I'm quite disturbed to see some players try to voteexit when loosing. Same with people blaming others failures without providing ingame help, constantly insulting people or similar behaviours.

If the community grows, it may be unmanageable and painful for admins to handle complaints. If nothing is done, it may simply prevent the community from growing because of newbies being treated too harshly and turning away. I have not seen many reviews of zk, but I'm pretty sure it would be very bad PR if some blogger or journalist happened to play and got abused by angry players, or just witnessed it and included it in its review...

If anyone has ideas to help promote good behaviour, please post. Something that doesn't require manual handling by moderators is obviously preferable.

My first idea is to implement another metric, along XP, something showing appreciation by other players. Having a high appreciation may boost XP to unlock things faster, or give some other advantage (like a special com module that doesn't depend on XP, but depend on appreciation level). Having a low/negative appreciation may scale down XP, and a very negative appreciation may end up locking things again, even for high level/good players. I don't have a clear plan for such a metric. Maybe players would get 1 or 2 votes for each game they play, that they can either use to up/down 1 or 2 players appreciation metric. Maybe it would not simply be a +1 or -1 on a single appreciation metric, but some kind of awards (positive or negative) you could give to people that would contribute to the metric, like abusive

-1, teamkiller

-1, tutor = +1, etc. Extra benefit would be that newbies being insulted by players that are known to be abusive may not turn away as easily, could end up improving and help grow the community. Comments are welcome, as well as abuse potential of such a system.

Worst/pathological offenders may still deserve a (manually setup) ban at some point, but if we can usually avoid going that far through some form of auto-regulation, everyone would benefit from it, players and admins.

No, this kind of system is no good. It will just be abused for the very things you are worried about: Experienced players will 'unappreciate' noobs for losing games, players will get into wars with eachother giving eachother negative ratings. It will be another tool used to troll.

Some kind of 'soft admin' function (beyond kick/ban) to get people to behave may be worthwhile, but the reason we dont enforce 'good behaviour' at the moment is because a lot of our players, even top players, are foul-mouthed trolls. Moderator enforcement would mean banning a lot of our playerbase (Not that this stops us, we still do it).

We could simply have built in complaint system and admins handling it..

I see the noobs coming who are crying about cheaters with about 1800 elo and don't know how to use the reporting system :)

Forn chicken egg problems there are "chicken egg" bots :D

I was new at zk but had allready experience with games like Empire Earth etc.

If you have played one real time strategy game you know much more about this as real newbes.

It is a big problem for us to understand this.

The best word for us to describe this is "n00b".


--- BUT ---


I think a too low amount of peoples watch replays to learn from good players.

How can we change this?

Maybe we should make less missions witch teach you NOT to porc, but WHERE to porc and how much.

We should add a button to labs who simple make each unit type at equal costs.

Only make this units and let the players control them.


--- OR ---


Add a possibility to comment replays, save them to a new file and add it to the not interactive tutorials.


--- P L S - T E L L - U S - W H A T ' S - W R O N G ! ! ! ---


What are the best tutorials and why are they the best?

What lesson helps you the most?

What are you missing?

@saktoth : I understand it could be abused if system is too simple, but implementation details may make it worthwhile.

Maybe a single award (either +1 or -1) could be given for each match instead of everyone having points to give for each match they played. No consensus among players/specs would mean no award. Allowing specs to vote may moderate the process, as they would vote without game-related anger.

As pointed out, having a "n00b"/"you suck" award would not help in any way. Having a closed set of appreciation awards that are not related to the skills of the players would force an angry player willing to punish someone to choose among (eg.) teamkiller, abusive, voteexitlooser. Voters, seeing that the angry player try to give a noob an "abusive award" just because his target hasn't built enough eco (or whatever) would be ignored/vote2 by others and have no effect.

I was talking about voteexit attempts (as one example of bad behaviour), but from what I've seen lately, it rarely succeeded (it seems most people can take a loss and get over it). In a recent game I specced, someone tried to voteexit, and his teammates refused to follow him (he then decided to selfd his base instead of resigning/giving his stuff to team). So, I feel like there are more honest people and that such a system could tend to work in the end, even if undeserved awards are sometimes granted. Maybe not. It seems difficult to evaluate, only an experiment would tell.

But if smurf accounts are too easy to get (you only have to register), such a democratic process is doomed from the start. There was a proposal in another post to force new players to play a few single/mission games before entering multi-p games... this restriction would stop all but the most dedicated trolls from having an influence on such a voting system, without having a negative impact on others.

I have yet to see a troll. Where are they? I think they are not able to survive, because the Spring engine does not allow bridges of any sort. They can not live anywhere!

If you talk about Galactic Trolls, I think they are cute and cuddly!

The chance that any random person on the world writes something bad about anything always exists and can not be eliminated. For reference see "Real Life (tm)". If people really would listen to them.. well if someone or some realy do it's no big problem either.

but I like insulting noobs :(

It makes me feel good about myself