Games use a variety of proactive and reactive methods to address disruptive behavior. The following are a selection of these methods.
Proactive design
Thinking about disruptive behavior early in design can help mitigate and sometimes even avoid it.
Proactive design methods include:
- Renovating social hotspots — Identifying and fixing aspects of the design that could lead to disruptive behavior, whether real or perceived.
- Setting expectations — Establishing baseline social behavior. Can be overt, like codes of conduct, or less obvious, like through narrative themes.
- Creating incentive systems — Motivating individuals to exhibit desired behaviors and not be disruptive. Reputation systems are one example.
See Shifting from Reactive to Proactive Design.
Social controls
Social controls give people agency over disruptive behavior.
Common social controls include:
- Muting — Enable players to prevent others from speaking to them.
- Blocking systems — Enable players to prevent others from engaging or being matchmade with them.
- Report systems — Enable players to submit suspected cases of disruptive behavior for review and potential punitive action.
- Content filters — Enable players to determine how much they want to see profanity, images, spam, etc.
- Privacy settings — Enable players to determine their own privacy levels (i.e., how visible and available they are to others). Blocking whispers is one example.
- Streamer modes — Enable streamers to hide personal information, invite links, etc.
- Kick vote systems — Enable teammates to vote out troublemakers. Requires careful design consideration to avoid abuse.
- Group and community moderation tools — Enable owners and moderators of groups and communities to manage content and players within their purview. Includes content moderation, server bans, and more.
Penalties
Penalties are punitive actions. They may be used in combination with player controls, detection systems, escalation ladders, or other punishments.
For the sake of clarity, we are intentionally creating a distinction between terms that people often interchangeably, specifically bans and suspensions.
Some common penalty types include:
- Warnings — Cautionary messages with no punitive action. Generally used for first-time and minor offenses.
- Delays — Delay of play for a period of time (sometimes called a cooldown). Some team games use them to punish leaving early or inconveniencing teammates.
- Reductions — Loss of rank, reputation, earnings, or speed of progression (aka slowdowns). Common use: disruptive behavior in competitive queues.
- Restrictions — Temporary limitation or loss of access to a specific feature, such as auto-mutes and chat restrictions. Typically used as punishment for minor forms of disruptive behavior.
- Suspensions — Temporary prevention of play in part or all of a game. Includes loss of queue access. Generally used for serious and repeat offenses.
- Bans — Permanent prevention of play (aka permabans). Includes hardware and identity bans. This method should be considered a last resort, to be used only in the worst cases.
Shielding
Less common penalty types include:
- Shadow mutes — Allow inappropriate content to be posted, but not shown to other players.
- Shadow bans — Isolate particularly troublesome players by putting them into a limited matchmaking pool. This method is generally not recommended (see Anti-Strategies).
Detection systems
Detection systems identify when disruptive behavior has occurred. These are used in combination with other systems, such as social controls and penalties.
Common types of detection systems:
- Name checks — Determine whether user-generated names are appropriate. May be used in account, character, or group creation.
- Gameplay evaluation — Detects gameplay-related transgressions, such as deliberately dying in game (aka “intentional feeding”).
- Chat evaluation — Detects inappropriate language in text or voice chat. Generally used after players have submitted reports, but some companies are using chat evaluation during games.
Machine learning is often, but not always, used in detection systems.
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