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House passes controversial copyright bill that could be abused by trolls
Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted in favor (410-6) of a controversial copyright bill known as the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019, or CASE Act. The bill is meant to give independent creators an affordable and accessible way to defend their intellectual property. But critics question whether it is constitutional and argue that it could be abused by trolls, potentially bankrupting the creators it's meant to benefit.
Appeal tribunal rules Uber drivers are definitely workers
Is Uber a taxi firm or a technology company, and are its drivers self-employed or mistreated employees? These questions are being asked of Uber the world over, and last year an employment tribunal case in the UK concluded two drivers were, in fact, entitled to minimum wage, holiday pay and other benefits. The ride-hailing service contested this potentially precedent-setting decision, as you'd expect, but today Uber lost its appeal. In other words, the appeal tribunal upheld the original ruling that drivers should be classed as workers rather than self-employed.
Uber drivers in the UK entitled to minimum wage, tribunal rules
Uber drivers have won an employment tribunal case in the UK, making them entitled to holiday pay, paid rest breaks and the National Minimum Wage. The ride-hailing company has long argued that its chauffeurs are self-employed contractors, not employees; the tribunal disagreed, however, setting a major precedent for the company and its relationship with workers. GMB, the union for professional drivers in the UK, initiated the two "test cases" in July. It's described the decision as a "monumental victory" that will impact "over 30,000 drivers" in England and Wales.
Counter-Strike: GO lets community police itself with Overwatch
Valve has introduced a new community discipline program for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that it calls "Overwatch," designed to let players govern themselves when it comes to problem behavior. Overwatch will deputize some players as "investigators" (based on stats like wins and hours played), who are then given a replay of a match from a reported player, and asked to rule on whether "the suspect" was cheating, griefing, or if there's "insufficient evidence" to rule. Once a collective verdict is reached, Valve will then determine if a ban needs to be given, and investigators will be rewarded if their judgments all agree. The process sounds very much like League of Legends' Tribunal program, which Riot Games has been using recently to try and cure that game of toxic player behavior. Valve says the system is currently in beta, and that it will be adding test cases to make sure the program works correctly. Eventually, however, the plan is to make Overwatch completely driven by the community.
Community Blog Topic Results: How to get rid of funsuckers
Last week we discussed how to get rid of the funsuckers making our WoW time less enjoyable. There was quite a bit of discussion in the comments and we had one blogger address the issue as well. Account-wide ignore I and others suggested one step in the right direction would be to make ignore account-wide. As long as the other characters on the ignored account were added to the ignore list invisibly, it couldn't be used for griefing. Peer review I had also mentioned the Tribunal system that League of Legends uses to police its player base. Commenter Yoojine linked to a video that described the science behind LoL's techniques. If you have the time to look at it, I highly recommend it for those who are interested in studying human behavior. It's fascinating and also heartening that a game company is going through so much effort to make the gameplay experience less toxic for everyone. Basically, they use peer review, direct feedback and the concept of priming to lower the toxicity of the in-game experience. I think that WoW could benefit from Blizzard conducting similar experiments on us.
Community Blog Topic: How to get rid of funsuckers
Our last Community Blog Topic talked about the bad behavior of guildies to non-guildies and whether it was the result of being in guilds or not. Many people brought up suggestions as to how to police the individuals causing the problems. Unfortunately, some of these suggestions can be exploited to grief non-funsuckers. So the question is, how can we police the bad guys without making things even worse for the good or at least not-so-bad guys? One suggestion that is constantly brought up is the expansion of the ignore feature. If you could /ignore someone's entire account rather than just the one character, that would prevent the funsucker from getting on another character to harass you. This would be best done anonymously so that only the one character appears on your ignore list, but the remaining characters on the funsucker's account would be silently ignored as well. (If using /ignore account-wide actually listed the ignored characters alts that were also ignored, that could be used by griefers to find people's alts just by temporarily ignoring them, so it would have to work anonymously.) I think that the ignore should work on all of the ignorer's characters as well so that logging on to an alt doesn't expose you to the player you've already ignored on your main.
Should players be in charge of accountability?
Once upon a time in vanilla World of Warcraft, player behavior was something that was kept in check by server community. How did this happen? Well at that point in time, there wasn't really anything in game that was cross-server. If you wanted to do something in game, you had to do it with people from your realm -- and if you misbehaved, players were quick to call you on your behavior in a very public manner. Because of this, players that were legitimately called out by the community soon found themselves with nothing to do, because nobody would group with them. Their only choice was to re-roll on another server and start over -- at this point, you couldn't even transfer your characters to other servers if you wanted to. And oddly enough, the system that wasn't really a system completely worked. Players that were jerks eventually had their jerk-ish ways come back to bite them on the butt, and the rest of the server community happily resumed playing. While cross-realm play is incredibly useful for opening up the player base, it's had the unfortunate side effect of getting rid of that accountability aspect of the game from vanilla. What's to be done about a jerk if that jerk is on another server?
The Summoner's Guidebook: Making League of Legends a better place
It's no surprised that League of Legends has a very caustic community. Players on messageboards all over the internet (including our comments section) can attest to the fact that LoL's community leaves a lot to be desired. Unfriendly players and offensive language are the norm, and these bad attitudes keep many summoners from logging in. Riot hasn't let the issue lie, though. The Tribunal was a good first step toward building a better community, and if reports are to be believed, it does a fairly good job. However, simply punishing players doesn't encourage good behavior. That's where the latest effort, the Honor system, comes into play. Honor allows players to give positive feedback to friendly or supportive players, either friend or foe. Gaining honor alerts a player of his or her good behavior, and Riot has hinted that it may be the basis of future rewards. Is it a good step in the right direction, or will it just encourage "honor trading?"
League of Legends nerfs Rumble, buffs Urgot and Cho'Gath
In addition to getting a new champion every few weeks, League of Legends is continually updated with balance changes and gameplay tweaks based on player feedback. Yesterday Riot Games released its early August patch preview, detailing incoming champion nerfs and buffs in addition to big changes for the player-mediated banning tribunal. Players who are punished by the tribunal will now be emailed a reform card showing the case made against them and highlighting the exact behaviours they need to improve to avoid further bans. Following a bugfix to Rumble's Flamespitter ability in the Jayce patch, his damage suddenly increased. Rumble's Danger Zone passive and Flamespitter abilities will have their damage reduced to compensate for the increase. The previous patch also gave Urgot some heavy nerfs that went a little bit too far, and in the next patch, some of those nerfs are being reverted. Classic champion Cho'Gath will also get a number of tweaks to remove random cast time delays and make him more fun to play. Skip past the cut to watch the full patch preview video in HD.
The Summoner's Guidebook: A community guide to League of Legends
Greetings, summoners, and welcome to the first installment of the Summoner's Guidebook! For a new player, the Guidebook is a one-stop-shop to gaining familiarity with the various elements of League of Legends. For the more advanced players, we'll also be covering ways to improve on weak areas of your play and how to deal with the toughest of matchups. I was a new player once, and I remember being extremely daunted by the number of things I needed to learn to be competitive in LoL. Although the journey from newbie to expert was long and difficult, I learned a lot about common mistakes and how to reduce them. If you're looking to step up your game or if you're just getting into the League, the Summoner's Guidebook is the place for you to learn without being treated like you're a noob. This week, we're going to cover the community resources available to you. There are a lot of websites dedicated to League of Legends, and it would be foolish to assume that this column is the only place to get advice on the game. If there's something I haven't covered yet or there's a topic I'm unfamiliar with, you can be sure that one of these places will have the info you're looking for. This article can't possibly cover all the League fansites on the internet (there are probably hundreds), but I can focus on the ones with the best information.
Over one percent of League of Legends players have been banned
Handling antisocial behaviour has always been a problem for online game developers, and MOBAs like League of Legends certainly get the worst of it. The inherently team-based nature and slippery slope gameplay in MOBAs makes it very easy for one antisocial player to ruin a game and cause your team to lose. The problem is normally tackled head-on with a report tool and a suite of hired GMs, but what do you do if your game is free-to-play and has over 15 million registered players? It would be impractical to hire thousands of GMs to police a community of that size, so Riot Games came up with an alternative in the Tribunal system. The Tribunal allows players who have played enough games to reach level 30 to vote on whether to take action against a reported player. Once enough votes are tallied, either the player is pardoned automatically or his case is submitted to a smaller GM team to await punishment. The system went live earlier this year, and Riot has now revealed how incredibly successful the system has been with the publication of some very interesting banning statistics. The biggest shocker is that a whopping 1.4% of LoL's over 15 million players have been banned with the system, a workload that far exceeds the capacity of a traditional GM team. Ninety-four percent of players submitted to the Tribunal are punished, with about 50% of them never reoffending. Skip past the cut for an image showing these and other statistics, and stay tuned to our weekly Not So Massively column every Monday for more LoL news and updates.
Apple's termination of retail employee over Facebook post upheld
Apple employees wanting to blow off some steam on Facebook or Twitter may want to think twice before they post their comments. In a recent decision, the UK Labor tribunal upheld Apple's right to fire employees over negative comments left on a social network. This decision cited Apple's social media policy which prohibits employees from posting negative comments on social networks. This legal dispute started when "Crisp," an Apple employee in the UK, posted some derogatory comments against Apple and its products on a private Facebook page. These comments were made outside working hours, but were noticed by a fellow colleague who printed them up and showed them to a manager. Crisp was then fired for "gross misconduct" because he had violated Apple's social policy. According to analysis by lawyer Jamie Hamnett, the UK tribunal agreed with Apple's assertion that these comments could have a material effect on Apple's commercial reputation. When Crisp claimed that he had a right to free expression, the Tribunal again sided with Apple which argued the company had a right to limit this speech, especially since these comments can be easily shared by Crisps's Facebook friends. This decision should be a warning to employees who work at companies that have strict social network policies. You need to be careful what you say online. It should also be a wake-up call for companies concerned about their employee's behavior online. Companies don't have to cross their fingers and hope employees are nice. They can enforce a strict, well-written social media policy with the expectation that it will likely be upheld in court. [Via CNET]
One Boss Leaves: A landslide win for Anub'arak
Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. Welcome to what's nearly the end of the current round of the five-man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let's get ready to rumble! It's no surprise, really, that Anub'arak took control of this week's Two Bosses deathmatch with a 73% pounding of the Tribunal of Ages. We're not sure that voters really considered any realistic scenario when casting their votes, but we did get a few interesting setups from spectators. The quality of the floor, in particular, seemed to be a sticking point for many. Tyr: Wouldn't Brann fall through the floor if Anub keeps burrowing holes in it? I mean, I'm sure that in Azjol-Nerub, his own kingdom, he has enough escape holes pre-burrowed to hide in, but an old titan complex just waiting to be condemned? Brann'll be lucky if the ceiling doesn't collapse and crush him on his way down.
Two Bosses Enter: Anub'Arak vs. Tribunal of Ages
Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. Welcome to what's nearly the end of the current round of the five-man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let's get ready to rumble! I'm hiding my eyes behind my hands for this one: Anub'Arak (Azjol-Nerub) versus Tribunal of Ages (Halls of Stone). Storyweavers, get ready to spin your webs ... This is the type of match where a good blow-by-blow account in the comments can go a long way toward swaying the vote. But first, the pound ground rules: This match takes place inside the Tribunal of Ages in the Halls of Stone ... or perhaps the Tribunal has been transplanted to the Two Bosses Thunderdome ... or perhaps they're someplace else ... Any way you slice it, the Tribunal's basic encounter mechanic functions as usual. Work with it, people! It's a fantasy tournie. No matter where you choose to set the match and who you may choose to stand in for Brann Bronzebeard, his survival ultimately determines the success or failure of the mission. Anub'Arak is therefore challenged with holding the Tribunal at bay long enough for Bronzebeard to complete his task. Technically, a "win" for Anub'Arak means that neither opponent dies. All of the competitors' abilities, including crowd control and other effects to which bosses are usually immune, work on their opponents. Assume that the opponents share similar levels, health pools and comparative overall damage output. Don't get caught up in gameplay mechanics and what actual players might do in each encounter. Don't neglect style, story and scale. Welcome to the Two Bosses Thunderdome. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls ... Dyin' time's here.
RPG legend Ken Rolston retires
If you're an RPG gamer, there's a good chance Ken Rolston has had an impact on the many nights you and your buddies have spent engrossed in tabletop and online adventures. From pen and paper classics such as Dungeons & Dragons, Stormbringer, and Warhammer to that copy of Oblivion you're enjoying today, Rolston's contributions to the role-playing genre have been monumental. Rolston's most recent work has been at Bethesda Softworks, where he acted as lead designer on Morrowind, and played a significant part in the development of Oblivion. The latter will end up making an appropriate swan song, as he's decided to call it quits after decades of leveling up through the industry. Read [H] Consumer's interview with Ken to find out what his fondest achievement is, as well as his thoughts on the evolution of RPGs. You'll be missed, Ken![via TeamXbox]
