[shawn]

Uhh, that logic doesn’t folllow. Heh. I’m a former S2 dev (heroes of newerth, a pretty similar game). The player base is uncontrollable. It’s a bunch of testosterone fueled teens.

Granted, we didn’t have any women in leadership positions either, but I’d like to think that was more because we were relatively small and it was Kalamazoo.

[pjc50]

> uncontrollable

It's not uncontrollable, you'd just rather have their money than ban them.

[shawn]

No, I assure you it’s uncontrollable. There are millions of games played per day on Dota. How do you propose to fairly evaluate each of them?

[TillE]

You seriously can't think of a single idea for how to ban toxic players at scale?

Start with crowd-sourcing via reports, then pass it over to customer service once a critical mass has been achieved. Make sure one person can't easily create a new account after being banned. This really isn't a new problem, tons of companies of all sizes have tackled it with varying success.

[shawn]

Spoken like someone who’s never played the game. Get ready to be banned for no fault of your own, just because your three teammates decided to report you for the lulz. There are people who post on /r/dota2 complaining that they get banned from the game for nothing but picking techies each game. They don’t even say anything. People just report them immediately.

By the way, streamers are one of the most high impact users of the game. They are also one of the most unfairly targeted by report systems. This problem is extensively studied and very tricky.

[olavgg]

I've been playing DOTA since the Warcraft 3 days, and a lot of HoN. I'm seriously grateful for the excellent Linux client.

Today I've moved over to Dota 2 and now I see that I no longer get banned and moved to unranked for picking techies. I play him at ancient/divine levels and getting reported is very common. Techies is my favorite hero as he is more about strategy than quick precise reactions. I think Valve has done some progress in this area, especially as you now can commend players.

[ethbro]

Just because there are false positives or one company has a bad implementation doesn't make it an unsolveable problem.

As parent mentioned, ml sentiment analysis + logging + peer reporting + final human analysis = problem effectively combated

It's the final human analysis that companies are loathe to fund (e.g. Facebook), as costs scale with user count.

But it's not efficiently unsolveable with current tech. Therefore, companies simply aren't prioritizing it. And won't, as long as the impact of toxic users isn't impacting the bottom line.

[shawn]

Kay. What are the odds that some HN commenters are going to solve the same problem that has been an active priority for years of the people in the field?

I can’t speak for Valve or Riot, but at S2 it was a concerning issue. There’s just no good way to do it when the people involved are actively malicious. If you think there is, get ready to have your community collapse around you as everyone complains about unfair bans.

I don’t think you really appreciate the scale of the problem. Final human analysis is not possible when there are literally millions of games per week. It’s also not something that ML can identify cleanly — the moment it does, the culture will adapt to bypass the evaluator. It always does.

[TomMarius]

Riot does exactly that.

[zetimana]

Okay something tells me you've never played an online game, like ever?

[dang]

Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[adn]

The same way ubisoft moderates rainbow six siege: ban anyone who uses slurs etc very quickly. It's not an unsolvable problem.

[chronid]

The chat is not the only way you can troll your team mates and cause them to rage quit (or scream at you and get banned themselves). I would actually say that the griefing created by people using slurs is actually pretty small.

You can be silent and ruin hundreds of games. Distinguishing that from genuinely bad players is not really easy.

[PakG1]

How do YouTube, Facebook, and others ban illegal, unsavory content? Teams of moderators with good tools. Unfortunately, also a thankless job with the potential to give PTSD.

[enraged_camel]

YouTube, Facebook and others have several orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem than an indie game company.

That’s why Riot’s level of progress over the problem is so remarkable.

[Qub3d]

Throwing an 'indie' tag on a company that makes over 1 billion in revenue annually is ridiculous.

And even indie companies have to pay the piper when the bad culture and tough decisions that are put off result in blowback.

[chronid]

Youtube, Facebook and company have a ridiculous amount of false positives, for the money (and the people, they have quite a lot of human moderators) they throw at the problem. Also, they enjoy complete market dominance, so even if you want to move out of youtube... where are you going to go?

With the same rate of false positives there will be enough community rage (I guarantee someone is going to find a way to have your system ban the top 10 streamers of your game after 2 days you put it in place) your players (both good and bad) will go somewhere else. :)

[davvolun]

We can't stop everyone from killing, so let's just let everyone kill?

[TomMarius]

You'd have to have the game invite only and do a interview with each applicant, checking their IDs and having them sign a contract after a psychological test. That's the only way, but of course, that's not possible; technically doable, but no, not possible.

[StreamBright]

if you ban them they stop spending.

[adn]

The current CEO of S2, Marc DeForest, has said incredibly racist things in the chat of HoN.

[shawn]

Yeah... all I can say is, he doesn’t speak for anyone except himself.

[PakG1]

That's unfortunately not how being the top leader works. Although I suppose you could say recent events in the world say otherwise.

[ipioxu15]

The CEO speaks for the company, like it or not.

[shawn]

Really? The CEO does not speak for me, especially when it comes to that.

[lubonay]

Then again, you are not the company. If anybody speaks for the company as a whole, it's the CEO.

[shawn]

Sure, but bucketing a company as racist just because someone said the n word once in 2009 isn’t productive. It’s like calling pewdiepie racist.