A discussion on toxicity

[Abandoned]

Toxicity is a bit of a boogieman. People don't like toxicity, nor do the companies who aforementioned players fund. The issue is that toxicity is extremely difficult to isolate, contrary to popular belief.

From an abstract point of view classify people as being part of one of two groups:

• Kind people: people who do not berate or criticize teammates
• Unkind people: people who do criticize and berate teammates

Now consider another two groups of people:

• Malicious people: people who, within a given context, aim to harm teammates
• Benign people: people who do not, within a given context, aim to harm teammates

Our goal is to filter out the malicious people. However, we can only do this given the a context. The context in Deadlock is a team game. What constitutes harm in a team game? Personally, I would argue the following as very reasonable:

• Refusing to consider you are part of a team
• Refusing to consider both opponents and allies are humans with feelings

So does that mean that being unkind is a sufficient condition for being malicious? No: but it can be. Think of people who continue to criticize others despite them already trying to adapt, simply being incapable of performing as demanded (a matchmaking issue, for example). But more strikingly I would just as easily argue being kind is not a sufficient condition for being benign. Consider the situation where you put your entire team on mute and just play your own little game without considering anyone else. This situation is extremely common and rarely identified as malicious, but it follows naturally from the provided context.

The reason I bring this up is because common heuristic punishment systems tend to equate kindness to "good" (non-malicious) and unkindness to "bad" (malicious) while only singling out other blatant cases of malice such as feeding, destroying items or what else have you. Dota 2 is the most obvious example of a punishment system that does all this and, as you are aware, Deadlock too is developed by Valve... In fact, the game is already moving in the direction of Dota 2's punishment system as we speak.

As the developers do not read anything outside the closed testing branch I wanted to put this discussion up here. Hopefully to argue on this before we get another aggressively naive system akin to the one we see in Dota 2.

 

[ZM]

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