How game communities should be moderated

written 2024-11-05

Many game communities have huge problems with toxic players who insult their opponents or teammates. And besides personally muting individual toxic players (which protects you but not the next person who has the misfortune of playing with them), people have no recourse but to submit a report and wait for a human moderator to address the case and decide whether to ban the offending player (permanently or temporarily), or do nothing.

But what if the punishment for toxicity wasn't a ban, but making them muted for everyone by default? This protects people from having to hear the insults but doesn't reduce the playerbase. It's a strictly better system.

Some forms of player misbehavior do warrant bans, such as stalling, cheating or disrupting a rating system through acts like smurfing or sandbagging. But toxic communication is far more common and can be completely solved by muting.

And with the punishment changed to being muted by default, the system no longer necessarily requires moderators to oversee. You could just apply the punishment automatically if several people report someone for toxicity. Of course it'd be terrible to auto-ban players like that because of false reports, but if the punishment is only muting, it's not so bad if occasionally an innocent person gets affected.

Another benefit is that since it's only muting *by default*, people who know the punished person and want to see their chat can still un-mute them. Everyone can decide for themselves, anarchically, yet still protect each other from toxic players without each individual having to be hurt by them to decide to mute them.

It could even show, for a player marked as toxic, how many people have reported them and some summary of the type of toxicity and severity level, and players could decide for themselves what sort of chatters they want to mute by default. Basically, each player could choose their own moderation policy.