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Destiny designed to counter trolls

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Just thinking about playing a shooter online with other people makes me want to assume the fetal position and hold myself while ignoring the incessant demands for sandwiches.  Bungie’s new MMO shooter, Destiny, has a plan to combat the trolls.

In an interview with Edge, Bungie’s technical director, Chris Butcher, explains:

“If you look back at online multiplayer gaming for the last ten years I think the dominant thread has been adolescent males shooting each other in the face and squatting on each other’s corpses. And that emerges from design decisions which… some of which were intentional, some of which were not, but the community gets attracted towards that, and that is popular to a lot of other people and so it kind of tends to exclude others.”

Destiny will encourage players to collaborate through a system of rewards for positive interactions.  In-game gestures such as waving and saluting are mapped to the D-pad, showing Bungie’s desire for improved cooperation and communication in game.  However, Butcher doesn’t expect to eradicate trolls entirely:

“I don’t think you can ever design toxic behaviour out, you can’t ever stop players from being toxic but what you can do is prevent them being able to ruin other players’ experiences. You give people these tools that encourage them to interact positively with each other and then if someone is interacting negatively with you, well, they can’t ruin your experience.”

I’m interested to see how this works in a practical sense.  Destiny is really looking incredibly cool and has tons of awesome ideas.  However, plenty of cool games can be ruined by the online population.  Just look at Dota 2.  Here’s hoping that Destiny pulls this off!

Last Updated: August 8, 2013

26 Comments

  1. Trevor Davies

    August 8, 2013 at 10:48

    Don’t worry Zoe, I can make my own sammich. Knitting a sweater on the other hand…

    Reply

  2. Sageville

    August 8, 2013 at 10:48

    How to fix the issue:

    Upon dying, you don’t get to see your corpse being teabagged.

    It won’t stop a tard being a tard in the chat window though.

    Reply

    • Trevor Davies

      August 8, 2013 at 10:51

      A proximity mine in your helmet that activates upon death. Surprise teabagger! 😀

      Reply

      • Slade Boender

        August 8, 2013 at 12:01

        hahaha thats a brilliant idea. Would make a great “perk”

        Reply

    • Steven Shearing

      August 9, 2013 at 13:34

      It’s funny to report them players as using “sexual behavior in a game” and it gets them a short ban.
      I have done this many times and a once in a while a get a message back from the banned player complaining how i got them ban, they even threaten me and i report for harassment and they get ban again lol.

      Reply

  3. OminousRain

    August 8, 2013 at 10:52

    The best is, just not too read the chat. Or ignore them completely. It’s hard, but with training one can do it.

    Or if the person rages allot. Just start to speak in another language. They will loose their minds.

    Reply

  4. Mark Treloar

    August 8, 2013 at 10:55

    But what if all this does is have a server full of people waving and saluting? Que the dubstep and it turns into Dance Central.

    Reply

    • Trevor Davies

      August 8, 2013 at 10:55

      A well placed rocket & it’s raining men.

      Reply

      • HvR

        August 8, 2013 at 10:58

        hallelujah!!

        Reply

  5. Umar Kiiroi Senk?

    August 8, 2013 at 10:57

    I sometimes wish upon a star, that trolls would say the things they say to people in real life. maybe then , Trolls will be ‘filtered’ out

    Reply

  6. Rags

    August 8, 2013 at 11:02

    Ya. Let’s make everyone behave the same. 😐

    http://youtu.be/dPDSQ8NBLFY

    Reply

    • Umar Kiiroi Senk?

      August 8, 2013 at 11:14

      let’s make everyone behave like decent human beings

      Reply

      • Rags

        August 8, 2013 at 12:22

        Eh, I love teabagging dead characters and what carebears would consider ‘trolling’ in Quake. It never gets old even when done to me. It makes it fun and I’ve laughed so hard in quake at the stunts we sometimes pull off that my stomach hurts and that I need to leave the room to recover. Sometimes we don’t need to take life so damn serious. 🙂

        But that does not stop me being a director of an international charity and ‘decent’ human being. We need to laugh sometimes too, at ourselves and others.

        Reply

        • Umar Kiiroi Senk?

          August 8, 2013 at 12:29

          I’m not talking about that type of trolling, I’m talking about the vile kind, where insults are thrown left right and center, racial slurs are common,the only type of language used is of the vulgar kind. Fine, we should ignore that and just not take life ‘seriously’, but it creates a toxic environment, one that makes online play a pain. In all honesty, people going around online, calling each other derogatory names etc are not decent human beings….trolling can be fun, we all do it. you just admitted to it too, I do too, but when exactly do we draw the line?

          Reply

          • Rags

            August 8, 2013 at 14:15

            Yeah I dunno. Don’t think I have really been part of a community like that. That said the only online games I play is Quake, (UT, ET back in the day) and Mass Effect which tend to be the older PC crowd. And while people do chirp each other(I do too, constantly). It is mostly to create more laughs. Newbies may not understand this though and could take offence. But I don’t want to limited in my interaction because they take offence 😛

            Its tough, but yeah rewarding positive behaviour may be a good start. It will keep the Something Awful crowd away 😛

  7. Pieter Kruger

    August 8, 2013 at 11:11

    I think that the new Xbox One rating & matchmaking system will go a loooong way towards curbing this. Sure, at first it wouldn’t have that dramatic an effect, but given time, all the trolls should be corralled into the same games! Would love to see that because more than often those guys are fine dealing it out but go completely nuclear when on the receiving side! ????

    Reply

  8. Pieter Kruger

    August 8, 2013 at 11:26

    WOW, someone just commented on a March 2009 article? Does LG ever do recounts on “most commented”? LOL!

    Reply

  9. Ultimo_Cleric N7

    August 8, 2013 at 11:34

    WANT THIS GAME NOOOWWWWW!!!!

    Reply

    • Rock789

      August 8, 2013 at 12:10

      Hell-to-the-yeah!!!

      Reply

  10. Hillbilly Gamer

    August 8, 2013 at 12:05

    Not all Trolls are so bad, watch die video and the end of page: http://kotaku.com/the-seven-types-of-people-you-never-want-on-your-team-1031562569

    Reply

  11. DAS

    August 8, 2013 at 21:34

    Trolls will never be fully filtered out, and we have to accept that a good portion of the gaming community is made up of immature acting flaming trolls. I really like that steps are being taken on Bungie’s side to cut down on the ease of trolling with mapped gestures, encouraging teamwork and good conduct, and I assume there will be some kind of chat filter as in other games like Defiance and Rift. There will always be teabagging as long as there is a crouch function, there will always be the 10 year old cursing and “trying” to act like a big boy online after school til his parents get home, as well as the 30-40 year old doing the same thing…The fact is that, like the government, if we expect the game designers and developers to be held responsible for these social interactions and problems that can be taken care of with proper individual reporting and sticking up for one another, then we are asking for tighter restriction and less freedom in game (as with society). Btw, these games and programs all say that online interaction may vary and content cannot be guaranteed to not be offensive…go play single player games if you don’t want social interaction, stay out of a Massive Multiplayer Online game! On another note, trolls suck and trolling only shows your level of maturity and decency as a person.

    Reply

  12. Noire1297

    August 9, 2013 at 03:05

    It’s as simple as this;

    – Have one option called “Single-Player”, Where the lone wolves who don’t like the idea of sharing their loot, or their ENTIRE DAMN UNIVERSE can thrive
    – Have another called “Private Server”, dedicated to die hard introverts like myself who much prefer the idea of travelling with trustworthy friends than people who may or may not shoot them in the back last second and take all of their stuff (AND tea bag them XD)
    – Have two more options for players who like meeting new people in an MMO fashion, one called “Friendly Multiplayer Server” for people who like to play among multitudes without needing to worry about being shot in the face and tea bagged, and one called “Hardcore Multiplayer Server” for people who could care less because they like both trolling and being trolled.

    Rewarding people for playing nice is NOT going to eliminate even just a few trolls. Trolls are never negotiable, they just bought the game to piss off people who bought the same game. Make multiple server options, and you can separate them. Better than eliminating the spirit of squatting over a corpse you just dropped before getting shot in the face in the distraction.

    Reply

  13. jquincy

    August 19, 2013 at 03:29

    I couldn’t care less what someone does after they kill me. The ones that ruin online games for me -what I consider “trolls” to be- are people that have enough time (and lack any semblance of real world social interaction) in their lives to get really good at a game, and then pray on “n00bs” (aka people who have better things to do with their time than devoting 18 hours out a day at getting obscenely good at one f-ing game). Smart game designers are the ones that take away the incentive to be an a$$hole. For example: if you kill someone who’s more than ten levels below you, not only do YOU die for killing them, but they get the same amount of experience points as they would had they killed you. In essence, this would make advanced gamers avoid “n00bs” like the f-ing plague. That oughtta learn ’em. Also, when people do die and respawn, regardless of level, they should be invincible but unable to harm anyone for the first 10-30 seconds they’re back alive. This prevents the douches of the world from sitting on respawn points and killing people the second they come back to life. THAT’S a troll move if ever there was one!

    Reply

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