DonkOPP wrote: ↑Thu Oct 13, 2022 6:07 pm
wargrimnir wrote: ↑Thu Oct 13, 2022 5:55 pm
DonkOPP wrote: ↑Thu Oct 13, 2022 5:32 pm
The game use to average 1,300 at my prime time and 900 at low hours. Now its 900 or so at prime time. You do the math. Toxic people don't help build good communities and this game has plenty of them apparently. So much so that the GMs need a auto chat ban system.
If you got hit by an auto chat ban, are you part of the toxicity? You made this thread about your one bad experience being the reason the game is dying.
If GM's didn't enforce the rules, manually or automated, would the toxicity level of any other game increase or decrease?
Yes, I was being toxic. I will freely admit to that. Only after being targeted by a salty member of the community but that doesn't excuse my behavior.
I do love how the GM's of this game like yourself take the time to respond to forums posts like this with retorts defending your game and your decisions. Why waste your time but I've seen that you guys do this time and time again on the forums. Few times it's the GMs that have inflated the forum thread beyond some guy just venting about something he didn't like. You needing a auto chat ban says a lot about the community, most games just have a mature filter but you feel the need to go beyond that, that's my point.
Some games are more toxic than others for sure. PvP games are typically more toxic, it's just part of the playerbase that comes along with it and we've adapted over the years for it. If this were maplestory or final fantasy, maybe we wouldn't need a filter as people don't have a reason to be nearly as aggressive towards each other. There's certainly games that give up entirely and don't have a filter at all, but I find those experiences to be bottom of the barrel. Look at any old Call of Duty for example. Our is modeled after some games more aggressive in nature. Warframe for example is highly aggressive with their automatic chat filter and they seem to be doing just fine.
I assume people pining for a less aggressive chat filter would rather prefer a more toxic community than otherwise, whether or not they want to admit it. Do you want more negative interactions with other players? That seems more likely without an aggressive filter. We also have data backing this up internally, not only are there significantly less direct reports of bad behavior after the filter was implemented, but the number of auto mutes have been slowly decreasing over time as people adjust to change their lexicon to be more appropriate for public chat channels. This in turn makes private chat toxicity even more stand out, and rather than leading to threads like this one, I would hope leads to GM reports and action only towards players that deserve it the most.
Now I don't expect this to clear up every bad actor that visits the server, we have new people joining every day, there's bound to be people that get frustrated and run into a mute. We're going to get people that run past this pretty clear warning and cause problems for players directly. I mean it's a free PvP focused MMO on the internet, why wouldn't they expect it to be toxic? You know, maybe you're onto something. If we just dropped all this pretense of TOS enforcement and allowed people to opt-in to being toxic with a mature filter (we don't monitor private chats so technically you already have mature guilds for this experience), we could experience a whole renaissance of returning players. Just imagine the things you didn't know your mother was doing! Sadly, leadership on the server is rather unlikely to choose that path. We're going to have to settle for a sub-1k population.
The only real reason population comes and goes is content. We don't produce enough monthly content for the average event-focused player to stay engaged with. We don't create new PvE dungeons at all for people to progress through. We haven't significantly updated RvR mechanics since cities were introduced a couple years ago. There hasn't been a broad class balance shakeup in over a year now. Each of these things cause populations to bump up, and then slowly recede over time. Big youtubers are a rare anomaly that give us the big spikes in population, which may have been the back that you trailed in on if you saw 1300 at prime time. We do our best to manage the influx of players but understand they're not all going to stay. We're not going to manage a massive population of players consistently unless we're drawing about half of them in month to month.
Don't bother trying to shame me over posting in threads. I rather enjoy posting with the community, and defending the team and the decisions we make is typically my first priority. Cute profile, definitely not toxic
