I totally support this call. I play a lot in Arena and my first step after log in is always to silent other crews (because the option does not stays between matches)
Avoiding its toxicity for sure will make more players to join and stay playing.
Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews
@the3sheetsneate Maybe look into bugs like hitregs, and update the anticheat if you really want to provide a better experience for new players. It is not complicated to understand.
@the3sheetsneate - Way to be play your role in cancel culture. "Play your own way in a sandbox"..........but not this way, or that way. Oh and you can't do this, or that. Have fun just staring at each other, but pay us for our services......or by now, lack thereof.
@blackbeard806 said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
@the3sheetsneate Way more toxic players in Adventure, you gonna remove chat n text over there also?
@realstyli said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
Did you completely miss the part where he gave stats to disprove this statement?
Well no.
By the fact that there's so many more players in Adventure there's almost certainly many more toxic ones as well. There's a disproportionately large number of reports from Arena because you're immediately in contact with a greater number of people. Perhaps at this point in its life, it's also the case that a higher percentage of the arena players are toxic. But that's not going to amount to there being more total toxic players in Arena compared to Adventure.
@lw-jinh0r They've made lots of changes to hitreg and hitboxes in 2020, and I bet they'll keep on working on it. They can do both things.
A game with great netcode and polished mechanics can still be toxic. A fully-moderated game can have bad netcode and bad mechanics. Both problems are independent and both can be solved separately.
This is just my personal take on this whole thing.
@dekeita said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
@realstyli said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
@blackbeard806 said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
@the3sheetsneate Way more toxic players in Adventure, you gonna remove chat n text over there also?
Did you completely miss the part where he gave stats to disprove this statement?
Well no.
By the fact that there's so many more players in Adventure there's almost certainly many more toxic ones as well. There's a disproportionately large number of reports from Arena because you're immediately in contact with a greater number of people. But at this point in its life, it's probably also the case that a higher percentage of the arena players are toxic. But that's not going to amount to there being more total toxic players in Arena compared to Adventure.
Unless you actually have facts to back this up, you are just making an assumption. From my only experience, in the 3 years playing this game, I've only had to report 3 players in Adventure for actual toxicity.
Everyone is suggesting making Arena chat togglable and turned off by default, but nobody seems to be mentioning that they literally did just that in adventure mode for a month!
I think it was around the Ashen Winds update, but they quite honestly switched the in game chats to OFF by default, requiring you to turn then on yourself. The fact that they're not doing that here as well is, quite frankly, an unfortunate finger to the already-pained Arena community. I'm not even a big fan of Arena and I think this is an uncalled-for and an incredibly lazy option.
@realstyli I'm giving a reasonable explanation of the data. But at minimum I'm disproving the notion that Joe gave facts to disprove the OPs statement because we were also not given any stats about it.
We were only given stats about the percentage of playtime and number of reports.
@the3sheetsneate The ability to mute all players in the mode already exists, as does the ability to mute a single specific player. This choice that you have made to take away all communication is a choice to take away our freedom of speech, and it is wrong, pure and simple.
@polishnoob12 I share your opinion. Their ammount of work in the matter is not enough, but in my personal experience, the hitreg issue has improved a lot. Still, I trust that Rare is or will keep on working on this issue in the future, because it's on their best interest. If I'm wrong, I'm sure I'll remember this post...
The most important thing for me at the momment is that one thing doesn't exclude the other. They can make this change and also improve hitreg.
All of you guys that are supporting this decision because mean people were keeping you from arena better jump in then. I would like to see the stats a month after this is implemented to see what the change to that 3% is. My guess is it is going to do the opposite of what this is trying to accomplish. Arena is losing more than it is going to gain from this decision. And in all honesty if you don't play arena and have no intention of trying you shouldn't get an opinion.
@n0tmykd going to be even tougher getting these..
It would be great if Arena and adventure commendation tally were separate.@dekeita
The only line that matters is:In a given month, just over half of toxicity reports that hit our Customer Service team come from the Arena
If over half the reports received are from Arena, there are more toxic players in Arena. You can try to use conjecture to project that there's more in Adventure based on population and density but that, again, is making an assumption without evidence.
This change is 100% unnecessary. If someone was truly offended by something toxic in game, they can just turn off voice chat and text chat themselves. Also remember this game is rated T for teen, its not meant for little kids to be playing. Removing voice and text chat isn't gonna help with toxicity at all, if someone wants to be toxic they will spend the 2 seconds to type in someone's name in xbox and just dm them the toxic thing they wanted to say.
You're probably not looking for feedback on this, but for the sake of having a voice (haha) on the forums still, I might as well use it for something.
The definition of "drastic change" by all means bears an overall positive conclusion.
Eg.:- You've got lice, so shaving your hair completely bald will do the trick.
- Absolutely tired of using public transport to go to work/school? Buying a car offers the most convenience, privacy and availability for this task.
- Cannot afford the current rent where you are living? Just move, lol. Hell at the start, but there's more optimal life experiences down this road.
- Got an incredibly toxic person in your life that's dragging you down? Remove them asap. Tough to decide and hurts to miss them for a while, it is however integral to moving on and being happy.
The goal for me is to arrive at some sort of common grounds, so I can convince you that I understand the decision from the team to be drastic like this. It is absolutely important to keep toxicity low and people affected underexposed to this behavior, especially when what you're trying to promote is a friendly and rather upbeat environment for all.
I wanna preface this next section by offering a bit of a brain assignment:
Mr Neate, in this post you mention this line.. "In a given month, just over half of toxicity reports {...} come from the Arena, despite Arena accounting for around 3% of overall playtime in Sea of Thieves". My question for this homework, and mind you this won't account for your overall grade as it's a personal test, is 1) Why is the distribution of toxicity so abnormally skewed between the two modes despite playtime discrepancies, 2) Why is adventure so absolved of this phenomenon & 3) When did this start?
Let's keep these questions at the back of our mind for a bit, and I'll focus on what I've been meaning to bring up this entire time. The art of being drastic! ..is rather boring. I don't wanna have lice, but shaving my head is absolutely off limits as I love my hair. Public transport can get annoying with all these strangers but you really don't need a car to get from point A to B, plenty of people use a bicycle and actually keep a pretty healthy daily routine this way! Perhaps I digress a little bit, but seriously there's a lot of ways to tackle the same problem. "Drastic times call for drastic measures", sure but let's be honest with ourselves.. is it really drastic times? Is Sea of Thieves the only game to ever experience toxic players? These creatures live in gaming and are known to manipulate and often control the general community behavior. Dealing with this is paramount.
It is about time to reveal the one answer to all questions from earlier. That would be: Frequency of interaction. The when is a bit in an awkward place at a first look, but it makes total sense to be a question that's posed, as the sub-answer for that would be "Always". Arena has always had a massively inflated interaction frequency compared to Adventure, and that was always kind of the point. Get in, destroy some ships, get out. The element of having to socialize in this mode (whether that be with your own crew or enemies) has always been at the absolute center.
A proposal
By this point we hopefully have realized how critical it is to hold socialization in the spotlight of Arena. But we also understand that doing so hurts the community with abusive player behavior. Isn't it reasonable to have a bit more of a discussion about this? Either with the players here in this forum, or more talks within the team. We are used to being a part of how the game grows. The community has undoubtedly helped the game's general direction in a good way, so I think we owe it to each other to talk about this more.
A small personal suggestion as an alternative to dropping the most massive nuke from orbit on general in-game communications, would be to add an opt-in to voice chat. NOT an opt-out, but rather keep comms off by default, and whoever wants to tune in can choose so either at the front end (menu) before starting Arena, or just after joining and landing in the lobby.
I have a lot of faith in you guys keeping the game fun for everyone, except those that want to keep it un-fun from those same people ;)
-Thanks for reading!
Here's my two cents:
Arena already has the option to mute people if needed, and 90% of times that's what I do as soon as I join. But that's an option. Having options is always a good idea. Removing that option, even if it's for the 3% of our playtime, is bad.
I used to hate TDM because, as many people mentioned before me, it ruins the intended arena ways of playing. But nowadays, most of (sloops) lobbies have some degree of it, and embracing it, helped me & my crewmate to improve our PvP skill by a lot.
I guess it's true that you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain..
.POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
- Restrict voice and leave text on (without text-to-speech for the love of god!) but that would limit a ton Xbox players (even if that's dependent on how many console players there are in arena VS pc ones).
- Add in pre-made phrases "Let's do PvP!", I know it was not how Arena was intended, but sometimes in videogame development that happens, an idea that is developed in a way and played (or modded) very differently by the community and that gets more love!
- Have every other crew muted (or not) by default, and have a single-button prompt to change that option (like the one for changing lobbies - Which never works BTW - and maybe a different button that is not the "interact" one).
- Restrict voice only in the lobby, not ingame.
.
Furthermore, the problem with voice chat toxicity is not just in Arena, it's in Adventure too, but communication is a key part of the game (and online games in general), thing is, in Adventure it's just VERY difficult to find other players.
Especially nowadays with just 5 ships.The REAL PROBLEM is that Arena has an AWFUL LOBBY system that gets every player together for a large amount of time while it looks for crews / fill the one of that one person that's alone in Arena Galleon (with Arena sloops this problem is much more mitigated).
A SOLUTION to this problem could be that open crews (not ready to start playing right away) must be merged together BEFORE joining the lobby.
.
How many times have we seen (mostly Galleon) Arena lobbies stuck for 30+ minutes because there were multiple crews with just 1-2 people? Obviously if you get trash talked for 30+ minutes and play for 15 (maybe loosing badly as it's one of your first times as Arena is very different from Advetnure) you quit the gamemode and never go back.
If it would be for like max 5 minutes, it would still be bad, but not THAT bad..
.
Last but not least, a couple of other suggestions for Arena:
- You should not receive a penalty when crashing/leaving a lobby and decide to come straight back at it as soon as you reboot the game and the match hasn't finished yet. 99% of times one of my mates crashes for internet/pc problems and we have to stop play arena because we can't have a full galleon.
- points need a rebalance: boarding is worthless in terms of points, chest is worth too little in galleon arena - maybe a bit too much in sloop but it's not that bad. I know having two different values for the chest could cause confusion. But points need to be rethinked.
Tldr:
Having every crew muted by default can't be the right way to proceed.@NedryNewman
I don't play Arena and I think this is unnecessary. In Adventure, for a short time they had communication disabled by default, but it could be turned back on. Why not do that here?? Best of both worlds. Anyone truly toxic will message your gaming account anyways if they actually want to throw words pointlessly.@foxdodge said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
@the3sheetsneate The ability to mute all players in the mode already exists, as does the ability to mute a single specific player. This choice that you have made to take away all communication is a choice to take away our freedom of speech, and it is wrong, pure and simple.
...freedom of speech is not guaranteed to you in a video game.
@taaaamas said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
@dastallionducky said in Arena - removing the ability to use voice or text to communicate with other crews:
@the3sheetsneate idk if this is the way. My most memorable moments in SoT is the voice chat itself. You should make an option to turn off social chats in Arena if you don’t wanna hear it.
Agreed. I think the option should still be there. Perhaps having this other crew communication disabled by default, allowing people to turn it on at their own risk of that sort of behaviour. Arena isn't necessarily supposed to be communicative with other crews, but even in the tavern there can be great moments chatting with people. Similarly, certain commendations, tasks and achievements like those seen in the summer events for the arena did require you to be communicating with the rivals in the tavern and in-session to help each other, those would not really be viable anymore :/
I agree 100% @Taaaamas it should be the RISK of the player if they want to hear banter or not!! I have met some amazing folks in ARENA and also some overly salty folks. We have even had Stand Up Comedy sessions while waiting in lobby.
I think @The3SheetsNeate and team might want to review or explore other options. I agree with the overwhelming amount of reports of Toxic players. But at same time shutting them out like this I feel will only push them to Adventure mode or make them leave the game entirely. I get the approach here is to reduce the mode from being out right unreal toxic blood thirsty folks. But Toxic behavior will happen in games no matter what. Due to the heart of the player and their intentions towards other players. I remember some Call Of Duty Lobbies toxic as I can get out. Heck many Free to play games have unrelenting Toxic and harassing folks. Read many of the comments that said get thicker skin I don't think that is the correct answer at all. I also don't think we should just cut off all voice. I think we should change the behavior. Rare has done it before. Like old times when Rare changed the toxic behavior and they caused the whole SOT community to be giving and actually very welcoming in Adventure to the point where folks were not even sinking each other. Then they brought the Reaper Fraction and the Seas went back to blood thirsty rivals. At the end of the day it is the HEART of the players causing the Toxic behaviors is the problem not the game. Also all behaviors have the ability to be changed for GOOD be it a Game mechanic that causes that change or the Heart of the person that decides to make that change.
Imagine making a social game... Without taking responsibilities about it
Imagine making a social game... Without peoples being able to communicate
Imagine making a cosmetic progression game... Locking most of cosmetics under paywall
Imagine selling a beta game at full price.. 2 years later at 40$ but treating at as a free to play.
Hey Rare did Microsoft sold you to EA? 😂
@the3sheetsneate Worst decision ever Rare. But Yeah destroying your own game is not that big of a deal for you.
You're adding a Battle Pass -1 point
You're not update the Arena anymore -1 point
You're muting the communications in the Arena -1 point
You'll never fix the hitregs -1 point
And you probably have no plans for end-game and fidel players -1 pointYou only care about money and casual players. I get it, your decision, but you have a masterpiece in your hand and continue to make the wrong decisions, adding microtransaction instead of fixing your game...
If the toxicity situation is that bad in Arena, I think it's worth trying this out.
There's still Pirate Chat and Rare could add some more options to it for Arena to fill any missing needs (like the PvP/TDM stuff mentioned in this thread).I admit I don't play a ton of Arena, but this change actually sounds appealing to me to play it more often and I think some of my usual Adventure crew would agree.
When I do play Arena I'm focused on the actual gameplay/competition. When I'm waiting for a game in the Arena lobby, the Pirate Chat/emotes/shanties are enough to pass the time.
I saw a mention of leaving text chat but removing text-to-speech; i think accessibility requirements prevent Rare from doing that.
85 out of 652
