Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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I'm all for banning toxic players and cheaters, but the fact that they make you install a rootkit on your system to enable this is too much.
“People are too sensitive today” types are deliberately missing the point. Online is pretty much the only place where you can get away with spouting slurs or psycho shit. You wouldn’t do it in public or get away with most of it in public.
More to the point it's just tiring having these types come into a lobby. They generally don’t (or can’t) play properly or fuck around until someone calls them out. They then start on that person or spamming the N word.
More often than not it feels like they try to frame it as “oh ho, people can’t handle my casual use of slurs, snowflakes”. When more likely is if you’re talking and behaving like that generally it means you’re obnoxious and disruptive to the game.
Fuck those people. Still not worth getting infected by a rootkit.
I don’t buy games that run Kernel level software either generally but the two issues are tangentially related. This seems like a problem yesteryears algorithms plus monitoring staff could have solved. The problem is the latter cost money and doesn’t generate profit. LLM/ML makes this feasible again I suspect.
being forced to infect yourself with a rootkit*
Having witnessed teenage boys moaning into a microphone for an entire 25-minute match because my friend (a woman) spoke twice, I would say that it has nothing to do with growing thick skin.
My friend has thick skin. They heard it, muted everyone, calmly asked me to be the middleman for important callouts, and we played out the match. That is just normal there, unfortunately.
The article has literally zero info about what they are actually going to do. It's just people going "this is bad and these people are the worst, we do not want them here".
Ok? So what are you gonna do about it?
All it does is mention that "tech that can be a game-changer sometimes takes a long time" and I'm guessing that's referring to Riot's plans to use AI to mass-surveill all voice chats to detect harassment.
I will say their report software is very good and usually gets results within half an hour.
I've played in both valorant and csgo communities and after a year or so of valorant I came back to csgo. Maybe in some regions of the world or in lower ranks things may be worse but on csgo I felt pretty welcome everywhere. Sure we would talk shit and curse and maybe some random asshole griefer would ruin the game but I never liked valorant too much. I guess you kinda have to experience it to understand.
Edit: also, valorant is basically rootkit and I'm not running that on my computer, and couldn't if I wanted to (I use arch btw)
It's so interesting that there are comments about how people can mute/block people if they get harassed, but nothing about the people doing the actual unhinged harassment. It seems personal responsibility only should be for the victims of harassment...
On the topic itself, I actually know someone who works at Riot that is working on their "player management" tools, and the amount of data they have driving these is fascinating. The datasets they have are global, and aside from Vanguard, apparently there are certain toxicity trends that are so niche (in the Chinese servers, for example), you have to tune for the other server data sets for it (they weren't really clear on how this works).
I really wish I could see what the backend of this tech is like, very few games have 10+ years of player and esports data to train their LLM/AI models.
Yeah, can't have people just growning thicker skins ... they should have to buy them via micro transaction!
Lots of people in the comments self-reporting their habits in games with voice chat... yikes...
No one should play Valorant or any Riot game in the first place
Halo 2 never had a mute function and people survived.
That's just survivor bias. Gaming spaces are better when harassment is punished.
Do you really want the standard of life to be a halo 2 lobby? Halo 2 lobbies were full of bigotry of all types. We can and do, do better.