moderation
Latest
How the WoW community is about to push the self-destruct button
This post is going to be very meta in some regards, and it's going to touch on a few things that deal with the WoW community's very existence. We've written this article in hopes that it might help calm the waters, or at least bring some will on the part of the multitudes of individuals not to jump on the wrong bandwagon. If you've been paying attention to the role forums and the "Ghostcrawler drama" this past week, you know what I'm talking about. If not, we'll begin with a brief rundown. The Inherency of the Status Quo WoW is designed and run by a team of people, with a handful of "leads" in position to direct the design of the game. These people, such as Ghostcrawler, are at the top of the ladder in terms of game development. They are the conglomerate of the entire design and development teams underneath them. Ghostcrawler, and in the past a few people like him, post on the role forums daily in an effort to establish a dialogue with the community over some, but not all, game design principals. The community, as expected, is more than happy to talk with Ghostcrawler and the rest of Blizzard. The Harm of the Vocal Minority
EpicAdvice.com lets you ask and answer Warcraft questions
Reader Jesta sent us a note about his new website. He's a big fan of Stack Overflow, which is a big Q&A/advice site for programmers -- you show up, ask your question, and then other folks who might or might not be working on the same problem post their answers, in moderated and organized threads for everyone to read. Jesta decided this same type of thing could work for our little game, so he put together EpicAdvice.com -- the idea is that you go there, leave a question about anything in the game, and then wait for your answer from other people browsing the site.Stack Overflow actually has a little "badge" system where answerers can earn reputation points for answering questions correctly, and Jesta says that they're working on doing something similar for Epic Advice (though they'll probably have Achievements, as that's more Warcraft-y). But as of this writing, the site definitely needs more questions and answers, so if there's something bugging you about WoW (that our own Queue hasn't answered yet), or you consider yourself an expert and want to clear some things up, head over and give the site a look.
Study: Playing in a guild actually lowers stress
A new study done by researchers at Australia's Queensland University of Technology says that spending time online playing World of Warcraft with others can actually be good for your mental wellbeing -- within moderation of course. Researcher Huon Longman studied WoW players who played alongside guildies in game, and found that players often shared their real-life concerns with their virtual associates, which resulted in lowered levels of "anxiety, depression, and stress." In short, it seems that when you build relationships and share emotions even with people online, it can help you deal with problems in real life as well. That follows what we talked about earlier this week with Dr. Hilarie Cash -- games like WoW can definitely complement real-life relationships and actually help you relax.But only when used in moderation -- Longman also found that 10% of the sample he studied played considerably more World of Warcraft than normal, and that those players not only didn't experience a bigger benefit to their wellbeing, but actually experienced more "negative psychological symptoms." A good balance of virtual and real life can have a lot of benefits, but falling too much into virtual life can actually cause more problems psychologically, according to this researcher's work. Obviously, this is one study of many about how playing these games can affect how we think, but the results are definitely reflected in experience: in-game relationships, used in moderation, can definitely help you deal with the real world in a healthier way.Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
You wouldn't like Aventurine when they're angry...
Aventurine smash! Well, they smash people who attempt to impersonate GMs and cheat in their game, at least.Over at Hardcore Casual, Syncaine has put up a post discussing Aventurine's hardline attitude to players in their game, Darkfall. The company has already said, straight out, that they will ban players for an offense like attempting to impersonate a GM or cheating in their game. No warnings, no temporary boots, we're talking a full ban on the first offense.What is unclear, from the perspective of a player, is how well Aventurine is implementing their own policies. From one player's perspective, it seems that the GMs are certainly on the ball and are dealing with people who attempt to use joke names. But as to how many people may have been banned by Aventurine's staff? Well, that's an unknown number that most likely will never be released outside of the company.Even so, a hardline stance like the one Aventurine is taking isn't seen very often in MMOs. Companies worry about alienating their player base with moves such as those.Interested in the full post? Check it out over at Hardcore Casual.
TagWoW shrinks your WoW URLs [Updated: NSFW]
There are already quite a few "shrink your URL" sites out there, from the famous TinyURL to my favorite, is.gd. But former Wowhead honcho Tim Sullivan has seen fit to add one more to the mix, and who knows, maybe the tiny bit of functionality it adds will be worth it. TagWoW will shrink your Warcraft-related URLs (well, it'll shrink anything, but it's meant for Warcraft stuff) into whatever tiny URL you want, and then it'll track the most popular pages on the homepage.Sure, it's just another URL-shrinking site, but there is some usefulness to be found here -- Blizzard forum URLs, many guild websites, and talent builds on Wowhead and elsewhere all have gigantic URLs, and shrinking them down to a memorable phrase could be helpful. Not to mention that Tim tells us that they want to "heavily moderate" the service -- gold farmers, keystroke loggers, and phishing sites are supposed to be kicked right out of the system, so if you see a TagWoW link on the forums, you will hopefully always be able follow it without worrying about compromising your security.Like I said, there's just enough functionality added here that it could end up being something big. Currently, there's apparently only a few URLs saved in the system (the site only went live last week), but you can probably expect things to pick up with our post here -- and hopefully we won't burn the site down. With the right URL submissions and, as Tim promises, some serious moderation to make everything trustworthy, TagWoW could be a nice service.EDIT: Be advised that as of this writing one of the links on the front page of TagWoW leads to an adult site though it doesn't say so in the link description. Click the links on TagWoW at your own risk.
LittleBigPlanet level moderation a 'continually improving' process
That's according to Sony, which addressed several LittleBigPlanet concerns in a recent (and now weekly) post on the official PlayStation Blog. "The vast majority of moderated levels were due to offensive material," wrote SCEA marketing manager Mark Valledor, "however we are evolving the way moderation happens to ensure that creators are made aware of why their level was blocked." Earlier this year, level creators expressed their frustration at becoming victim of Sony's inscrutable moderation policies. The company has since released some general "don't put this stuff in your level" guidelines.Valledor also noted that other online aspects of the precious platformer are being examined and improved, including the occasionally problematic servers and the maddeningly unhelpful level search function. "We've heard your requests to get better search functionality to find levels and getting the PLAY, CREATE, SHARE stats up and running on the Info Moon and have put this on the top of our list." We hope you guys tagged that list properly -- it's going to be awfully difficult to find otherwise.
Sony issues LittleBigPlanet moderation guidelines
Curious as to why your magnificent LittleBigPlanet level, in which Mario investigates Princess Peach's plumbing, was deleted without warning? Well, it's probably because you failed to heed Sony's "suggestions" to creators. Also, because you're a copyright-infringing sicko. The list of diplomatic commandments, issued to CVG in response to widespread confusion over LittleBigPlanet's moderation policies, reads as follows: Ensure that the content you share with other users is suitable for all ages - everybody has access to your level if you publish it Please respect other people's intellectual property rights. For example, don't use images, brands or logos that you're not entitled to use. If you come across any content that you feel the need to report, then please do it responsibly. Hoax reports will be considered inappropriate behavior. As will designing a Heavenly Sword level before Sony has the opportunity to sell you one as DLC. But don't give up, folks -- the one thing that can never be moderated is imagination!
Sony promises better moderation system for LBP
It appears that LittleBigPlanet moderation has been incredibly aggressive, with some levels being removed from LBP servers completely -- without warning, and without reason. Creators, who have spent hours on building levels, don't have access to any backups when their levels are deleted off the face of the internet. Obviously, the sudden deletion of their levels have them quite peeved.Many of the levels in question involve copyrighted content. For example, levels based on Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. series may be wiped out. Even levels based on Sony's own God of War have been removed. While we understand Sony's need to ensure proper moderation against copyrighted material (they don't want to be sued, of course), this is the wrong way to approach it.Thankfully, things are looking to change. "We want to ensure that creators' levels are only permanently removed if they warrant it. In most innocent cases a simple tweak to the level may be required and that's what we're working on communicating," said Sony. Simply telling users what to change and giving them an opportunity to fix their mistakes is a far better alternative to unwarranted deletion. We'd be devastated too if one of our levels just disappeared.
LittleBigPlanet levels being deleted with no warning or explanation
If you've put countless hours into crafting a level in Media Molecule's uber-customizable platformer, you know how terrifying that headline really is -- LittleBigPlanet forums across the web are erupting with angry amateur level designers whose creations were 'moderated' (see: deleted) without explanation or forewarning. You read that right -- the levels aren't being removed from your list of published, downloadable creations. They are being deleted. Permanently. Forever. Gone.Affected parties have noticed that the moderations have erased levels which mention (to varying degrees) copyrighted IPs. For instance, that remarkable God of War level that everyone probably played during beta? It is no more. The gaggle of Super Mario Bros. reimaginings? Yeah, those are gone too. Our personal favorite -- a level titled "Failure to Launch" was deleted, supposedly for using the title of a 2006 McConnaughey-infused romantic comedy. Sadly, our very own magnum opus also fell beneath the axe -- yes, "Maid in Manhattan" is gone, and no amount of protest will bring it back.Moderators of the engulfed LBP forums have promised to implement a stronger feedback system to explain why levels are disappearing -- though their unwavering stance on copyrighted content has officially been displayed. Our lesson has certainly been learned -- we'll be keeping our rom-com-based creations to ourselves from now on.[Via Kotaku]
Forum post of the day: Where's my big brother
At one point in time Chuck Norris jokes dominated trade chat. Then it was the Murloc game. I'm sure we've all noticed that now it's the anal <insert spell> gibberish that now floods the channel. Dolce of Blackrock believes that it's time the Blizzard begin moderating trade channels during prime time. The chat channel can be turned off, but then it loses utility for valid messages such as selling enchants, transmutes, and well, general trade. As a parent, Dolce continued his argument: Wow has a very broad appeal and the average parent would look at the packaging of the World of Warcraft and assume that it is nothing more than a fantasy game where their son or daughter can play with their friends and have "adventures". The average parent I imagine (and this is merely a broadstroke comment based on the huge playerbase), may not have any sort of familiairity with online games, and even to a certain degree, computers as a whole. Asking parents (although I am extremely attentive to what my childrens activities are) to have an intimate knowledge of joining and exiting out of city channels is a bit extreme. Perhaps if there were parental controls that you could set ot make this easier...... /wink In any event I would not be suprised to see some news anchor with some over the top expository on the lewd and profane content that is seen in WoW spun out of context in the near future. I would say they would be killing a variety of birds with one stone if they simply moderated these popular channels.
Player vs. Everything: The retention game
The conventional wisdom in any service-driven industry is that it's far, far cheaper to retain an existing customer than to recruit a new one. This is especially true in the MMOG industry, where your business model is largely dependent on maintaining a long-term subscriber base. The concept also applies to transaction-driven and episodic games, where you need your customers to want to stick around and continue spending money. Box sales are great, but ultimately they're pretty useless except as an indicator of how many people actually bought the game -- returning players are the bread and butter of the MMO world. In fact, that's exactly why companies are so interested in finding out why you're quitting their game. If they can fix issues that are making a lot of people quit, they can retain more customers and drive up their revenue. Surprisingly, Blizzard is the only company I know of which actually makes people fill out an exit survey in order to cancel a subscription. It's not that annoying and it gives them great information about how to make their game better for you (so if you're adamant on copying Blizzard, that's a good thing to copy). Unfortunately, Blizzard keeps notoriously quiet about their internal numbers like that. So why exactly do people quit MMOGs, and what can and should game companies be doing to keep you interested?
Forum menus tweaked, cleaner and easier to browse
If you've visited the main page of the official forums lately, you'll notice that things are a little different -- they've replaced the simple links to class, realm, and battlegroup forums with a dynamic interface. All the forums that were there are still there, but the navigation to them is a little faster and less cluttered. It's not Flash or anything fancy, so it should work just fine across any number of widely used browsers.Something like this was probably inevitable, considering how much Blizzard's WoW forums have been multiplying -- there's one for every release, event, and topic Blizzard can think of. And considering they have only so many people running them, it means the threads further off the beaten path, especially realm threads, can run rampant with forum violations.Not that that's a problem -- what's in those threads can be pretty entertaining. But Blizzard moderates the forums for a reason, and the more threads they have, the harder time they'll have moderating them.
How much moderation do the forums need?
Before we even get started, I'm going to warn you now that some of the language behind the links in the next paragraph is not safe for work, so please be careful when you click.Warcraftchicks.com argues that the official World of Warcraft forums need full time moderation. This is an issues that I am very divided about.I generally fall under the 'say anything' school of free speech. If you know me personally you know that, while I'm capable of expressing myself without any vulgarities at all, I'm actually a fairly salty individual and when I talk I can be rather crude. Furthermore, I'm very comfortable with discussing topics that would probably nauseate or sicken a lot of people. I grew up on a farm and spent a lot of my time doing things that most people don't nowadays. One of my summer jobs every year was working in our slaughterhouse, and I spent almost every morning mucking out stalls. To this day, I can talk about these kinds of things while I eat. So I generally have a much higher threshold before anything really bothers me, my hot buttons tending to be overt racism or prejudice, and even then I usually just opt to avoid talking to the people spewing those kinds of things.But clearly the examples SugarChick lists are, in addition to being insanely crude, horribly racist (especially the lists posted on Martin Luther King day that she mentions) and otherwise generally unfit for social discourse with strangers (which is, after all, what the forums ultimately are) have no purpose aside from trying to be offensive or shocking.
Commenting on Massively for new users
Do you all love this new site or what? We love it (we're biased, of course, but still), and one of the things we love most about it is that we've got a brand new, state-of-the-art commenting system. If you've ever commented on Joystiq, you'll probably have it all figured out already, but if not, here's a short guide to get you up and commenting (and moderating-- oh, the joys of comment moderation) with the best of them.Your first commentYou've read something interesting, you've got an opinion on it, and you want to comment. Great! Click on the comments link below the post to go to the comment entry form, put in your name and email under "New Users" (your email is only used for verification-- we'll never spam you, ever, and the email is never shown publicly), look over the options listed and choose your preferences, and start typing. Then hit "Add your comments," and... your comment won't appear just yet.We'll send you an email to verify that you are who you say you are, and then when that email shows up, you click a link inside it, and your comment will appear. There may be a short delay, but sit tight, it'll show up. Congrats! You made your first comment! But getting that email has another very important purpose, and that is that it will help you...
01000010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110011 01110100
01010010 01100101 01100011 01100101 01101110 01110100 01101100 01111001 00101100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100001 01111001 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110000 01101111 01110011 01110100 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01110001 01110101 01100101 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01010000 01100001 01101100 01100001 01100100 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01110101 01101101 00101100 00100000 01100001 01110011 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100011 00100000 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01110101 01110011 01100101 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110011 01101111 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01110100 01101000 00101110 00100000 01001000 01101111 01110111 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00101100 00100000 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110001 01110101 01101001 01100011 01101011 01101100 01111001 00100000 01110011 01101000 01110101 01110100 00100000 01100100 01101111 01110111 01101110 00100000 01100010 01111001 00100000 01000011 01001101 00100000 01010011 01100001 01101100 01110100 01101000 01100101 01101101 00101100 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01100111 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01100001 01101110 01100100 01100001 01110010 01100100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110011 01110000 01101111 01101110 01110011 01100101 00111010
