Negative Behavior within Online Communities Continued

Current strategies to fix bad behavior

Recently developers are beginning to realize the problem of negative player behaviors and are working on solutions to reduce these toxic behaviors. Developers are exploring game mechanics that will reward good behavior and or punish bad behavior.

Examples

Riot Games the developers of one of the most popular competitive online games, League of Legends, hired a team of psychologists to help solve behavior problems in their game. League of Legends and other well known multiplier online battle arena (MOBA) games suffer from a steep learning curve, and a competitive player base that will yell at any player for inhibiting the teams success. (Madigan, 2013)

To help remedy this issue Riot Games implemented a new game mechanic called the Honor system to reward good behavior. Players may commend teammates and opponents for being helpful, friendly, or being an honorable opponent. Players are limited to certain number of commendations that can be given per day so as to add more value to the commendations. Riot is looking into providing special in game rewards such as skins or badges to players with a high amount of honor.

For the MOBA game Prime World, the developer team Nival took an interesting approach to solve player behavior. The team decided rather than creating the rules of the game themselves, to let the players vote on rules they wanted implemented in the game. The Nobles Pact, is a short list of rules and guidelines voted on by the players, players proposed rules in the forums and as a community changed the wording and purpose of those rules. The community established rules that would be enforced by the game's support team or become non punishable guide for player to follow.(Graft, 2013)

Obviously Nival had to moderate the rules in the best interest of the community, so trolling was kept to a minimum. The Noble's Pact is to be a living document, every 6 months or so players to will get another chance to revisit the document and vote on changes.(Graft, 2013)

References:

Graft, K. (2013, October 17). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/202594/Some_players_break_the_rules_In_Prime_World_players_make_them.php

Madigan, J. (2013, January 23). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/184806/Modifying_player_behavior_in_League_of_Legends_using_positive_reinforcement.php