About "Report a Player"

As you can see, I have used the Scout icon for this post. I can think of no better way to sum up how the community has been feeling about our new Report a Player system.

Many of you have voiced some concerns, to say the least. We want to address those concerns. Note that this post was a combined effort from Idejder, and JohnnyUtah, and myself.

First off, do not doubt that S2 takes input from the playerbase very seriously. Your concerns are not falling on deaf ears.

Secondly, our intentions are good. We do not intend to put excessive restrictions on the community. Report a player is primarily to allow each HoN game to progress to its conclusion without it being intentionally ruined.

For example, feeding a dozen monkey couriers to the enemy team or suiciding your hero in a dedicated manner multiple times can only mean you are intentionally ruining the game, and should be punished for it.

The Report a Player system is new. As with any new system, there are bugs that need to be worked out. S2 asks for, and thanks you for, your patience during this time.

There is something hard to understand, but absolutely crucial about this new system: every day, there are a massive number of reports to sort through. What this means is that, right now, it will be difficult for us to make an accurate decision in every single case. We will get better at this with time. Again, we ask for your patience. We have already overturned several recent decisions that were deemed to be unfair on appeal.

We will be making a few adjustments in regards to how penalties are being handled. Note that we may change how the penalties scale in the future, but this will never change: Your first offense will result in a warning only, never a suspension.

1st Offense - Warning
2nd Offenses - 1 day (24 hour) suspension
3rd Offenses - 3 day (72 hour) suspension
4th+ Offenses - 1 week suspension

Each offense will last a period of 4 months.

Currently players who have committed an offense will receive an email informing them of their warning/suspension and how to appeal it. We will be implementing ingame popups/notifications in the near future to make sure you are aware if your account receives a warning and that you can appeal the decision.

We will also be setting up a publicly viewable forum section for players who have received penalties to submit their appeals where they will be reviewed and decided upon on an individual basis. This system will replace the previous appeal method by email and should provide more transparency into our decisions and let you hold us accountable if the community believes a decision is unfair and unjustified. Remember, we want to make the game as enjoyable as possible for everyone in all situations.



Here is a quick recap all of the things that you can be given an Offense for:

Advertising
Repeatedly advertising or spamming a service in a game or public channel is not permitted.

Bad Nickname
Players with racially offensive, sexually explicit, or profane nicknames will have their accounts flagged so that they can change their nickname. Those who do not do so in a timely manner will receive an offense if reported again.

Bug Exploitation
Deliberate and malicious exploitation of bugs to gain an advantage over the enemy team or grief allies is not permitted.

Feeding/Boosting
Manipulation of stats, rating, or game outcome via multi-accounting, plants, or PSR bugs is not permitted.

Illegal Content
Sharing anything that violates US Law or the Terms of Service is not permitted.

Impersonating S2Games
Impersonation of S2Games employees or volunteer personnel to intimidate or otherwise gain an advantage over other players is not permitted.

Verbal Abuse
Excessive in-game verbal harassment of another player is not permitted.
Special note about this: Don't be afraid to let the spirits of competition and rage flow free. Talking smack is part of the game, just don't go too far with it. Be mindful not to go into any territory you wouldn't if that person was sitting next to you in the same room. No one enjoys playing with someone who says more swear words than anything else.

Harassing someone via whispers or PMs is not tolerated at all, and neither is getting your friends to harass players. People attempting to circumvent our chat filters will definitely find themselves in trouble.

General Abuse
General in-game abuse of heroes, items, or abilities to grief your teammates is not permitted.
This includes but is not limited to the following:

• Abuse of allied control, including courier
• Destruction of allied items
• Abuse of items and abilities (e.g. silencing an ally repeatedly with Blood Hunter after they have asked you to stop)
• Calling out allied positions

We will most likely tweak these rules as we get more feedback from you guys as a whole, but we will always keep you informed of any changes.

Hopefully this is all taken care of soon (today - Sunday) so we can get this issue straightened out for everyone.

Yes you heard me, we are going to try to change it on July 4th. Before fireworks. We will let you know if we get it done.

regarding the R.A.P, I think it is a fail system because the GMs are volunteers, but as you said, it is still new but you shouldn't suspend people that quick, if you are testing it, you should have only gone with warnings

also, what is calling out allied positions?

btw

Second

[raven`]

I love how my actual constructive post was deleted for no reason. The point was that you have already suspended people, whom were not given a warning. This should of been thought about before you implemented the system. This is constructive, and should not be deleted. ;s

this sounds more reasonable I think

Hi Shawn,

Harassing someone via whispers or PMs is not tolerated at all, and neither is getting your friends to harass players. People attempting to circumvent our chat filters will definitely find themselves in trouble.

I might be mistaken, but I could not find the ability to report people for sending me offensive PM messages yesterday, as the report function requires you to select a MatchID. Are we still supposed to mail support@heroesofnewerth.com for this kind of behavior?

Originally Posted by raven`

I love how my actual constructive post was deleted for no reason. The point was that you have already suspended people, whom were not given a warning. This should of been thought about before you implemented the system. This is constructive, and should not be deleted. ;s

It was removed because I had to get in the response about today. There was no way to read the post that fast anyway.

All it said was "Too late for this" which is completely incorrect. We already said we would fix the issues that are there and we are addressing the issues that have been brought up on a weekend in the middle of the night and light years faster than almost any other game company.

I fail to see how you can complain about it. Sure the initial implementation could have been better, but it wasn't so we will improve it.

So you cant be banned for kicking the 5th guy who dont wanna concede, like it seems alot of ppl already have been?

Whats the point in this? Everyone can still be jerks and mess up games intentionally as long as they play dumb or do it politely.

The whole system is flawed. Especially when you factor in that this type of behavior was encouraged in dota and 99% of your players are dota players. Its pretty much a part of the game. There are filters and mute/block functions. This is an unneeded waste of resources.

Originally Posted by CassiveMock

Whats the point in this? Everyone can still be jerks and mess up games intentionally as long as they play dumb or do it politely.

The whole system is flawed. Especially when you factor in that this type of behavior was encouraged in dota and 99% of your players are dota players. Its pretty much a part of the game. There are filters and mute/block functions. This is an unneeded waste of resources.

I agree 100%

waste of resources because some kittens get mad so easily

Originally Posted by zhatan

So you cant be banned for kicking the 5th guy who dont wanna concede, like it seems alot of ppl already have been?

Barring exceptional circumstances you wouldn't be. Kick already has a safeguard: you can't kick without all 9 players agreeing. If all your team wants to kick you so they can concede, and all the enemy agree that it's reasonable, then the odds are that it was a reasonable kick.

[mtK]

Any kind of AFKing should be forbidden. I mean ANY kind.

[[SCZ]pablofsi]

Please take this into account, don't ban anyone EVER permanently, unless they hack your servers or something truly severe like that. Bans for bad behavior should only reach one month at maximum if the abuse is repetitive.

nice work, hopefully the system settles down quickly and people stop yelling all over the place about how unfair it was they where banned

edit: on the kicking 5th person its rather odd thing to do since they get leaver i think it should be a misuse of the system, if they don't get a leaver then it'd be fine because this wouldnt punish them for not wanting to give up, as i can very well see people putting the vote up, 4/5 say yes the last down votes and then instantly tried to be kicked and he is kicked when alot of the time if they knew they felt stongly enough to kick them for it they would concede

[[NaBT]DarthCidious]

since you want your feedback here concerning RaP
you should really only allow S2 members to suspend accounts while the volunteers can reject reports and hand out warnings.
since nome stated how he will be treating reports and your volunteers dont stick to those rules

[[WWF]Kevinn]

I wouldnt mind the GMs being Volunteers if they werent so...how should i say this...stupid?

Calling out allied positions

Does this apply to spectators ghosting as well? As in blatant allchat ghosting.

@Darthcidious: S2 wouldn't have volunteers if they could do that, this is a very large scale thing and will need constant attention, that is not to say you argument is invalid.

edit: The only thing that i see largely at the moment is the player base is not giving this a chance because it is a change, and it will change the community, but not drastically as many are making out, i think the majority of people are over exagerating, yes the new system has flaws and damn at the GM banning the wrong dude, s2 need to look at that kind of stuff, and make sure it doesn't happen because that makes the system look bad.

Yes it was rectified but it shouldn't happen to begin with, the system needs work, but like the OP says it is day one, and anything from day 1 is gunna be a horror show, i hope many of you help the system to work rather than take a dump on it.

Originally Posted by Kevinn

I wouldnt mind the GMs being Volunteers if they werent so...how should i say this...stupid?

The GMs are spending a lot of time doing something without getting paid, just to help the community and they haven't banned anyone randomly yet, so I think they're fine.

Originally Posted by Fenshu

Does this apply to spectators ghosting as well? As in blatant allchat ghosting.

Yes.