Quote:
Originally Posted by Motti
But that again can not be regulated by ingame limitations - it is just part of the game.
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You say "just part of the game", as if player behaviour is something that we can never hope to alter. Lots of things can be done to change player behaviour. Here's some truly ridiculous ways of changing the way people play the game, roughly in ascending order of idiocy:
- Give people in lower ranked alliances +50% cap if they land on people in higher ranked alliances.
- Allow botting.
- Implement a rule banning NAPs outside of the game, punished with full alliance closure.
- Remove asteroids.
- Give 10 times as much XP.
- Give 200% attacker salvage.
All of those are dumb as shit, but they would undeniably change player behaviour. If I got double my fleet value back whenever I crash an attack, I'll build 300 factories, prod the shittiest ship Terran has and launch suicide attacks 9 times a day. That's different from forting up with Fr/De and initing to 2000 roids. Again, balls to the wall attacking is not the behaviour we want to encourage, but we also don't want the game to encourage 1000 tick NAP snoozefests interspersed with a couple of frantic 6 hour long gang bangs, and yet, that's what it does.
A more reasonable example, then, from DotA 2. After each game, you can report people (on both teams!) for a variety of behaviours that the designers consider detrimental. When the community managers agree, the players in question can be punished. For example, they might have to wait longer when queueing, or get muted for a certain amount of time.
That's all fairly standard nowadays. The problem with report systems is that normally, if you report someone, you'll never hear of it again. You don't know if the perpetrator was punished, hell, you don't even know if anyone's looked at it. But in DotA, they do something I haven't seen in other games (though it might exist!): you get feedback when those people have been punished in some way. Getting provided feedback on your reports closes a feedback loop that encourages people to continue reporting. And best of all,
they didn't change the game mechanics at all.
Player behaviour can always be changed, you just have to figure out the right way to do it.