Vote ban

[wiseguy]

I've noticed several frustrating games where one player does not communicate or change strategies despite the (very polite) requests by all of his/her teammates, contributing significantly to the eventual loss of the match. This is tantamount to intentionally throwing the game.

If a player sets out to lose (making no attempt to win is the same thing), I think they should be banned from ladder, which exists to provide a higher level of competition in Altitude.

When this happens it's usually fairly obvious--but hard to do anything about it. I'd like to open the floor for ideas on how to handle this, and offer my own: can we get a vote ban implemented? Require 75% to affirm it, and maybe make it short term--half an hour, maybe.

tl;dr: intentionally sucking needs to be a bannable offense.

Thanks,

wiseguy

[Aki1024]

/vote ban would end up being a anti-popularity contest. Don't like someone? Get enough friends to vote with you. The best this feature could do is mark a person for review, which is what the sticky thread is already for.

What you need is evidence that the person is throwing a game purposely.

[Tekn0]

Originally Posted by Aki1024

/vote ban would end up being a anti-popularity contest. Don't like someone? Get enough friends to vote with you.

LOL, this means I can never play ladder cuz i'll be getting vote banned everytime i join.

[tgleaf]

I think the real problem is that there aren't always admins present during ladder matches. So instead of a /vote ban which could be abused, maybe just implement a /vote report that sends the match # (or whatever) to the current admins. That way, the admins can review it after the fact and if a player is on the receiving end of that vote enough times, the admins can choose to issue a ban.

[elxir]

This was disabled because we kept kicking the ****ty players.

[sunshineduck]

fwiw, i'm generally around an area in which i receive internet, and can be easily reached either via AIM (sunshineduckglb) or on the forums if you need me to pop in and check if someone's rulebreaking or not.

also of note: refusing to adopt your team's strategy is not a bannable offense by any means.

[sunshineduck]

also i don't know how many times i've said this, but ladder exists strictly to rank players based on their playing ability. the fact that it provides a higher level of competition than pubs is simply due to the fact that it organizes teams into the generally accepted optimal number of players and that people tend to try harder when there are fake internet points on the line.

[Ribilla]

Is it an offense to play a plane the person knows is suboptimal, but then play their best at that plane.

e.g.

Player 1: This game has gone on forever, I am going to switch TA
Player 2: We already have 2 TAs
Player 1: I know, I want us to lose faster, we're going to anyway.

Before you say that this is a ridiculously convoluted course of events, it has arisen before.

[sunshineduck]

no, it's not

[[Y]]

Originally Posted by sunshineduck

no, it's not

Why wouldn't that be treated as game throwing if it is obvious that the player is trying to end the game faster by making his team lose faster?

Or was that answer based the instances when he player doesn't openly admit it?

[sunshineduck]

how do you know that he means he wants to lose it faster? did rib provide that information in that fictional scenario? if you want the robot yes/no answer that ignores context, then the fake player rib invented did not break any rules. in reality, gamethrowing bans are always taken within context.

for example, is mikesol playing rubber hull tracker loopy gamethrowing when he would obviously win significantly more games in his time anchor? is it only game throwing if he starts doing it at a high rank? if donk decides to ace rank up in the middle of a ladder season, is he not allowed to play again until he gets his time anchor back? you're asking a loaded question. if you feel like someone is throwing games, report it.

[[Y]]

I don't think it's a loaded question. In terms of pure semantics, in Rib's scenario, Player 2 implies to Player 1 that switching to TA is a bad idea/detrimental to team since they already have two other TA's. Player 1 replies "I know", acknowledging the fact that it would be a detriment and goes on to say that he's doing it to end the game faster. Yes, I realize gamethrowing bans require context, but Rib's scenario seems pretty straightforward in that there's an open admission to game throwing.

And you could have answered yes to my second question instead of retaliating with 50 rhetorical questions :|

[elxir]

i feel like shm0 is throwing games because the 0nly games i l0se inv0lve shm0

[sunshineduck]

Originally Posted by [Y]

I don't think it's a loaded question. In terms of pure semantics, in Rib's scenario, Player 2 implies to Player 1 that switching to TA is a bad idea/detrimental to team since they already have two other TA's. Player 1 replies "I know", acknowledging the fact that it would be a detriment and goes on to say that he's doing it to end the game faster. Yes, I realize gamethrowing bans require context, but Rib's scenario seems pretty straightforward in that there's an open admission to game throwing.

And you could have answered yes to my second question instead of retaliating with 50 rhetorical questions :|

how can you read so much from three half-lines of text? you can't really assume specific situations based just on chat logs, which was the entire point. the situation rib laid out doesn't say anything about the score of the game, just that one player switched to TA. try to read that same fictionalized log with the idea that player 1 and player 2 were both on a team winning 5-0. i obviously can't know for sure what player 1 is thinking, but if we read it within that context then it seems to me like player 1 is just tired of his team's mirandas being unable to win the game and wanting to play miranda to finish the game himself.

this is exactly the point i was trying to prove - you can't assume certain things just based on what you think people are thinking. in order to moderate gamethrowing situations well, the admins have to look into context and probably talk to the individual players involved as well. aside from "i am throwing this game because i hate my team" remarks and obvious "grab neutral bomb mid, fly back to base, rev over it until you die and enemy hits" scenarios, all of these bans require a more in-depth analysis and eventual subjective final decision. based on the information rib gave me it's not a bannable offense, but if the player in question's team had been down 0-5 and he had said those words, grabbed ball out of spawn, and flew into his own goal and crashed into the back of it, it would very probably be a bannable offense.

[[Y]]

I agree that you can spin chat logs- I wasn't advocating banning with chat logs as sole evidence. In Rib's case, I was assuming that the *some* context for those words (i.e. the team is losing) was known. Like, you were in the server and saw that his team was losing and saw him say those words. But it's understandable that admins want overwhelming evidence before banning. I suppose that's where the subjectivity issue comes in- how much context/evidence/hints that point toward the offense is enough for the admin. In your example, the player that grabs the neutral bomb and revs over the base could be waiting for his team. If he gets killed before his team spawns and claims that he was waiting for his team, does he still get banned? Or would you wait until he continues to revs over the base after he sees his team spawn before banning?

[Ribilla]

[Y] is right, I just didn't want to type out an entire conversation, I have edited for clarity.

[Ingbo]

even tho i absolutely despice being on the same team with a handfull of ladder players i just cannot see this ending well.... at all.

[Tekn0]

Originally Posted by Ribilla

Is it an offense to play a plane the person knows is suboptimal, but then play their best at that plane.

e.g.

Player 1: This game has gone on forever, I am going to switch TA
Player 2: We already have 2 TAs
Player 1: I know, I want us to lose faster, we're going to anyway.

Before you say that this is a ridiculously convoluted course of events, it has arisen before.

I can very well imagine who those TAs would be

Banning a player for throwing is rare, and from an admin's point-of-view it's difficult to simply go with the word of one or two people (unless they are admins themselves).

For instance, Mulu clearly threw a game reported by void and I was a spectator and what he did was absolutely ridiculous. He was let off with a warning, fair enough IMO as doesn't do it anymore. But as far as that one game is concerned anyone with half a brain will agree that bouncing the ball over and over in your own goal till the other team scores is intentional. This had nothing to do with Mulu being bad (he's obviously improved since then).

But more than regular players, it is those players who join once in a while, throw a game and then leave. There are number of times this has happened and most of the time it has been TBD players who are pissed off because there is no TBD ladder going. They decide to join ball ladder and muck around and say "I don't really care about my ball ranking" (mostly meaning, yeah i'm going to rev-around and have "fun").

I'm not starting another TBD vs ball flame war, just giving what I've observed in playing 3 seasons of ladder with well over 1500 matches. Obviously the majority of TBD players aren't this way, but there are few. I'm sure TBD ladder also has similar experiences with ball players but there it's more a genuine case of the player being bad at TBD than intentionally fooling around.

The only thing that is somewhat conclusive is video evidence. Sadly this is rather hard to obtain.

[Ribilla]

Originally Posted by Tekn0

I can very well imagine who those TAs would be

Banning a player for throwing is rare, and from an admin's point-of-view it's difficult to simply go with the word of one or two people (unless they are admins themselves).

For instance, Mulu clearly threw a game reported by void and I was a spectator and what he did was absolutely ridiculous. He was let off with a warning, fair enough IMO as doesn't do it anymore. But as far as that one game is concerned anyone with half a brain will agree that bouncing the ball over and over in your own goal till the other team scores is intentional. This had nothing to do with Mulu being bad (he's obviously improved since then).

But more than regular players, it is those players who join once in a while, throw a game and then leave. There are number of times this has happened and most of the time it has been TBD players who are pissed off because there is no TBD ladder going. They decide to join ball ladder and muck around and say "I don't really care about my ball ranking" (mostly meaning, yeah i'm going to rev-around and have "fun").

I'm not starting another TBD vs ball flame war, just giving what I've observed in playing 3 seasons of ladder with well over 1500 matches. Obviously the majority of TBD players aren't this way, but there are few. I'm sure TBD ladder also has similar experiences with ball players but there it's more a genuine case of the player being bad at TBD than intentionally fooling around.

The only thing that is somewhat conclusive is video evidence. Sadly this is rather hard to obtain.

Good points, but you misunderstand. This was someone who never plays TA, switching to it so that they would lose faster. Someone like Mulu genuinely believes playing TA is the best thing whatever their plane comp. This would be like me switching from bomber to TA if we had no other heavies.

As an aside, I don't want vote kick/ban to be reinstated, that was always just stupid and whilst it my result in better games, (as SSD says) that's not the point of ladder.

[JDR]

This is literally just a backdoor to ban things nobo has repeatedly said he doesnt want banned (eg. specific perks). Requiring a 75% vote to get it done doesn't mean dick when 80% of the players in ladder are vengeful little brats that can't properly asses what is wrong with their team ("o0mg yuo plaeying rev maeking us L0SE).