour" in their original post, so I would suggest going back and rereading that for more clarity.
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I personally don't agree with the jury style of handling stuff like this, it can be easily abused by other players for various reason. One being that "I don't like that guy.", even if this player is slightly toxic. "toxic" in-general just defines a player that's distasteful towards others, it's been twisted around so much in this community that it starts to dilute it's true meaning.
But again, a jury handling something like that is not something I personally want to get behind, it should be handled by a support team by default. Also it's hard to say that you're 100% sure if someone is being toxic off of... what? How they play alone? You can't really guess that someone is toxic, they either are or not. If someone is t-bagging you in-game, that's BMing... not toxicity. If they do that and than harass you afterwards, than that's a different story. Of course if someone body blocks you in a corner, that's kind of a no brainer that they're intentionally trying to ruin your experience. A player won't do this out of the blue though... Hence why I rarely see it happen.
I agree that stress is bad, I mean who doesn't? But you can't eliminate toxicity, you can only contain and suppress it. This might be a cynical outlook on it, but you'll always find a player that will go out of their way to ruin your experience. It could even happen on a whim, because you "didn't do something they wanted you to do", which has happened to other players before. This is why the in-game report system exists, it helps suppress this behavior and take care of anyone who misbehaves. This is a common format that pretty much every game follows now, especially with how gaming has become pretty mainstream these days.
Don't think of it as pointless though, reporting someone is definitely helpful and appreciated. It definitely keeps less and less people from acting this way, and it even helps out others besides yourself! But yes, I can see why the limited play-time mixed with the potential toxicity during that play-time can be stressful indeed. I personally don't come across these types of players that much, they're quite rare for me. And as I've said before, I've never seen anyone go after specific players for no reason, there's always a reason behind it.
As for your last bits of info
Some people have said this before in the past, that an email of sorts would be nice to receive. While the support team isn't required to do this, I can see why it would be nice and "reassuring" to the reporter who reported this issue. The support team most likely has their own reasons behind WHY they don't do this, and I personally can't tell you what those reasons are (because I obviously don't know).
Also you mentioned an exploit where these players would "inject themselves back into the game after death". if this has happened to you in-game than I hope you know to record it for a report. If you didn't that one time, than please keep that in-mind if it happens again. If they DOES happen again, record it, report it in-game, submit a support ticket, and than BHVR can take care of it from there.
As for aggressive body blocking, that's another debate as well... If a Survivor is body blocking you repeatedly, than some would argue that it should be reportable as well. It's technically griefing (which is reportable), but minor body blocking is usually ignored. I personally don't want to debate that topic for my own reasons, but I can agree that aggressive body blocking is not ok.
My criticism about your ending idea
Your idea is good, but there's an issue with it. I don't know if BHVR is able to tax a players blood-points and distribute it to 4 other players. I feel that would require a lot of manual editing on the devs part, which I can tell you is something they most likely won't do. I agree that a harsher punishment will deter players from acting that way, whether being toxic or breaking the rules, but a ban usually is enough to do this... Also, I personally don't think the average player should be rewarded for reporting someone who is clearly breaking the rules, it's an incentive yes, but that defeats the point of the system. It's like giving candy to a child who won't eat their vegetables, you shouldn't reward them with one thing to get them to do the other... but like all of what I've said, it's just my opinion.
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I hear you, fellow DbD player from the other side(Strictly Killer player here) and I will vow right now: No moris OR sacrifices for all next month. I'll just injure and hook once each and let them go. Collect my chase, destruction and damage points and call it a time. I can't promise there won't be some teams who let their pals bleed out but I will observe Merciful May, in honor of your IRL sacrifices. F ●7
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