votekick: an absolute necessity
nef
Join Date: 2013-01-25 Member: 182091Members
Join Date: 2013-01-25 Member: 182091Members
<div class="IPBDescription">The game needs this darn feature</div>To start off, yes, I'm a pub player. I don't play comp matches, nor do I play pick-up games.
That doesn't change the fact that probably a good 60-70% of players are also pub players. Their skill varies from walking garbage can to CS pro, and that's a good thing (sortof... maybe). It means that pub matches range from insanely fun, well-balanced tugs-of-war to massacre steamrolls where one team (usually marines, but that's a topic for another thread) gets locked down to 1 tech point and 1 res node so early in the game that the other team charges in with onos/exos by 10 minutes.
I'm not here to whine about balance issues. But boy howdy am I here to whine.
NS2 desperately needs a vote kick system. And it needs it soon.
<u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><b>The "Problem Players"</b><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
<u><!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->1. The AFK<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
Too many times.
TOO. MANY. TIMES.
have I been playing this game, 4v5 favoring the other team, and we have an AFK player. He sits absolutely still, usually in base, and does nothing the entire game while you get slaughtered by the 2 person advantage (in this, frequently-occurring instance, DOUBLE the number of active players, given each team actually has a commander, which is not always in pub matches).
You have to ask yourself, why did he launch the game if he was going to do nothing for 25 straight minutes? I have yet to discover an answer to this question. Frankly, I'm beginning to doubt that there is one.
Anecdotally, I once saw a player demand that the commander rush spores and adrenaline, which the com then did, and said player sat AFK on top of the hive (as lerk) for the rest of the match. We lost that one pretty fast.
This is not fun. In fact, it is the opposite of fun, because nothing can be done about the fact that you will probably lose, and you can't help but think that it might be directly connected to the fact that you could have had another player on your team helping you out for the entire game, but you didn't. He was sitting in your main, maybe browsing the internet, or watching netflix. or having a life outside of video games (haha, yeah right!)
<!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><u>2. The Troll</u><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
hurr hurr yous trollan
All disgustingly bad and uncreative jokes aside, this is a problem. A real problem, that requires a solution. Fortunately, one exists <!--sizeo:1--><span style="font-size:8pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><!--coloro:#C0C0C0--><span style="color:#C0C0C0"><!--/coloro-->(votekick!)<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
NS2 is a team-based game. Got a good team? Awesome! Go shoot some skulks! Bite some marines! Hopefully, the other team has the same kind of team composition, skillwise, and you'll be in for a good game.
But wait, another guy just joined your team. He plays for a bit, just another player. Then your commander has to jump out for some reason. Maybe your main is getting harassed, maybe something needs to get built, and he goes to take care of it, like a good com.
Oh look. New guy hopped in the com chair, recycled your second base, and is now sitting at the chair, repeatedly getting in and out so you can't eject him or get into the chair. Continues until... An onos rush. Gee, that sure was fun for both of us. Let's do it again some time.
Now, the umbrella term 'troll' also covers things such as 'useless players' that run around in base, intentionally not doing anything useful.
Anecdotally again, I saw a marine and alien pair march around together on veil for an entire map. This wasn't so bad, since it was one on each team, but occasionally another from either team would join them and start being similarly useless.
<u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><b>The solution</b><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
Fortunately, a simple solution is available. A solution that has been implemented in many other games natively or otherwise, when the community decided it had had enough of developer apathy.
<!--coloro:#FF0000--><span style="color:#FF0000"><!--/coloro-->VOTEKICK<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
Players can initiate a vote to kick a player from the server, requiring (usually) a 50% margin at least. A simple feature to implement, and one which the community will be very thankful. UWE can decide for themselves how to implement this, I'm not gonna do anything more than say "there needs to be a votekick function".
<u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><b>The Naysayers</b><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
Browsing the forums for an active thread about adding a votekick functionality, (but not finding one that seemed suitably votekick-centric, please excuse me if I've created a new thread erroneously) I saw a lot of people saying that adding a votekick would hurt the game. Make it possible for people to kick rookies and for roving bands of trolls to join servers and votekick everybody.
Tell me something. Lots of other games have votekick functionality. Do you REALLY see groups of 4+ people (would be required for a kick vote to pass in any reasonable system) roving around in those games, trying to democratically kick people off the server? No. You see groups of people ruining fun in much more fail-safe ways. Sure, a team full of trolls might vote kick you, but when an entire team is made up of people who are actively trying to ruin your and everybody else's fun on the server, you've already lost the war. Find a new server.
Kicking rookies, I concede, could become an issue. And trying to do something like adding votekick immunity for rookies would just mean "click rookie mode for votekick immunity". I admit I don't know of an easy solution for this other than "don't be a jerk".
However, consider this: There are many different kinds of rookies. I would be TOTALLY FINE with kicking the ones who refuse to learn from their mistakes. You know, the ones that constantly run off alone as a marine, and just die over and over? The ones that try to snipe lerks across rooms using a shotgun? The one that charges straight at groups of 3+ marines as skulk? The one that JUST KEEPS LAUNCHING GRENADES AT THAT WHIP WHY DON'T YOU STOP.
If somebody takes the time to learn how to play the game well, and has played a video game before, they won't be a rookie for long, and the issue of them getting kicked for being a rookie will disappear.
That doesn't change the fact that probably a good 60-70% of players are also pub players. Their skill varies from walking garbage can to CS pro, and that's a good thing (sortof... maybe). It means that pub matches range from insanely fun, well-balanced tugs-of-war to massacre steamrolls where one team (usually marines, but that's a topic for another thread) gets locked down to 1 tech point and 1 res node so early in the game that the other team charges in with onos/exos by 10 minutes.
I'm not here to whine about balance issues. But boy howdy am I here to whine.
NS2 desperately needs a vote kick system. And it needs it soon.
<u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><b>The "Problem Players"</b><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
<u><!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->1. The AFK<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
Too many times.
TOO. MANY. TIMES.
have I been playing this game, 4v5 favoring the other team, and we have an AFK player. He sits absolutely still, usually in base, and does nothing the entire game while you get slaughtered by the 2 person advantage (in this, frequently-occurring instance, DOUBLE the number of active players, given each team actually has a commander, which is not always in pub matches).
You have to ask yourself, why did he launch the game if he was going to do nothing for 25 straight minutes? I have yet to discover an answer to this question. Frankly, I'm beginning to doubt that there is one.
Anecdotally, I once saw a player demand that the commander rush spores and adrenaline, which the com then did, and said player sat AFK on top of the hive (as lerk) for the rest of the match. We lost that one pretty fast.
This is not fun. In fact, it is the opposite of fun, because nothing can be done about the fact that you will probably lose, and you can't help but think that it might be directly connected to the fact that you could have had another player on your team helping you out for the entire game, but you didn't. He was sitting in your main, maybe browsing the internet, or watching netflix. or having a life outside of video games (haha, yeah right!)
<!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><u>2. The Troll</u><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
hurr hurr yous trollan
All disgustingly bad and uncreative jokes aside, this is a problem. A real problem, that requires a solution. Fortunately, one exists <!--sizeo:1--><span style="font-size:8pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><!--coloro:#C0C0C0--><span style="color:#C0C0C0"><!--/coloro-->(votekick!)<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
NS2 is a team-based game. Got a good team? Awesome! Go shoot some skulks! Bite some marines! Hopefully, the other team has the same kind of team composition, skillwise, and you'll be in for a good game.
But wait, another guy just joined your team. He plays for a bit, just another player. Then your commander has to jump out for some reason. Maybe your main is getting harassed, maybe something needs to get built, and he goes to take care of it, like a good com.
Oh look. New guy hopped in the com chair, recycled your second base, and is now sitting at the chair, repeatedly getting in and out so you can't eject him or get into the chair. Continues until... An onos rush. Gee, that sure was fun for both of us. Let's do it again some time.
Now, the umbrella term 'troll' also covers things such as 'useless players' that run around in base, intentionally not doing anything useful.
Anecdotally again, I saw a marine and alien pair march around together on veil for an entire map. This wasn't so bad, since it was one on each team, but occasionally another from either team would join them and start being similarly useless.
<u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><b>The solution</b><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
Fortunately, a simple solution is available. A solution that has been implemented in many other games natively or otherwise, when the community decided it had had enough of developer apathy.
<!--coloro:#FF0000--><span style="color:#FF0000"><!--/coloro-->VOTEKICK<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
Players can initiate a vote to kick a player from the server, requiring (usually) a 50% margin at least. A simple feature to implement, and one which the community will be very thankful. UWE can decide for themselves how to implement this, I'm not gonna do anything more than say "there needs to be a votekick function".
<u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo--><b>The Naysayers</b><!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u>
Browsing the forums for an active thread about adding a votekick functionality, (but not finding one that seemed suitably votekick-centric, please excuse me if I've created a new thread erroneously) I saw a lot of people saying that adding a votekick would hurt the game. Make it possible for people to kick rookies and for roving bands of trolls to join servers and votekick everybody.
Tell me something. Lots of other games have votekick functionality. Do you REALLY see groups of 4+ people (would be required for a kick vote to pass in any reasonable system) roving around in those games, trying to democratically kick people off the server? No. You see groups of people ruining fun in much more fail-safe ways. Sure, a team full of trolls might vote kick you, but when an entire team is made up of people who are actively trying to ruin your and everybody else's fun on the server, you've already lost the war. Find a new server.
Kicking rookies, I concede, could become an issue. And trying to do something like adding votekick immunity for rookies would just mean "click rookie mode for votekick immunity". I admit I don't know of an easy solution for this other than "don't be a jerk".
However, consider this: There are many different kinds of rookies. I would be TOTALLY FINE with kicking the ones who refuse to learn from their mistakes. You know, the ones that constantly run off alone as a marine, and just die over and over? The ones that try to snipe lerks across rooms using a shotgun? The one that charges straight at groups of 3+ marines as skulk? The one that JUST KEEPS LAUNCHING GRENADES AT THAT WHIP WHY DON'T YOU STOP.
If somebody takes the time to learn how to play the game well, and has played a video game before, they won't be a rookie for long, and the issue of them getting kicked for being a rookie will disappear.
Comments
Definately a needed features, and ignore the morons who say 'hurr durr go tu survur wiff amdins noob', sometimes server admins arent on, get lazy, or, the game is full, and you're stuck with an official server and generally, those have ZERO admins, so you're stuck with afks, trolls, asshats and generally the worst of the community combined.
This happens rarely, but when it does I wish for votekick option.
Also: it needs to come with a 1hr temporary ban from the server/servers in question. A kick that simply forces you to rejoin is pretty useless. Retry in console and you're back in 10 seconds. Not good enough.
Since a 1hr ban is pretty severe (not really >.>) make sure the default % is high enough. Like 80% of your team...
...does it work if marine team votes for a marine to get kicked? I mean it's kinda hard for aliens to participate in the kicking if they don't know what's up...?
This happens rarely, but when it does I wish for votekick option.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Mute the player and ignore the text. The comm can do the same.
1.) Auto-kick after two to five minutes idle would resolve afkers.
2.) Players who aren't working with the team is an admin issue, in my opinion.
I've experienced and abused vote kick in other games. If I wanted to "pub-stomp", join a server, get my teammates to kick others, then get my friends/clanmates into the open slots. Once my guys are in, kick more teammates to get whoever I want in and proceed to decimate my opponents; or keep the game close so people don't rage quit.
Besides being exploited (especially by clans), you have very irrational, ignorant players, who will want players kicked silly reasons.
That 15 minutes, kick the comm, player will now be one of the top votekick requester. Players with low K:D, rookies, early explorers, are targets, for not helping the team. A lot of pub players are closed minded. Anyone who deviates from their assumed norms is labelled an idiot.
Good admins and good server communities fix a lot of problems.
I can guarantee any server with vote kick will be short on good player because good players don't like being booted just cause they're winning, any game that implements a vote kick I stop playing just cause people are sore losers and kick you in the middle of great games.
Servers just need to have admins, and like I said a mute/ignore feature. Vote kick is garbage.
Most people did disable the afk feature since people were getting kicked as commander, once that's fixed it won't be a problem. Same with most servers disabling the vote random feature, they're broken.
One example of terrible vote kicking is Crossfire, it was a cheap game and before it was bought by suba it was awesome for a cheapo, it's only downfall was..... you guessed it vote kick, I don't know how many times I'd go 20 or more kills without dieing and get kicked almost every other game cause they thought I cheated.
I have never seen vote kick put into a remotely decent game, ever, the only time they put it in is win it's a garbage game that never gets updated so the cheaters run in flocks.
Firstly, your argument to be able to votekick AFK players is sort of obsolete because b236+ brought in the automatic removal of AFK players (granted, server admins can turn this off).
Secondly, trolling would surely be worse if the trolls had the power to kick legitimate players from the game...
Frankly, a votekick has far more uses for annoying/laming people than it does for helping. Put power of that magnitude in to the hands of the masses and u have anarchy. You'd have to strike a balance between it being usable and not being abusable and i don't think that could ever be done for a game of this nature with such few players on a team in a typical game. I can easily see it being misappropriated for uses as minor as ppl having arguments on tactics, people accusing others of cheating and voting because of that, etc
Having played wow for 8 years, i've played with various forms of vote kick systems for different aspects of that game for a long time. The amount of iteration the various votekick features have gone through as Blizzard struggle to balance the ease of use of the function for legitimate users vs the ease of misusing it is astronomical. To this day, vote kick is still abused more than legitimately used in (for example) LFR - some1 sets off a vote and every1 will click yes to kicking them just because. I mean ######, even i click yes, i have no idea who they are and have no idea of their transgression but i'm still quite happy to click yes purely because i do not care one iota for them.
I'd also say that votekick creates an elitist mentality where new players (rookies) are discarded rather than taken on board and given the time to learn how to play. This game lives or dies depending whether new players come and stay or not. Lets face it, Natural Selection is not your average FPS game where any moron can just pick up and understand every facet of the gameplay within the first 2 minutes. It's vastly more complex than that and i'd hate to see a revolt on rookies purely because they have no experience :(. During the holiday sales of NS2, i had a couple of days of joining servers with nothing but pure rookies - 15 rookies and me being the only white name on the scoreboard. Oh boy that was an exhausting couple of days playing NS2 (i think i know how UWE personnel feel at launch events trying to teach entire teams of people what to do and how things work lmao) and was certainly a different type of game than what would normally of happened but was an entertaining few days regardless.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Also: it needs to come with a 1hr temporary ban from the server/servers in question. A kick that simply forces you to rejoin is pretty useless. Retry in console and you're back in 10 seconds. Not good enough.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->Hypothetically, what if i turned up in a server you are playing on with 3 friends and we got u kicked and therefore banned. That'd be pretty funny for us but it would suck for u :(
When I played L4D2, one of the few games that I have ever seen actually include this kind of feature (where any player can decide he wants another kicked), it was almost always turned off on every server I played on.
Consider the amount of grief a player can cause my going AFK or doing stupid ######. Now consider the amount of grief caused by some friends who want their friend to be able to join a full server.
In short, No. Kicking is reserved for admins only.
There's probably a grand total of 3 admins who play on Aus server max, the whole oceania area is a ######ing cess pool for bad servers facilitating bad game play.
This'll probably only ever get added through server mods anyway, repost to modding forum or PM the ns2stats/DAK people
4 players shouldn't be able to kick someone. 6vs6 it should require 5 people to vote kick (ASSUMING VOTING WOULD ONLY BE RESTRICTED TO THE TEAM IN QUESTION) and 8vs8 it should be 6 out of 8 and 10vs10 should be 8 out of 10...
If 80% of my team is trolls, the situation is, as I've said many times before, already lost way before the kick.
It's a really far fetched situation imho. Sure, it can happen, but considering that having 1 troll happens about 999 times more often, I'd rather get kicked that 1 time and kick the troll those 999 times.
DISCLAIMER: I don't experience this problem at all. On UWE servers I've bumped into a troll once in +500hrs, and on private servers a 2nd time, in which case he got perma banned in an hour once the admin came on.
This happens rarely, but when it does I wish for votekick option.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I know I've joined games late and tried to eject the commander before. The current com is just someone filling in since no one else would do it, and the new player at least thinks they are a competent commander, then that's exactly what should happen. In fact I think that someone in that situation should log out almost as soon as someone offers to replace them.
On the other hand you should never EVER call for an eject if you don't intend to replace the com yourself.
QTF, Lofung wins the thread, GG.
- A quality server is running DAK mod or other custom code which automatically kicks AFKs.
- A quality server has admins around or a method for reporting to admins who will check logs.
See a contradiction?
autokick and votekick for non-adminned servers. turned off for servers with admins, if it's too hard to wrap your brains around it, shoo and let the adults converse on the subject,
Calling people stupid isn't going to make a bad idea any better. Go look at L4D2's votekick system. It's far from perfect, and it does a lot of what you guys are asking, but it's just another feature that can be abused to hell and back. It can be abused way worse than a troll/swearing/whatever makes your butt tighten