Why we do it.
We strongly believe gaming should be a chance for people to escape their troubles and worries for a couple of hours. Bullying, personal attacks, harassment, and racist or sexist comments are contradictory to that desire and purpose. Therefore, we have provided you – as the players – with a code of conduct and tools to report behavior that you think ruins your experience. Like we have invited you to influence and shape the development of the game, you have also been part of shaping the definition of what is healthy interactions and activities in First Class Trouble.
This post is to provide you with some transparency on how you reported, how we have taken action, and how you will be able to take action in the future.
How we do it and the role of the moderators.
Reports are the moderators' strongest tool to understand what you as players tolerate in the games you play. Since we launched in April this year more than 631.000 games have been played. You have filed 44.053 reports during that time, meaning a report was filed every 14th game.
Reports don’t mean someone is instantly banned – we know some of you have questioned this. There is a process and that process ultimately involves human judgement. Usually, we act on reports within hours, which means creating, adding to or reviewing a case we have started on a player. When we receive reports on a player, several things decide whether we issue a ban: The severity of the report weighs heavy, the number of reports against that player for similar behavior, the karma score of the player being reported and the karma scores of those reporting is also taken into consideration (keep reading for more information on Karma). We also have a range of tools to catch spam reporting, which works very effectively.
Based on your reports we took action and have issued bans to 548 total unique users since the launch of First Class Trouble in April 2021. Repeat offenders make up 61 of those – meaning they were previously banned and warned but went back to repeating the behavior that got them banned in the first place. As I am writing this, 136 of all bans are currently active. 47 players in total are permanently banned from playing First Class Trouble. We permanently ban people when we take action against hate speech or online bullying. We do not permanently ban for ‘RDM’ or ‘Disruptive Gameplay’.
It’s important for us to address the role of the moderators. The moderators enforce the reports you make. We have provided you with a Code of Conduct because we believe games should be for everyone and that you are here to ensure people have fun. It’s your responsibility to patrol, report and make those reports actionable. Without your input our moderators won’t and can’t take action.
What’s coming?
We are always looking at the feedback on both the Steam Forums and our Discord. Some of the main points you have is that we don’t ban fast enough. We will be introducing a new feature to mitigate this pain:
Blocking. Very soon we will introduce ‘player blocking’. If you block a player, it will be instant. You won’t hear them and you won’t matchmake with them again.
Other users have complained that it’s unfair to be banned from a game you have purchased, rendering it unplayable. In the near future a ban will mean you can still play with friends:
‘Matchmaking ban’. This means when you are banned you are only banned from matchmaking with random people. You will still be able to matchmake with a full lobby of friends. Finally, the integrity of the reporting system is often being criticized. Some claim to be the victim of troll reports. We are always working on the integrity of our security systems. One of the things we have been working on is a karma system, which allows us to understand how players play First Class Trouble.
Karma. Some time ago we introduced karma – under the hood. Karma will continue to be a feature’ used by the moderation team and it is unlikely we will open it up to public matchmaking. Without disclosing any details, karma points are given or taken according to actions you take in the game.