Agreed. Well, I'm sure there is a way to properly implement - another cause for concern would be you wouldn't want players to get all their own mobs for themselves. I suppose it wouldn't serve as a form of punishment. Removal of proper actions could be in order though, or there are several ways to go about this.

One system I considered was I wanted to make a Fable-like game once. Players deemed as annoying, troll-like, etc. could be naturally banned from specific areas based on the rules of in-game cities - or better yet, have prison hunts for people. That way you can turn their horrible attitudes into something fun to mess with. :)

CauTi0N wrote:

I mean - regarding the best possible multi-player game, given that administrator status may create bias and imbalance, wouldn't it be better to have a good behind-the-scenes administrative system to moderate your game?

This part I disagree with. Automatic moderation techniques are great, but you have to have some human-controlled component for games with a lot of players. Both because the automatic system will not catch everything, and because the automatic system could make a mistake that a moderator needs to fix.

Still, automatic moderation is great. It has been a long time since I have had anything that other people were playing, but when I did, I found automation to be very useful and effective. If done properly, it hardly ever gets in the way.

Those dingos sure are wacky.

On a related note, don't use a moderator hierarchy. All staff should be equal, and should be able to punish each other and themselves. That takes out hassle coding-wise, and forces you to be careful about who you give staff powers to. Allow them to be able to perma-ban you too. That's what makes it fun.

I'm not kidding. Give your staff the ability to ban you and the other staff members from the game. It's a really useful feature, and works wonders on keeping peace in the game. You just gotta let it settle after the first month or so, where you realize the people you picked to staff the game have no experience or common sense in staffing, and just like messing around with people.

If you want good staffers, use strangers, not your friends. Put an ad up in the Classified Ads forum, and interview people who WANT to staff your game. Pick the best ones, give them a rule sheet, and have them moderate your game. Make sure they have no intention of actually playing it, as that keeps them impartial.

There really needs to be a Sarcastica font. When I first started reading this, it took me awhile until I finished reading the whole post. :-P

That was a reply to Warlord Fred's obviously sarcastic response, which I was almost too dense to realize was just a joke.


As for the subject of your original post, I think most of it has already been touched on by the others here, but my two cents. This comes from my own experience with working for customer service for large commercial MMORPGs. Obviously certain adjustments need to be made for a small hobbyist game, but most of it still applies.

"Moderation assistance" tools are a must. Chat log viewers and the such. If you want to make them in a way that they attempt to automatically pick up and report inappropriate behavior, that's cool. Having them automatically act on it, on the other hand, isn't my cup of tea. If you want to do that, it's your call, so go for it. But I think it should be for very limited and specific situations to cut down on the amount of false positives. No tool should ever completely replace the human element of moderation.

There needs to be a staff hierarchy. Moderators != GM or Admins. They should be two completely separate trees, although the head moderator should ultimately be responsible for reporting to some sort of administrator figure. Giving moderators stuff like subscriber perks for volunteering is a cool gesture, giving them GM abilities/equipment meant for debugging/testing is not. The lowest levels of the moderator tree should not even be able to directly mute or warn other players, but instead be responsible for reporting it to the next higher tier.

Ideally any staff will not actually "play" the game with the account they are flagged as staff on. This also includes participating in in-game chat. The only person representing the staff of the game to talk with players over worldwide chat channels should be storyline/event helpers and under rare circumstances A GM/Admin for special announcements. Otherwise staff should be using their own separate chat channel to communicate with each other. If you want to give perks for volunteers, let them create a second account or have some system in place for them to have an unflagged character for them to play on.

Any type of action taken against players should not be broadcast to all players. Keep it private. There's no need to alert the world that a player was banned or muted. If there is a dispute between two players and you wind up taking disciplinary action against one of them, keep the result private from the other party. Just let them know you'll deal with it. It is unprofessional and illegal in some states to be waving your banhammer around out in the open. :-P

Just because you're making a game for friends, doesn't mean they all have to be staff either. Keep it realistic. Sure, look to friends first if you need them (and they are mature), but keep the staff to player ratio balanced. Logging into a game where you see 3 GMs having a personal and/or immature conversation in world chat and there are only 4 other players online is an instant turn-off.

Write a policy and procedures document. Cover the most common scenarios and how your staff are expected to act. Make a list of do's and dont's. Make sure that staff periodically compile an activity report to higher ranked individuals so that you can see what is going on. Log all staff commands and review their use for possible abuse.

A - The auto-mute that doesn't inform the muted person(s) is clever, and I utilize it.

B - The parallel map for players is actually a great and easy to accomplish thing. Benefits of it is there is no hassle of players claiming the moderators/operators/administration/staff being abusive. This also avoids any potential existing T.O.S. issues.

C - Integrated warning system. I use this a lot, the players data is stored into an external file they cannot access, nor can anyone for that matter, just the game. What happens is, the game automatically picks up any possible "rule breaking" or bad behavior. If they do anything wrong, no matter how extreme, they just get 1 (one) single warning. These add up however.
1 Warning = Mute.
2 Warning = Boot.
3 Warning = Ban.

It's very strict but very effective and very reasonable. By the first time they break a rule, they should know by then to figure out how the game is supposed to be played.

D - Real-Time Configuration. Always find a way to make sure you can adjust the settings of automatic-moderation within your game whether it's an external file that all servers share, or a host-sided file that is configurable. These settings would include spam limit, spam delay, same-message spam toggle, multikey, inappropriate words list, etc. etc. Any changes to said file would have to be integrated in real-time.

E - No levels of moderation. If you are going to have in-game moderators, might as well make them all the same authority. There can be benefits of having multiple level administration statuses, but the general ideal for moderating is to be able to fix the problem right there and then at the source, and not have to redirect like trying to call any customer service branches in the U.S., when we all know it's just about being redirected a thousand times until someone who can't clearly speak your native language tries to repeat your words.
If the game isn't open-source, just make sure you cannot be disrespected and protect yourself from being banned/booted/muted by other moderators or any automated system.

F - If you make the game, you can do whatever the hell you want to. No exceptions. It's rather irritating trying to play a game and another player complains that the owner of the game is abusive. There's no such thing as abuse if the owner is the one to make the game and make the rules.

G - Although above I stated to try to keep moderators/administration on the same page, this excludes actual staff. Staff are the members who actually dug their hands into the game to create it. Moderation/Administration would be the ones who don't directly touch the game, but help control the servers and/or additional services. They don't actually need any verbs whatsoever, since a real moderator should be able to solve any player-related dispute only using text. Any additional/extra verbs would be entirely for temporarily making manual patches to the game or to specific players' characters.

H - There is no need for debugging verbs at all. Keep your debugging versions and your actual playable versions separate. This is in terms of development and hosting. Anything that is done specifically for testing or debugging, should not be in the general population servers. Anything that is specifically done for debugging or testing the game, should be in a debuggers/testers server where the users should actually focus on the task at hand, and not just happen to run into an issue while they are casually gaming.


That's the general guidelines I tend to follow. They have never done me any wrong, and I have a strict policy that, "So what if I ban this player, there's always another one to replace them."
Strict? Maybe. Reasonable? Yeah. Gets the job done without any issues? Totally.

Kaioken wrote:

Any 3 offenses (like 3 small ones) resulting in a permanent ban isn't really reasonable -- especially when the detection and verdict are automatic and done by a computer (so there can be errors and there isn't any human judgment involved, at least at the time of punishment).

Depends purely on the programming.

Not necessarily always. If the staff is too trigger-happy, then eventually the number of (unbanned) players coming will see a decline because they don't wanna play a game with trigger-happy or unreasonable staff (or maybe because all of their friends got banned ;D).

Taking into consideration that if a game really needs moderation, it's most likely doomed to begin with.

D - Yeah, you should definitely do that and allow moderators to change the settings. Would help a lot if the system gets bugged and starts false-alarming like crazy. The settings don't have to be stored in a file, though.

Better in a file than to be altered via a memory editor.

E - Different levels of moderation is good to prevent distribution of too much power around and to give new moderators less ability to do damage if you don't trust them 100% yet.

Getting moderators in the first place should be 100% trustful. I would never settle myself so low to pick some random user and assign them some few rules and give them some commands to use. All processes of getting individuals to be moderators would be intensive because it's not something I would personally look for as a temporary means, but as a permanent means.

Also, you really don't need 100% of your moderation team to have the end-all abilities like permanent-banning and savefile-erasing (not to mention any potentially gamebreaking abilities, even those meant to be used to fix issues, like teleportation & summoning, item creation, etc).

If the game was made properly, there wouldn't necessarily be a reason to have teleportation, summoning, item creation, savefile-editing.

F - Indeed. You set the rules. Of course, if you care about having players then while setting the rules you should bear in mind that if the players don't like your rules, they will probably leave.

See: Above.

H - There's really no harm if the running, populated game has debugging features if they're invisible and only activated on-demand by moderators. On the contrary, it can help a lot.

Actually, I would hate to be a test subject to a game that claims it's playable. See: Majority of BYOND hub entries.

Just to note, I wasn't sarcastic.

I believe people should honestly have little hierarchy as well. The best moderators should rarely even have to use their moderation tools, like Maximus said.

And yes, I think it's fair that other staff can be muted/booted (banned is a stretch), but not the owner: Again, like Maximus said, the owner should be able to do what they want, and if they want to mess up their games' community, go for it.

A hierarchy causes a mess - speech should be simple enough, and the tools are really only necessary if someone is just being a troll/consistent abuse.

I worked in customer service for Apple, and I can tell you that speech is generally all it takes - Tier 2 (in this case, the extra tools) is rarely needed except for the stubborn, narcissistic customers (trolls), or in the case of a supremely faulty device, in which all that would require is a bug report for a BYOND game. You can do away with the Tier 2, they should rarely have to use those tools anyways, but when necessary, they will have them available.