5 Star Ratings & Toxicity Combat.

Duke_Falcon

I've been thinking of ways to counter the inherent toxicity that develops in Social Online Environments where people are mostly anonymous and unaccountable for their toxicity.

One idea I've had is that everyone should have a 1-5 star rating associated with their accounts. After a Social encounter, for example after being in a group with someone, present the opportunity for people to rate others, or skip it and have the default rating be 5 stars if people don't take part in the review system.

Similar to Lyft or Ubers Ridingsharing apps, if you rate someone lower than 2 or 3 stars then your never paired with them again in a group Activity Finder. I was a Lyft Driver for about 3 years, and out of the 9,000 rides I gave my rating was usually 4.93-5 stars, meaning out of the last 100 ratings I only lost 0 - 7 stars out of 500 potential stars. Lyft drivers and passengers can see the rating of the other passengers and drivers, and I soon learn never accepted anyone with less than 3 stars in your vehicle, because without fail they are horrible people.

After every 100 reviews then make a number tied to the persons name for all to see as they play the game. People will know right away, that's not a person I want to hang out with, and as a result people will be in a position where they are directly accountable for what they do, they can't hide behind anonymity and continue to be abusive toward others. If they want to have people to play the game with, they'll have to be nice to everyone or everyone will see that they are not a nice person by their peer reviewed rating.

SilverBride

Please, no.

Necrotech_Master

and how would you deal with "review bombing" in that system? lol

people could word of mouth say that player X is bad, and then everyone who ever plays with them would just rate them a 1 just because they heard they were bad and leave the group

not to mention if people were never up to your standards and constantly marked everyone as 1 star, then your queues would get longer and longer

any kind of review system is just rife for abuse

blue_peaceful_Manticore

Duke_Falcon wrote: »

I've been thinking of ways to counter the inherent toxicity that develops in Social Online Environments where people are mostly anonymous and unaccountable for their toxicity.

One idea I've had is that everyone should have a 1-5 star rating associated with their accounts. After a Social encounter, for example after being in a group with someone, present the opportunity for people to rate others, or skip it and have the default rating be 5 stars if people don't take part in the review system.

Similar to Lyft or Ubers Ridingsharing apps, if you rate someone lower than 2 or 3 stars then your never paired with them again in a group Activity Finder. I was a Lyft Driver for about 3 years, and out of the 9,000 rides I gave my rating was usually 4.93-5 stars, meaning out of the last 100 ratings I only lost 0 - 7 stars out of 500 potential stars. Lyft drivers and passengers can see the rating of the other passengers and drivers, and I soon learn never accepted anyone with less than 3 stars in your vehicle, because without fail they are horrible people.

After every 100 reviews then make a number tied to the persons name for all to see as they play the game. People will know right away, that's not a person I want to hang out with, and as a result people will be in a position where they are directly accountable for what they do, they can't hide behind anonymity and continue to be abusive toward others. If they want to have people to play the game with, they'll have to be nice to everyone or everyone will see that they are not a nice person by their peer reviewed rating.

bro... you can't even post ingame printscreen if they show player names because named&shamed rule. And now you belive rating players will go foward? lol

Katheriah

I've seen players being called out for mass reporting because people didn't like how they played the game.

Please don't.

Also we all know ZOS would mess up this functionality.

ATomiX69

Yeah we need a social credit system and everyone below a certain treshold gets reeducated (banned)
Sounds good, sign me up.

VaranisArano

Surely the best player in Battlegrounds/Tales of Tribute won't get 1-starred until they can't find matches, right?!

No, wait, that already happened in Overwatch.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-i-overwatch-i-losing-avoid-this-player-feature-after-top-players-can-t-find-games

"Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan...writes that "One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him."

But they hadn't avoided that Widowmaker player because of his toxicity, they'd clicked "Avoid this player" because he was too good.

Things only got worse. Per Kaplan, "The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had 'opened up' to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level.""

SkaraMinoc

Both star ratings and toxicity are subjective. It's also a prime target for abuse.

jaws343

Please no. Let's leave Reddit to Reddit and not infect video games directly with toxic down-voting.

I_killed_Vivec

Looks like your 4.9 rating is crumbling with this idea... be careful what you wish for!

nuttytom

this is terrible

dmnqwk

Here is a 'better' idea.

Instead of being negative and hateful, consider the following:
At the end of a group activity, you are able to 'tip' a player for positive, helpful behaviour. At the end of each month, the players with the most tips receives in-game rewards like motifs and gold (something comparable to 30 days of rewards of the worthy or whatnot). Players who queue with you, who are in your guilds and on your friends list may still tip but their tips are disregarded.

They could open it up to multiple categories if they wanted:
Helpful and Kind
Awesome skill
Patient and Understanding

Think this idea is bad? Me too. But I wanted to show how the OP could've chosen to portray their 5 star idea positively and not in a way condusive to awful, horrible, disgusting behaviour.

Carcamongus

Social credit on ESO, really? The comparison with Uber/Lyft doesn't apply because those apps rate paid services, not social encounters in a video game. Do you want people to censor almost everything they say for fear of getting poor ratings? I'm not talking about the basic common sense of not acting stupid, but keeping your mouth shut because anything you said, no matter how harmless it might seem to you, might offend someone. For example, take how seemingly innocuous @names are reported and the users forced to change them. Or how about getting poor ratings for committing the "heinous" act of telling a lousy healer/tank in a dungeon to heal/tank?

No, just no.

AinSoph

I do agree about the accountability and there should be consequences for it but DEFENITELY not this way. However, since they really promote play how you want and 95% of the game is solo, chances are almost next to nothing.

zaria

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

and how would you deal with "review bombing" in that system? lol

people could word of mouth say that player X is bad, and then everyone who ever plays with them would just rate them a 1 just because they heard they were bad and leave the group

not to mention if people were never up to your standards and constantly marked everyone as 1 star, then your queues would get longer and longer

any kind of review system is just rife for abuse

This and if you are the weak link as an lvl 47 in random normal in an March of Sacrifice run.
So pugs get punished while guild members get 5 stars and some of them are toxic.
I assume guild policy will be to rank everybody 5 and report stuff in guild. As in don't queue for an normal dlc with 5K dps as an DD and hopefully guild link to ways to solve this.

boi_anachronism_

Definitely not the way. Streamers have already complained about folks bomb reporting their accounts for no reason... Ending in multi day suspensions... This would end badly...

Amottica

While the toxicity is real and can be harsh, it is not rampant throughout the game. As such, we do not need a system to counter it.

The best way to counter dealing with toxic players is to run with guild mates and friends. For those who choose to run with very random players, the next best way to avoid toxic players is to vote to kick them from the group.

Even then, there is nothing to stop players from reporting truly abusive behavior to which Zenimax has its own star system for handling issues.

Nothing new is needed.

TaSheen

Bad idea all around.

bmnoble

Over the years I have seen multiple people in zone chat calling to mass report people, often over the stupidest things, this would get abused the moment its implemented, so no thanks.

If you don't want to deal with a random group that has a high chance of giving you group members that won't fit your standards, find friends or guild mates if you want your near perfect premade group.

The ignore function doesn't even prevent you from being grouped with people, would rather they change that, to avoid grouping with those on your ignore list, then create some new social credit score.

propertyOfUndefined

I don't think the idea per se is bad, and I know the OP's intentions are good, but... human nature

https://youtu.be/CI4kiPaKfAE

Kingsindarkness

Sorry... terrible idea.

If Zos truly wanted to take a huge chunk out of toxicity, they would just have to adopt FFXIV zero-tolerance policy...sure folks get salty there but they don't make it a habit because they want to keep their account.

alternatelder

Oh yeah, this totally wouldn't lead trolls to abuse the system...

emilyhyoyeon

if ZOS were to ever do something to encourage good behavior, makes way more sense to do a ''reward good behavior'' and not ''punish bad behavior'' system

example was already mentioned above even

Duke_Falcon

bmnoble wrote: »

The ignore function doesn't even prevent you from being grouped with people, would rather they change that, to avoid grouping with those on your ignore list, then create some new social credit score.

I genuinely loved the feed back. 8-) This one does seem like a really good idea.

Even take it one step further I think if someone blocks you or vise versa make it so they can't see anything you type, currently it just makes it so you can't see what they type, but I find that most people end up not blocking anyone because they want to know if someone is trash talking them. Then every time they see you make any kind of comment make it a point to trash you because if you have them blocked you'll never see it.

I_killed_Vivec wrote: »

Looks like your 4.9 rating is crumbling with this idea... be careful what you wish for!

Oh, and I just check my Lyft rating its currently 4.9 stars. lolol I'm not worried about losing it. lol Just be nice its easy to keep.

chessalavakia_ESO

I think you could possibly make up a beneficial rating system but, I don't think that approach would beneficial.

First, ESO's matchmaker frequently seems to struggle when it comes to making matches so adding in dealing with player's avoid lists would likely cause it to curl up and beg for death.

Second, having it automatically give a five makes it so the only feedback you'd be getting would be negative which would potentially feel bad.

Third, players could grind out positive ratings too easily. Any time you got a low rating just make a new tank alt and avoid being a jerk for a couple hours doing dungeons.

Fourth, the game has enough of player shortage in areas that people may be less likely to react to low ratings which dampens the impact.

ForumBully

There isn't going to be a substitute for in game moderation.

Artim_X

Just block and report. As mentioned by others, this can be abused in so many ways.

Real EX: I play PvE and PvP. I play PvP offline to avoid toxicity, but while I was tanking Vet City of Ash 2, a random person in group started talking bad about me in chat in relation to PvP and saying that I'm not a tank. Now I don't recognize the @ name or character name so it is a completely random person who lacked the mentality capacity to realize that people use different builds for different content. Even though I tanked through the whole dungeon including hardmode, people like this would probably rate someone they dislike 1 star just for the hell of it and I don't even know this person so it could of been a word of mouth situation like mentioned above.

The moral of the story is that a rating system is a bad idea.

Tenthirty2

Oh good gods no.

Grizzbeorn

Combat toxicity by implementing a system that used to be ubiquitous in online communities but has been largely abandoned precisely for being toxic itself, by way of how people chose to use it.
Not a good plan.

Kisakee

Dojohoda

How would that help anything? The very idea of rating people is disgusting.